Biblio

Since the massive deployment of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) calls for long-range and reliable communication services with manageable cost, it has been believed to be an inevitable trend to relay a significant portion of CPS traffic through existing networking infrastructures such as the Internet. Adversaries who have access to networking infrastructures can therefore eavesdrop network traffic and then perform traffic analysis attacks in order to identify CPS sessions and subsequently launch various attacks. As we can hardly prevent all adversaries from accessing network infrastructures, thwarting traffic analysis attacks becomes indispensable. Traffic morphing serves as an effective means towards this direction. In this paper, a novel traffic morphing algorithm, CPSMorph, is proposed to protect CPS sessions. CPSMorph maintains a number of network sessions whose distributions of inter-packet delays are statistically indistinguishable from those of typical network sessions. A CPS message will be sent through one of these sessions with assured satisfaction of its time constraint. CPSMorph strives to minimize the overhead by dynamically adjusting the morphing process. It is characterized by low complexity as well as high adaptivity to changing dynamics of CPS sessions. Experimental results have shown that CPSMorph can effectively performing traffic morphing for real-time CPS messages with moderate overhead.
 

Due to deep automation, the configuration of many Cloud infrastructures is static and homogeneous, which, while easing administration, significantly decreases a potential attacker's uncertainty on a deployed Cloud-based service and hence increases the chance of the service being compromised. Moving-target defense (MTD) is a promising solution to the configuration staticity and homogeneity problem. This paper presents our findings on whether and to what extent MTD is effective in protecting a Cloud-based service with heterogeneous and dynamic attack surfaces - these attributes, which match the reality of current Cloud infrastructures, have not been investigated together in previous works on MTD in general network settings. We 1) formulate a Cloud-based service security model that incorporates Cloud-specific features such as VM migration/snapshotting and the diversity/compatibility of migration, 2) consider the accumulative effect of the attacker's intelligence on the target service's attack surface, 3) model the heterogeneity and dynamics of the service's attack surfaces, as defined by the (dynamic) probability of the service being compromised, as an S-shaped generalized logistic function, and 4) propose a probabilistic MTD service deployment strategy that exploits the dynamics and heterogeneity of attack surfaces for protecting the service against attackers. Through simulation, we identify the conditions and extent of the proposed MTD strategy's effectiveness in protecting Cloud-based services. Namely, 1) MTD is more effective when the service deployment is dense in the replacement pool and/or when the attack is strong, and 2) attack-surface heterogeneity-and-dynamics awareness helps in improving MTD's effectiveness.

A web service is a web-based application connected via the internet connectivity. The common web-based applications are deployed using web browsers and web servers. However, the security of Web Service is a major concern issues since it is not widely studied and integrated in the design stage of Web Service standard. They are add-on modules rather a well-defined solutions in standards. So, various web services security solutions have been defined in order to protect interaction over a network. Remote attestation is an authentication technique proposed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) which enables the verification of the trusted environment of platforms and assuring the information is accurate. To incorporate this method in web services framework in order to guarantee the trustworthiness and security of web-based applications, a new framework called TrustWeb is proposed. The TrustWeb framework integrates the remote attestation into SSL/TLS protocol to provide integrity information of the involved endpoint platforms. The framework enhances TLS protocol with mutual attestation mechanism which can help to address the weaknesses of transferring sensitive computations, and a practical way to solve the remote trust issue at the client-server environment. In this paper, we describe the work of designing and building a framework prototype in which attestation mechanism is integrated into the Mozilla Firefox browser and Apache web server. We also present framework solution to show improvement in the efficiency level.

In this paper, we have proposed the IBE-RAOLSR and ECDSA-RAOLSR protocols for WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks), which contributes to security routing protocols. We have implemented the IBE (Identity Based Encryption) and ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) methods to secure messages in RAOLSR (Radio Aware Optimized Link State Routing), namely TC (Topology Control) and Hello messages. We then compare the ECDSA-based RAOLSR with IBE-based RAOLSR protocols. This study shows the great benefits of the IBE technique in securing RAOLSR protocol for WMNs. Through extensive ns-3 (Network Simulator-3) simulations, results have shown that the IBE-RAOLSR outperforms the ECDSA-RAOLSR in terms of overhead and delay. Simulation results show that the utilize of the IBE-based RAOLSR provides a greater level of security with light overhead.

