Biblio

In this work, a measurement system is developed based on acoustic resonance which can be used for classification of materials. Basically, the inspection methods based on acoustic, utilized for containers screening in the field, identification of defective pills hold high significance in the fields of health, security and protection. However, such techniques are constrained by costly instrumentation, offline analysis and complexities identified with transducer holder physical coupling. So a simple, non-destructive and amazingly cost effective technique in view of acoustic resonance has been formulated here for quick data acquisition and analysis of acoustic signature of liquids for their constituent identification and classification. In this system, there are two ceramic coated piezoelectric transducers attached at both ends of V-shaped glass, one is act as transmitter and another as receiver. The transmitter generates sound with the help of white noise generator. The pick up transducer on another end of the V-shaped glass rod detects the transmitted signal. The recording is being done with arduino interfaced to computer. The FFTs of recorded signals are being analyzed and the resulted resonant frequency observed for water, water+salt and water+sugar are 4.8 KHz, 6.8 KHz and 3.2 KHz respectively. The different resonant frequency in case different sample is being observed which shows that the developed prototype model effectively classifying the materials.

Logic locking has been conceived as a promising proactive defense strategy against intellectual property (IP) piracy, counterfeiting, hardware Trojans, reverse engineering, and overbuilding attacks. Yet, various attacks that use a working chip as an oracle have been launched on logic locking to successfully retrieve its secret key, undermining the defense of all existing locking techniques. In this paper, we propose stripped-functionality logic locking (SFLL), which strips some of the functionality of the design and hides it in the form of a secret key(s), thereby rendering on-chip implementation functionally different from the original one. When loaded onto an on-chip memory, the secret keys restore the original functionality of the design. Through security-aware synthesis that creates a controllable mismatch between the reverse-engineered netlist and original design, SFLL provides a quantifiable and provable resilience trade-off between all known and anticipated attacks. We demonstrate the application of SFLL to large designs (textgreater100K gates) using a computer-aided design (CAD) framework that ensures attaining the desired security level at minimal implementation cost, 8%, 5%, and 0.5% for area, power, and delay, respectively. In addition to theoretical proofs and simulation confirmation of SFLL's security, we also report results from the silicon implementation of SFLL on an ARM Cortex-M0 microprocessor in 65nm technology.

Due to the proliferation of reprogrammable hardware, core designs built from modules drawn from a variety of sources execute with direct access to critical system resources. Expressing guarantees that such modules satisfy, in particular the dynamic conditions under which they release information about their unbounded streams of inputs, and automatically proving that they satisfy such guarantees, is an open and critical problem.,,To address these challenges, we propose a domain-specific language, named STREAMS, for expressing information-flow policies with declassification over unbounded input streams. We also introduce a novel algorithm, named SIMAREL, that given a core design C and STREAMS policy P, automatically proves or falsifies that C satisfies P. The key technical insight behind the design of SIMAREL is a novel algorithm for efficiently synthesizing relational invariants over pairs of circuit executions.,,We expressed expected behavior of cores designed independently for research and production as STREAMS policies and used SIMAREL to check if each core satisfies its policy. SIMAREL proved that half of the cores satisfied expected behavior, but found unexpected information leaks in six open-source designs: an Ethernet controller, a flash memory controller, an SD-card storage manager, a robotics controller, a digital-signal processing (DSP) module, and a debugging interface.

Hashing methods play an important role in large scale image retrieval. Traditional hashing methods use hand-crafted features to learn hash functions, which can not capture the high level semantic information. Deep hashing algorithms use deep neural networks to learn feature representation and hash functions simultaneously. Most of these algorithms exploit supervised information to train the deep network. However, supervised information is expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a pseudo label based unsupervised deep discriminative hashing algorithm. First, we cluster images via K-means and the cluster labels are treated as pseudo labels. Then we train a deep hashing network with pseudo labels by minimizing the classification loss and quantization loss. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our unsupervised deep discriminative hashing method outperforms the state-of-art unsupervised hashing methods.

