Biblio

Found 151 results

Filters: Keyword is security metrics  [Clear All Filters]
2023-01-13
Wu, Haijiang.  2022.  Effective Metrics Modeling of Big Data Technology in Electric Power Information Security. 2022 6th International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC). :607—610.
This article focuses on analyzing the application characteristics of electric power big data, determining the advantages that electric power big data provides to the development of enterprises, and expounding the power information security protection technology and management measures under the background of big data. Focus on the protection of power information security, and fundamentally control the information security control issues of power enterprises. Then analyzed the types of big data structure and effective measurement modeling, and finally combined with the application status of big data concepts in the construction of electric power information networks, and proposed optimization strategies, aiming to promote the effectiveness of big data concepts in power information network management activities. Applying the creation conditions, the results show that the measurement model is improved by 7.8%
Clausen, Marie, Schütz, Johann.  2022.  Identifying Security Requirements for Smart Grid Components: A Smart Grid Security Metric. 2022 IEEE 20th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN). :208—213.
The most vital requirement for the electric power system as a critical infrastructure is its security of supply. In course of the transition of the electric energy system, however, the security provided by the N-1 principle increasingly reaches its limits. The IT/OT convergence changes the threat structure significantly. New risk factors, that can lead to major blackouts, are added to the existing ones. The problem, however, the cost of security optimizations are not always in proportion to their value. Not every component is equally critical to the energy system, so the question arises, "How secure does my system need to be?". To adress the security-by-design principle, this contribution introduces a Security Metric (SecMet) that can be applied to Smart Grid architectures and its components and deliver an indicator for the "Securitisation Need" based on an individual risk assessment.
Yee, George O. M..  2022.  Improving the Derivation of Sound Security Metrics. 2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). :1804—1809.
We continue to tackle the problem of poorly defined security metrics by building on and improving our previous work on designing sound security metrics. We reformulate the previous method into a set of conditions that are clearer and more widely applicable for deriving sound security metrics. We also modify and enhance some concepts that led to an unforeseen weakness in the previous method that was subsequently found by users, thereby eliminating this weakness from the conditions. We present examples showing how the conditions can be used to obtain sound security metrics. To demonstrate the conditions' versatility, we apply them to show that an aggregate security metric made up of sound security metrics is also sound. This is useful where the use of an aggregate measure may be preferred, to more easily understand the security of a system.
Kareem, Husam, Almousa, Khaleel, Dunaev, Dmitriy.  2022.  Matlab GUI-based Tool to Determine Performance Metrics of Physical Unclonable Functions. 2022 Cybernetics & Informatics (K&I). :1—5.
This paper presents a MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) based tool that determines the performance evaluation metrics of the physically unclonable functions (PUFs). The PUFs are hardware security primitives which can be utilized in several hardware security applications like integrated circuits protection, device authentication, secret key generation, and hardware obfuscation. Like any other technology approach, PUFs evaluation requires testing different performance metrics, each of which can be determined by at least one mathematical equation. The proposed tool (PUFs Tool) reads the PUF instances’ output and then computes and generates the values of the main PUFs’ performance metrics: uniqueness, reliability, uniformity, and bit-aliasing. In addition, it generates a bar code for each PUF instance considered in the evaluation process. The PUFs Tool is designed and developed using the app designer of MATLAB software 2021b.
Masago, Hitoshi, Nodaka, Hiro, Kishimoto, Kazuma, Kawai, Alaric Yohei, Shoji, Shuichi, Mizuno, Jun.  2022.  Nano-Artifact Metrics Chip Mounting Technology for Edge AI Device Security. 2022 17th International Microsystems, Packaging, Assembly and Circuits Technology Conference (IMPACT). :1—4.
