Biblio

This report presents characterizations of in vivo neural recordings performed with a CMOS multichannel chip that uses rapid multiplexing directly at the electrodes, without any pre-amplification or buffering. Neural recordings were taken from a 16-channel microwire array implanted in rodent cortex, with comparison to a gold-standard commercial bench-top recording system. We were able to record well-isolated threshold crossings from 10 multiplexed electrodes and typical local field potential waveforms from 16, with strong agreement with the standard system (average SNR = 2.59 and 3.07 respectively). For 10 electrodes, the circuit achieves an effective area per channel of 0.0077 mm2, which is \textbackslashtextgreater5× smaller than typical multichannel chips. Extensive characterizations of noise and signal quality are presented and compared to fundamental theory, as well as results from in vivo and in vitro experiments. By demonstrating the validation of rapid multiplexing directly at the electrodes, this report confirms it as a promising approach for reducing circuit area in massively-multichannel neural recording systems, which is crucial for scaling recording site density and achieving large-scale sensing of brain activity with high spatiotemporal resolution.

Moving target defense (MTD) suggests a game-changing way of enhancing web security by increasing uncertainty and complexity for attackers. A good number of web MTD techniques have been investigated to counter various types of web attacks. However, in most MTD techniques, only fixed attributes of the attack surface are shifted, leaving the rest exploitable by the attackers. Currently, there are few mechanisms to support the whole attack surface movement and solve the partial coverage problem, where only a fraction of the possible attributes shift in the whole attack surface. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Web Gene Tree (WGT) based MTD mechanism. The key point is to extract all potential exploitable key attributes related to vulnerabilities as web genes, and mutate them using various MTD techniques to withstand various attacks. Experimental results indicate that, by randomly shifting web genes and diversely inserting deceptive ones, the proposed WGT mechanism outperforms other existing schemes and can significantly improve the security of web applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a revolutionary expandable network which has brought many advantages, improving the Quality of Life (QoL) of individuals. However, IoT carries dangers, due to the fact that hackers have the ability to find security gaps in users' IoT devices, which are not still secure enough and hence, intrude into them for malicious activities. As a result, they can control many connected devices in an IoT network, turning IoT into Botnet of Things (BoT). In a botnet, hackers can launch several types of attacks, such as the well known attacks of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Man in the Middle (MitM), and/or spread various types of malicious software (malware) to the compromised devices of the IoT network. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered honeynet for enhanced IoT botnet detection rate with the use of Cloud Computing (CC). This upcoming security mechanism makes use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques like the Logistic Regression (LR) in order to predict potential botnet existence. It can also be adopted by other conventional security architectures in order to intercept hackers the creation of large botnets for malicious actions.

Cloud computing has been envisioned as a next generation information technology (IT) paradigm. The risk of losing data stored with any untrustworthy service provider is the key barrier to widespread uptake of cloud computing. This paper proposes an algebraic signature based remote data possession checking (RDPC) scheme to verify the integrity of the data stored in the cloud. This scheme integrates forward error-correcting codes to enhance the data possession guarantee, which can recover the data when a small amount of file has been deleted. The scheme allows verification without the need for the auditor to compare against the original data, which reduces the communication complexity dramatically. The storage complexity of cloud user is reduced to several bytes' information. Extensive security analysis and simulation show that the proposed scheme is highly provably secure. Finally, experiment results reveal that the computation performance is effective, and bounded by disk I/O.

Malware is any software that causes harm to the user information, computer systems or network. Modern computing and internet systems are facing increase in malware threats from the internet. It is observed that different malware follows the same patterns in their structure with minimal alterations. The type of threats has evolved, from file-based malware to fileless malware, such kind of threats are also known as Advance Volatile Threat (AVT). Fileless malware is complex and evasive, exploiting pre-installed trusted programs to infiltrate information with its malicious intent. Fileless malware is designed to run in system memory with a very small footprint, leaving no artifacts on physical hard drives. Traditional antivirus signatures and heuristic analysis are unable to detect this kind of malware due to its sophisticated and evasive nature. This paper provides information relating to detection, mitigation and analysis for such kind of threat.

