Biblio

We propose secure RAID, i.e., low-complexity schemes to store information in a distributed manner that is resilient to node failures and resistant to node eavesdropping. We generalize the concept of systematic encoding to secure RAID and show that systematic schemes have significant advantages in the efficiencies of encoding, decoding and random access. For the practical high rate regime, we construct three XOR-based systematic secure RAID schemes with optimal encoding and decoding complexities, from the EVENODD codes and B codes, which are array codes widely used in the RAID architecture. These schemes optimally tolerate two node failures and two eavesdropping nodes. For more general parameters, we construct efficient systematic secure RAID schemes from Reed-Solomon codes. Our results suggest that building “keyless”, information-theoretic security into the RAID architecture is practical.

As smart grid becomes more popular and emergent, the need for reliable communication technology becomes crucial to ensure the proper and efficient operation of the grid. Therefore, cognitive radio has been recently utilized to provide a scalable and reliable communication infrastructure for smart grid. However, accurate spectrum sensing is the core of this infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an architecture, utilizing Role-Based Delegation to manage spectrum sensing within the cognitive-radio-based communication infrastructure for smart grid and ensure its reliability and security.

When a group of individuals and organizations wish to compute a stable matching–-for example, when medical students are matched to medical residency programs–-they often outsource the computation to a trusted arbiter in order to preserve the privacy of participants' preferences. Secure multi-party computation offers the possibility of private matching processes that do not rely on any common trusted third party. However, stable matching algorithms have previously been considered infeasible for execution in a secure multi-party context on non-trivial inputs because they are computationally intensive and involve complex data-dependent memory access patterns. We adapt the classic Gale-Shapley algorithm for use in such a context, and show experimentally that our modifications yield a lower asymptotic complexity and more than an order of magnitude in practical cost improvement over previous techniques. Our main improvements stem from designing new oblivious data structures that exploit the properties of the matching algorithms. We apply a similar strategy to scale the Roth-Peranson instability chaining algorithm, currently in use by the National Resident Matching Program. The resulting protocol is efficient enough to be useful at the scale required for matching medical residents nationwide, taking just over 18 hours to complete an execution simulating the 2016 national resident match with more than 35,000 participants and 30,000 residency slots.

In this paper we present Securebox, an affordable and deployable platform for securing and managing IoT networks. Our proposal targets an alarming spot in the fast growing IoT industry where security is often overlooked due to device limitation, budget constraint, and development deadline. In contrast to existing host-centric and hardware-coupled solutions, Securebox empowers a cloud-assisted "charge for network service" model that is dedicated to budget and resource constrained IoT environments. Owing to its cloud-driven and modular design, Securebox allows us to 1) flexibly offload and onload security and management functions to the cloud and network edge components; 2) offer advanced security and management services to end users in an affordable and on-demand manner; 3) ease the upgrade and deployment of new services to guard against abrupt security breakouts. To demonstrate Securebox, we have implemented the platform consisting of a plug-n-play frontend, a Kubernetes-powered backend cluster, and a smartphone mobile application. Based on the testbed evaluation, we show that Securebox is robust and responsive. Its collaborative and extensible architecture enforces rapid update cycles and can scale with the growing diversity of IoT devices.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a numerous of small devices called sensor which has a limitation in resources such as low energy, memory, and computation. Sensors deployed in a harsh environment and vulnerable to various security issues and due to the resource restriction in a sensor, key management and provide robust security in this type of networks is a challenge. keys may be used in two ways in cryptography is symmetric or asymmetric, asymmetric is required more communication, memory, and computing when compared with symmetric, so it is not appropriate for WSN. In this paper, key management scheme based on symmetric keys has been proposed where each node uses pseudo-random generator (PRNG)to generate key that is shared with base station based on pre-distributed initial key and CBC - RC5 to reached to confidently, integrity and authentication.

The market of wearable healthcare monitoring devices has exploded in recent years as healthcare consciousness has increased. These types of devices usually consist of several biosensors, which can be worn on human bodies, such as the head, arms, and feet. The health status of a user can be analyzed according to the user's real-time vital signs that are collected from different biosensors. Due to personal medical data being transmitted through a wireless network, the data have to be encrypted. In this paper, a key agreement protocol for biosensors within Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) has been proposed based on the n-Party Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. In order to prevent the man-in-the-middle attacks, we have used Advance Encryption Standard (AES) encryption with Electrocardiography-based (ECG-based) keys to secure the key exchange procedures. The security and performance analysis show the feasibility of the proposed method.