In this study, the effect of surface treatment on the boding strength between Quad flat package (QFP) and quartz was investigated for establishing a QFP/quartz glass bonding technique. This bonding technique is necessary to prevent bond failure at the nano-artifact metrics (NAM) chip and adhesive interface against physical attacks such as counterfeiting and tampering of edge AI devices that use NAM chips. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between surface roughness and tensile strength by applying surface treatments such as vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and Ar/O2 plasma. All QFP/quartz glass with surface treatments such as VUV and Ar/O2 plasma showed increased bond strength. Surface treatment and bonding technology for QFP and quartz glass were established to realize NAM chip mounting.
Benarous, Leila, Boudjit, Saadi.  2022.  Security and Privacy Evaluation Methods and Metrics in Vehicular Networks. 2022 IEEE 19th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC). :1—6.
The vehicular networks extend the internet services to road edge. They allow users to stay connected offering them a set of safety and infotainment services like weather forecasts and road conditions. The security and privacy are essential issues in computing systems and networks. They are particularly important in vehicular networks due to their direct impact on the users’ safety on road. Various researchers have concentrated their efforts on resolving these two issues in vehicular networks. A great number of researches are found in literature and with still existing open issues and security risks to be solved, the research is continuous in this area. However, the researchers may face some difficulties in choosing the correct method to prove their works or to illustrate their excellency in comparison with existing solutions. In this paper, we review a set of evaluation methodologies and metrics to measure, proof or analyze privacy and security solutions. The aim of this review is to illuminate the readers about the possible existing methods to help them choose the correct techniques to use and reduce their difficulties.
Kappelhoff, Fynn, Rasche, Rasmus, Mukhopadhyay, Debdeep, Rührmair, Ulrich.  2022.  Strong PUF Security Metrics: Response Sensitivity to Small Challenge Perturbations. 2022 23rd International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED). :1—10.
This paper belongs to a sequence of manuscripts that discuss generic and easy-to-apply security metrics for Strong PUFs. These metrics cannot and shall not fully replace in-depth machine learning (ML) studies in the security assessment of Strong PUF candidates. But they can complement the latter, serve in initial PUF complexity analyses, and are much easier and more efficient to apply: They do not require detailed knowledge of various ML methods, substantial computation times, or the availability of an internal parametric model of the studied PUF. Our metrics also can be standardized particularly easily. This avoids the sometimes inconclusive or contradictory findings of existing ML-based security test, which may result from the usage of different or non-optimized ML algorithms and hyperparameters, differing hardware resources, or varying numbers of challenge-response pairs in the training phase.This first manuscript within the abovementioned sequence treats one of the conceptually most straightforward security metrics on that path: It investigates the effects that small perturbations in the PUF-challenges have on the resulting PUF-responses. We first develop and implement several sub-metrics that realize this approach in practice. We then empirically show that these metrics have surprising predictive power, and compare our obtained test scores with the known real-world security of several popular Strong PUF designs. The latter include (XOR) Arbiter PUFs, Feed-Forward Arbiter PUFs, and (XOR) Bistable Ring PUFs. Along the way, our manuscript also suggests techniques for representing the results of our metrics graphically, and for interpreting them in a meaningful manner.
Hoque, Mohammad Aminul, Hossain, Mahmud, Hasan, Ragib.  2022.  BenchAV: A Security Benchmarking Framework for Autonomous Driving. 2022 IEEE 19th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC). :729—730.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are capable of making driving decisions autonomously using multiple sensors and a complex autonomous driving (AD) software. However, AVs introduce numerous unique security challenges that have the potential to create safety consequences on the road. Security mechanisms require a benchmark suite and an evaluation framework to generate comparable results. Unfortunately, AVs lack a proper benchmarking framework to evaluate the attack and defense mechanisms and quantify the safety measures. This paper introduces BenchAV – a security benchmark suite and evaluation framework for AVs to address current limitations and pressing challenges of AD security. The benchmark suite contains 12 security and performance metrics, and an evaluation framework that automates the metric collection process using Carla simulator and Robot Operating System (ROS).

