Biblio

In cyberspace, a digital signature is a mathematical technique that plays a significant role, especially in validating the authenticity of digital messages, emails, or documents. Furthermore, the digital signature mechanism allows the recipient to trust the authenticity of the received message that is coming from the said sender and that the message was not altered in transit. Moreover, a digital signature provides a solution to the problems of tampering and impersonation in digital communications. In a real-life example, it is equivalent to a handwritten signature or stamp seal, but it offers more security. This paper proposes a scheme to enable users to digitally sign their communications by validating their identity through users’ mobile devices. This is done by utilizing the user’s ambient Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Moreover, the proposed scheme depends on something that a user possesses (i.e., Wi-Fi-enabled devices), and something that is in the user’s environment (i.e., ambient Wi-Fi access points) where the validation process is implemented, in a way that requires no effort from users and removes the "weak link" from the validation process. The proposed scheme was experimentally examined.

Traditionally, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have been operated as air-gapped networks, without a necessity to connect directly to the Internet. With the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, along with the cloud computing shift in traditional IT environments, ICS systems went through an adaptation period in the recent years, as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) became popular. ICS systems, also called Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS), operate on physical devices (i.e., actuators, sensors) at the lowest layer. An anomaly that effect this layer, could potentially result in physical damage. Due to the new attack surfaces that came about with IIoT movement, precise, accurate, and prompt intrusion/anomaly detection is becoming even more crucial in ICS. This paper proposes a novel method for real-time intrusion/anomaly detection based on a cyber-physical system network traffic. To evaluate the proposed anomaly detection method's efficiency, we run our implementation against a network trace taken from a Secure Water Treatment Testbed (SWAT) of iTrust Laboratory at Singapore.

in this paper, we describe a method for detecting abnormal pedestrians or cars by expressing the behavioral characteristics of pedestrians on a global surveillance map in a video security system using CCTV and patrol robots. This method converts a large amount of video surveillance data into a compressed map shape format to efficiently transmit and process data. By using deep learning auto-encoder and CNN algorithm, pedestrians belonging to the abnormal category can be detected in two steps. In the case of the first-stage abnormal candidate extraction, the normal detection rate was 87.7%, the abnormal detection rate was 88.3%, and in the second stage abnormal candidate filtering, the normal detection rate was 99.8% and the abnormal detection rate was 96.5%.

This paper introduces a robust random number generator that based on Bernoulli discrete chaotic map. An eight bit SAR ADC is used with discrete time chaotic map to generate random bit sequences. Compared to RNGs that use the continuous time chaotic map, sensitivity to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations are reduced. Thanks to utilizing switch capacitor circuits to implement Bernoulli chaotic map equations, power consumption decreased significantly. Proposed design that has a throughput of 500 Kbit/second is implemented in TSMC 180 nm process technology. Generated bit sequences has successfully passed all four primary tests of FIPS-140-2 test suite and all tests of NIST 820–22 test suite without post processing. Furthermore, data rate can be increased by sacrificing power consumption. Hence, proposed architecture could be utilized in high speed cryptography applications.

With the booming of Internet technology, the continuous emergence of new technologies and new algorithms greatly expands the application boundaries of cyberspace. While enjoying the convenience brought by informatization, the society is also facing increasingly severe threats to the security of cyberspace. In cyber security defense, cyberspace operators rely on the discovered vulnerabilities, attack patterns, TTPs, and other knowledge to observe, analyze and determine the current threats to the network and security situation in cyberspace, and then make corresponding decisions. However, most of such open-source knowledge is distributed in different data sources in the form of text or web pages, which is not conducive to the understanding, query and correlation analysis of cyberspace operators. In this paper, a knowledge graph for cyber security is constructed to solve this problem. At first, in the process of obtaining security data from multi-source heterogeneous cyberspaces, we adopt efficient crawler to crawl the required data, paving the way for knowledge graph building. In order to establish the ontology required by the knowledge graph, we abstract the overall framework of security data sources in cyberspace, and depict in detail the correlations among various data sources. Then, based on the \$$\backslash$mathbfOWL +$\backslash$mathbfSWRL\$ language, we construct the cyber security knowledge graph. On this basis, we design an analysis system for situation in cyberspace based on knowledge graph and the Snort intrusion detection system (IDS), and study the rules in Snort. The system integrates and links various public resources from the Internet, including key information such as general platforms, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, attack patterns, tactics, techniques, etc. in real cyberspace, enabling the provision of comprehensive, systematic and rich cyber security knowledge to security researchers and professionals, with the expectation to provide a useful reference for cyber security defense.

