Biblio
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are found in critical infrastructure such as for power generation and water treatment. When security requirements are incorporated into an ICS, one needs to test the additional code and devices added do improve the prevention and detection of cyber attacks. Conducting such tests in legacy systems is a challenge due to the high availability requirement. An approach using Timed Automata (TA) is proposed to overcome this challenge. This approach enables assessment of the effectiveness of an attack detection method based on process invariants. The approach has been demonstrated in a case study on one stage of a 6- stage operational water treatment plant. The model constructed captured the interactions among components in the selected stage. In addition, a set of attacks, attack detection mechanisms, and security specifications were also modeled using TA. These TA models were conjoined into a network and implemented in UPPAAL. The models so implemented were found effective in detecting the attacks considered. The study suggests the use of TA as an effective tool to model an ICS and study its attack detection mechanisms as a complement to doing so in a real plant-operational or under design.
The discussion of threats and vulnerabilities in Industrial Control Systems has gained popularity during the last decade due to the increase in interest and growing concern to secure these systems. In order to provide an overview of the complete landscape of these threats and vulnerabilities this contribution provides a tiered security analysis of the assets that constitute Industrial Control Systems. The identification of assets is obtained from a generalization of the system's architecture. Additionally, the security analysis is complemented by discussing security countermeasures and solutions that can be used to counteract the vulnerabilities and increase the security of control systems.
Many a time's assumptions are key to inventions. One such notion in recent past is about data exchange between two disjoint computer systems. It is always assumed that, if any two computers are separated physically without any inter communication, it is considered to be very secure and will not be compromised, the exchange of data between them would be impossible. But recent growth in the field of computers emphasizes the requirements of security analysis. One such security concern is with the air-gapped systems. This paper deals with the flaws and flow of air-gapped systems.
In order to support large volume of transactions and number of users, as estimated by the load demand modeling, a system needs to scale in order to continue to satisfy required quality attributes. In particular, for systems exposed to the Internet, scaling up may increase the attack surface susceptible to malicious intrusions. The new proactive approach based on the concept of Moving Target Defense (MTD) should be considered as a complement to current cybersecurity protection. In this paper, we analyze the scalability of the Self Cleansing Intrusion Tolerance (SCIT) MTD approach using Cloud infrastructure services. By applying the model of MTD with continuous rotation and diversity to a multi-node or multi-instance system, we argue that the effectiveness of the approach is dependent on the share-nothing architecture pattern of the large system. Furthermore, adding more resources to the MTD mechanism can compensate to achieve the desired level of secure availability.
We present and explore a model of stateless and self-stabilizing distributed computation, inspired by real-world applications such as routing on today's Internet. Processors in our model do not have an internal state, but rather interact by repeatedly mapping incoming messages ("labels") to outgoing messages and output values. While seemingly too restrictive to be of interest, stateless computation encompasses both classical game-theoretic notions of strategic interaction and a broad range of practical applications (e.g., Internet protocols, circuits, diffusion of technologies in social networks). Our main technical contribution is a general impossibility result for stateless self-stabilization in our model, showing that even modest asynchrony (with wait times that are linear in the number of processors) can prevent a stateless protocol from reaching a stable global configuration. Furthermore, we present hardness results for verifying stateless self-stabilization. We also address several aspects of the computational power of stateless protocols. Most significantly, we show that short messages (of length that is logarithmic in the number of processors) yield substantial computational power, even on very poorly connected topologies.
High accurate time synchronization is very important for many applications and industrial environments. In a computer network, synchronization of time for connected devices is provided by the Precision Time Protocol (PTP), which in principal allows for device time synchronization down to microsecond level. However, PTP and network infrastructures are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which can de-synchronize an entire network, leading to potentially devastating consequences. This paper will focus on the issue of internal attacks on time synchronization networks and discuss how counter-measures based on public key infrastructures, trusted platform modules, network intrusion detection systems and time synchronization supervisors can be adopted to defeat or at least detect such internal attacks.