Purdy, Ruben, Duvalsaint, Danielle, Blanton, R. D. Shawn.  2022.  Security Metrics for Logic Circuits. 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). :53—56.
Any type of engineered design requires metrics for trading off both desirable and undesirable properties. For integrated circuits, typical properties include circuit size, performance, power, etc., where for example, performance is a desirable property and power consumption is not. Security metrics, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to develop because there are active adversaries that intend to compromise the protected circuitry. This implies metric values may not be static quantities, but instead are measures that degrade depending on attack effectiveness. In order to deal with this dynamic aspect of a security metric, a general attack model is proposed that enables the effectiveness of various security approaches to be directly compared in the context of an attack. Here, we describe, define and demonstrate that the metrics presented are both meaningful and measurable.
2022-09-20
Emadi, Hamid, Clanin, Joe, Hyder, Burhan, Khanna, Kush, Govindarasu, Manimaran, Bhattacharya, Sourabh.  2021.  An Efficient Computational Strategy for Cyber-Physical Contingency Analysis in Smart Grids. 2021 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM). :1—5.
The increasing penetration of cyber systems into smart grids has resulted in these grids being more vulnerable to cyber physical attacks. The central challenge of higher order cyber-physical contingency analysis is the exponential blow-up of the attack surface due to a large number of attack vectors. This gives rise to computational challenges in devising efficient attack mitigation strategies. However, a system operator can leverage private information about the underlying network to maintain a strategic advantage over an adversary equipped with superior computational capability and situational awareness. In this work, we examine the following scenario: A malicious entity intrudes the cyber-layer of a power network and trips the transmission lines. The objective of the system operator is to deploy security measures in the cyber-layer to minimize the impact of such attacks. Due to budget constraints, the attacker and the system operator have limits on the maximum number of transmission lines they can attack or defend. We model this adversarial interaction as a resource-constrained attacker-defender game. The computational intractability of solving large security games is well known. However, we exploit the approximately modular behaviour of an impact metric known as the disturbance value to arrive at a linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal defense strategy. We validate the efficacy of the proposed strategy against attackers of various capabilities and provide an algorithm for a real-time implementation.
2022-04-01
Lanotte, Ruggero, Merro, Massimo, Munteanu, Andrei, Tini, Simone.  2021.  Formal Impact Metrics for Cyber-physical Attacks. 2021 IEEE 34th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF). :1—16.
Cyber-Physical systems (CPSs) are exposed to cyber- physical attacks, i.e., security breaches in cyberspace that adversely affect the physical processes of the systems.We define two probabilistic metrics to estimate the physical impact of attacks targeting cyber-physical systems formalised in terms of a probabilistic hybrid extension of Hennessy and Regan's Timed Process Language. Our impact metrics estimate the impact of cyber-physical attacks taking into account: (i) the severity of the inflicted damage in a given amount of time, and (ii) the probability that these attacks are actually accomplished, according to the dynamics of the system under attack. In doing so, we pay special attention to stealthy attacks, i. e., attacks that cannot be detected by intrusion detection systems. As further contribution, we show that, under precise conditions, our metrics allow us to estimate the impact of attacks targeting a complex CPS in a compositional way, i.e., in terms of the impact on its sub-systems.
Setzler, Thomas, Mountrouidou, Xenia.  2021.  IoT Metrics and Automation for Security Evaluation. 2021 IEEE 18th Annual Consumer Communications Networking Conference (CCNC). :1—4.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous, with web cameras, smart refrigerators, and digital assistants appearing in homes, offices, and public spaces. However, these devices are lacking in security measures due to their low time to market and insufficient funding for security research and development. In order to improve the security of IoTs, we have defined novel security metrics based on generic IoT characteristics. Furthermore, we have developed automation for experimentation with IoT devices that results to repeatable and reproducible calculations of security metrics within a realistic IoT testbed. Our results demonstrate that repeatable IoT security measurements are feasible with automation. They prove quantitatively intuitive hypotheses. For example, an large number of inbound / outbound network connections contributes to higher probability of compromise or measuring password strength leads to a robust estimation of IoT security.