Industrial Control System (ICS) transmits control and monitoring data between devices in an industrial environment that includes smart grids, water and gas distribution, or traffic control. Unlike traditional internet communication, ICS traffic is stable, periodical, and with regular communication patterns that can be described using statistical modeling. By observing selected features of ICS transmission, e.g., packet direction and inter-arrival times, we can create a statistical profile of the communication based on distribution of features learned from the normal ICS traffic. This paper demonstrates that using statistical modeling, we can detect various anomalies caused by irregular transmissions, device or link failures, and also cyber attacks like packet injection, scanning, or denial of service (DoS). The paper shows how a statistical model is automatically created from a training dataset. We present two types of statistical profiles: the master-oriented profile for one-to-many communication and the peer-to-peer profile that describes traffic between two ICS devices. The proposed approach is fast and easy to implement as a part of an intrusion detection system (IDS) or an anomaly detection (AD) module. The proof-of-concept is demonstrated on two industrial protocols: IEC 60870-5-104 (aka IEC 104) and IEC 61850 (Goose).

An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a core element for securing critical systems. An IDS can use signatures of known attacks, or an anomaly detection model for detecting unknown attacks. Attacking an IDS is often the entry point of an attack against a critical system. Consequently, the security of IDSs themselves is imperative. To secure model-based IDSs, we propose a method to authenticate the anomaly detection model. The anomaly detection model is an autoencoder for which we only have access to input-output pairs. Inputs consist of time windows of values from sensors and actuators of an Industrial Control System. Our method is based on a multipath Neural Network (NN) classifier, a newly proposed deep learning technique. The idea is to characterize errors of an IDS's autoencoder by using a multipath NN's confidence measure \$c\$. We use the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) test to detect a change in the distribution of the summary variable \$c\$, indicating that the autoencoder is not working properly. We compare our method to two baselines. They consist in using other summary variables for the WMW test. We assess the performance of these three methods using simulated data. Among others, our analysis shows that: 1) both baselines are oblivious to some autoencoder spoofing attacks while 2) the WMW test on a multipath NN's confidence measure enables detecting eventually any autoencoder spoofing attack.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) becomes more and more popular. IaaS customers may not clearly know the actual performance of each cloud platform. Moreover, there are no unified standards in performance evaluation of IaaS VMs (virtual machine). The underlying virtualization technology of IaaS cloud is transparent to customers. In this paper, we will design an automated performance benchmarking platform which can automatically install, configure and execute each benchmarking tool with a configuration center. This platform can easily visualize multidimensional benchmarking parameters data of each IaaS cloud platform. We also rented four IaaS VMs from AliCloud-Beijing, AliCloud-Qingdao, UCloud and Huawei to validate our benchmarking system. Performance comparisons of multiple parameters between multiple platforms were shown in this paper. However, in practice, customers' applications running on VMs are often complex. Performance of complex applications may not depend on single benchmarking parameter (e.g. CPU, memory, disk I/O etc.). We ran a TPC-C test for example to get overall performance in MySQL application scenario. The effects of different benchmarking parameters differ in this specific scenario.