Transform based image steganography methods are commonly used in security applications. However, the application of several recent transforms for image steganography remains unexplored. This paper presents bit-plane based steganography method using different transforms. In this work, the bit-plane of the transform coefficients is selected to embed the secret message. The characteristics of four transforms used in the steganography have been analyzed and the results of the four transforms are compared. This has been proven in the experimental results.
Assured Mission Delivery Network (AMDN) is a collaborative network to support data-intensive scientific collaborations in a multi-cloud environment. Each scientific collaboration group, called a mission, specifies a set of rules to handle computing and network resources. Security is an integral part of the AMDN design since the rules must be set by authorized users and the data generated by each mission may be privacy-sensitive. In this paper, we propose a CertificateLess cryptography-based Rule-management Protocol (CL-RP) for AMDN, which supports authenticated rule registrations and updates with non-repudiation. We evaluate CL-RP through test-bed experiments and compare it with other standard protocols.
In a number of information security scenarios, human beings can be better than technical security measures at detecting threats. This is particularly the case when a threat is based on deception of the user rather than exploitation of a specific technical flaw, as is the case of spear-phishing, application spoofing, multimedia masquerading and other semantic social engineering attacks. Here, we put the concept of the human-as-a-security-sensor to the test with a first case study on a small number of participants subjected to different attacks in a controlled laboratory environment and provided with a mechanism to report these attacks if they spot them. A key challenge is to estimate the reliability of each report, which we address with a machine learning approach. For comparison, we evaluate the ability of known technical security countermeasures in detecting the same threats. This initial proof of concept study shows that the concept is viable.
Authentication of smartphone users is important because a lot of sensitive data is stored in the smartphone and the smartphone is also used to access various cloud data and services. However, smartphones are easily stolen or co-opted by an attacker. Beyond the initial login, it is highly desirable to re-authenticate end-users who are continuing to access security-critical services and data. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication system for implicit, continuous authentication of the smartphone user based on behavioral characteristics, by leveraging the sensors already ubiquitously built into smartphones. We propose novel context-based authentication models to differentiate the legitimate smartphone owner versus other users. We systematically show how to achieve high authentication accuracy with different design alternatives in sensor and feature selection, machine learning techniques, context detection and multiple devices. Our system can achieve excellent authentication performance with 98.1% accuracy with negligible system overhead and less than 2.4% battery consumption.
The principal mission of Multi-Source Multicast (MSM) is to disseminate all messages from all sources in a network to all destinations. MSM is utilized in numerous applications. In many of them, securing the messages disseminated is critical. A common secure model is to consider a network where there is an eavesdropper which is able to observe a subset of the network links, and seek a code which keeps the eavesdropper ignorant regarding all the messages. While this is solved when all messages are located at a single source, Secure MSM (SMSM) is an open problem, and the rates required are hard to characterize in general. In this paper, we consider Individual Security, which promises that the eavesdropper has zero mutual information with each message individually. We completely characterize the rate region for SMSM under individual security, and show that such a security level is achievable at the full capacity of the network, that is, the cut-set bound is the matching converse, similar to non-secure MSM. Moreover, we show that the field size is similar to non-secure MSM and does not have to be larger due to the security constraint.
Intrusion detection systems do not perform well when it comes to detecting zero-day attacks, therefore improving their performance in that regard is an active research topic. In this study, to detect zero-day attacks with high accuracy, we proposed two deep learning based anomaly detection models using autoencoder and denoising autoencoder respectively. The key factor that directly affects the accuracy of the proposed models is the threshold value which was determined using a stochastic approach rather than the approaches available in the current literature. The proposed models were tested using the KDDTest+ dataset contained in NSL-KDD, and we achieved an accuracy of 88.28% and 88.65% respectively. The obtained results show that, as a singular model, our proposed anomaly detection models outperform any other singular anomaly detection methods and they perform almost the same as the newly suggested hybrid anomaly detection models.
