Biblio

Software applications continue to challenge user privacy when users interact with them. Privacy practices (e.g. Data Minimisation (DM), Privacy by Design (PbD) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) and related “privacy engineering” methodologies exist and provide clear instructions for developers to implement privacy into software systems they develop that preserve user privacy. However, those practices and methodologies are not yet a common practice in the software development community. There has been no previous research focused on developing “educational” interventions such as serious games to enhance software developers' coding behaviour. Therefore, this research proposes a game design framework as an educational tool for software developers to improve (secure) coding behaviour, so they can develop privacy-preserving software applications that people can use. The elements of the proposed framework were incorporated into a gaming application scenario that enhances the software developers' coding behaviour through their motivation. The proposed work not only enables the development of privacy-preserving software systems but also helping the software development community to put privacy guidelines and engineering methodologies into practice.

This paper studies the security issue of a gossip-based distributed projected gradient (DPG) algorithm, when it is applied for solving a decentralized multi-agent optimization. It is known that the gossip-based DPG algorithm is vulnerable to insider attacks because each agent locally estimates its (sub)gradient without any supervision. This work leverages the convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform the detection and localization of the insider attackers. Compared to the previous work, CNN can learn appropriate decision functions from the original state information without preprocessing through artificially designed rules, thereby alleviating the dependence on complex pre-designed models. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CNN-based approach can effectively improve the performance of detecting and localizing malicious agents, as compared with the conventional pre-designed score-based model.

In this paper, our aim is to detect illegal spectrum access behaviors. Firstly, we detect whether the channel is busy, and then if it is busy, recognizing whether there are illegal users. To get closer to the actual situation, we consider a more general scenario where multiple users are authorized to work on the same channel under certain interference control strategies, and build it as a ternary hypothesis test model using the generalized multi-hypothesis Neyman-Pearson criterion. Considering the various potential combination of multiple authorized users, the spectrum detection process utilizes a two-step detector. We adopt the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) and the Rao test to detect illegal spectrum access behaviors. What is more, the Wald test is proposed which has a compromise between computational complexity and performance. The relevant formulas of the three detection schemes are derived. Finally, comprehensive and in-depth simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed detection scheme that it has the best detection performance under different authorized sample numbers and different performance constraints. Besides, we illustrate the probability of detection of illegal behaviors under different parameters of illegal behaviors and different sets of AUs' states under the Wald test.

The popularity of cloud storage among data users is due to easy maintenance, and no initial infrastructure setup cost as compared to local storage. However, although the data users outsource their data to cloud storage (a third party) still, they concern about their physical data. To check whether the data stored in the cloud storage has been modified or not, public auditing of the data is required before its utilization. To audit over vast outsourced data, the availability of the auditor is an essential requirement as nowadays, data owners are using mobile devices. But unfortunately, a single auditor leads to a single point of failure and inefficient to preserve the security and correctness of outsourced data. So, we introduce a distributed public auditing scheme which is based on peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. In this work, the auditors are organized using a distributed hash table (DHT) mechanism and audit the outsourced data with the help of a published hashed key of the data. The computation and communication overhead of our proposed scheme is compared with the existing schemes, and it found to be an effective solution for public auditing on outsourced data with no single point of failure.

Many social networks contain sensitive relational information. One approach to protect the sensitive relational information while offering flexibility for social network research and analysis is to release synthetic social networks at a pre-specified privacy risk level, given the original observed network. We propose the DP-ERGM procedure that synthesizes networks that satisfy the differential privacy (DP) via the exponential random graph model (EGRM). We apply DP-ERGM to a college student friendship network and compare its original network information preservation in the generated private networks with two other approaches: differentially private DyadWise Randomized Response (DWRR) and Sanitization of the Conditional probability of Edge given Attribute classes (SCEA). The results suggest that DP-EGRM preserves the original information significantly better than DWRR and SCEA in both network statistics and inferences from ERGMs and latent space models. In addition, DP-ERGM satisfies the node DP, a stronger notion of privacy than the edge DP that DWRR and SCEA satisfy.