The emerging Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is expected to facilitate content sharing among users. ICN will make it easy for users to appoint storage nodes, in various network locations, perhaps owned or controlled by them, where shared content can be stored and disseminated from. These storage nodes should be (somewhat) trusted since not only they have (some level of) access to user shared content, but they should also properly enforce access control. Traditional forms of encryption introduce significant overhead when it comes to sharing content with large and dynamic groups of users. To this end, proxy re-encryption provides a convenient solution. In this paper, we use Identity-Based Proxy Re-Encryption (IB-PRE) to provide confidentiality and access control for content items shared over ICN, realizing secure content distribution among dynamic sets of users. In contrast to similar IB-PRE based solutions, our design allows each user to generate the system parameters and the secret keys required by the underlay encryption scheme using their own \textbackslashemph\Private Key Generator\, therefore, our approach does not suffer from the key escrow problem. Moreover, our design further relaxes the trust requirements on the storage nodes by preventing them from sharing usable content with unauthorized users. Finally, our scheme does not require out-of-band secret key distribution.

Cameras have become nearly ubiquitous with the rise of smartphones and laptops. New wearable devices, such as Google Glass, focus directly on using live video data to enable augmented reality and contextually enabled services. However, granting applications full access to video data exposes more information than is necessary for their functionality, introducing privacy risks. We propose a privilege-separation architecture for visual recognizer applications that encourages modularization and least privilege–-separating the recognizer logic, sandboxing it to restrict filesystem and network access, and restricting what it can extract from the raw video data. We designed and implemented a prototype that separates the recognizer and application modules and evaluated our architecture on a set of 17 computer-vision applications. Our experiments show that our prototype incurs low overhead for each of these applications, reduces some of the privacy risks associated with these applications, and in some cases can actually increase the performance due to increased parallelism and concurrency.

'Software as a service - SaaS' is a well known model used in cloud infrastructure, outsourcing and pervasive computing. With the SaaS model, application service providers (ASP) facilitates various functionalities of software to application developers as well as to consumers over a public channel like Internet. In order to manage large volumes of users data, 'Database as a service - DaaS' model is a practical requirement for ASPs. The DaaS model allows implementation of need-based (e.g., role-based) privileges of database access to its users. However, the use of DaaS model raises security concerns (e.g. confidentiality and integrity of data) of data while storing users data in untrusted public storage server. In this paper, we review one DaaS tool, CryptDB [1], developed in recent times, and we observe some limitations in it and then present an improved solution for securing data in untrusted database provider. The proposed solution mitigates the limitations of CryptDB while keeping the efficiency of the service model used between ASP and DB intact.

The pervasive presence of interconnected objects enables new communication paradigms where devices can easily reach each other while interacting within their environment. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) represents the integration of several computing and communications systems aiming at facilitating the interaction between these devices. Arduino is one of the most popular platforms used to prototype new IoT devices due to its open, flexible and easy-to-use architecture. Ardunio Yun is a dual board microcontroller that supports a Linux distribution and it is currently one of the most versatile and powerful Arduino systems. This feature positions Arduino Yun as a popular platform for developers, but it also introduces unique infection vectors from the security viewpoint. In this work, we present a security analysis of Arduino Yun. We show that Arduino Yun is vulnerable to a number of attacks and we implement a proof of concept capable of exploiting some of them.

Text-based Captchas have been widely used to deter misuse of services on the Internet. However, many designs have been broken. It is intellectually interesting and practically relevant to look for alternative designs, which are currently a topic of active research. We motivate the study of Chinese Captchas as an interesting alternative design - co-unterintuitively, it is possible to design Chinese Captchas that are universally usable, even to those who have never studied Chinese language. More importantly, we ask a fundamental question: is the segmentation-resistance principle established for Roman-character based Captchas applicable to Chinese based designs? With deep learning techniques, we offer the first evidence that computers do recognize individual Chinese characters well, regardless of distortion levels. This suggests that many real-world Chinese schemes are insecure, in contrast to common beliefs. Our result offers an essential guideline to the design of secure Chinese Captchas, and it is also applicable to Captchas using other large-alphabet languages such as Japanese.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are widely used today because of their low price, usability and being wireless. As RFID systems use wireless communication, they may encounter challenging security problems. Several lightweight encryption algorithms have been proposed so far to solve these problems. The RBS block cipher is one of these algorithms. In designing RBS, conventional block cipher elements such as S-box and P-box are not used. RBS is based on inserting redundant bits between altered plaintext bits using an encryption key Kenc. In this paper, considering not having a proper diffusion as the main defect of RBS, we propose a chosen ciphertext attack against this algorithm. The data complexity of this attack equals to N pairs of text and its time complexity equals to N decryptions, where N is the size of the encryption key Kenc.

