Biblio

Resilience and security of infrastructures depend not only on their constituent systems but also on interdependencies among them. This paper studies how these interdependencies in infrastructures affect the defense effort needed to counter external attacks, by formulating a simultaneous game between a service provider (i.e., defender) and an attacker. Effects of interdependencies in three basic topological structures, namely, bus, star and ring, are considered and compared in terms of the game-theoretic defense strategy. Results show that in a star topology, the attacker's and defender's pure strategies at Nash Equilibrium (NE) are sensitive to interdependency levels whereas in a bus structure, the interdependencies show little impact on both defender's and attacker's pure strategies. The sensitivity estimates of defense and attack strategies at NE with respect to target valuation and unit cost are also presented. The results provide insights into infrastructure design and resource allocation for reinforcement of constituent systems.

Advances in technology have enabled tremendous progress in the development of a highly connected ecosystem of ubiquitous computing devices collectively called the Internet of Things (IoT). Ensuring the security of IoT devices is a high priority due to the sensitive nature of the collected data. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as critical hardware primitive for ensuring the security of IoT nodes. Malicious modeling of PUF architectures has proven to be difficult due to the inherently stochastic nature of PUF architectures. Extant approaches to malicious PUF modeling assume that a priori knowledge and physical access to the PUF architecture is available for malicious attack on the IoT node. However, many IoT networks make the underlying assumption that the PUF architecture is sufficiently tamper-proof, both physically and mathematically. In this work, we show that knowledge of the underlying PUF structure is not necessary to clone a PUF. We present a novel non-invasive, architecture independent, machine learning attack for strong PUF designs with a cloning accuracy of 93.5% and improvements of up to 48.31% over an alternative, two-stage brute force attack model. We also propose a machine-learning based countermeasure, discriminator, which can distinguish cloned PUF devices and authentic PUFs with an average accuracy of 96.01%. The proposed discriminator can be used for rapidly authenticating millions of IoT nodes remotely from the cloud server.

It seems impossible to certify that a remote hosting service does not leak its users' data - or does quantum mechanics make it possible? We investigate if a server hosting data can information-theoretically prove its definite deletion using a "BB84-like" protocol. To do so, we first rigorously introduce an alternative to privacy by encryption: privacy delegation. We then apply this novel concept to provable deletion and remote data storage. For both tasks, we present a protocol, sketch its partial security, and display its vulnerability to eavesdropping attacks targeting only a few bits.

With the increasing of health awareness, the users become more and more interested in their daily health information and healthcare activities results from healthcare organizations. They always try to collect them together for better usage. Traditionally, the healthcare data is always delivered by paper format from the healthcare organizations, and it is not easy and convenient for data usage and management. They would have to translate these data on paper to digital version which would probably introduce mistakes into the data. It would be necessary if there is a secure and convenient method for electronic health data transferring between the users and the healthcare organizations. However, for the security and privacy problems, almost no healthcare organization provides a stable and full service for health data delivery. In this paper, we propose a secure and convenient method, QRStream, which splits original health data and loads them onto QR code frame streaming for the data transferring. The results shows that QRStream can transfer text health data smoothly with an acceptable performance, for example, transferring 10K data in 10 seconds.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) are used by attackers for their effectiveness. This type of attack is one of the most devastating attacks in the Internet. Every year, the intensity of DDoS attacks increases and attackers use sophisticated multi-target DDoS attacks. In this paper, a modular system that allows to increase the filtering capacity linearly and allows to protect against the combination of DDoS attacks is designed and implemented. The main motivation for development of the modular filtering system was to find a cheap solution for filtering DDoS attacks with possibility to increase filtering capacity. The proposed system is based on open-source detection and filtration tools.

Machine learning has been adopted widely to perform prediction and classification. Implementing machine learning increases security risks when computation process involves sensitive data on training and testing computations. We present a proposed system to protect machine learning engines in IoT environment without modifying internal machine learning architecture. Our proposed system is designed for passwordless and eliminated the third-party in executing machine learning transactions. To evaluate our a proposed system, we conduct experimental with machine learning transactions on IoT board and measure computation time each transaction. The experimental results show that our proposed system can address security issues on machine learning computation with low time consumption.