The article discusses new models and methods for timely identification and blocking of malicious code of critically important information infrastructure based on static and dynamic analysis of executable program codes. A two-stage method for detecting malicious code in the executable program codes (the so-called "digital bombs") is described. The first step of the method is to build the initial program model in the form of a control graph, the construction is carried out at the stage of static analysis of the program. The article discusses the purpose, features and construction criteria of an ordered control graph. The second step of the method is to embed control points in the program's executable code for organizing control of the possible behavior of the program using a specially designed recognition automaton - an automaton of dynamic control. Structural criteria for the completeness of the functional control of the subprogram are given. The practical implementation of the proposed models and methods was completed and presented in a special instrumental complex IRIDA.

Wearable technology, such as Fitbit devices, log a user's daily activities, heart rate, calories burned, step count, and sleep activity. This information is valuable to digital forensic investigators as it may serve as evidence to a crime, to either support a suspect's innocence or guilt. It is important for an investigator to find and analyze every piece of data for accuracy and integrity; however, there is no standard for conducting a forensic investigation for wearable technology. In this paper, we conduct a forensic analysis of two different Fitbit devices using open-source tools. It is the responsibility of the investigator to show how the data was obtained and to ensure that the data was not modified during the analysis. This paper will guide investigators in understanding what data is collected by a Fitbit device (specifically the Ionic smartwatch and Alta tracker), how to handle Fitbit devices, and how to extract and forensically analyze said devices using open-source tools, Autopsy Sleuth Kit and Bulk Extractor Viewer.

In this century, the demand for energy is increasing daily, and the need for energy resources has become urgent and inevitable. New ways of generating energy, such as renewable resources that depend on many sources, including the sun and wind energy will contribute to the future of humankind largely and effectively. These renewable sources are facing major challenges that cannot be ignored which also require more researches on appropriate solutions . This has led to the emergence of a new type of network user called prosumer, which causes new challenges such as the intermittent nature of renewable. Smart grids have emerged as a solution to integrate these distributed energy sources. It also provides a mechanism to maintain safety and security for power supply networks. The main idea of smart grids is to facilitate local production and consumption By customers and consumers.Distributed ledger technology (DLT) or Block-chain technology has evolved dramatically since 2008 that coincided with the birth of its first application Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency. This innovation led to sparked in the digital revolution, which provides decentralization, security, and democratization of information storage and transfer systems across numerous sectors/industries. Block-chain can be applied for the sake of the durability and safety of energy systems. In this paper, we will propose a new distributed framework that provides protection based on block-chain technology for energy systems to enhance self-defense capability against those cyber-attacks.

This paper analyzes the vulnerability in the process of key negotiation between the main mode and aggressive mode of IKEv1 protocol in IPSec VPN, and proposes a DOS attack method based on OSPF protocol adjacent route spoofing. The experiment verifies the insecurity of IPSec VPN using IKEv1 protocol. This attack method has the advantages of lower cost and easier operation compared with using botnet.

We present a fast dynamic graph data structure for the GPU. Our dynamic graph structure uses one hash table per vertex to store adjacency lists and achieves 3.4-14.8x faster insertion rates over the state of the art across a diverse set of large datasets, as well as deletion speedups up to 7.8x. The data structure supports queries and dynamic updates through both edge and vertex insertion and deletion. In addition, we define a comprehensive evaluation strategy based on operations, workloads, and applications that we believe better characterize and evaluate dynamic graph data structures.

With the proliferation of cloud services, cloud-based image retrieval services enable large-scale image outsourcing and ubiquitous image searching. While enjoying the benefits of the cloud-based image retrieval services, critical privacy concerns may arise in such services since they may contain sensitive personal information. In this paper, we propose an efficient and Privacy-Preserving Image Retrieval scheme with Key Switching Technique (PPIRS). PPIRS utilizes the inner product encryption for measuring Euclidean distances between image feature vectors and query vectors in a privacy-preserving manner. Due to the high dimension of the image feature vectors and the large scale of the image databases, traditional secure Euclidean distance comparison methods provide insufficient search efficiency. To prune the search space of image retrieval, PPIRS tailors key switching technique (KST) for reducing the dimension of the encrypted image feature vectors and further achieves low communication overhead. Meanwhile, by introducing locality sensitive hashing (LSH), PPIRS builds efficient searchable indexes for image retrieval by organizing similar images into a bucket. Security analysis shows that the privacy of both outsourced images and queries are guaranteed. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that PPIRS achieves efficient image retrieval in terms of computational cost.