2022-09-20
Singh, Jagdeep, Behal, Sunny.  2021.  A Novel Approach for the Detection of DDoS Attacks in SDN using Information Theory Metric. 2021 8th International Conference on Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom). :512—516.
Internet always remains the target for the cyberattacks, and attackers are getting equipped with more potent tools due to the advancement of technology to preach the security of the Internet. Industries and organizations are sponsoring many projects to avoid these kinds of problems. As a result, SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture is becoming an acceptable alternative for the traditional IP based networks which seems a better approach to defend the Internet. However, SDN is also vulnerable to many new threats because of its architectural concept. SDN might be a primary target for DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks due to centralized control and linking of data plane and control plane. In this paper, the we propose a novel technique for detection of DDoS attacks using information theory metric. We compared our approach with widely used Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) based on Shannon entropy and Renyi entropy, and proved that our proposed methodology has more power to detect malicious flows in SDN based networks. We have used precision, detection rate and FPR (False Positive Rate) as performance parameters for comparison, and validated the methodology using a topology implemented in Mininet network emulator.
Boutaib, Sofien, Elarbi, Maha, Bechikh, Slim, Palomba, Fabio, Said, Lamjed Ben.  2021.  A Possibilistic Evolutionary Approach to Handle the Uncertainty of Software Metrics Thresholds in Code Smells Detection. 2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). :574—585.
A code smells detection rule is a combination of metrics with their corresponding crisp thresholds and labels. The goal of this paper is to deal with metrics' thresholds uncertainty; as usually such thresholds could not be exactly determined to judge the smelliness of a particular software class. To deal with this issue, we first propose to encode each metric value into a binary possibility distribution with respect to a threshold computed from a discretization technique; using the Possibilistic C-means classifier. Then, we propose ADIPOK-UMT as an evolutionary algorithm that evolves a population of PK-NN classifiers for the detection of smells under thresholds' uncertainty. The experimental results reveal that the possibility distribution-based encoding allows the implicit weighting of software metrics (features) with respect to their computed discretization thresholds. Moreover, ADIPOK-UMT is shown to outperform four relevant state-of-art approaches on a set of commonly adopted benchmark software systems.
2022-04-20
Barbeau, Michel, Cuppens, Frédéric, Cuppens, Nora, Dagnas, Romain, Garcia-Alfaro, Joaquin.  2021.  Resilience Estimation of Cyber-Physical Systems via Quantitative Metrics. IEEE Access. 9:46462–46475.
This paper is about the estimation of the cyber-resilience of CPS. We define two new resilience estimation metrics: k-steerability and l-monitorability. They aim at assisting designers to evaluate and increase the cyber-resilience of CPS when facing stealthy attacks. The k-steerability metric reflects the ability of a controller to act on individual plant state variables when, at least, k different groups of functionally diverse input signals may be processed. The l-monitorability metric indicates the ability of a controller to monitor individual plant state variables with l different groups of functionally diverse outputs. Paired together, the metrics lead to CPS reaching (k,l)-resilience. When k and l are both greater than one, a CPS can absorb and adapt to control-theoretic attacks manipulating input and output signals. We also relate the parameters k and l to the recoverability of a system. We define recoverability strategies to mitigate the impact of perpetrated attacks. We show that the values of k and l can be augmented by combining redundancy and diversity in hardware and software, in order to apply the moving target paradigm. We validate the approach via simulation and numeric results.
Conference Name: IEEE Access
2022-04-01
Williams, Adam D., Adams, Thomas, Wingo, Jamie, Birch, Gabriel C., Caskey, Susan A., Fleming, Elizabeth S., Gunda, Thushara.  2021.  Resilience-Based Performance Measures for Next-Generation Systems Security Engineering. 2021 International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology (ICCST). :1—5.