Recently, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the internet service has seen an upsurge in use. As a result, the usage of cloud computing apps, which offer services to end users on a subscription basis, rises in this situation. However, the availability and efficiency of cloud computing resources are impacted by DDoS attacks, which are designed to disrupt the availability and processing power of cloud computing services. Because there is no effective way for detecting or filtering DDoS attacks, they are a dependable weapon for cyber-attackers. Recently, researchers have been experimenting with machine learning (ML) methods in order to create efficient machine learning-based strategies for detecting DDoS assaults. In this context, we propose a technique for detecting DDoS attacks in a cloud computing environment using big data and deep learning algorithms. The proposed technique utilises big data spark technology to analyse a large number of incoming packets and a deep learning machine learning algorithm to filter malicious packets. The KDDCUP99 dataset was used for training and testing, and an accuracy of 99.73% was achieved.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the principal signalling protocol in Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, responsible for initialising, terminating, and maintaining sessions amongst call parties. However, the problem with the SIP protocol is that it was not designed to be secure by nature as the HTTP digest authentication used in SIP is insecure, making it vulnerable to a variety of attacks. The current solutions rely on several standardised encryption protocols, such as TLS and IPsec, to protect SIP registration messages. However, the current centralised solutions do not scale well and cause algorithm overload when encoding and decoding SIP messages. In trying to rectify this issue, we propose in this paper a blockchain-based lightweight authentication mechanism, which involves a decentralised identity model to authenticate the SIP client to the SIP server. Our mechanism uses a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain to ensure trust, accountability and preserves user privacy. We provided a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate our work. Further analysis of this approach's usability, mainly CPU and memory usage, was conducted comparing to IPsec and TLS. Then we discussed our system's security and presented a security analysis. Our analysis proves that our approach satisfies the SIP protocol security requirements.

In this paper, we propose a Chaotic Constellation Masking (CCM) encryption method based on henon mapping to enhance the security of CO-OFDM/OQAM system. Simulation results indicate the capability of the CCM method improving system security.

Physical layer security has a paramount importance in tactical wireless networks. Traditional approaches may not fulfill all requirements, demanding additional sophisticated techniques. Thus, Combined Interference and Communications (CIC) emerges as a strategy against message interception in Cognitive Radio Military Networks (CRMN). Since CIC adopts an interference approach under specific CRMN requirements and characteristics, it saves great energy and reduces the receiver detection factor when compared to previous proposals in the literature. However, previous CIC analyses were conducted under vaguely realistic channel models. Thus, the focus of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we identify more realistic channel models to achieve tactical network scenario channel parameters. Additionally, we use such parameters to evaluate CIC suitability to increase CRMN physical layer security. Numerical experiments and emulations illustrate potential impairments on previous work due to the adoption of unrealistic channel models, concluding that CIC technique remains as an upper limit to increase physical layer security in CRMN.

This paper proposes a configurable architecture of butterfly unit (BU) supporting number theoretic transform (NTT) and inverse NTT (INTT) accelerators in the ring learning with error based homomorphic encryption. The proposed architecture is fully pipelined and carefully optimized the critical path delay. To compare with related works, several BU designs of different bit-size specific primes are synthesized and successfully placed-and-routed on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU102 FPGA platform. Implementation results show that the proposed BU designs achieve 3× acceleration with more efficient resource utilization compared with previous works. Thus, the proposed BU architecture is worthwhile to develop NTTINTT accelerators in advanced homomorphic encryption systems.

We study a problem of covert communication over binary symmetric channels (BSC) in an asynchronous setup. Here, Alice seeks to communicate to Bob over a BSC while trying to be covert with respect to Willie, who observes any communication through possibly a different BSC. When Alice communicates, she transmits a message (using a codeword of length n) at a random time uniformly distributed in a window of size Aw slots. We assume that Bob has side information about the time of transmission leading to a reduced uncertainty of Ab slots for Bob, where \$A\_b$\backslash$lt A\_w\$. In this setup, we seek to characterize the limits of covert communication as a function of the timing advantage. When Aw is increasing exponentially in n, we characterize the covert capacity as a function of Aw and Ab. When Aw is increasing sub-exponentially in n, we characterize lower and upper bounds on achievable covert bits and show that positive covert rates are not feasible irrespective of timing advantage. Using numerical work, we illustrate our results for different network scenarios, and also highlight a tradeoff between timing advantage and channel advantage (between Bob and Willie).