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) is an emerging technology that enables miniaturized analysis systems for point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and environmental monitoring. A DMFB reduces the rate of sample and reagent consumption, and automates the analysis of assays. In this paper, we provide the first assessment of the security vulnerabilities of DMFBs. We identify result-manipulation attacks on a DMFB that maliciously alter the assay outcomes. Two practical result-manipulation attacks are shown on a DMFB platform performing enzymatic glucose assay on serum. In the first attack, the attacker adjusts the concentration of the glucose sample and thereby modifies the final result. In the second attack, the attacker tampers with the calibration curve of the assay operation. We then identify denial-of-service attacks, where the attacker can disrupt the assay operation by tampering either with the droplet-routing algorithm or with the actuation sequence. We demonstrate these attacks using a digital microfluidic synthesis simulator. The results show that the attacks are easy to implement and hard to detect. Therefore, this work highlights the need for effective protections against malicious modifications in DMFBs.

With the discovery of the Stuxnet malware in June 2010, Industrial Control System (ICS) security has gained global attention and scrutiny. Due to the unique industrial control operating environment, standard information technology host-based defenses such as operating system upgrades are not always feasible. Therefore, ICS security strategies must rely upon layered network infrastructure and enclave boundary defenses. As ICS threats evolve, so too must ICS security practices and strategies. ICS security innovation rely upon understanding the effectiveness of established defenses and countermeasures. In an effort to evaluate the security effectiveness of ICS layered perimeter defenses, a Red Team security assessment was conducted on an ICS test network. This experiment offers insight to the effectiveness of ICS perimeter defenses by demonstrating the reduction of attack vectors, decreased adversarial network access, and perimeter network defenses are an effective ICS security strategy.

Modern smart surveillance systems can not only record the monitored environment but also identify the targeted objects and detect anomaly activities. These advanced functions are often facilitated by deep neural networks, achieving very high accuracy and large data processing throughput. However, inappropriate design of the neural network may expose such smart systems to the risks of leaking the target being searched or even the adopted learning model itself to attackers. In this talk, we will present the security challenges in the design of smart surveillance systems. We will also discuss some possible solutions that leverage the unique properties of emerging nano-devices, including the incurred design and performance cost and optimization methods for minimizing these overheads.

Proliferation of electronics and their increasing connectivity pose formidable challenges for information security. At the most fundamental level, nanostructures and nanomaterials offer an unprecedented opportunity to introduce new approaches to securing electronic devices. First, we discuss engineering nanomaterials, (e.g., carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene, and layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs)) to make unclonable cryptographic primitives. These security primitives not only can supplement existing solutions in silicon integrated circuits (ICs) but can also be used for emerging applications in flexible and wearable electronics. Second, we discuss security engineering of advanced nanostructures such as reactive materials.

In this presentation, I describe how the SEI's Security Engineering Risk Analysis (SERA) method provides a structure that connects desired system functionality with the underlying software to evaluate the sufficiency of requirements for software security and the potential operational security risks based on mission impact.

Cloud computing is a wide-spread technology that enables the enterprises to provide services to their customers with a lower cost, higher performance, better availability and scalability. However, privacy and security in cloud computing has always been a major challenge to service providers and a concern to its users. Trusted computing has led its way in securing the cloud computing and virtualized environment, during the past decades. In this paper, first we study virtualized trusted platform modules and integration of vTPM in hypervisor-based virtualization. Then we propose two architectural solutions for integrating the vTPM in container-based virtualization model.

Cybernetic closed loop regulators are used to model socio-technical systems in adversarial contexts. Cybernetic principles regarding these idealized control loops are applied to show how the incompleteness of system models enables system exploitation. We consider abstractions as a case study of model incompleteness, and we characterize the ways that attackers and defenders interact in such a formalism. We end by arguing that the science of security is most like a military science, whose foundations are analytical and generative rather than normative.

Video surveillance, closed-circuit TV and IP-camera systems became virtually omnipresent and indispensable for many organizations, businesses, and users. Their main purpose is to provide physical security, increase safety, and prevent crime. They also became increasingly complex, comprising many communication means, embedded hardware and non-trivial firmware. However, most research to date focused mainly on the privacy aspects of such systems, and did not fully address their issues related to cyber-security in general, and visual layer (i.e., imagery semantics) attacks in particular. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of existing and novel threats in video surveillance, closed-circuit TV and IP-camera systems based on publicly available data. The insights can then be used to better understand and identify the security and the privacy risks associated with the development, deployment and use of these systems. We study existing and novel threats, along with their existing or possible countermeasures, and summarize this knowledge into a comprehensive table that can be used in a practical way as a security checklist when assessing cyber-security level of existing or new CCTV designs and deployments. We also provide a set of recommendations and mitigations that can help improve the security and privacy levels provided by the hardware, the firmware, the network communications and the operation of video surveillance systems. We hope the findings in this paper will provide a valuable knowledge of the threat landscape that such systems are exposed to, as well as promote further research and widen the scope of this field beyond its current boundaries.