This paper has conducted analyzing the accident case of data spill to study policy issues for ICT security from a social science perspective focusing on risk. The results from case analysis are as follows. First, ICT risk can be categorized 'severe, strong, intensive and individual' from the level of both probability and impact. Second, strategy of risk management can be designated 'avoid, transfer, mitigate, accept' by understanding their own culture type of relative group such as 'hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and individualism'. Third, personal data has contained characteristics of big data such like 'volume, velocity, variety' for each risk situation. Therefore, government needs to establish a standing organization responsible for ICT risk policy and management in a new big data era. And the policy for ICT risk management needs to balance in considering 'technology, norms, laws, and market' in big data era.
 

Big data's explosive growth has prompted the US government to release new reports that address the issues--particularly related to privacy--resulting from this growth. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/j49eoe5g8-c is an audio recording from the Computing and the Law column, in which authors Brian M. Gaff, Heather Egan Sussman, and Jennifer Geetter discuss how big data's explosive growth has prompted the US government to release new reports that address the issues--particularly related to privacy--resulting from this growth.
 

This paper proposes a security architecture for an IoT transparent middleware. Focused on bringing real life objects to the virtual realm, the proposed architecture is deployable and comprises protection measures based on existent technologies for security such as AES, TLS and oAuth. This way, privacy, authenticity, integrity and confidentiality on data exchange services are integrated to provide security for generated smart objects and for involved users and services in a reliable and deployable manner.

Moving Target Defense (MTD) changes the attack surface of a system that confuses intruders to thwart attacks. Various MTD techniques are developed to enhance the security of a networked system, but the effectiveness of these techniques is not well assessed. Security models (e.g., Attack Graphs (AGs)) provide formal methods of assessing security, but modeling the MTD techniques in security models has not been studied. In this paper, we incorporate the MTD techniques in security modeling and analysis using a scalable security model, namely Hierarchical Attack Representation Models (HARMs), to assess the effectiveness of the MTD techniques. In addition, we use importance measures (IMs) for scalable security analysis and deploying the MTD techniques in an effective manner. The performance comparison between the HARM and the AG is given. Also, we compare the performance of using the IMs and the exhaustive search method in simulations.

Wireless channel reciprocity can be successfully exploited as a common source of randomness for the generation of a secret key by two legitimate users willing to achieve confidential communications over a public channel. This paper presents an analytical framework to investigate the theoretical limits of secret-key generation when wireless multi-dimensional Gaussian channels are used as source of randomness. The intrinsic secrecy content of wide-sense stationary wireless channels in frequency, time and spatial domains is derived through asymptotic analysis as the number of observations in a given domain tends to infinity. Some significant case studies are presented where single and multiple antenna eavesdroppers are considered. In the numerical results, the role of signal-to-noise ratio, spatial correlation, frequency and time selectivity is investigated.

The trend towards Cloud computing infrastructure has increased the need for new methods that allow data owners to share their data with others securely taking into account the needs of multiple stakeholders. The data owner should be able to share confidential data while delegating much of the burden of access control management to the Cloud and trusted enterprises. The lack of such methods to enhance privacy and security may hinder the growth of cloud computing. In particular, there is a growing need to better manage security keys of data shared in the Cloud. BYOD provides a first step to enabling secure and efficient key management, however, the data owner cannot guarantee that the data consumers device itself is secure. Furthermore, in current methods the data owner cannot revoke a particular data consumer or group efficiently. In this paper, we address these issues by incorporating a hardware-based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) mechanism called the Trusted Extension Device (TED) together with our security model and protocol to allow stronger privacy of data compared to software-based security protocols. We demonstrate the concept of using TED for stronger protection and management of cryptographic keys and how our secure data sharing protocol will allow a data owner (e.g, author) to securely store data via untrusted Cloud services. Our work prevents keys to be stolen by outsiders and/or dishonest authorised consumers, thus making it particularly attractive to be implemented in a real-world scenario.

