Biblio

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.

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.

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.

Physical layer security can ensure secure communication over noisy channels in the presence of an eavesdropper with unlimited computational power. We adopt an information theoretic variant of semantic-security (SS) (a cryptographic gold standard), as our secrecy metric and study the open problem of the type II wiretap channel (WTC II) with a noisy main channel is, whose secrecy-capacity is unknown even under looser metrics than SS. Herein the secrecy-capacity is derived and shown to be equal to its SS capacity. In this setting, the legitimate users communicate via a discrete-memory less (DM) channel in the presence of an eavesdropper that has perfect access to a subset of its choosing of the transmitted symbols, constrained to a fixed fraction of the block length. The secrecy criterion is achieved simultaneously for all possible eavesdropper subset choices. On top of that, SS requires negligible mutual information between the message and the eavesdropper's observations even when maximized over all message distributions. A key tool for the achievability proof is a novel and stronger version of Wyner's soft covering lemma. Specifically, the lemma shows that a random codebook achieves the soft-covering phenomenon with high probability. The probability of failure is doubly-exponentially small in the block length. Since the combined number of messages and subsets grows only exponentially with the block length, SS for the WTC II is established by using the union bound and invoking the stronger soft-covering lemma. The direct proof shows that rates up to the weak-secrecy capacity of the classic WTC with a DM erasure channel (EC) to the eavesdropper are achievable. The converse follows by establishing the capacity of this DM wiretap EC as an upper bound for the WTC II. From a broader perspective, the stronger soft-covering lemma constitutes a tool for showing the existence of codebooks that satisfy exponentially many constraints, a beneficial ability for many other applications in information theoretic security.
 

Physical layer security can ensure secure communication over noisy channels in the presence of an eavesdropper with unlimited computational power. We adopt an information theoretic variant of semantic-security (SS) (a cryptographic gold standard), as our secrecy metric and study the open problem of the type II wiretap channel (WTC II) with a noisy main channel is, whose secrecy-capacity is unknown even under looser metrics than SS. Herein the secrecy-capacity is derived and shown to be equal to its SS capacity. In this setting, the legitimate users communicate via a discrete-memory less (DM) channel in the presence of an eavesdropper that has perfect access to a subset of its choosing of the transmitted symbols, constrained to a fixed fraction of the block length. The secrecy criterion is achieved simultaneously for all possible eavesdropper subset choices. On top of that, SS requires negligible mutual information between the message and the eavesdropper's observations even when maximized over all message distributions. A key tool for the achievability proof is a novel and stronger version of Wyner's soft covering lemma. Specifically, the lemma shows that a random codebook achieves the soft-covering phenomenon with high probability. The probability of failure is doubly-exponentially small in the block length. Since the combined number of messages and subsets grows only exponentially with the block length, SS for the WTC II is established by using the union bound and invoking the stronger soft-covering lemma. The direct proof shows that rates up to the weak-secrecy capacity of the classic WTC with a DM erasure channel (EC) to the eavesdropper are achievable. The converse follows by establishing the capacity of this DM wiretap EC as an upper bound for the WTC II. From a broader perspective, the stronger soft-covering lemma constitutes a tool for showing the existence of codebooks that satisfy exponentially many constraints, a beneficial ability for many other applications in information theoretic security.

Utility computing is being gradually realized as exemplified by cloud computing. Outsourcing computing and storage to global-scale cloud providers benefits from high accessibility, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. However, users are uneasy outsourcing the storage of sensitive data due to security concerns. We address this problem by presenting SeMiNAS–-an efficient middleware system that allows files to be securely outsourced to providers and shared among geo-distributed offices. SeMiNAS achieves end-to-end data integrity and confidentiality with a highly efficient authenticated-encryption scheme. SeMiNAS leverages advanced NFSv4 features, including compound procedures and data-integrity extensions, to minimize extra network round trips caused by security meta-data. SeMiNAS also caches remote files locally to reduce accesses to providers over WANs. We designed, implemented, and evaluated SeMiNAS, which demonstrates a small performance penalty of less than 26% and an occasional performance boost of up to 19% for Filebench workloads.

Encrypting Internet communications has been the subject of renewed focus in recent years. In order to add end-to-end encryption to legacy applications without losing the convenience of full-text search, ShadowCrypt and Mimesis Aegis use a new cryptographic technique called "efficiently deployable efficiently searchable encryption" (EDESE) that allows a standard full-text search system to perform searches on encrypted data. Compared to other recent techniques for searching on encrypted data, EDESE schemes leak a great deal of statistical information about the encrypted messages and the keywords they contain. Until now, the practical impact of this leakage has been difficult to quantify. In this paper, we show that the adversary's task of matching plaintext keywords to the opaque cryptographic identifiers used in EDESE can be reduced to the well-known combinatorial optimization problem of weighted graph matching (WGM). Using real email and chat data, we show how off-the-shelf WGM solvers can be used to accurately and efficiently recover hundreds of the most common plaintext keywords from a set of EDESE-encrypted messages. We show how to recover the tags from Bloom filters so that the WGM solver can be used with the set of encrypted messages that utilizes a Bloom filter to encode its search tags. We also show that the attack can be mitigated by carefully configuring Bloom filter parameters.