Routing security has a great importance to the security of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). There are various kinds of attacks when establishing routing path between source and destination. The adversaries attempt to deceive the source node and get the privilege of data transmission. Then they try to launch the malicious behaviors such as passive or active attacks. Due to the characteristics of the MANETs, e.g. dynamic topology, open medium, distributed cooperation, and constrained capability, it is difficult to verify the behavior of nodes and detect malicious nodes without revealing any privacy. In this paper, we present PVad, an approach conducting privacy-preserving verification in the routing discovery phase of MANETs. PVad tries to find the existing communication rules by association rules instead of making the rules. PVad consists of two phases, a reasoning phase deducing the expected log data of the peers, and a verification phase using Merkle Hash Tree to verify the correctness of derived information without revealing any privacy of nodes on expected routing paths. Without deploying any special nodes to assist the verification, PVad can detect multiple malicious nodes by itself. To show our approach can be used to guarantee the security of the MANETs, we conduct our experiments in NS3 as well as the real router environment, and we improved the detection accuracy by 4% on average compared to our former work.

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) always bring challenges to the designers in terms of its security deployment due to their dynamic and infrastructure less nature. In the past few years different researchers have proposed different solutions for providing security to MANETs. In most of the cases however, the solution prevents either a particular attack or provides security at the cost of sacrificing the QoS. In this paper we introduce a model that deploys security in MANETs and takes care of the Quality of Services issues to some extent. We have adopted the concept of analyzing the behavior of the node as we believe that if nodes behave properly and in a coordinated fashion, the insecurity level goes drastically down. Our methodology gives the advantage of using this approach

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are increasing in frequency and volume on the Internet, and there is evidence that cyber-criminals are turning to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices such as cameras and vending machines as easy launchpads for large-scale attacks. This paper quantifies the capability of consumer IoT devices to participate in reflective DDoS attacks. We first show that household devices can be exposed to Internet reflection even if they are secured behind home gateways. We then evaluate eight household devices available on the market today, including lightbulbs, webcams, and printers, and experimentally profile their reflective capability, amplification factor, duration, and intensity rate for TCP, SNMP, and SSDP based attacks. Lastly, we demonstrate reflection attacks in a real-world setting involving three IoT-equipped smart-homes, emphasising the imminent need to address this problem before it becomes widespread.

IT system risk assessments are indispensable due to increasing cyber threats within our ever-growing IT systems. Moreover, laws and regulations urge organizations to conduct risk assessments regularly. Even though there exist several risk management frameworks and methodologies, they are in general high level, not defining the risk metrics, risk metrics values and the detailed risk assessment formulas for different risk views. To address this need, we define a novel risk assessment methodology specific to IT systems. Our model is quantitative, both asset and vulnerability centric and defines low and high level risk metrics. High level risk metrics are defined in two general categories; base and attack graph-based. In our paper, we provide a detailed explanation of formulations in each category and make our implemented software publicly available for those who are interested in applying the proposed methodology to their IT systems.

Protection of information achieves keeping confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data. These features are essential for the proper operation of modern industrial technologies, like Smart Grid. The complex grid system integrates many electronic devices that provide an efficient way of exploiting the power systems but cause many problems due to their vulnerabilities to attacks. The aim of the work is to propose a solution to the privacy problem in Smart Grid communication network between the customers and Control center. It consists in using the relatively new cryptographic task - quantum key distribution (QKD). The solution is based on choosing an appropriate quantum key distribution method out of all the conventional ones by performing an assessment in terms of several parameters. The parameters are: key rate, operating distances, resources, and trustworthiness of the devices involved. Accordingly, we discuss an answer to the privacy problem of the SG network with regard to both security and resource economy.

