Biblio

Smart grid (SG) is considered the next generation of the traditional power grid. It is mainly divided into three main infrastructures: power system, information and communication infrastructures. Cybersecurity is imperative for information infrastructure and the secure, reliable, and efficient operation of the smart grid. Cybersecurity or a lack of proper implementation thereof poses a considerable challenge to the deployment of SG. Therefore, in this paper, A comprehensive survey of cyber security is presented in the smart grid context. Cybersecurity-related information infrastructure is clarified. The impact of adopting cybersecurity on control and management systems has been discussed. Also, the paper highlights the cybersecurity issues and challenges associated with the control decisions in the smart grid.

In recent years, the blackout accident shows that the cause of power failure is not only in the power network, but also in the cyber network. Aiming at the problem of cyber network fault Cyber-physical power systems, combined with the structure and functional attributes of cyber network, the comprehensive criticality of information node is defined. By evaluating the vulnerability of ieee39 node system, it is found that the fault of high comprehensive criticality information node will cause greater load loss to the system. The simulation results show that the comprehensive criticality index can effectively identify the key nodes of the cyber network.

The increasing demand for the interconnected IoT based smart grid is facing threats from cyber-attacks due to inherent vulnerability in the smart grid network. There is a pressing need to evaluate and model these vulnerabilities in the network to avoid cascading failures in power systems. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a vulnerability assessment framework based on attack probability for the protection and security of a smart grid. Several factors were taken into consideration such as the probability of attack, propagation of attack from a parent node to child nodes, effectiveness of basic metering system, Kalman estimation and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The IEEE-300 bus smart grid was simulated using MATPOWER to study the effectiveness of the proposed framework by injecting false data injection attacks (FDIA); and studying their propagation. Our results show that the use of severity assessment standards such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), AMI measurements and Kalman estimates were very effective for evaluating the vulnerability assessment of smart grid in the presence of FDIA attack scenarios.

The paper aims to discover vulnerabilities by application of supervisory control theory and to design a defensive supervisor against vulnerability attacks. Supervisory control restricts the system behavior to satisfy the control specifications. The existence condition of the supervisor, sometimes results in undesirable plant behavior, which can be regarded as a vulnerability of the control specifications. We aim to design a more robust supervisor against this vulnerability.

Verifiable Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (VDSSE) enables users to securely outsource databases (document sets) to cloud servers and perform searches and updates. The verifiability property prevents users from accepting incorrect search results returned by a malicious server. However, we discover that the community currently only focuses on preventing malicious behavior from the server but ignores incorrect updates from the client, which are very likely to happen since there is no record on the client to check. Indeed most existing VDSSE schemes are not sufficient to tolerate incorrect updates from the client. For instance, deleting a nonexistent keyword-identifier pair can break their correctness and soundness. In this paper, we demonstrate the vulnerabilities of a type of existing VDSSE schemes that fail them to ensure correctness and soundness properties on incorrect updates. We propose an efficient fault-tolerant solution that can consider any DSSE scheme as a black-box and make them into a fault-tolerant VDSSE in the malicious model. Forward privacy is an important property of DSSE that prevents the server from linking an update operation to previous search queries. Our approach can also make any forward secure DSSE scheme into a fault-tolerant VDSSE without breaking the forward security guarantee. In this work, we take FAST [1] (TDSC 2020), a forward secure DSSE, as an example, implement a prototype of our solution, and evaluate its performance. Even when compared with the previous fastest forward private construction that does not support fault tolerance, the experiments show that our construction saves 9× client storage and has better search and update efficiency.

Nowadays, safety is a first-rate subject for all applications. There has been an exponential growth year by year in the number of businesses going digital since the few decades following the birth of the Internet. In these technologically advanced times, cyber security is a must mainly for internet applications, so we have the notion of diving deeper into the Cyber security domain and are determined to make a complete project. We aim to develop a website portal for ease of communication between us and the end user. Utilizing the power of python scripting and flask server to make independent automated tools for detection of SQLI, XSS & a Spider(Content Discovery Tool). We have also integrated skipfish as a website vulnerability scanner to our project using python and Kali Linux. Since conducting a penetration test on another website without permission is not legal, we thought of building a dummy website prone to OS Command Injection in addition to the above-mentioned attacks. A well-documented report will be generated after the penetration test/ vulnerability scan. In case the website is vulnerable, patching of the website will be done with the user's consent.