The reliability theory used in the design of complex systems including electric grids assumes random component failures and is thus unsuited to analyzing security risks due to attackers that intentionally damage several components of the system. In this paper, a security risk analysis methodology is proposed consisting of vulnerability analysis and impact analysis. Vulnerability analysis is a method developed by security engineers to identify the attacks that are relevant for the system under study, and in this paper, the analysis is applied on the communications network topology of the electric grid automation system. Impact analysis is then performed through co-simulation of automation and the electric grid to assess the potential damage from the attacks. This paper makes an extensive review of vulnerability and impact analysis methods and relevant system modeling techniques from the fields of security and industrial automation engineering, with a focus on smart grid automation, and then applies and combines approaches to obtain a security risk analysis methodology. The methodology is demonstrated with a case study of fault location, isolation and supply restoration smart grid automation.

Future wireless communications are made up of different wireless technologies. In such a scenario, cognitive and cooperative principles create a promising framework for the interaction of these systems. The opportunistic behavior of cognitive radio (CR) provides an efficient use of radio spectrum and makes wireless network setup easier. However more and more frequently, CR features are exploited by malicious attacks, e.g., denial-of-service (DoS). This paper introduces active radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) with double application scenario. CRs could encapsulate common-control-channel (CCC) information in an existing channel using active RFF and avoiding any additional or dedicated link. On the other hand, a node inside a network could use the same technique to exchange a public key during the setup of secure communication. Results indicate how the active RFF aims to a valuable technique for cognitive radio manager (CRM) framework facilitating data exchange between CRs without any dedicated channel or additional radio resource.

Social networking sites (SNSs), with their large number of users and large information base, seem to be the perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, who are considered the weakest link in security. Deceiving, persuading, or influencing people to provide information or to perform an action that will benefit the attacker is known as "social engineering." Fraudulent and deceptive people use social engineering traps and tactics through SNSs to trick users into obeying them, accepting threats, and falling victim to various crimes such as phishing, sexual abuse, financial abuse, identity theft, and physical crime. Although organizations, researchers, and practitioners recognize the serious risks of social engineering, there is a severe lack of understanding and control of such threats. This may be partly due to the complexity of human behaviors in approaching, accepting, and failing to recognize social engineering tricks. This research aims to investigate the impact of source characteristics on users' susceptibility to social engineering victimization in SNSs, particularly Facebook. Using grounded theory method, we develop a model that explains what and how source characteristics influence Facebook users to judge the attacker as credible.

With the rapid advancement in technology and the growing complexities in the interaction of these technologies and networks, it is even more important for countries and organizations to gain sustainable security advantage. Security advantage refers to the ability to manage and respond to threats and vulnerabilities with a proactive security posture. This is accomplished through effectively planning, managing, responding to and recovering from threats and vulnerabilities. However not many organizations and even countries, especially in the developing world, have been able to equip themselves with the necessary and sufficient know-how or ability to integrate knowledge and capabilities to achieve security advantage within their environment. Having a structured set of requirements or indicators to aid in progressively attaining different levels of maturity and capabilities is one important method to determine the state of cybersecurity readiness. The research introduces the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2), a 6-step process of progressive development of cybersecurity maturity and knowledge integration that ranges from a state of limited awareness and application of security controls to pervasive optimization of the protection of critical assets.