The average computer user is no longer restricted to one device. They may have several devices and expect their applications to work on all of them. A challenge arises when these applications need the cryptographic private key of the devices' owner. Here the device owner typically has to manage keys manually with a "keychain" app, which leads to private keys being transferred insecurely between devices – or even to other people. Even with intuitive synchronization mechanisms, theft and malware still pose a major risk to keys. Phones and watches are frequently removed or set down, and a single compromised device leads to the loss of the owner's private key, a catastrophic failure that can be quite difficult to recover from. We introduce Shatter, an open-source framework that runs on desktops, Android, and Android Wear, and performs key distribution on a user's behalf. Shatter uses threshold cryptography to turn the security weakness of having multiple devices into a strength. Apps that delegate cryptographic operations to Shatter have their keys compromised only when a threshold number of devices are compromised by the same attacker. We demonstrate how our framework operates with two popular Android apps (protecting identity keys for a messaging app, and encryption keys for a note-taking app) in a backwards-compatible manner: only Shatter users need to move to a Shatter-aware version of the app. Shatter has minimal impact on app performance, with signatures and decryption being calculated in 0.5s and security proofs in 14s.

Security vulnerability assessment is an important process that must be conducted against any system before the deployment, and emerging technologies are no exceptions. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has aggressively evolved in the past few years and is now almost at the early adoption stage. At this stage, the attack surface of SDN should be thoroughly investigated and assessed in order to mitigate possible security breaches against SDN. Inspired by the necessity, we reveal three attack scenarios that leverage SDN application to attack SDNs, and test the attack scenarios against three of the most popular SDN controllers available today. In addition, we discuss the possible defense mechanisms against such application-originated attacks.

We examine the security of home smart locks: cyber-physical devices that replace traditional door locks with deadbolts that can be electronically controlled by mobile devices or the lock manufacturer's remote servers. We present two categories of attacks against smart locks and analyze the security of five commercially-available locks with respect to these attacks. Our security analysis reveals that flaws in the design, implementation, and interaction models of existing locks can be exploited by several classes of adversaries, allowing them to learn private information about users and gain unauthorized home access. To guide future development of smart locks and similar Internet of Things devices, we propose several defenses that mitigate the attacks we present. One of these defenses is a novel approach to securely and usably communicate a user's intended actions to smart locks, which we prototype and evaluate. Ultimately, our work takes a first step towards illuminating security challenges in the system design and novel functionality introduced by emerging IoT systems.

Providing a global understanding of privacy is crucial, because everything is connected. Nowadays companies are providing their customers with more services that will give them more access to their data and daily activity; electricity companies are marketing the new smart meters as a new service with great benefit to reduce the electricity usage by monitoring the electricity reading in real time. Although the users might benefit from this extra service, it will compromise the privacy of the users by having constant access to the readings. Since the smart meters will provide the users with real electricity readings, they will be able to decide and identify which devices are consuming energy in that specific moment and how much it will cost. This kind of information can be exploited by numerous types of people. Unauthorized use of this information is an invasion of privacy and may lead to much more severe consequences. This paper will propose an algorithm approach for the comparison and analysis of Smart Meter data readings, considering the time and temperature factors at each second to identify the use patterns at each house by identifying the appliances activities at each second in time complexity O(log(m)).

In organizations that use DevOps practices, software changes can be deployed as fast as 500 times or more per day. Without adequate involvement of the security team, rapidly deployed software changes are more likely to contain vulnerabilities due to lack of adequate reviews. The goal of this paper is to aid software practitioners in integrating security and DevOps by summarizing experiences in utilizing security practices in a DevOps environment. We analyzed a selected set of Internet artifacts and surveyed representatives of nine organizations that are using DevOps to systematically explore experiences in utilizing security practices. We observe that the majority of the software practitioners have expressed the potential of common DevOps activities, such as automated monitoring, to improve the security of a system. Furthermore, organizations that integrate DevOps and security utilize additional security activities, such as security requirements analysis and performing security configurations. Additionally, these teams also have established collaboration between the security team and the development and operations teams.

In organizations that use DevOps practices, software changes can be deployed as fast as 500 times or more per day. Without adequate involvement of the security team, rapidly deployed software changes are more likely to contain vulnerabilities due to lack of adequate reviews. The goal of this paper is to aid software practitioners in integrating security and DevOps by summarizing experiences in utilizing security practices in a DevOps environment. We analyzed a selected set of Internet artifacts and surveyed representatives of nine organizations that are using DevOps to systematically explore experiences in utilizing security practices. We observe that the majority of the software practitioners have expressed the potential of common DevOps activities, such as automated monitoring, to improve the security of a system. Furthermore, organizations that integrate DevOps and security utilize additional security activities, such as security requirements analysis and performing security configurations. Additionally, these teams also have established collaboration between the security team and the development and operations teams.