Structured Query Language Injection (SQLi) is a client-side application vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious SQL queries with harmful intents, including stealing sensitive information, bypassing authentication, and even executing illegal operations to cause more catastrophic damage to users on the web application. According to OWASP, the top 10 harmful attacks against web applications are SQL Injection attacks. Moreover, based on data reports from the UK's National Fraud Authority, SQL Injection is responsible for 97% of data exposures. Therefore, in order to prevent the SQL Injection attack, detection SQLi system is essential. The contribution of this research is securing web applications by developing a browser extension for Google Chrome using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which is a unique kind of RNN algorithm capable of learning long-term dependencies like SQL Injection attacks. The results of the model will be deployed in static analysis in a browser extension, and the LSTM algorithm will learn to identify the URL that has to be injected into Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) as a sample-tested web application. Experimental results show that the proposed SQLi detection model based on the LSTM algorithm achieves an accuracy rate of 99.97%, which means that a reliable client-side can effectively detect whether the URL being accessed contains a SQLi attack or not.

AbuSaif is a human-like social robot designed and built at the UAE University's Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab. AbuSaif was initially operated by a classical personal computer (PC), like most of the existing social robots. Thus, most of the robot's functionalities are limited to the capacity of that mounted PC. To overcome this, in this study, we propose a web-based platform that shall take the benefits of clustering in cloud computing. Our proposed platform will increase the operational capability and functionality of AbuSaif, especially those needed to operate artificial intelligence algorithms. We believe that the robot will become more intelligent and autonomous using our proposed web platform.

This document takes an in-depth approach to identify WhatsApp's Security risk management, governance and controls. WhatsApp is a communication mobile application that is available on both android and IOS, recently acquired by Facebook and allows us to stay connected. This document identifies all necessary assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and risks to WhatsApp and further provides mitigations and security controls to possibly utilize and secure the application.

Recent studies have demonstrated the lack of robustness of image reconstruction networks to test-time evasion attacks, posing security risks and potential for misdiagnoses. In this paper, we evaluate how vulnerable such networks are to training-time poisoning attacks for the first time. In contrast to image classification, we find that trigger-embedded basic backdoor attacks on these models executed using heuristics lead to poor attack performance. Thus, it is non-trivial to generate backdoor attacks for image reconstruction. To tackle the problem, we propose a bi-level optimization (BLO)-based attack generation method and investigate its effectiveness on image reconstruction. We show that BLO-generated back-door attacks can yield a significant improvement over the heuristics-based attack strategy.

With the widespread application of power Internet of Things (IoT), the edge IoT agents are often threatened by various attacks, among which the white-box attack is the most serious. The white-box implementation of the cryptography algorithm can hide key information even in the white-box attack context by means of obfuscation. However, under the specially designed attack, there is still a risk of the information being recovered within a certain time complexity. In this paper, by introducing pseudo states, a new white-box implementation of SM4 algorithm is proposed. The encryption and decryption processes are implemented in the form of matrices and lookup tables, which are obfuscated by scrambling encodings. The introduction of pseudo states could complicate the obfuscation, leading to the great improvement in the security. The number of pseudo states can be changed according to the requirements of security. Through several quantitative indicators, including diversity, ambiguity, the time complexity required to extract the key and the value space of the key and external encodings, it is proved that the security of the proposed implementation could been enhanced significantly, compared with the existing schemes under similar memory occupation.