System security is becoming an indispensable part of our daily life due to the rapid proliferation of unknown malware attacks. Recent malware found to have a very complicated structure that is hard to detect by the traditional malware detection techniques such as antivirus, intrusion detection systems, and network scanners. In this paper, we propose a complex network-based malware detection technique, Malware Detection using Complex Network (MDCN), that considers Application Program Interface Call Transition Matrix (API-CTM) to generate complex network topology and then extracts various feature set by analyzing different metrics of the complex network to distinguish malware and benign applications. The generated feature set is then sent to several machine learning classifiers, which include naive-Bayes, support vector machine, random forest, and multilayer perceptron, to comparatively analyze the performance of MDCN-based technique. The analysis reveals that MDCN shows higher accuracy, with lower false-positive cases, when the multilayer perceptron-based classifier is used for the detection of malware. MDCN technique can efficiently be deployed in the design of an integrated enterprise network security system.

Here, we propose a simple design approach based on metal-masked titanium dioxide nanopillars, which can realize strong Mie resonance in metasurfaces and enables light confinement within itself over the range of visible wavelengths. By selecting the appropriate period and diameter of individual titanium dioxide nanopillars, the coincidence of resonance peak positions derived from excited electric and magnetic dipoles can be achived. And the optical properties in this design have been investigated with the Finite-Difference Time-Domain(FDTD) solutions.

Malicious software (malware) is designed to cause unwanted or destructive effects on computers. Since modern society is dependent on computers to function, malware has the potential to do untold damage. Therefore, developing techniques to effectively combat malware is critical. With the rise in popularity of polymorphic malware, conventional anti-malware techniques fail to keep up with the rate of emergence of new malware. This poses a major challenge towards developing an efficient and robust malware detection technique. One approach to overcoming this challenge is to classify new malware among families of known malware. Several machine learning methods have been proposed for solving the malware classification problem. However, these techniques rely on hand-engineered features extracted from malware data which may not be effective for classifying new malware. Deep learning models have shown paramount success for solving various classification tasks such as image and text classification. Recent deep learning techniques are capable of extracting features directly from the input data. Consequently, this paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning framework for multimodels (henceforth, multimodel learning) to solve the challenging malware classification problem. The proposed model utilizes three different deep neural network architectures to jointly learn meaningful features from different attributes of the malware data. End-to-end learning optimizes all processing steps simultaneously, which improves model accuracy and generalizability. The performance of the model is tested with the widely used and publicly available Microsoft Malware Challenge Dataset and is compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning-based malware classification pipeline. Our results suggest that the proposed model achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods while offering faster training using end-to-end multimodel learning.

Child security in the school campus is most important in building a good society. In and around the world the children are abused and killed also in sometimes by the people those who are not in good attitude in the school campus. To track and resolve such issues an enhanced security feature system is required. Hence in this paper an enhanced version of security system for children is proposed by using `Wearable Sensors'. In this proposed method two wearable sensors nodes such as `Staff Node' and `Student Node' are paired by using `Bluetooth' communication technology and Smart Watch technology is also used to communicate the Security Center or Processing Node for tracking them about their location and whether the two nodes are moved away from the classroom. If the child node is not moving for a long period then it may be notified by the center and they will inform the security officers near to the place. This proposed method may satisfy the need of school management about the staff movements with students and the behavior of students to avoid unexpected issues.