Recently, smart video security systems have been active. The existing video security system is mainly a method of detecting a local abnormality of a unit camera. In this case, it is difficult to obtain the characteristics of each local region and the situation for the entire watching area. In this paper, we developed an object map for the entire surveillance area using a combination of surveillance cameras, and developed an algorithm to detect anomalies by learning normal situations. The surveillance camera in each area detects and tracks people and cars, and creates a local object map and transmits it to the server. The surveillance server combines each local maps to generate a global map for entire areas. Probability maps were automatically calculated from the global maps, and normal and abnormal decisions were performed through trained data about normal situations. For three reporting status: normal, caution, and warning, and the caution report performance shows that normal detection 99.99% and abnormal detection 86.6%.

The main method for long-distance underwater communication is underwater acoustic communication(UAC). The bandwidth of UAC channel is narrow and the frequency band resources are scarce. Therefore, it is important to improve the frequency band utilization of UAC system. Cognitive underwater acoustic (CUA) technology is an important method. CUA network can share spectrum resources with the primary network. Spectrum sensing (SS) technology is the premise of realizing CUA. Therefore, improving the accuracy of spectral sensing is the main purpose of this paper. However, the realization of underwater SS technology still faces many difficulties. First, underwater energy supplies are scarce, making it difficult to apply complex algorithms. Second, and more seriously, CUA network can sometimes be attacked and exploited by hostile forces, which will not only lead to data leakage, but also greatly affect the accuracy of SS. In order to improve the utilization of underwater spectrum and avoid attack, an underwater spectrum sensing model based on the two-threshold energy detection method and K of M fusion decision method is established. Then, the trust mechanism based on beta function and XOR operation are proposed to combat individual attack and multi-user joint attack (MUJA) respectively. Finally, simulation result shows the effectiveness of these methods.

Network Function Virtualization or NFV gives numerous advantages over the conventional networking techniques by incorporating distinctive features of a network over the virtual machine (VM). It decreases capital and operational costs to give more noteworthy adaptability and flexibility. But all of these advantages come at the expense of the intrinsic system vulnerabilities because of specific sorts of cyber attacks like the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. With the increased number of layers in NFV, it becomes easier for an attacker to execute DDoS attack. This study indicates a new model for mitigating the effects of DDoS attacks on NFV. The model has been designed specifically for the individual users especially gamers and online streamers who become victim of DDoS attack on adaily basis. However, the method can be used for a online service like a website in general as well after making certain changes which have been discussed in detail. ARDefense usually performs server migration and IP spoofing when it detects a DDoS attack on the application layer. Effectiveness of ARDefense was tested by measuring load migration and IP spoofing processing time.

Cloud computing is the flexible platform to outsource the data from local server to commercial cloud. However cloud provides tremendous benefits to user, data privacy and data leakage reduce the attention of cloud. For protecting data privacy and reduce data leakage various techniques has to be implemented in cloud. There are various types of cloud environment, but we concentrate on Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is nothing but combination of more than two or more cloud. Where critical operations are performed in private cloud and non critical operations are performed in public cloud. So, it has numerous advantages and criticality too. In this paper, we focus on data security through encryption scheme over Hybrid Cloud. There are various encryption schemes are close to us but it also have data security issues. To overcome these issues, Attribute Based Encryption Scheme with Dynamic Attributes Supporting (ABE-DAS) has proposed. Attribute based Encryption Scheme with Dynamic Attributes Supporting technique enhance the security of the data in hybrid cloud.