Performance measures commonly used in systems security engineering tend to be static, linear, and have limited utility in addressing challenges to security performance from increasingly complex risk environments, adversary innovation, and disruptive technologies. Leveraging key concepts from resilience science offers an opportunity to advance next-generation systems security engineering to better describe the complexities, dynamism, and nonlinearity observed in security performance—particularly in response to these challenges. This article introduces a multilayer network model and modified Continuous Time Markov Chain model that explicitly captures interdependencies in systems security engineering. The results and insights from a multilayer network model of security for a hypothetical nuclear power plant introduce how network-based metrics can incorporate resilience concepts into performance metrics for next generation systems security engineering.
2022-09-20
Zhao, Lianying, Oshman, Muhammad Shafayat, Zhang, Mengyuan, Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi, Chander, Shubham, Pourzandi, Makan.  2021.  Towards 5G-ready Security Metrics. ICC 2021 - IEEE International Conference on Communications. :1—6.
The fifth-generation (5G) mobile telecom network has been garnering interest in both academia and industry, with better flexibility and higher performance compared to previous generations. Along with functionality improvements, new attack vectors also made way. Network operators and regulatory organizations wish to have a more precise idea about the security posture of 5G environments. Meanwhile, various security metrics for IT environments have been around and attracted the community’s attention. However, 5G-specific factors are less taken into consideration.This paper considers such 5G-specific factors to identify potential gaps if existing security metrics are to be applied to the 5G environments. In light of the layered nature and multi-ownership, the paper proposes a new approach to the modular computation of security metrics based on cross-layer projection as a means of information sharing between layers. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation.
Yao, Pengchao, Hao, Weijie, Yan, Bingjing, Yang, Tao, Wang, Jinming, Yang, Qiang.  2021.  Game-Theoretic Model for Optimal Cyber-Attack Defensive Decision-Making in Cyber-Physical Power Systems. 2021 IEEE 5th Conference on Energy Internet and Energy System Integration (EI2). :2359—2364.

Cyber-Physical Power Systems (CPPSs) currently face an increasing number of security attacks and lack methods for optimal proactive security decisions to defend the attacks. This paper proposed an optimal defensive method based on game theory to minimize the system performance deterioration of CPPSs under cyberspace attacks. The reinforcement learning algorithmic solution is used to obtain the Nash equilibrium and a set of metrics of system vulnerabilities are adopted to quantify the cost of defense against cyber-attacks. The minimax-Q algorithm is utilized to obtain the optimal defense strategy without the availability of the attacker's information. The proposed solution is assessed through experiments based on a realistic power generation microsystem testbed and the numerical results confirmed its effectiveness.

2022-04-01
Muzammal, Syeda Mariam, Murugesan, Raja Kumar, Jhanjhi, NZ.  2021.  Introducing Mobility Metrics in Trust-based Security of Routing Protocol for Internet of Things. 2021 National Computing Colleges Conference (NCCC). :1—5.

Internet of Things (IoT) is flourishing in several application areas, such as smart cities, smart factories, smart homes, smart healthcare, etc. With the adoption of IoT in critical scenarios, it is crucial to investigate its security aspects. All the layers of IoT are vulnerable to severely disruptive attacks. However, the attacks in IoT Network layer have a high impact on communication between the connected objects. Routing in most of the IoT networks is carried out by IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). RPL-based IoT offers limited protection against routing attacks. A trust-based approach for routing security is suitable to be integrated with IoT systems due to the resource-constrained nature of devices. This research proposes a trust-based secure routing protocol to provide security against packet dropping attacks in RPL-based IoT networks. IoT networks are dynamic and consist of both static and mobile nodes. Hence the chosen trust metrics in the proposed method also include the mobility-based metrics for trust evaluation. The proposed solution is integrated into RPL as a modified objective function, and the results are compared with the default RPL objective function, MRHOF. The analysis and evaluation of the proposed protocol indicate its efficacy and adaptability in a mobile IoT environment.