The study focused on assessing and testing Windows 10 to identify possible vulnerabilities and their ability to withstand cyber-attacks. CVE data, alongside other vulnerability reports, were instrumental in measuring the operating system's performance. Metasploit and Nmap were essential in penetration and intrusion experiments in a simulated environment. The study applied the following testing procedure: information gathering, scanning and results analysis, vulnerability selection, launch attacks, and gaining access to the operating system. Penetration testing involved eight attacks, two of which were effective against the different Windows 10 versions. Installing the latest version of Windows 10 did not guarantee complete protection against attacks. Further research is essential in assessing the system's vulnerabilities are recommending better solutions.

In covert communication systems, covert messages can be transmitted without being noticed by the monitors or adversaries. Therefore, the covert communication technology has emerged as a novel method for network authentication, copyright protection, and the evidence of cybercrimes. However, how to design the covert communication in the physical layer of wireless networks and how to improve the channel capacity for the covert communication systems are very challenging. In this paper, we propose a wireless covert communication system, where data streams from the antennas of the transmitter are coded according to a code book to transmit covert and public messages. We adopt a modulation scheme, named covert quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), to modulate the messages, where the constellation of covert information bits deviates from its normal coordinates. Moreover, the covert receiver can detect the covert information bits according to the constellation departure. Simulation results show that proposed covert communication system can significantly improve the covert data rate and reduce the covert bit error rate, in comparison with the traditional covert communication systems.

The SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has become ubiquitous in industrial control systems. However, it may be exposed to cyber attack threats when it accesses the Internet. We propose a three-layer IDS (Intrusion Detection System) model, which integrates three main functions: access control, flow detection and password authentication. We use the reliability test system IEEE RTS-79 to evaluate the reliability. The experimental results provide insights into the establishment of the power SCADA system reliability enhancement strategies.

Fruit-80, an ultra-lightweight stream cipher with 80-bit secret key, is oriented toward resource constrained devices in the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose area and speed optimization architectures of Fruit-80 on FPGAs. The area optimization architecture reuses NFSR&LFSR feedback functions and achieves the most suitable ratio of look-up-tables and flip-flops. The speed optimization architecture adopts a hybrid approach for parallelization and reduces the latency of long data paths by pre-generating primary feedback and inserting flip-flops. In conclusion, the optimal throughput-to-area ratio of the speed optimization architecture is better than that of Grain v1. The area optimization architecture occupies only 35 slices on Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA, smaller than that of Grain and other common stream ciphers. To the best of our knowledge, this result sets a new record of the minimum area in lightweight cipher implementations on FPGA.

Data privacy is a key concern for smart contracts handling sensitive data. The existing work zkay addresses this concern by allowing developers without cryptographic expertise to enforce data privacy. However, while zkay avoids fundamental limitations of other private smart contract systems, it cannot express key applications that involve operations on foreign data.We present ZeeStar, a language and compiler allowing non-experts to instantiate private smart contracts and supporting operations on foreign data. The ZeeStar language allows developers to ergonomically specify privacy constraints using zkay’s privacy annotations. The ZeeStar compiler then provably realizes these constraints by combining non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and additively homomorphic encryption.We implemented ZeeStar for the public blockchain Ethereum. We demonstrated its expressiveness by encoding 12 example contracts, including oblivious transfer and a private payment system like Zether. ZeeStar is practical: it prepares transactions for our contracts in at most 54.7s, at an average cost of 339k gas.