Modern control flow attacks circumvent existing defense mechanisms to transfer the program control to attacker chosen malicious code in the program, leaving application vulnerable to attack. Advanced attacks such as Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attack and its variants, transfer program execution to gadgets (code-snippet that ends with return instruction). The code space to generate gadgets is large and attacks using these gadgets are Turing-complete. One big challenge to harden the program against ROP attack is to confine gadget selection to a limited locations, thus leaving the attacker to search entire code space according to payload criteria. In this paper, we present a novel approach to label the nodes of the Control-Flow Graph (CFG) of a program such that labels of the nodes on a valid control flow edge satisfy a Hamming distance property. The newly encoded CFG enables detection of illegal control flow transitions during the runtime in the processor pipeline. Experimentally, we have demonstrated that the proposed Control Flow Integrity (CFI) implementation is effective against control-flow hijacking and the technique can reduce the search space of the ROP gadgets upto 99.28%. We have also validated our technique on seven applications from MiBench and the proposed labeling mechanism incurs no instruction count overhead while, on average, it increases instruction width to a maximum of 12.13%.

Facial biometrics have the advantages of high reliability, strong distinguishability and easily acquired for authentication. Therefore, it is becoming wildly used in identity authentication filed. However, there are stability, security and privacy issues in generating face key, which brings great challenges to face biometric authentication. In this paper, we propose a biometric key generation scheme based on face image. On the one hand, a deep neural network model for feature extraction is used to improve the stability of identity authentication. On the other hand, a key generation mechanism is designed to generate random biometric key while hiding original facial biometrics to enhance security and privacy of user authentication. The results show the FAR reach to 0.53% and the FRR reach to 0.57% in LFW face database, which achieves the better performance of biometric identification, and the proposed method is able to realize randomness of the generated biometric keys by NIST statistical test suite.

The mechanism for distributing information on the source of the attack by combining blockchain technology with the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) can be done so that DDoS attack mitigation becomes more flexible, saves resources and costs. Also, by informing the blacklisted Internet Protocol(IP), each IPS can share attack source information so that attack traffic blocking can be carried out on IPS that are closer to the source of the attack. Therefore, the attack traffic passing through the network can be drastically reduced because the attack traffic has been blocked on the IPS that is closer to the attack source. The blocking of existing DDoS attack traffic is generally carried out on each IPS without a mechanism to share information on the source of the attack so that each IPS cannot cooperate. Also, even though the DDoS attack traffic did not reach the server because it had been blocked by IPS, the attack traffic still flooded the network so that network performance was reduced. Through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, it is possible to inform the source of the attack or blacklisted IP addresses without requiring additional infrastructure. The blacklisted IP address is used by IPS to detect and handle DDoS attacks. Through the blacklisted IP distribution scheme, testing and analysis are carried out to see information on the source of the attack on each IPS and the attack traffic that passes on the network. The result is that each IPS can have the same blacklisted IP so that each IPS can have the same attack source information. The results also showed that the attack traffic through the network infrastructure can be drastically reduced. Initially, the total number of attack packets had an average of 115,578 reduced to 27,165.

Achieving efficient and secure accesses to real-time information from the designated IoT node is the fundamental key requirement for the applications of the Internet of Things. However, IoT nodes are prone to physical attacks, public channels reveal the sensitive information, and gateways that manage the IoT nodes suffer from the single-point failure, thereby causing the security and privacy problems. In this paper, a blockchain-based user remote authentication scheme using physical unclonable functions (PUFs) is proposed to overcome these problems. The PUFs provide physically secure identities for the IoT nodes and the blockchain acts as a distributed database to manage the key materials reliably for gateways. The security analysis is conducted and shows that our scheme realizes reliable security features and resists various attacks. Furthermore, a prototype was implemented to prove our scheme is efficient, scalable, and suitable for IoT scenarios.

Most modern cloud and web services are programmatically accessed through REST APIs. This paper discusses how an attacker might compromise a service by exploiting vulnerabilities in its REST API. We introduce four security rules that capture desirable properties of REST APIs and services. We then show how a stateful REST API fuzzer can be extended with active property checkers that automatically test and detect violations of these rules. We discuss how to implement such checkers in a modular and efficient way. Using these checkers, we found new bugs in several deployed production Azure and Office365 cloud services, and we discuss their security implications. All these bugs have been fixed.