Nowadays, the domain of Information System (IS) security is closely related to that of Risk Management (RM). As an immediate consequence, talking about and tackling the security of IS imply the implementation of a set of mechanisms that aim to reduce or eliminate the risk of IS degradations. Also, the high cadence of IS evolution requires careful consideration of corresponding measures to prevent or mitigate security risks that may cause the degradation of these systems. From this perspective, an access control service is subjected to a number of rules established to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the handled data. During their lifecycle, the use or manipulation of Access Control Policies (ACP) is accompanied with several defects that are made intentionally or not. For many years, these defects have been the subject of numerous studies either for their detection or for the analysis of the risks incurred by IS to their recurrence and complexity. In our research works, we focus on the analysis and risk assessment of noncompliance anomalies in concrete instances of access control policies. We complete our analysis by studying and assessing the risks associated with the correlation that may exist between different anomalies. Indeed, taking into account possible correlations can make a significant contribution to the reliability of IS. Identifying correlation links between anomalies in concrete instances of ACP contributes in discovering or detecting new scenarios of alterations and attacks. Therefore, once done, this study mainly contributes in the improvement of our risk assessment model.

This paper introduces a new method of applying both an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and an Intrusion Response System (IRS) to communications protected using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) in the context of the Internet of Things. This method leverages features specific to CP-ABE in order to improve the detection capabilities of the IDS and the response ability of the network. It also enables improved privacy towards the users through group encryption rather than one-to-one shared key encryption as the policies used in the CP-ABE can easily include the IDS as an authorized reader. More importantly, it enables different levels of detection and response to intrusions, which can be crucial when using anomaly-based detection engines.

The server is an important for storing data, collected during the diagnostics of Smart Business Center (SBC) as a subsystem of Industrial Internet of Things including sensors, network equipment, components for start and storage of monitoring programs and technical diagnostics. The server is exposed most often to various kind of attacks, in particular, aimed at processor, interface system, random access memory. The goal of the paper is analyzing the methods of the SBC server protection from malicious actions, as well as the development and investigation of the Markov model of the server's functioning in the SBC network, taking into account the impact of DDoS-attacks.

Software defined systems use virtualization technologies to provide an abstraction of the hardware infrastructure at different layers. Ultimately, the adoption of software defined systems in all cloud infrastructure components will lead to Software Defined Cloud Computing. Nevertheless, virtualization has already been used for years and is a key element of cloud computing. Traditionally, virtual machines are deployed in cloud infrastructure and used to execute applications on common operating systems. New lightweight virtualization technologies, such as containers and unikernels, appeared later to improve resource efficiency and facilitate the decomposition of big monolithic applications into multiple, smaller services. In this work, we present and empirically evaluate four popular unikernel technologies, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit. We deployed containers both on bare metal and on virtual machines. To fairly evaluate their performance, we created similar applications for unikernels and containers. Additionally, we deployed full-fledged database applications ported on both virtualization technologies. Although in bibliography there are a few studies which compare unikernels and containers, in our study for the first time, we provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of clean-slate and legacy unikernels, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks have been a serious security concern, as no service is, in principle, protected against them. Although a Dolev-Yao intruder with unlimited resources can trivially render any service unavailable, DoS attacks do not necessarily have to be carried out by such (extremely) powerful intruders. It is useful in practice and more challenging for formal protocol verification to determine whether a service is vulnerable even to resource-bounded intruders that cannot generate or intercept arbitrary large volumes of traffic. This paper proposes a novel, more refined intruder model where the intruder can only consume at most some specified amount of resources in any given time window. Additionally, we propose protocol theories that may contain timeouts and specify service resource usage during protocol execution. In contrast to the existing resource-conscious protocol verification models, our model allows finer and more subtle analysis of DoS problems. We illustrate the power of our approach by representing a number of classes of DoS attacks, such as, Slow, Asymmetric and Amplification DoS attacks, exhausting different types of resources of the target, such as, number of workers, processing power, memory, and network bandwidth. We show that the proposed DoS problem is undecidable in general and is PSPACE-complete for the class of resource-bounded, balanced systems. Finally, we implemented our formal verification model in the rewriting logic tool Maude and analyzed a number of DoS attacks in Maude using Rewriting Modulo SMT in an automated fashion.