The aim of this study is to determine the current challenges related to security and trust issues in digital supply chains. The development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has improved the efficiency of supply chains, while creating new vulnerabilities and increasing the likelihood of security threats. Previous studies lack the physical security aspect, so the emphasis is on the security of cyber-physical systems. In order to achieve the goal of the study, traditional and digital supply chains, their security risks and main differences were examined. A security framework for cyber-physical risks in digital supply chains was developed.

In order to identify potential weakness in communication and data in transit, a microgrid testbed is being developed at Boise State University. This testbed will be used to verify microgrid models and communication methods in an effort to increase the resiliency of these systems to cyber-attacks. If vulnerabilities are found in these communication methods, then risk mitigation techniques will be developed to address them.

Distributed wind is an electric energy resource segment with strong potential to be deployed in many applications, but special consideration of resilience and cybersecurity is needed to address the unique conditions associated with distributed wind. Distributed wind is a strong candidate to help meet renewable energy and carbon-free energy goals. However, care must be taken as more systems are installed to ensure that the systems are reliable, resilient, and secure. The physical and communications requirements for distributed wind mean that there are unique cybersecurity considerations, but there is little to no existing guidance on best practices for cybersecurity risk management for distributed wind systems specifically. This research develops an architecture for managing cyber risks associated with distributed wind systems through resilience functions. The architecture takes into account the configurations, challenges, and standards for distributed wind to create a risk-focused perspective that considers threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences. We show how the resilience functions of identification, preparation, detection, adaptation, and recovery can mitigate cyber threats. We discuss common distributed wind architectures and interconnections to larger power systems. Because cybersecurity cannot exist independently, the cyber-resilience architecture must consider the system holistically. Finally, we discuss risk assessment recommendations with special emphasis on what sets distributed wind systems apart from other distributed energy resources (DER).

Most information systems rely on the Internet to provide users with various services. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are currently one of the main cyber threats, which causes the system or network disabled. To ensure that the information system can provide services for users normally, it is important to detect the occurrence of DDoS attacks quickly and accurately. Therefore, this research proposes a system based on packet continuity to detect DDoS attacks. On average, it only takes a few milliseconds to collect a certain number of consecutive packets, and then DDoS attacks can be detected. Experimental results show that the accuracy of detecting DDoS attacks based on packet continuity is higher than 99.9% and the system response time is about 5 milliseconds.

In a collaboration with the Georgia Peanut Commission’s Education Center and museum in Georgia, USA, we developed an augmented reality app to guide visitors through the museum and offer immersive educational information about the artifacts, exhibits, and artwork displayed therein. Notably, our augmented reality system applies the First Order Motion Model for Image Animation to several portraits of individuals influential to the Georgia peanut industry to provide immersive animated narration and monologue regarding their contributions to the peanut industry. [4]

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) has gained great success in solving several challenging problems in recent years. It is well known that training a DNN model from scratch requires a lot of data and computational resources. However, using a pre-trained model directly or using it to initialize weights cost less time and often gets better results. Therefore, well pre-trained DNN models are valuable intellectual property that we should protect. In this work, we propose DeepTrace, a framework for model owners to secretly fingerprinting the target DNN model using a special trigger set and verifying from outputs. An embedded fingerprint can be extracted to uniquely identify the information of model owner and authorized users. Our framework benefits from both white-box and black-box verification, which makes it useful whether we know the model details or not. We evaluate the performance of DeepTrace on two different datasets, with different DNN architectures. Our experiment shows that, with the advantages of combining white-box and black-box verification, our framework has very little effect on model accuracy, and is robust against different model modifications. It also consumes very little computing resources when extracting fingerprint.