Software defined networking promises network operators to dramatically simplify network management. It provides flexibility and innovation through network programmability. With SDN, network management moves from codifying functionality in terms of low-level device configuration to building software that facilitates network management and debugging[1]. SDN provides new techniques to solve long-standing problems in networking like routing by separating the complexity of state distribution from network specification. Despite all the hype surrounding SDNs, exploiting its full potential is demanding. Security is still the major issue and a striking challenge that reduces the growth of SDNs. Moreover the introduction of various architectural components and up cycling of novel entities of SDN poses new security issues and threats. SDN is considered as major target for digital threats and cyber-attacks[2] and have more devastating effects than simple networks. Initial SDN design doesn't considered security as its part; therefore, it must be raised on the agenda. This article discusses the security solutions proposed to secure SDNs. We categorize the security solutions in the article by presenting a thematic taxonomy based on SDN architectural layers/interfaces[3], security measures and goals, simulation framework. Moreover, the literature also points out the possible attacks[2] targeting different layers/interfaces of SDNs. For securing SDNs, the potential requirements and their key enablers are also identified and presented. Also, the articles sketch the design of secure and dependable SDNs. At last, we discuss open issues and challenges of SDN security that may be rated appropriate to be handled by professionals and researchers in the future.

Security mechanism of the mobile agent running platform is very important for mobile agent system operation and stability running. In this paper we mainly focus on the security issues related with the mobile agent running platform and we proposed a cross validation mechanism mixed with encryption algorithm to solve the security problems during the migration and communication of mobile agents. Firstly, we employ the cross-validation mechanism to authenticate the nodes mobile agents will be visiting. Secondly, we employ the hybrid encryption mechanism, which combines the advantages of the symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption, to encrypt the mobile agents and ensure the transferring process of data. Finally, we employ the EMSSL socket communication method to encrypt the content of transmission, in turn to enhance the security and robustness of the mobile agent system. We implement several experiments in the simulation environment and the experimental results verify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed methods.

Ensuring security in the military applications of IoT is a big challenge. The main reasons for this state of affairs is that the sensor nodes of the network are usually mobile, use wireless links, have a small processing power and have a little energy resources. The paper presents the solution for cryptographic protection of transmission between sensor nodes in the data link layer and for cryptographic protection of data stored in the sensor node resources. For this purpose, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) was used. The proposed solution makes it possible to build secure and fault tolerant sensor network. The following aspects were presented in the paper: the model of such a network, applied security solutions, analysis of the security in the network and selected investigation results of such a network were presented.

Technology coined as the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is harmonizing with Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Intelligent Traffic System (ITF). An application scenario of VANET is the military communication where vehicles move as a convoy on roadways, requiring secure and reliable communication. However, utilization of radio frequency (RF) communication in VANET limits its usage in military applications, due to the scarce frequency band and its vulnerability to security attacks. Visible Light Communication (VLC) has been recently introduced as a more secure alternative, limiting the reception of neighboring nodes with its directional transmission. However, secure vehicular VLC that ensures confidential data transfer among the participating vehicles, is an open problem. In this paper, we propose a secure military light communication protocol (SecVLC) for enabling efficient and secure data sharing. We use the directionality property of VLC to ensure that only target vehicles participate in the communication. Vehicles use full-duplex communication where infra-red (IR) is utilized to share a secret key and VLC is used to receive encrypted data. We experimentally demonstrate the suitability of SecVLC in outdoor scenarios at varying inter-vehicular distances with key metrics of interest, including the security, data packet delivery ratio and delay.

Sego is a hypervisor-based system that gives strong privacy and integrity guarantees to trusted applications, even when the guest operating system is compromised or hostile. Sego verifies operating system services, like the file system, instead of replacing them. By associating trusted metadata with user data across all system devices, Sego verifies system services more efficiently than previous systems, especially services that depend on data contents. We extensively evaluate Sego's performance on real workloads and implement a kernel fault injector to validate Sego's file system-agnostic crash consistency and recovery protocol.