When transferring sensitive data to a non-trusted party, end-users require that the data be kept private. Mobile and IoT application developers want to leverage the sensitive data to provide better user experience and intelligent services. Unfortunately, existing programming abstractions make it impossible to reconcile these two seemingly conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present a novel programming mechanism for distributed managed execution environments that hides sensitive user data, while enabling developers to build powerful and intelligent applications, driven by the properties of the sensitive data. Specifically, the sensitive data is never revealed to clients, being protected by the runtime system. Our abstractions provide declarative and configurable data query interfaces, enforced by a lightweight distributed runtime system. Developers define when and how clients can query the sensitive data's properties (i.e., how long the data remains accessible, how many times its properties can be queried, which data query methods apply, etc.). Based on our evaluation, we argue that integrating our novel mechanism with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) can address some of the most pertinent privacy problems of IoT and mobile applications.

As modern attacks become more stealthy and persistent, detecting or preventing them at their early stages becomes virtually impossible. Instead, an attack investigation or provenance system aims to continuously monitor and log interesting system events with minimal overhead. Later, if the system observes any anomalous behavior, it analyzes the log to identify who initiated the attack and which resources were affected by the attack and then assess and recover from any damage incurred. However, because of a fundamental tradeoff between log granularity and system performance, existing systems typically record system-call events without detailed program-level activities (e.g., memory operation) required for accurately reconstructing attack causality or demand that every monitored program be instrumented to provide program-level information. To address this issue, we propose RAIN, a Refinable Attack INvestigation system based on a record-replay technology that records system-call events during runtime and performs instruction-level dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) during on-demand process replay. Instead of replaying every process with DIFT, RAIN conducts system-call-level reachability analysis to filter out unrelated processes and to minimize the number of processes to be replayed, making inter-process DIFT feasible. Evaluation results show that RAIN effectively prunes out unrelated processes and determines attack causality with negligible false positive rates. In addition, the runtime overhead of RAIN is similar to existing system-call level provenance systems and its analysis overhead is much smaller than full-system DIFT.

Wireless sensor networks are responsible for sensing, gathering and processing the information of the objects in the network coverage area. Basic data fusion technology generally does not provide data privacy protection mechanism, and the privacy protection mechanism in health care, military reconnaissance, smart home and other areas of the application is usually indispensable. In this paper, we consider the privacy, confidentiality, and the accuracy of fusion results, and propose a data fusion algorithm for privacy preserving. This algorithm relies on the characteristics of data fusion, and uses the method of pre-distribution random number in the node to get the privacy protection requirements of the original data. Theoretical analysis shows that the malicious attacker attempts to steal the difficulty of node privacy in PPND algorithm. At the same time in the TOSSIM simulation results also show that, compared with TAG, SMART algorithm, PPND algorithm in the data traffic, the convergence accuracy of the good performance.

Cloud computing presents unlimited prospects for Information Technology (IT) industry and business enterprises alike. Rapid advancement brings a dark underbelly of new vulnerabilities and challenges unfolding with alarming regularity. Although cloud technology provides a ubiquitous environment facilitating business enterprises to conduct business across disparate locations, security effectiveness of this platform interspersed with threats which can bring everything that subscribes to the cloud, to a halt raises questions. However advantages of cloud platforms far outweighs drawbacks and study of new challenges helps overcome drawbacks of this technology. One such emerging security threat is of ransomware attack on the cloud which threatens to hold systems and data on cloud network to ransom with widespread damaging implications. This provides huge scope for IT security specialists to sharpen their skillset to overcome this new challenge. This paper covers the broad cloud architecture, current inherent cloud threat mechanisms, ransomware vulnerabilities posed and suggested methods to mitigate it.

This paper proposes a prototype of a level 3 autonomous vehicle using Raspberry Pi, capable of detecting the nearby vehicles using an IR sensor. We make the first attempt to analyze autonomous vehicles from a microscopic level, focusing on each vehicle and their communications with the nearby vehicles and road-side units. Two sets of passive and active experiments on a pair of prototypes were run, demonstrating the interconnectivity of the developed prototype. Several sensors were incorporated into an emulation based on System-on-Chip to further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.