2022-02-24
Zhou, Andy, Sultana, Kazi Zakia, Samanthula, Bharath K..  2021.  Investigating the Changes in Software Metrics after Vulnerability Is Fixed. 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). :5658–5663.
Preventing software vulnerabilities while writing code is one of the most effective ways for avoiding cyber attacks on any developed system. Although developers follow some standard guiding principles for ensuring secure code, the code can still have security bottlenecks and be compromised by an attacker. Therefore, assessing software security while developing code can help developers in writing vulnerability free code. Researchers have already focused on metrics-based and text mining based software vulnerability prediction models. The metrics based models showed higher precision in predicting vulnerabilities although the recall rate is low. In addition, current research did not investigate the impact of individual software metric on the occurrences of vulnerabilities. The main objective of this paper is to track the changes in every software metric after the developer fixes a particular vulnerability. The results of our research will potentially motivate further research on building more accurate vulnerability prediction models based on the appropriate software metrics. In particular, we have compared a total of 250 files from Apache Tomcat and Apache CXF. These files were extracted from the Apache database and were chosen because Apache released these files as vulnerable in their publicly available security advisories. Using a static analysis tool, metrics of the targeted vulnerable files and relevant fixed files (files where vulnerable code is removed by the developers) were extracted and compared. We show that eight of the 40 metrics have an average increase of 2% from vulnerable to fixed files. These metrics include CountDeclClass, CountDeclClassMethod, CountDeclClassVariable, CountDeclInstanceVariable, CountDeclMethodDefault, CountLineCode, MaxCyclomaticStrict, MaxNesting. This study will help developers to assess software security through utilizing software metrics in secure coding practices.
2022-04-01
Pereira, José D'Abruzzo, Campos, João R., Vieira, Marco.  2021.  Machine Learning to Combine Static Analysis Alerts with Software Metrics to Detect Security Vulnerabilities: An Empirical Study. 2021 17th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC). :1—8.

Software developers can use diverse techniques and tools to reduce the number of vulnerabilities, but the effectiveness of existing solutions in real projects is questionable. For example, Static Analysis Tools (SATs) report potential vulnerabilities by analyzing code patterns, and Software Metrics (SMs) can be used to predict vulnerabilities based on high-level characteristics of the code. In theory, both approaches can be applied from the early stages of the development process, but it is well known that they fail to detect critical vulnerabilities and raise a large number of false alarms. This paper studies the hypothesis of using Machine Learning (ML) to combine alerts from SATs with SMs to predict vulnerabilities in a large software project (under development for many years). In practice, we use four ML algorithms, alerts from two SATs, and a large number of SMs to predict whether a source code file is vulnerable or not (binary classification) and to predict the vulnerability category (multiclass classification). Results show that one can achieve either high precision or high recall, but not both at the same time. To understand the reason, we analyze and compare snippets of source code, demonstrating that vulnerable and non-vulnerable files share similar characteristics, making it hard to distinguish vulnerable from non-vulnerable code based on SAT alerts and SMs.

Aigner, Andreas, Khelil, Abdelmajid.  2021.  A Security Scoring Framework to Quantify Security in Cyber-Physical Systems. 2021 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). :199—206.
The need to achieve a suitable level of security in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) presents a major challenge for engineers. The unpredictable communication of highly constrained, but safety-relevant systems in a heterogeneous environment, significantly impacts the number and severity of vulnerabilities. Consequently, if security-related weaknesses can successfully be exploited by attackers, the functionality of critical infrastructure could be denied or malfunction. This might consequently threaten life or leak sensitive information. A toolkit to quantitatively express security is essential for security engineers in order to define security-enhancing measurements. For this purpose, security scoring frameworks, like the established Common Vulnerability Scoring System can be used. However, existing security scoring frameworks may not be able to handle the proposed challenges and characteristics of CPS. Therefore, in this work, we aim to elaborate a security scoring system that is tailored to the needs of CPS. In detail, we analyze security on a System-of-Systems level, while considering multiple attacks, as well as potential side effects to other security-related objects. The positive effects of integrated mitigation concepts should also be abbreviated by our proposed security score. Additionally, we generate the security score for interacting AUTOSAR platforms in a highly-connected Vehicle-to-everything (V2x) environment. We refer to this highly relevant use case scenario to underline the benefits of our proposed scoring framework and to prove its effectiveness in CPS.