Real-time situational awareness (SA) plays an essential role in accurate and timely incident response. Maintaining SA is, however, extremely costly due to excessive false alerts generated by intrusion detection systems, which require prioritization and manual investigation by security analysts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to prioritizing alerts so as to maximize SA, by formulating the problem as that of active learning in a hidden Markov model (HMM). We propose to use the entropy of the belief of the security state as a proxy for the mean squared error (MSE) of the belief, and we develop two computationally tractable policies for choosing alerts to investigate that minimize the entropy, taking into account the potential uncertainty of the investigations' results. We use simulations to compare our policies to a variety of baseline policies. We find that our policies reduce the MSE of the belief of the security state by up to 50% compared to static baseline policies, and they are robust to high false alert rates and to the investigation errors.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), a class of complex intelligent systems, are considered the backbone of Industry 4.0. They aim to achieve large-scale, networked control of dynamical systems and processes such as electricity and gas distribution networks and deliver pervasive information services by combining state-of-the-art computing, communication, and control technologies. However, CPSs are often highly nonlinear and uncertain, and their intrinsic reliance on open communication platforms increases their vulnerability to security threats, which entails additional challenges to conventional control design approaches. Indeed, sensor measurements and control command signals, whose integrity plays a critical role in correct controller design, may be interrupted or falsely modified when broadcasted on wireless communication channels due to cyber attacks. This can have a catastrophic impact on CPS performance. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough analysis of recently developed secure and resilient control approaches leveraging the solid foundations of adaptive control theory to achieve security and resilience in networked CPSs against sensor and actuator attacks. Then, we discuss the limitations of current adaptive control strategies and present several future research directions in this field.

Accurate and synchronized timing information is required by power system operators for controlling the grid infrastructure (relays, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), etc.) and determining asset positions. Satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) is the primary source of timing information. However, GPS disruptions today (both intentional and unintentional) can significantly compromise the reliability and security of our electric grids. A robust alternate source for accurate timing is critical to serve both as a deterrent against malicious attacks and as a redundant system in enhancing the resilience against extreme events that could disrupt the GPS network. To achieve this, we rely on the highly accurate, terrestrial atomic clock-based network for alternative timing and synchronization. In this paper, we discuss an experimental setup for an alternative timing approach. The data obtained from this experimental setup is continuously monitored and analyzed using various time deviation metrics. We also use these metrics to compute deviations of our clock with respect to the National Institute of Standards and Technologys (NIST) GPS data. The results obtained from these metric computations are elaborately discussed. Finally, we discuss the integration of the procedures involved, like real-time data ingestion, metric computation, and result visualization, in a novel microservices-based architecture for situational awareness.

With the increasing number of catastrophic weather events and resulting disruption in the energy supply to essential loads, the distribution grid operators’ focus has shifted from reliability to resiliency against high impact, low-frequency events. Given the enhanced automation to enable the smarter grid, there are several assets/resources at the disposal of electric utilities to enhances resiliency. However, with a lack of comprehensive resilience tools for informed operational decisions and planning, utilities face a challenge in investing and prioritizing operational control actions for resiliency. The distribution system resilience is also highly dependent on system attributes, including network, control, generating resources, location of loads and resources, as well as the progression of an extreme event. In this work, we present a novel multi-stage resilience measure called the Anticipate-Withstand-Recover (AWR) metrics. The AWR metrics are based on integrating relevant ‘system characteristics based factors’, before, during, and after the extreme event. The developed methodology utilizes a pragmatic and flexible approach by adopting concepts from the national emergency preparedness paradigm, proactive and reactive controls of grid assets, graph theory with system and component constraints, and multi-criteria decision-making process. The proposed metrics are applied to provide decision support for a) the operational resilience and b) planning investments, and validated for a real system in Alaska during the entirety of the event progression.

Bus factor is a metric that identifies how resilient is the project to the sudden engineer turnover. It states the minimal number of engineers that have to be hit by a bus for a project to be stalled. Even though the metric is often discussed in the community, few studies consider its general relevance. Moreover, the existing tools for bus factor estimation focus solely on the data from version control systems, even though there exists other channels for knowledge generation and distribution. With a survey of 269 engineers, we find that the bus factor is perceived as an important problem in collective development, and determine the highest impact channels of knowledge generation and distribution in software development teams. We also propose a multimodal bus factor estimation algorithm that uses data on code reviews and meetings together with the VCS data. We test the algorithm on 13 projects developed at JetBrains and compared its results to the results of the state-of-the-art tool by Avelino et al. against the ground truth collected in a survey of the engineers working on these projects. Our algorithm is slightly better in terms of both predicting the bus factor as well as key developers compared to the results of Avelino et al. Finally, we use the interviews and the surveys to derive a set of best practices to address the bus factor issue and proposals for the possible bus factor assessment tool.