Just as cloud customers have different performance requirements, they also have different security requirements for their computations in the cloud. Researchers have suggested a "security on demand" service model for cloud computing, where secure computing environment are dynamically provisioned to cloud customers according to their specific security needs. The availability of secure computing platforms is a necessary but not a sufficient solution to convince cloud customers to move their sensitive data and code to the cloud. Cloud customers need further assurance to convince them that the security measures are indeed deployed, and are working correctly. In this paper, we present Policy-Customized Trusted Cloud Service architecture with a new remote attestation scheme and a virtual machine migration protocol, where cloud customer can custom security policy of computing environment and validate whether the current computing environment meets the security policy in the whole life cycle of the virtual machine. To prove the availability of proposed architecture, we realize a prototype that support customer-customized security policy and a VM migration protocol that support customer-customized migration policy and validation based on open source Xen Hypervisor.
We present a formal method for computing the best security provisioning for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios characterized by a high degree of mobility. The security infrastructure is intended as a security resource allocation plan, computed as the solution of an optimization problem that minimizes the risk of having IoT devices not monitored by any resource. We employ the shortfall as a risk measure, a concept mostly used in the economics, and adapt it to our scenario. We show how to compute and evaluate an allocation plan, and how such security solutions address the continuous topology changes that affect an IoT environment.
With the advances in the areas of mobile computing and wireless communications, V2X systems have become a promising technology enabling deployment of applications providing road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment. Due to their increasing popularity, V2X networks have become a major target for attackers, making them vulnerable to security threats and network conditions, and thus affecting the safety of passengers, vehicles and roads. Existing research in V2X does not effectively address the safety, security and performance limitation threats to connected vehicles, as a result of considering these aspects separately instead of jointly. In this work, we focus on the analysis of the tradeoffs between safety, security and performance of V2X systems and propose a dynamic adaptability approach considering all three aspects jointly based on application needs and context to achieve maximum safety on the roads using an Internet of vehicles. Experiments with a simple V2V highway scenario demonstrate that an adaptive safety/security approach is essential and V2X systems have great potential for providing low reaction times.
Mission assurance requires effective, near-real time defensive cyber operations to appropriately respond to cyber attacks, without having a significant impact on operations. The ability to rapidly compute, prioritize and execute network-based courses of action (CoAs) relies on accurate situational awareness and mission-context information. Although diverse solutions exist for automatically collecting and analysing infrastructure data, few deliver automated analysis and implementation of network-based CoAs in the context of the ongoing mission. In addition, such processes can be operatorintensive and available tools tend to be specific to a set of common data sources and network responses. To address these issues, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) is leading the development of the Automated Computer Network Defence (ARMOUR) technology demonstrator and cyber defence science and technology (S&T) platform. ARMOUR integrates new and existing off-the-shelf capabilities to provide enhanced decision support and to automate many of the tasks currently executed manually by network operators. This paper describes the cyber defence integration framework, situational awareness, and automated mission-oriented decision support that ARMOUR provides.
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices perform security-critical operations and deal with sensitive information in the IoT-based systems. Therefore, the increased deployment of smart devices will make them targets for cyber attacks. Adversaries can perform malicious actions, leak private information, and track devices' and their owners' location by gaining unauthorized access to IoT devices and networks. However, conventional security protocols are not primarily designed for resource constrained devices and therefore cannot be applied directly to IoT systems. In this paper, we propose Boot-IoT - a privacy-preserving, lightweight, and scalable security scheme for limited resource devices. Boot-IoT prevents a malicious device from joining an IoT network. Boot-IoT enables a device to compute a unique identity for authentication each time the device enters a network. Moreover, during device to device communication, Boot-IoT provides a lightweight mutual authentication scheme that ensures privacy-preserving identity usages. We present a detailed analysis of the security strength of BootIoT. We implemented a prototype of Boot-IoT on IoT devices powered by Contiki OS and provided an extensive comparative analysis of Boot-IoT with contemporary authentication methods. Our results show that Boot-IoT is resource efficient and provides better scalability compared to current solutions.