Wireless sensors are often deployed in environments where it is difficult for them to discern friend from enemy. An example case is a military tactical scenario, where sensors are deployed to map the location of an item but where some of the nodes have been compromised or where there are other malicious nodes present. In this scenario, sharing data with other network nodes may present a critical security risk to the sensor nodes. Blockchain technology, with its ability to house a secure distributed ledger, offers a possible solution. However, blockchain applications for Wireless Sensor Networks suffer from poor latency in block propagation which in turn decreases throughput and network scalability. Several researchers have proposed solutions for improved network throughput. In this work, a comparison of these existing works is performed leading to a taxonomy of existing algorithms. Characteristics consistently found in algorithms reporting improved throughput are presented and, later, these characteristics are used in the development of a new algorithm for improving throughput. The proposed algorithm utilizes a proof-of- authority consensus algorithm with a node trust-based scheme. The proposed algorithm shows strong results over the base case algorithm and was evaluated with blockchain network simulations of up to 20000 nodes.

In the coming future, Software-defined networking (SDN) will become a technology more responsive, fully automated, and highly secure. SDN is a way to manage networks by separate the control plane from the forwarding plane, by using software to manage network functions through a centralized control point. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the most popular malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network. The problem of the paper is the DDoS attack inside the SDN environment and how could use SDN specifications through the advantage of Open vSwitch programmability feature to stop the attack. This paper presents DDoS attack detection and mitigation in the SDN data-plane by applying a written SDN application in python language, based on the malicious traffic abnormal behavior to reduce the interference with normal traffic. The evaluation results reveal detection and mitigation time between 100 to 150 sec. The work also sheds light on the programming relevance with the open daylight controller over an abstracted view of the network infrastructure.

While internet technologies are developing day by day, threats against them are increasing at the same speed. One of the most serious and common types of attacks is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The DDoS intrusion detection approach proposed in this study is based on fuzzy logic and entropy. The network is modeled as a graph and graphics-based features are used to distinguish attack traffic from non-attack traffic. Fuzzy clustering is applied based on these properties to indicate the tendency of IP addresses or port numbers to be in the same cluster. Based on this uncertainty, attack and non-attack traffic were modeled. The detection stage uses the fuzzy relevance function. This algorithm was tested on real data collected from Boğaziçi University network.

Nowadays the use of the Internet is growing; E-voting system has been used by different countries because it reduces the cost and the time which used to consumed by using traditional voting. When the voter wants to access the E-voting system through the web application, there are requirements such as a web browser and a server. The voter uses the web browser to reach to a centralized database. The use of a centralized database for the voting system has some security issues such as Data modification through the third party in the network due to the use of the central database system as well as the result of the voting is not shown in real-time. However, this paper aims to provide an E-voting system with high security by using blockchain. Blockchain provides a decentralized model that makes the network Reliable, safe, flexible, and able to support real-time services.

Access to data at large scales expedites the progress of research in medical fields. Nevertheless, accessibility to patients' data faces significant challenges on regulatory, organizational and technical levels. In light of this, we present a novel approach based on the crowdsourcing paradigm to solve this data scarcity problem. Utilizing the infrastructure that blockchain provides, our decentralized platform enables researchers to solicit contributions to their well-defined research study from a large crowd of volunteers. Furthermore, to overcome the challenge of breach of privacy and mutual trust, we employed the cryptographic primitive of Zero-knowledge Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK). This not only allows participants to make contributions without exposing their privacy-sensitive health data, but also provides a means for a distributed network of users to verify the validity of the contributions in an efficient manner. Finally, since without an incentive mechanism in place, the crowdsourcing platform would be rendered ineffective, we incorporated smart contracts to ensure a fair reciprocal exchange of data for reward between patients and researchers.