Robust Adaptive Secure Secret Sharing (RASSS) is a protocol for reconstructing secrets and information in distributed computing systems even in the presence of a large number of untrusted participants. Since the original Shamir's Secret Sharing scheme, there have been efforts to secure the technique against dishonest shareholders. Early on, researchers determined that the Reed-Solomon encoding property of the Shamir's share distribution equation and its decoding algorithm could tolerate cheaters up to one third of the total shareholders. However, if the number of cheaters grows beyond the error correcting capability (distance) of the Reed-Solomon codes, the reconstruction of the secret is hindered. Untrusted participants or cheaters could hide in the decoding procedure, or even frame up the honest parties. In this paper, we solve this challenge and propose a secure protocol that is no longer constrained by the limitations of the Reed-Solomon codes. As long as there are a minimum number of honest shareholders, the RASSS protocol is able to identify the cheaters and retrieve the correct secret or information in a distributed system with a probability close to 1 with less than 60% of hardware overhead. Furthermore, the adaptive nature of the protocol enables considerable hardware and timing resource savings and makes RASSS highly practical.

Ransomware attacks are becoming prevalent nowadays with the flourishing of crypto-currencies. As the most harmful variant of ransomware crypto-ransomware encrypts the victim's valuable data, and asks for ransom money. Paying the ransom money, however, may not guarantee recovery of the data being encrypted. Most of the existing work for ransomware defense purely focuses on ransomware detection. A few of them consider data recovery from ransomware attacks, but they are not able to defend against ransomware which can obtain a high system privilege. In this work, we design RDS3, a novel Ransomware Defense Strategy, in which we Stealthily back up data in the Spare space of a computing device, such that the data encrypted by ransomware can be restored. Our key idea is that the spare space which stores the backup data is fully isolated from the ransomware. In this way, the ransomware is not able to ``touch'' the backup data regardless of what privilege it can obtain. Security analysis and experimental evaluation show that RDS3 can mitigate ransomware attacks with an acceptable overhead.

An approach to creating secure virtual private networks for the Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol suite is described. It encrypts and encapsulates NDN packets from higher security domains and places them as the payload in unencrypted NDN packets, much as IPsec encapsulates encrypted IP datagrams in unencrypted IP datagrams. We then leverage the well-known properties of the IP-in-IP approach, taken by IPsec in tunnel mode, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed NDN-in-NDN approach.

Image and video super-resolution (SR) has been explored for several decades. However, few works are integrated into practical systems for real-time image and video SR. In this work, we present a real-time deep video SpaTial Resolution UpConversion SysTem (STRUCT++). Our demo system achieves real-time performance (50 fps on CPU for CIF sequences and 45 fps on GPU for HDTV videos) and provides several functions: 1) batch processing; 2) full resolution comparison; 3) local region zooming in. These functions are convenient for super-resolution of a batch of videos (at most 10 videos in parallel), comparisons with other approaches and observations of local details of the SR results. The system is built on a Global context aggregation and Local queue jumping Network (GLNet). It has a thinner and deeper network structure to aggregate global context with an additional local queue jumping path to better model local structures of the signal. GLNet achieves state-of-the-art performance for real-time video SR.

The Modbus/TCP protocol is commonly used in the industrial control systems for communications between the human-machine interface and the industrial controllers. This paper proposes a real-time intrusion detection method based on bidirectional access of the Modbus/TCP protocol. The method doesnt require key observation that Modbus/TCP traffic to and from master device or slave device is periodic. Anomaly detection can be realized in time by the method after checking only two packets. And even though invader modifies the legal function code to another legal one in the packet from master device to slave device, the method can also figure it out. The test results show that the presented method has traits of timeliness, low false positive rate and low false negative rate.