Efficiently searchable and easily deployable encryption schemes enable an untrusted, legacy service such as a relational database engine to perform searches over encrypted data. The ease with which such schemes can be deployed on top of existing services makes them especially appealing in operational environments where encryption is needed but it is not feasible to replace large infrastructure components like databases or document management systems. Unfortunately all previously known approaches for efficiently searchable and easily deployable encryption are vulnerable to inference attacks where an adversary can use knowledge of the distribution of the data to recover the plaintext with high probability. We present a new efficiently searchable, easily deployable database encryption scheme that is provably secure against inference attacks even when used with real, low-entropy data. We implemented our constructions in Haskell and tested databases up to 10 million records showing our construction properly balances security, deployability and performance.

Attacks on cloud-computing services are becoming more prevalent with recent victims including Tesla, Aviva Insurance and SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto[1]. The risk posed to organisations from malicious insiders is becoming more widely known about and consequently many are now investing in hardware, software and new processes to try to detect these attacks. As for all types of attack vector, there will always be those which are not known about and those which are known about but remain exceptionally difficult to detect - particularly in a timely manner. We believe that insider attacks are of particular concern in a cloud-computing environment, and that cloud-service providers should enhance their ability to detect them by means of indirect detection. We propose a combined attack-tree and kill-chain based method for identifying multiple indirect detection measures. Specifically, the use of attack trees enables us to encapsulate all detection opportunities for insider attacks in cloud-service environments. Overlaying the attack tree on top of a kill chain in turn facilitates indirect detection opportunities higher-up the tree as well as allowing the provider to determine how far an attack has progressed once suspicious activity is detected. We demonstrate the method through consideration of a specific type of insider attack - that of attempting to capture virtual machines in transit within a cloud cluster via use of a network tap, however, the process discussed here applies equally to all cloud paradigms.

Cloud Computing is the most promising paradigm in recent times. It offers a cost-efficient service to individual and industries. However, outsourcing sensitive data to entrusted Cloud servers presents a brake to Cloud migration. Consequently, improving the security of data access is the most critical task. As an efficient cryptographic technique, Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption(CP-ABE) develops and implements fine-grained, flexible and scalable access control model. However, existing CP-ABE based approaches suffer from some limitations namely revocation, data owner overhead and computational cost. In this paper, we propose a sliced revocable solution resolving the aforementioned issues abbreviated RS-CPABE. We applied splitting algorithm. We execute symmetric encryption with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)in large data size and asymmetric encryption with CP-ABE in constant key length. We re-encrypt in case of revocation one single slice. To prove the proposed model, we expose security and performance evaluation.

Living in the age of digital transformation, companies and individuals are moving to public and private clouds to store and retrieve information, hence the need to store and retrieve data is exponentially increasing. Existing storage technologies such as DAS are facing a big challenge to deal with these huge amount of data. Hence, newer technologies should be adopted. Storage Area Network (SAN) is a distributed storage technology that aggregates data from several private nodes into a centralized secure place. Looking at SAN from a security perspective, clearly physical security over multiple geographical remote locations is not adequate to ensure a full security solution. A SAN security framework needs to be developed and designed. This work investigates how SAN protocols work (FC, ISCSI, FCOE). It also investigates about other storages technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) including different metrics such as: IOPS (input output per second), Throughput, Bandwidths, latency, cashing technologies. This research work is focusing on the security vulnerabilities in SAN listing different attacks in SAN protocols and compare it to other such as NAS and DAS. Another aspect of this work is to highlight performance factors in SAN in order to find a way to improve the performance focusing security solutions aimed to enhance the security level in SAN.