Cancelable biometric is a new era of technology that deals with the protection of the privacy content of a person which itself helps in protecting the identity of a person. Here the biometric information instead of being stored directly on the authentication database is transformed into a non-invertible coded format that will be utilized for providing access. The conversion into an encrypted code requires the provision of an encryption key from the user side. Both invertible and non-invertible coding techniques are there but non-invertible one provides additional security to the user. In this paper, a non-invertible cancelable biometric method has been proposed where the biometric image information is canceled and encoded into a code using a user-provided encryption key. This code is generated from the image histogram after continuous bin updation to the maximal value and then it is encrypted by the Hill cipher. This code is stored on the database instead of biometric information. The technique is applied to a set of retinal information taken from the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy database.

Static analysis tools help to detect common pro-gramming errors but generate a large number of false positives. Moreover, when applied to evolving software systems, around 95 % of alarms generated on a version are repeated, i.e., they have also been generated on the previous version. Version-aware static analysis techniques (VSATs) have been proposed to suppress the repeated alarms that are not impacted by the code changes between the two versions. The alarms reported by VSATs after the suppression, called delta alarms, still constitute 63% of the tool-generated alarms. We observe that delta alarms can be further postprocessed using their corresponding code changes: the code changes due to which VSATs identify them as delta alarms. However, none of the existing VSATs or alarms postprocessing techniques postprocesses delta alarms using the corresponding code changes. Based on this observation, we use the code changes to classify delta alarms into six classes that have different priorities assigned to them. The assignment of priorities is based on the type of code changes and their likelihood of actually impacting the delta alarms. The ranking of alarms, obtained by prioritizing the classes, can help suppress alarms that are ranked lower, when resources to inspect all the tool-generated alarms are limited. We performed an empirical evaluation using 9789 alarms generated on 59 versions of seven open source C applications. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed classification and ranking of delta alarms help to identify, on average, 53 % of delta alarms as more likely to be false positives than the others.

False news has become widespread in the last decade in political, economic, and social dimensions. This has been aided by the deep entrenchment of social media networking in these dimensions. Facebook and Twitter have been known to influence the behavior of people significantly. People rely on news/information posted on their favorite social media sites to make purchase decisions. Also, news posted on mainstream and social media platforms has a significant impact on a particular country’s economic stability and social tranquility. Therefore, there is a need to develop a deceptive system that evaluates the news to avoid the repercussions resulting from the rapid dispersion of fake news on social media platforms and other online platforms. To achieve this, the proposed system uses the preprocessing stage results to assign specific vectors to words. Each vector assigned to a word represents an intrinsic characteristic of the word. The resulting word vectors are then applied to RNN models before proceeding to the LSTM model. The output of the LSTM is used to determine whether the news article/piece is fake or otherwise.

Concurrency vulnerabilities caused by synchronization problems will occur in the execution of multi-threaded programs, and the emergence of concurrency vulnerabilities often cause great threats to the system. Once the concurrency vulnerabilities are exploited, the system will suffer various attacks, seriously affecting its availability, confidentiality and security. In this paper, we extract 839 concurrency vulnerabilities from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the trend, classifications, causes, severity, and impact. Finally, we obtained some findings: 1) From 1999 to 2021, the number of concurrency vulnerabilities disclosures show an overall upward trend. 2) In the distribution of concurrency vulnerability, race condition accounts for the largest proportion. 3) The overall severity of concurrency vulnerabilities is medium risk. 4) The number of concurrency vulnerabilities that can be exploited for local access and network access is almost equal, and nearly half of the concurrency vulnerabilities (377/839) can be accessed remotely. 5) The access complexity of 571 concurrency vulnerabilities is medium, and the number of concurrency vulnerabilities with high or low access complexity is almost equal. The results obtained through the empirical study can provide more support and guidance for research in the field of concurrency vulnerabilities.