Steganography is the concept to conceal information and the data by embedding it as secret data into various digital medium in order to achieve higher security. To achieve this, many steganographic algorithms are already proposed. The ability of human eyes as well as invisibility remain the most important and prominent factor for the security and protection. The most commonly used security measure of data hiding within imagesYet it is ineffective against Steganalysis and lacks proper verifications. Thus the proposed system of Image Steganography using PVD (Pixel Value Differentiating) proves to be a better choice. It compresses and embeds data in images at the pixel value difference calculated between two consecutive pixels. To increase the security, another technique called Edge Detection is used along with PVD to embed data at the edges. Edge Detection techniques like Canny algorithm are used to find the edges in an image horizontally as well as vertically. The edge pixels in an image can be used to handle more bits of messages, because more pixel value shifts can be handled by the image edge area.

Owing to the advancements in communication media and devices all over the globe, there has arisen a dire need for to limit the alarming number of attacks targeting these and to enhance their security. Multiple techniques have been incorporated in different researches and various protocols and schemes have been put forward to cater security issues of session initiation protocol (SIP). In 2008, Qiu et al. presented a proposal for SIP authentication which while effective than many existing schemes, was still found vulnerable to many security attacks. To overcome those issues, Zhang et al. proposed an authentication protocol. This paper presents the analysis of Zhang et al. authentication scheme and concludes that their proposed scheme is susceptible to user traceablity. It also presents an improved SIP authentication scheme that eliminates the possibility of traceability of user's activities. The proposed scheme is also verified by contemporary verification tool, ProVerif and it is found to be more secure, efficient and practical than many similar SIP authetication scheme.

Privacy preservation is one of the greatest concerns when data is shared between different organizations. On the one hand, releasing data for research purposes is inevitable. On the other hand, sharing this data can jeopardize users' privacy. An effective solution, for the sharing organizations, is to use anonymization techniques to hide the users' sensitive information. One of the most popular anonymization techniques is k-Anonymization in which any data record is indistinguishable from at least k-1 other records. However, one of the fundamental challenges in choosing the value of k is the trade-off between achieving a higher privacy and the information loss associated with the anonymization. In this paper, the problem of choosing the optimal anonymization level for k-anonymization, under possible attacks, is studied when multiple organizations share their data to a common platform. In particular, two common types of attacks are considered that can target the k-anonymization technique. To this end, a novel game-theoretic framework is proposed to model the interactions between the sharing organizations and the attacker. The problem is formulated as a static game and its different Nash equilibria solutions are analytically derived. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can significantly improve the utility of the sharing organizations through optimizing the choice of k value.

OLAP is an authoritative analytical tool in the emerging big data analytics context, with particular regards to the target distributed environments (e.g., Clouds). Here, privacy-preserving OLAP-based big data analytics is a critical topic, with several amenities in the context of innovative big data application scenarios like smart cities, social networks, bio-informatics, and so forth. The goal is that of providing privacy preservation during OLAP analysis tasks, with particular emphasis on the privacy of OLAP aggregates. Following this line of research, in this paper we provide a deep contribution on experimenting and assessing a state-of-the-art distributed privacy-preserving OLAP framework, named as SPPOLAP, whose main benefit is that of introducing a completely-novel privacy notion for OLAP data cubes.

Cryptography is the method of transforming the original texted message into an unknown form and in reverse also. It is the process of hiding and forwarding the data in an appropriate form so that only authorized persons can know and can process it. Cryptographic process secures the data from hijacking or transmutation, it is mainly used for users data security. This paper justifies the encryption and decryption using DNA(Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid) sequence. This process includes several intermediate steps, the perception of binary-coded form and generating of arbitrary keys is used to encrypt the message. A common key should be established between the sender and receiver for encryption and decryption process. The common key provides more security to the sequence. In this paper, both the process of binary-coded form and generating of arbitrary keys are used to encrypt the message. It is widely used in an institution and by every individual to hide their data from the muggers and hijackers and provides the data securely, and confidentially over the transmission of information.