Blockchain is a database technology that provides the integrity and trust of the system can't make arbitrary modifications and deletions by being an append-only distributed ledger. That is, the blockchain is not a modification or deletion but a CRAB (Create-Retrieve-Append-Burn) method in which data can be read and written according to a legitimate user's access right(For example, owner private key). However, this can not delete the created data once, which causes problems such as privacy breach. In this paper, we propose an on-off block-chained Hybrid Blockchain system to separate the data and save the connection history to the blockchain. In addition, the state is changed to the distributed database separately from the ledger record, and the state is changed by generating the arbitrary injection in the XOR form, so that the history of modification / deletion of the Off Blockchain can be efficiently retrieved.

Since cyber-physical systems are inherently vulnerable to information leaks, software architects need to reason about security policies to define desired and undesired information flow through a system. The microservice architectural style requires the architects to refine a macro-level security policy into micro-level policies for individual microservices. However, when policies are refined in an ill-formed way, information leaks can emerge on composition of microservices. Related approaches to prevent such leaks do not take into account characteristics of cyber-physical systems like real-time behavior or message passing communication. In this paper, we enable the refinement and verification of information-flow security policies for cyber-physical microservice architectures. We provide architects with a set of well-formedness rules for refining a macro-level policy in a way that enforces its security restrictions. Based on the resulting micro-level policies, we present a verification technique to check if the real-time message passing of microservices is secure. In combination, our contributions prevent information leaks from emerging on composition. We evaluate the accuracy of our approach using an extension of the CoCoME case study.

Cloud computing is a rapid growing advanced technology which is Internet based, providing various ways for storage, resource sharing, and various features. It has brought a new way to securely store and share information and data with multiple users and groups. The cloud environment deals with many problems, and one of the most important problems in recent days is the security issues. Sharing the data in a group, in cloud conditions has turned into a blazing theme in up and coming decades. Thus the blasting interest in cloud computing, ways and measures to accomplish secure and effective information and data sharing in the cloud is a flourishing point to be engaged. In this way, the venture centers around empowering information sharing and capacity for a similar gathering inside the cloud with high security and intensity. Therefore, Honey Encryption and Advanced Encryption Standard is used for providing security for the data shared within the group by the crew members in cloud environment. In addition, an access key is provided by the Group Manager to enable access to the documents and files stored in cloud by the users for specific time period.

Online Social Networks(OSN) plays a vital role in our day to day life. The most popular social network, Facebook alone counts currently 2.23 billion users worldwide. Online social network users are aware of the various security risks that exist in this scenario including privacy violations and they are utilizing the privacy settings provided by OSN providers to make their data safe. But most of them are unaware of the risk which exists after deletion of their data which is not really getting deleted from the OSN server. Self destruction of data is one of the prime recommended methods to achieve assured deletion of data. Numerous techniques have been developed for self destruction of data and this paper discusses and evaluates these techniques along with the various privacy risks faced by an OSN user in this web centered world.

Certificate Transparency (CT) is an emerging system for enabling the rapid discovery of malicious or misissued certificates. Initially standardized in 2013, CT is now finally beginning to see widespread support. Although CT provides desirable security benefits, web browsers cannot begin requiring all websites to support CT at once, due to the risk of breaking large numbers of websites. We discuss challenges for deployment, analyze the adoption of CT on the web, and measure the error rates experienced by users of the Google Chrome web browser. We find that CT has so far been widely adopted with minimal breakage and warnings. Security researchers often struggle with the tradeoff between security and user frustration: rolling out new security requirements often causes breakage. We view CT as a case study for deploying ecosystem-wide change while trying to minimize end user impact. We discuss the design properties of CT that made its success possible, as well as draw lessons from its risks and pitfalls that could be avoided in future large-scale security deployments.