With the rising interest of expedient, safe, and high-efficient transportation, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have turned into a critical technology in smart transportation systems. Because of the high mobility of nodes, VANETs are vulnerable to security attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of software-defined VANETs with trust management. Specifically, we separate the forwarding plane in VANETs from the control plane, which is responsible for the control functionality, such as routing protocols and trust management in VANETs. Using the on-demand distance vector routing (TAODV) protocol as an example, we present a routing protocol named software-defined trust based ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (SD-TAODV). Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed software-defined VANETs with trust management.

Beyond other domains, the field of immersive analytics makes use of Augmented Reality techniques to successfully support users in analyzing data. When displaying ubiquitous data integrated into the everyday life, spatial immersion issues like depth perception, data localization and object relations become relevant. Although there is a variety of techniques to deal with those, they are difficult to apply if the examined data or the reference space are large and abstract. In this work, we discuss observed problems in such immersive analytics systems and the applicability of current countermeasures to identify needs for action.

Virtual machine live migration technology, as an important support for cloud computing, has become a central issue in recent years. The virtual machines' runtime environment is migrated from the original physical server to another physical server, maintaining the virtual machines running at the same time. Therefore, it can make load balancing among servers and ensure the quality of service. However, virtual machine migration security issue cannot be ignored due to the immature development of it. This paper we analyze the security threats of the virtual machine migration, and compare the current proposed protection measures. While, these methods either rely on hardware, or lack adequate security and expansibility. In the end, we propose a security model of live virtual machine migration based on security policy transfer and encryption, named as SPLM (Security Protection of Live Migration) and analyze its security and reliability, which proves that SPLM is better than others. This paper can be useful for the researchers to work on this field. The security study of live virtual machine migration in this paper provides a certain reference for the research of virtualization security, and is of great significance.

OpenFlow, as the prevailing technique for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces significant programmability, granularity, and flexibility for many network applications to effectively manage and process network flows. However, because OpenFlow attempts to keep the SDN data plane simple and efficient, it focuses solely on L2/L3 network transport and consequently lacks the fundamental ability of stateful forwarding for the data plane. Also, OpenFlow provides a very limited access to connection-level information in the SDN controller. In particular, for any network access management applications on SDNs that require comprehensive network state information, these inherent limitations of OpenFlow pose significant challenges in supporting network services. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative connection tracking framework called STATEMON that introduces a global state-awareness to provide better access control in SDNs. STATEMON is based on a lightweight extension of OpenFlow for programming the stateful SDN data plane, while keeping the underlying network devices as simple as possible. To demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of STATEMON, we implement and evaluate a stateful network firewall and port knocking applications for SDNs, using the APIs provided by STATEMON. Our evaluations show that STATEMON introduces minimal message exchanges for monitoring active connections in SDNs with manageable overhead (3.27% throughput degradation).

Real world applications of Wireless Sensor Networks such as border control, healthcare monitoring and target tracking require secure communications. Thus, during WSN setup, one of the first requirements is to distribute the keys to the sensor nodes which can be later used for securing the messages exchanged between sensors. The key management schemes in WSN secure the communication between a pair or a group of nodes. However, the storage capacity of the sensor nodes is limited which makes storage requirement as an important parameter for the evaluation of key management schemes. This paper classifies the existing key management schemes proposed for WSNs into three categories: storage inefficient, storage efficient and highly storage efficient key management schemes.

In-depth consideration and evaluation of security and resilience is necessary for developing the scientific foundations and technology of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In this demonstration, we present SURE [1], a CPS experimentation and evaluation testbed for security and resilience focusing on transportation networks. The testbed includes (1) a heterogeneous modeling and simulation integration platform, (2) a Web-based tool for modeling CPS in adversarial environments, and (3) a framework for evaluating resilience using attacker-defender games. Users such as CPS designers and operators can interact with the testbed to evaluate monitoring and control schemes that include sensor placement and traffic signal configuration.

Security is concerned with protecting assets. The aspects of security can be applied to any situation- defense, detection and deterrence. Network security plays important role of protecting information, hardware and software on a computer network. Denial of service (DOS) attacks causes great impacts on the internet world. These attacks attempt to disrupt legitimate user's access to services. By exploiting computer's vulnerabilities, attackers easily consume victim's resources. Many special techniques have been developed to protest against DOS attacks. Some organizations constitute several defense mechanism tools to tackle the security problems. This paper has proposed various types of attacks and solutions associated with each layers of OSI model. These attacks and solutions have different impacts on the different environment. Thus the rapid growth of new technologies may constitute still worse impacts of attacks in the future.