This paper presents the design and the verification of an efficient image protection method based on the QR code, which is a type of two-dimensional barcode widely used in various fields. For this purpose, we design a new image protection system consisting of a secure image generator and a secure image recognizer. One adds a new pre-processing block to the typical QR code generator and the other combines the existing QR code reader with a new post-processing block. The new architecture provides image de-identification. It is also flexible, allowing the use of text-based compression and encryption. We have implemented prototype applications for verifying the functions of the secure image generator and those of the secure image recognizer. As a result, it is shown that the proposed architecture can be used as a good solution for image privacy protection, especially in offline environments.

With the advancement of communication technology, the interoperability of the power grid operation has improved significantly, but due to its dependence on the communication system, it is extremely vulnerable to network attacks. Among them, the false data injection attack utilizes the loophole of bad data detection in the system and attacks the state estimation system, resulting in frequent occurrence of abnormal data in the system, which brings great harm to the power grid. In view of the fact that false data injection attacks are easy to avoid traditional bad data detection methods, this paper analyzes the different situations of false data injection attacks based on the characteristics of the power grid. Firstly, it proposes to apply the distortion index method to false data injection attack detection. Experiments prove that the detection results are good and can be complementary to traditional detection methods. Then, combined with the traditional normalized residual method, this paper proposes the improved distortion index method based on the distortion index, which is good at detecting abnormal data. The use of improved distortion index method to detect false data injection attacks can make up for the defect of the lack of universality of traditional detection methods, and meet the requirements of anomaly detection efficiency. Finally, based on the MATLAB power simulation test system, experimental simulation is carried out to verify the effectiveness and universality of the proposed method for false data injection attack detection.

Phishing sends malicious links or attachments through emails that can perform various functions, including capturing the victim's login credentials or account information. These emails harm the victims, cause money loss, and identity theft. In this paper, we contribute to solving the phishing problem by developing an extension for the Google Chrome web browser. In the development of this feature, we used JavaScript PL. To be able to identify and prevent the fishing attack, a combination of Blacklisting and semantic analysis methods was used. Furthermore, a database for phishing sites is generated, and the text, links, images, and other data on-site are analyzed for pattern recognition. Finally, our proposed solution was tested and compared to existing approaches. The results validate that our proposed method is capable of handling the phishing issue substantially.

When modeling information security systems (ISS), the vast majority of works offer various models of threats to the object of protection (threat trees, Petri nets, etc.). However, ISS is not only a mean to prevent threats or reduce damage from their implementation, but also other components - the qualifications of employees responsible for IS, the internal climate in the team, the company's position on the market, and many others. The article considers the cognitive model of the state of the information security system of an average organization. The model is a weighted oriented graph, its' vertices are standard elements of the organization's information security system. The most significant factors affecting the condition of information security of the organization are identified based on the model. Influencing these factors is providing the most effect if IS level.

Due to high availability and easy accessibility of information, it has become quite difficult to assure security of data. Even though watermarking seems to be an effective solution to protect data, it is still challenging to be used with relational databases. Moreover, inserting a watermark in database may lead to distortion. As a result, the contents of database can no longer remain useful. Our proposed distortion-free watermarking approach ensures that integrity of database can be preserved by generating an image watermark from its contents. This image is registered with Certification Authority (CA) before the database is distributed for use. In case, the owner suspects any kind of tampering in the database, an image watermark is generated and compared with the registered image watermark. If both do not match, it can be concluded that the integrity of database has been compromised. Experiments are conducted on Forest Cover Type data set to localize tampering to the finest granularity. Results show that our approach can detect all types of attack with 100% accuracy.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) has become a preferred technology for monitoring in industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications like supply chain, medical industry, vehicle tracking and warehouse monitoring where information is required continually. Typical security threats seen in these applications are denial of service (DOS) attack, transmission attack etc. We propose a novel edge data security schema based on spike modulation along with backscatter communication technique to modulate both sensor and identification (ID) information. It is observed that this data encoding schema works well even in a multi-tag single-reader environment. Further, it uses lower power and offers a low-cost solution for Industrial IoT applications.