A cyber-attack detection system issues alerts when an attacker attempts to coerce a trusted software application to perform unsafe actions on the attacker's behalf. One way of issuing such alerts is to create an application-agnostic cyber- attack detection system that responds to prevalent software vulnerabilities. The creation of such an autonomic alert system, however, is impeded by the disparity between implementation language, function, quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, and architectural patterns present in applications, all of which contribute to the rapidly changing threat landscape presented by modern heterogeneous software systems. This paper evaluates the feasibility of creating an autonomic cyber-attack detection system and applying it to several exemplar web-based applications using program transformation and machine learning techniques. Specifically, we examine whether it is possible to detect cyber-attacks (1) online, i.e., as they occur using lightweight structures derived from a call graph and (2) offline, i.e., using machine learning techniques trained with features extracted from a trace of application execution. In both cases, we first characterize normal application behavior using supervised training with the test suites created for an application as part of the software development process. We then intentionally perturb our test applications so they are vulnerable to common attack vectors and then evaluate the effectiveness of various feature extraction and learning strategies on the perturbed applications. Our results show that both lightweight on-line models based on control flow of execution path and application specific off-line models can successfully and efficiently detect in-process cyber-attacks against web applications.
In a continually evolving cyber-threat landscape, the detection and prevention of cyber attacks has become a complex task. Technological developments have led organisations to digitise the majority of their operations. This practice, however, has its perils, since cybespace offers a new attack-surface. Institutions which are tasked to protect organisations from these threats utilise mainly network data and their incident response strategy remains oblivious to the needs of the organisation when it comes to protecting operational aspects. This paper presents a system able to combine threat intelligence data, attack-trend data and organisational data (along with other data sources available) in order to achieve automated network-defence actions. Our approach combines machine learning, visual analytics and information from business processes to guide through a decision-making process for a Security Operation Centre environment. We test our system on two synthetic scenarios and show that correlating network data with non-network data for automated network defences is possible and worth investigating further.
Security issues in the IoT based CPS are exacerbated with human participation in CPHS due to the vulnerabilities in both the technologies and the human involvement. A holistic framework to mitigate security threats in the IoT-based CPHS environment is presented to mitigate these issues. We have developed threat model involving human elements in the CPHS environment. Research questions, directions, and ideas with respect to securing IoT based CPHS against collaborative attacks are presented.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a complex and dynamic mobile network system that enables information sharing between vehicles, their surrounding sensors, and clouds. While IoV opens new opportunities in various applications and services to provide safety on the road, it introduces new challenges in the field of digital forensics investigations. The existing tools and procedures of digital forensics cannot meet the highly distributed, decentralized, dynamic, and mobile infrastructures of the IoV. Forensic investigators will face challenges while identifying necessary pieces of evidence from the IoV environment, and collecting and analyzing the evidence. In this article, we propose TrustIoV - a digital forensic framework for the IoV systems that provides mechanisms to collect and store trustworthy evidence from the distributed infrastructure. Trust-IoV maintains a secure provenance of the evidence to ensure the integrity of the stored evidence and allows investigators to verify the integrity of the evidence during an investigation. Our experimental results on a simulated environment suggest that Trust-IoV can operate with minimal overhead while ensuring the trustworthiness of evidence in a strong adversarial scenario.
Security and privacy of big data becomes challenging as data grows and more accessible by more and more clients. Large-scale data storage is becoming a necessity for healthcare, business segments, government departments, scientific endeavors and individuals. Our research will focus on the privacy, security and how we can make sure that big data is secured. Managing security policy is a challenge that our framework will handle for big data. Privacy policy needs to be integrated, flexible, context-aware and customizable. We will build a framework to receive data from customer and then analyze data received, extract privacy policy and then identify the sensitive data. In this paper we will present the techniques for privacy policy which will be created to be used in our framework.