After suffering decades of high-profile attacks, the need for formal verification of security-critical software has never been clearer. Verification-oriented programming languages like F* are now being used to build high-assurance cryptographic libraries and implementations of standard protocols like TLS. In this paper, we seek to apply these verification techniques to modern Web applications, like WhatsApp, that embed sophisticated custom cryptographic components. The problem is that these components are often implemented in JavaScript, a language that is both hostile to cryptographic code and hard to reason about. So we instead target WebAssembly, a new instruction set that is supported by all major JavaScript runtimes. We present a new toolchain that compiles Low*, a low-level subset of the F* programming language, into WebAssembly. Unlike other WebAssembly compilers like Emscripten, our compilation pipeline is focused on compactness and auditability: we formalize the full translation rules in the paper and implement it in a few thousand lines of OCaml. Using this toolchain, we present two case studies. First, we build WHACL*, a WebAssembly version of the existing, verified HACL* cryptographic library. Then, we present LibSignal*, a brand new, verified implementation of the Signal protocol in WebAssembly, that can be readily used by messaging applications like WhatsApp, Skype, and Signal.

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is an experimental transport protocol designed to primarily reduce connection establishment and transport latency, as well as to improve security standards with default end-to-end encryption in HTTPbased applications. QUIC is a multiplexed and secure transport protocol fostered by Google and its design emerged from the urgent need of innovation in the transport layer, mainly due to difficulties extending TCP and deploying new protocols. While still under standardisation, a non-negligble fraction of the Internet's traffic, more than 7% of a European Tier1-ISP, is already running over QUIC and it constitutes more than 30% of Google's egress traffic [1].

In this paper we propose ROS-Defender, a holistic approach to secure robotics systems, which integrates a Security Event Management System (SIEM), an intrusion prevention system (IPS) and a firewall for a robotic system. ROS-Defender combines anomaly detection systems at application (ROS) level and network level, with dynamic policy enforcement points using software defined networking (SDN) to provide protection against a large class of attacks. Although SIEMs, IPS, and firewall have been previously used to secure computer networks, ROSDefender is applying them for the specific use case of robotic systems, where security is in many cases an afterthought.

Emergency medical services universally get regarded as the essential part of the health care delivery system [1]. A relationship exists between the emergency patient death rate and factors such as the failure to access a patient's critical data and the time it takes to arrive at hospitals. Nearly thirty million Americans do not live within an hour of trauma care, so this poor access to trauma centers links to higher pre-hospital death rates in more than half of the United States [2]. So, we need to address the problem. In a patient care-cycle, loads of medical data items are born in different healthcare settings using a disparate system of records during patient visits. The ability for medical care providers to access a patient's complete picture of emergency-relevant medical data is critical and can significantly reduce the annual mortality rate. Today, the problem exists with a continuous recording system of the patient data between healthcare providers. In this paper, we've introduced a combination of secure file transfer methods/tools and blockchain technology as a solution to record patient Emergency relevant medical data as patient walk through from one clinic/medical facility to another, creating a continuous footprint of patient as a secure and scalable data source. So, ambulance crews can access and use it to provide high quality pre-hospital care. All concerns of medical record sharing and accessing like authentication, privacy, security, scalability and audibility, confidentiality has been considered in this approach.

Most searchable attribute-based encryption schemes only support the search for single-keyword without attribute revocation, the data user cannot quickly detect the validity of the ciphertext returned by the cloud service provider. Therefore, this paper proposes an authorization of searchable CP-ABE scheme with attribute revocation and applies the scheme to the cloud computing environment. The data user to send the authorization information to the authorization server for authorization, assists the data user to effectively detect the ciphertext information returned by the cloud service provider while supporting the revocation of the user attribute in a fine-grained access control structure without updating the key during revocation stage. In the random oracle model based on the calculation of Diffie-Hellman problem, it is proved that the scheme can satisfy the indistinguishability of ciphertext and search trapdoor. Finally, the performance analysis shows that the scheme has higher computational efficiency.