With the rapid advancement in technology and the growing complexities in the interaction of these technologies and networks, it is even more important for countries and organizations to gain sustainable security advantage. Security advantage refers to the ability to manage and respond to threats and vulnerabilities with a proactive security posture. This is accomplished through effectively planning, managing, responding to and recovering from threats and vulnerabilities. However not many organizations and even countries, especially in the developing world, have been able to equip themselves with the necessary and sufficient know-how or ability to integrate knowledge and capabilities to achieve security advantage within their environment. Having a structured set of requirements or indicators to aid in progressively attaining different levels of maturity and capabilities is one important method to determine the state of cybersecurity readiness. The research introduces the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (CM2), a 6-step process of progressive development of cybersecurity maturity and knowledge integration that ranges from a state of limited awareness and application of security controls to pervasive optimization of the protection of critical assets.
 

Commercial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be accessed through sensor web portals. However, associated security implications and threats to the 1) users/subscribers 2) investors and 3) third party operators regarding sensor web portals are not seen in completeness, rather the contemporary work handles them in parts. In this paper, we discuss different kind of security attacks and vulnerabilities at different layers to the users, investors including Wireless Sensor Network Service Providers (WSNSPs) and WSN itself in relation with the two well-known documents i.e., “Department of Homeland Security” (DHS) and “Department of Defense (DOD)”, as these are standard security documents till date. Further we propose a comprehensive cross layer security solution in the light of guidelines given in the aforementioned documents that is minimalist in implementation and achieves the purported security goals.
 

Wireless security has been an active research area since the last decade. A lot of studies of wireless security use cryptographic tools, but traditional cryptographic tools are normally based on computational assumptions, which may turn out to be invalid in the future. Consequently, it is very desirable to build cryptographic tools that do not rely on computational assumptions. In this paper, we focus on a crucial cryptographic tool, namely 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer. This tool plays a central role in cryptography because we can build a cryptographic protocol for any polynomial-time computable function using this tool. We present a novel 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer protocol based on wireless channel characteristics, which does not rely on any computational assumption. We also illustrate the potential broad applications of this protocol by giving two applications, one on private communications and the other on privacy preserving password verification. We have fully implemented this protocol on wireless devices and conducted experiments in real environments to evaluate the protocol. Our experimental results demonstrate that it has reasonable efficiency.
 

Recent events have brought to light the increasingly intertwined nature of modern infrastructures. As a result much effort is being put towards protecting these vital infrastructures without which modern society suffers dire consequences. These infrastructures, due to their intricate nature, behave in complex ways. Improving their resilience and understanding their behavior requires a collaborative effort between the private sector that operates these infrastructures and the government sector that regulates them. This collaboration in the form of information sharing requires a new type of information network whose goal is in two parts to enable infrastructure operators share status information among interdependent infrastructure nodes and also allow for the sharing of vital information concerning threats and other contingencies in the form of alerts. A communication model that meets these requirements while maintaining flexibility and scalability is presented in this paper.
 

Most web applications have critical bugs (faults) affecting their security, which makes them vulnerable to attacks by hackers and organized crime. To prevent these security problems from occurring it is of utmost importance to understand the typical software faults. This paper contributes to this body of knowledge by presenting a field study on two of the most widely spread and critical web application vulnerabilities: SQL Injection and XSS. It analyzes the source code of security patches of widely used web applications written in weak and strong typed languages. Results show that only a small subset of software fault types, affecting a restricted collection of statements, is related to security. To understand how these vulnerabilities are really exploited by hackers, this paper also presents an analysis of the source code of the scripts used to attack them. The outcomes of this study can be used to train software developers and code inspectors in the detection of such faults and are also the foundation for the research of realistic vulnerability and attack injectors that can be used to assess security mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, vulnerability scanners, and static code analyzers.

Web applications need to validate and sanitize user inputs in order to avoid attacks such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection. Writing string manipulation code for input validation and sanitization is an error-prone process leading to many vulnerabilities in real-world web applications. Automata-based static string analysis techniques can be used to automatically compute vulnerability signatures (represented as automata) that characterize all the inputs that can exploit a vulnerability. However, there are several factors that limit the applicability of static string analysis techniques in general: 1) undesirability of static string analysis requires the use of approximations leading to false positives, 2) static string analysis tools do not handle all string operations, 3) dynamic nature of the scripting languages makes static analysis difficult. In this paper, we show that vulnerability signatures computed for deliberately insecure web applications (developed for demonstrating different types of vulnerabilities) can be used to generate test cases for other applications. Given a vulnerability signature represented as an automaton, we present algorithms for test case generation based on state, transition, and path coverage. These automatically generated test cases can be used to test applications that are not analyzable statically, and to discover attack strings that demonstrate how the vulnerabilities can be exploited.
 