A hidden dimension of software and hardware security is secret-revealing information disseminated through side channels. Even the most secure systems tend to reveal their secrets through secret-dependent computation. Secret-dependent computation is detectable by monitoring a system's time, power, outputs, and electromagnetic signature. Common defenses to side channel emanations include adding noise to the channel or making algorithmic changes to eliminate specific side channels. Unfortunately, existing solutions are either, not automatic, not comprehensive, and/or not practical. We propose an isolation-based approach for eliminating power and timing side-channels that is automatic, comprehensive, and practical. Our approach eliminates side channels by leveraging energy harvesting techniques to isolate trusted computation from the rest of the system. Software has the ability to request a fixed-power and fixed-time quantum of isolated computation. By discretizing power and time, our approach controls the granularity of side channel leakage; the only burden on programmers is to ensure that all secret-dependent execution differences converge within a single power/time quantum. We design and implement three approaches to power/time-based quantization and isolation: a wholly-digital version, a hybrid version that uses capacitors for time tracking, and a full-custom version. A key insight we leverage is that capacitors act as resource efficient, workload and environment independent time trackers. We explore the trade-offs of the three designs and look at the challenges ahead.

Ransomware techniques have evolved over time with the most resilient attacks making data recovery practically impossible. This has driven countermeasures to shift towards recovery against prevention but in this paper, we model ransomware attacks from an infection vector point of view. We follow the basic infection chain of crypto ransomware and use Bayesian network statistics to infer some of the most common ransomware infection vectors. We also employ the use of attack and sensor nodes to capture uncertainty in the Bayesian network.

To improve the resilience of state estimation strategy against cyber attacks, the Compressive Sensing (CS) is applied in reconstruction of incomplete measurements for cyber physical systems. First, observability analysis is used to decide the time to run the reconstruction and the damage level from attacks. In particular, the dictionary learning is proposed to form the over-completed dictionary by K-Singular Value Decomposition (K-SVD). Besides, due to the irregularity of incomplete measurements, sampling matrix is designed as the measurement matrix. Finally, the simulation experiments on 6-bus power system illustrate that the proposed method achieves the incomplete measurements reconstruction perfectly, which is better than the joint dictionary. When only 29% available measurements are left, the proposed method has generality for four kinds of recovery algorithms.

Recently, scaling down dynamic random access memory (DRAM) has become more of a challenge, with more faults than before and a significant degradation in yield. To improve the yield in DRAM, a redundancy repair technique with intra-subarray replacement has been extensively employed to replace faulty elements (i.e., rows or columns with defective cells) with spare elements in each subarray. Unfortunately, such technique cannot efficiently handle a biased distribution of faulty cells because each subarray has a fixed number of spare elements. In this article, we propose a novel redundancy repair technique that uses a hashing method to solve this problem. Our hashing technique reorganizes replacement regions by changing the way in which their replacement information is referred, thus making faulty cells become evenly distributed to the regions. We also propose a fast repair algorithm to find the best hash function among all possible candidates. Even if our approach requires little hardware overhead, it significantly improves the yield when compared with conventional redundancy techniques. In particular, the results of our experiment show that our technique saves spare elements by about 57% and 55% for a yield of 99% at BER 1e-6 and 5e-7, respectively.

Over the last decade, a globalization of the software industry took place, which facilitated the sharing and reuse of code across existing project boundaries. At the same time, such global reuse also introduces new challenges to the software engineering community, with not only components but also their problems and vulnerabilities being now shared. For example, vulnerabilities found in APIs no longer affect only individual projects but instead might spread across projects and even global software ecosystem borders. Tracing these vulnerabilities at a global scale becomes an inherently difficult task since many of the existing resources required for such analysis still rely on proprietary knowledge representation. In this research, we introduce an ontology-based knowledge modeling approach that can eliminate such information silos. More specifically, we focus on linking security knowledge with other software knowledge to improve traceability and trust in software products (APIs). Our approach takes advantage of the Semantic Web and its reasoning services, to trace and assess the impact of security vulnerabilities across project boundaries. We present a case study, to illustrate the applicability and flexibility of our ontological modeling approach by tracing vulnerabilities across project and resource boundaries.

Software attacks are commonly performed against embedded systems in order to access private data or to run restricted services. In this work, we demonstrate some vulnerabilities of commonly use processor which can be leveraged by hackers to attack a system. The targeted devices are based on open processor architectures OpenRISC and RISC-V. Several software exploits are discussed and demonstrated while a hardware countermeasure is proposed and validated on OpenRISC against Return Oriented Programming attack.