2022-02-22
Farzana, Nusrat, Ayalasomayajula, Avinash, Rahman, Fahim, Farahmandi, Farimah, Tehranipoor, Mark.  2021.  SAIF: Automated Asset Identification for Security Verification at the Register Transfer Level. 2021 IEEE 39th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS). :1–7.
With the increasing complexity, modern system-onchip (SoC) designs are becoming more susceptible to security attacks and require comprehensive security assurance. However, establishing a comprehensive assurance for security often involves knowledge of relevant security assets. Since modern SoCs contain myriad confidential assets, the identification of security assets is not straightforward. The number and types of assets change due to numerous embedded hardware blocks within the SoC and their complex interactions. Some security assets are easily identifiable because of their distinct characteristics and unique definitions, while others remain in the blind-spot during design and verification and can be utilized as potential attack surfaces to violate confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the SoC. Therefore, it is essential to automatically identify security assets in an SoC at pre-silicon design stages to protect them and prevent potential attacks. In this paper, we propose an automated CAD framework called SAF to identify an SoC's security assets at the register transfer level (RTL) through comprehensive vulnerability analysis under different threat models. Moreover, we develop and incorporate metrics with SAF to quantitatively assess multiple vulnerabilities for the identified security assets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SAF on MSP430 micro-controller and CEP SoC benchmarks. Our experimental results show that SAF can successfully and automatically identify an SoC's most vulnerable underlying security assets for protection.
2022-09-20
Chandramouli, Athreya, Jana, Sayantan, Kothapalli, Kishore.  2021.  Efficient Parallel Algorithms for Computing Percolation Centrality. 2021 IEEE 28th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC). :111—120.
Centrality measures on graphs have found applications in a large number of domains including modeling the spread of an infection/disease, social network analysis, and transportation networks. As a result, parallel algorithms for computing various centrality metrics on graphs are gaining significant research attention in recent years. In this paper, we study parallel algorithms for the percolation centrality measure which extends the betweenness-centrality measure by incorporating a time dependent state variable with every node. We present parallel algorithms that compute the source-based and source-destination variants of the percolation centrality values of nodes in a network. Our algorithms extend the algorithm of Brandes, introduce optimizations aimed at exploiting the structural properties of graphs, and extend the algorithmic techniques introduced by Sariyuce et al. [26] in the context of centrality computation. Experimental studies of our algorithms on an Intel Xeon(R) Silver 4116 CPU and an Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU on a collection of 12 real-world graphs indicate that our algorithmic techniques offer a significant speedup.
Pereira, Luiz Manella, Iyengar, S. S., Amini, M. Hadi.  2021.  On the Impact of the Embedding Process on Network Resilience Quantification. 2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI). :836—839.
Network resilience is crucial to ensure reliable and secure operation of critical infrastructures. Although graph theoretic methods have been developed to quantify the topological resilience of networks, i.e., measuring resilience with respect to connectivity, in this study we propose to use the tools from Topological Data Analysis (TDA), Algebraic Topology, and Optimal Transport (OT). In our prior work, we used these tools to create a resilience metric that bypassed the need to embed a network onto a space. We also hypothesized that embeddings could encode different information about a network and that different embeddings could result in different outcomes when computing resilience. In this paper we attempt to test this hypothesis. We will utilize the WEGL framework to compute the embedding for the considered network and compare the results against our prior work, which did not use an embedding process. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the ramifications of choosing an embedding, thus providing a novel understanding into how to choose an embedding and whether such a choice matters when quantifying resilience.