Using one password for all web services is not secure because the leakage of the password compromises all the web services accounts, while using independent passwords for different web services is inconvenient for the identity claimant to memorize. A password manager is used to address this security-convenience dilemma by storing and retrieving multiple existing passwords using one master password. On the other hand, a password manager liberates human brain by enabling people to generate strong passwords without worry about memorizing them. While a password manager provides a convenient and secure way to managing multiple passwords, it centralizes the passwords storage and shifts the risk of passwords leakage from distributed service providers to a software or token authenticated by a single master password. Concerned about this one master password based security, biometrics could be used as a second factor for authentication by verifying the ownership of the master password. However, biometrics based authentication is more privacy concerned than a non-biometric password manager. In this paper we propose a cloud password manager scheme exploiting privacy enhanced biometrics, which achieves both security and convenience in a privacy-enhanced way. The proposed password manager scheme relies on a cloud service to synchronize all local password manager clients in an encrypted form, which is efficient to deploy the updates and secure against untrusted cloud service providers.

The addition of synchrophasors such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) to the existing power grid will enhance real-time monitoring and analysis of the grid. The PMU collects bus voltage, line current, and frequency measurements and uses the communication network to send the measurements to the respective substation(s)/control center(s). Since this approach relies on network infrastructure, possible cyber security vulnerabilities have to be addressed to ensure that is stable, secure, and reliable. In this paper, security vulnerabilities associated with a synchrophasor network in a benchmark IEEE 68 bus (New England/New York) power system model are examined. Currently known feasible attacks are demonstrated. Recommended testing and verification methods are also presented.

The strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT) is dramatically changing traditional perceptions of the current Internet towards an integrated vision of smart objects interacting with each other. While in recent years many technological challenges have already been solved through the extension and adaptation of wireless technologies, security and privacy still remain as the main barriers for the IoT deployment on a broad scale. In this emerging paradigm, typical scenarios manage particularly sensitive data, and any leakage of information could severely damage the privacy of users. This paper provides a concise description of some of the major challenges related to these areas that still need to be overcome in the coming years for a full acceptance of all IoT stakeholders involved. In addition, we propose a distributed capability-based access control mechanism which is built on public key cryptography in order to cope with some of these challenges. Specifically, our solution is based on the design of a lightweight token used for access to CoAP Resources, and an optimized implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) inside the smart object. The results obtained from our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal and show promising in order to cover more complex scenarios in the future, as well as its application in specific IoT use cases.

In smart grid, critical data like monitoring data, usage data, state estimation, billing data etc are regularly being talked among its elements. So, security of such a system, if violated, results in massive losses and damages. By compromising with security aspect of such a system is as good as committing suicide. Thus in this paper, we have proposed security mechanism in Advanced Metering Infrastructure of smart grid, formed as Mesh-Zigbee topology. This security mechanism involves PKI based Digital certificate Authentication and Intrusion detection system to protect the AMI from internal and external security attack.

Mobile Apps running on smartphones and tablet pes offer a new possibility to enhance the work of engineers because they provide an easy-to-use, touchscreen-based handling and can be used anytime and anywhere. Introducing mobile apps in the engineering domain is difficult because the IT environment is heterogeneous and engineering-specific challenges in the app development arise e. g., large amount of data and high security requirements. There is a need for an engineering-specific middleware to facilitate and standardize the app development. However, such a middleware does not yet exist as well as a holistic set of requirements for the development. Therefore, we propose a design method which offers a systematic procedure to develop Mobile Engineering-Application Middleware.