Smart cities and societies are driving unprecedented technological and socioeconomic growth in everyday life albeit making us increasingly vulnerable to infinitely and incomprehensibly diverse threats. Short Message Service (SMS) spam is one such threat that can affect mobile security by propagating malware on mobile devices. A security breach could also cause a mobile device to send spam messages. Many works have focused on classifying incoming SMS messages. This paper proposes a tool to detect spam from outgoing SMS messages, although the work can be applied to both incoming and outgoing SMS messages. Specifically, we develop a system that comprises multiple machine learning (ML) based classifiers built by us using three classification methods – Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naïve Bayes Multinomial (NBM)- and five preprocessing and feature extraction methods. The system is built to allow its execution in cloud, fog or edge layers, and is evaluated using 15 datasets built by 4 widely-used public SMS datasets. The system detects spam SMSs and gives recommendations on the spam filters and classifiers to be used based on user preferences including classification accuracy, True Negatives (TN), and computational resource requirements.

Recently, several practical attacks raised serious concerns over the security of searchable encryption. The attacks have brought emphasis on forward privacy, which is the key concept behind solutions to the adaptive leakage-exploiting attacks, and will very likely to become a must-have property of all new searchable encryption schemes. For a long time, forward privacy implies inefficiency and thus most existing searchable encryption schemes do not support it. Very recently, Bost (CCS 2016) showed that forward privacy can be obtained without inducing a large communication overhead. However, Bost's scheme is constructed with a relatively inefficient public key cryptographic primitive, and has poor I/O performance. Both of the deficiencies significantly hinder the practical efficiency of the scheme, and prevent it from scaling to large data settings. To address the problems, we first present FAST, which achieves forward privacy and the same communication efficiency as Bost's scheme, but uses only symmetric cryptographic primitives. We then present FASTIO, which retains all good properties of FAST, and further improves I/O efficiency. We implemented the two schemes and compared their performance with Bost's scheme. The experiment results show that both our schemes are highly efficient.

In this work, we propose a new concept of multiple support thresholds to sanitize the database for specific sensitive itemsets. The proposed method assigns a stricter threshold to the sensitive itemset for data sanitization. Furthermore, a genetic-algorithm (GA)-based model is involved in the designed algorithm to minimize side effects. In our experimental results, the GA-based PPDM approach is compared with traditional compact GA-based model and results clearly showed that our proposed method can obtain better performance with less computational cost.

Current Internet Protocol routing provides minimal privacy, which enables multiple exploits. The main issue is that the source and destination addresses of all packets appear in plain text. This enables numerous attacks, including surveillance, man-in-the-middle (MITM), and denial of service (DoS). The talk explains how these attacks work in the current network. Endpoints often believe that use of Network Address Translation (NAT), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) can minimize the loss of privacy.We will explain how the regularity of human behavior can be used to overcome these countermeasures. Once packets leave the local autonomous system (AS), they are routed through the network by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The talk will discuss the unreliability of BGP and current attacks on the routing protocol. This will include an introduction to BGP injects and the PEERING testbed for BGP experimentation. One experiment we have performed uses statistical methods (CUSUM and F-test) to detect BGP injection events. We describe work we performed that applies BGP injects to Internet Protocol (IP) address randomization to replace fixed IP addresses in headers with randomized addresses. We explain the similarities and differences of this approach with virtual private networks (VPNs). Analysis of this work shows that BGP reliance on autonomous system (AS) numbers removes privacy from the concept, even though it would disable the current generation of MITM and DoS attacks. We end by presenting a compromise approach that creates software-defined data exchanges (SDX), which mix traffic randomization with VPN concepts. We contrast this approach with the Tor overlay network and provide some performance data.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has played an increasingly important role in the next generation network design. However, to make better use of request-response communication mode in the ICN network, revoke user privileges more efficiently and protect user privacy more safely, an effective access control mechanism is needed. In this paper, we propose IBSS (identity-based secret sharing), which achieves efficient content distribution by using improved Shamir's secret sharing method. At the same time, collusion attacks are avoided by associating polynomials' degree with the number of users. When authenticating user identity and transmitting content, IBE and IBS are introduced to achieve more efficient and secure identity encryption. From the experimental results, the scheme only introduces an acceptable delay in file retrieval, and it can request follow-up content very efficiently.