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) are used in power grids across North America to measure the amplitude, phase, and frequency of an alternating voltage or current. PMU's use the IEEE C37.118 protocol to send telemetry to phasor data collectors (PDC) and human machine interface (HMI) workstations in a control center. However, the C37.118 protocol utilizes the internet protocol stack without any authentication mechanism. This means that the protocol is vulnerable to false data injection (FDI) and false command injection (FCI). In order to study different scenarios in which C37.118 protocol's integrity and confidentiality can be compromised, we created a testbed that emulates a C37.118 communication network. In this testbed we conduct FCI and FDI attacks on real-time C37.118 data packets using a packet manipulation tool called Scapy. Using this platform, we generated C37.118 FCI and FDI datasets which are processed by multi-label machine learning classifier algorithms, such as Decision Tree (DT), k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), and Naive Bayes (NB), to find out how effective machine learning can be at detecting such attacks. Our results show that the DT classifier had the best precision and recall rate.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have given the cyber security industry a huge leverage with the possibility of having significantly autonomous models that can detect and prevent cyberattacks – even though there still exist some degree of human interventions. AI technologies have been utilized in gathering data which can then be processed into information that are valuable in the prevention of cyberattacks. These AI-based cybersecurity frameworks have commendable scalability about them and are able to detect malicious activities within the cyberspace in a prompter and more efficient manner than conventional security architectures. However, our one or two completed studies did not provide a complete and clear analyses to apply different machine learning algorithms on different media systems. Because of the existing methods of attack and the dynamic nature of malware or other unwanted software (adware etc.) it is important to automatically and systematically create, update and approve malicious packages that can be available to the public. Some of Complex tests have shown that DNN performs maybe can better than conventional machine learning classification. Finally, we present a multiple, large and hybrid DNN torrent structure called Scale-Hybrid-IDS-AlertNet, which can be used to effectively monitor to detect and review the impact of network traffic and host-level events to warn directly or indirectly about cyber-attacks. Besides this, they are also highly adaptable and flexible, with commensurate efficiency and accuracy when it comes to the detection and prevention of cyberattacks.There has been a multiplicity of AI-based cyber security architectures in recent years, and each of these has been found to show varying degree of effectiveness. Deep Neural Networks, which tend to be more complex and even more efficient, have been the major focus of research studies in recent times. In light of the foregoing, the objective of this paper is to discuss the use of AI methods in fighting cyberattacks like malware and DDoS attacks, with attention on DNN-based models.

In this work a data provenance system for grid-oriented applications is presented. The proposed Keyless Infrastructure Security Solution (KISS) provides mechanisms to store and maintain digital data fingerprints that can later be used to validate and assert data provenance using a time-based, hash tree mechanism. The developed solution has been designed to satisfy the stringent requirements of the modern power grid including execution time and storage necessities. Its applicability has been tested using a lab-scale, proof-of-concept deployment that secures an energy management system against the attack sequence observed on the 2016 Ukrainian power grid cyberattack. The results demonstrate a strong potential for enabling data provenance in a wide array of applications, including speed-sensitive applications such as those found in control room environments.

Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) that enables a client to perform searches and updates on encrypted data has been intensively studied in cloud computing. Recently, forward privacy and backward privacy has engaged significant attention to protect DSSE from the leakage of updates. However, the research in this field almost focused on keyword-level updates. That is, the client needs to know the keywords of the documents in advance. In this paper, we proposed a document-level update scheme, DBP, which supports immediate deletion while guaranteeing forward privacy and backward privacy. Compared with existing forward and backward private DSSE schemes, our DBP scheme has the following merits: 1) Practicality. It achieves deletion based on document identifiers rather than document/keyword pairs; 2) Efficiency. It utilizes only lightweight primitives to realize backward privacy while supporting immediate deletion. Experimental evaluation on two real datasets demonstrates the practical efficiency of our scheme.

Modern embedded systems need to cater for several needs depending upon the application domain in which they are deployed. For example, mixed-critically needs to be considered for real-time and safety-critical systems and energy for battery-operated systems. At the same time, many of these systems demand for their reliability and security as well. With electronic systems being used for increasingly varying type of applications, novel challenges have emerged. For example, with the use of embedded systems in increasingly complex applications that execute tasks with varying priorities, mixed-criticality systems present unique challenges to designing reliable systems. The large design space involved in implementing cross-layer reliability in heterogeneous systems, particularly for mixed-critical systems, poses new research problems. Further, malicious security attacks on these systems pose additional extraordinary challenges in the system design. In this paper, we cover both the industry and academia perspectives of the challenges posed by these emergent aspects of system design towards designing highperformance, energy-efficient, reliable and/or secure embedded systems. We also provide our views on paths forward.