Biblio

Despite the latest initiatives and research efforts to increase user privacy in digital scenarios, identity-related cybercrimes such as identity theft, wrong identity or user transactions surveillance are growing. In particular, blanket surveillance that might be potentially accomplished by Identity Providers (IdPs) contradicts the data minimization principle laid out in GDPR. Hence, user movements across Service Providers (SPs) might be tracked by malicious IdPs that become a central dominant entity, as well as a single point of failure in terms of privacy and security, putting users at risk when compromised. To cope with this issue, the OLYMPUS H2020 EU project is devising a truly privacy-preserving, yet user-friendly, and distributed identity management system that addresses the data minimization challenge in both online and offline scenarios. Thus, OLYMPUS divides the role of the IdP among various authorities by relying on threshold cryptography, thereby preventing user impersonation and surveillance from malicious or nosy IdPs. This paper overviews the OLYMPUS framework, including requirements considered, the proposed architecture, a series of use cases as well as the privacy analysis from the legal point of view.

In this paper, a closely packed Biosensor construction by using a two-dimensional structure is described. This structure uses air-holes slab constructed on silicon material. By removing certain air holes in the slab, waveguides are constructed. By carrying out simulation, it is proved that the harmonic guided wave changes to lengthier wavelengths with reagents, pesticides, proteins & DNA capturing. A Biosensor is constructed with an improved Quality factor & wavelength. This gives high Quality Factor (HQF) resolution Biosensor. The approach used for Simulation purpose is Finite Difference Time Domain(FDTD).

Intelligent environments work collaboratively, bringing more comfort to human beings. The intelligence of these environments comes from technological advances in sensors and communication. IoT is the model developed that allows a wide and intelligent communication between devices. Hardware reduction of IoT devices results in vulnerabilities. Thus, there are numerous concerns regarding the security of user information, since mobile devices are easily trackable over the Internet. Care must be taken regarding the information in user profiles. Mobile devices are protected by a permission-based mechanism, which limits third-party applications from accessing sensitive device resources. In this context, this work aims to present a proposal for materialization of application for the evolution of user profiles in intelligent environments. Having as parameters the parameters presented in the proposed taxonomy. The proposed solution is the development of two applications, one for Android devices, responsible for allowing or blocking some features of the device. And another in Cloud, responsible for imposing the parameters and privacy criteria, formalizing the profile control module (PRIPRO - PRIvacy PROfiles).

Cyber physical systems (CPS) is a dominant technology in today's world due to its vast variety of applications. But in recent times, the alarmingly increasing breach of privacy and security in CPS is a matter of grave concern. Security and trust of CPS has become the need of the hour. Hardware Trojans are one such a malicious attack which compromises on the security of the CPS by changing its functionality or denial of services or leaking important information. This paper proposes the detection of Hardware Trojans at the system level in AES-256 decryption algorithm implemented in Atmel XMega Controller (Target Board) using a combination of side-channel power analysis and machine learning. Power analysis is done with help of ChipWhisperer-Lite board. The power traces of the golden algorithm (Hardware Trojan free) and Hardware Trojan infected algorithms are obtained and used to train the machine learning model using the 80/20 rule. The proposed machine learning model obtained an accuracy of 97%-100% for all the Trojans inserted.

The intensity of DNA figuring will reinforce the current security on frameworks by opening up another probability of a half and half cryptographic framework. Here, we are exhibiting the DNA S-box for actualizing cryptographic algorithm. The DNA based S-Box is designed using vivado software and implemented using Artix-7 device. The main aim is to design the DNA based S-box to increase the security. Also pipelining and parallelism techniques are to be implement in future to increase the speed.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to describe Kerberos authentication with multi factor authentication in context aware systems. Multi factor authentication will make the framework increasingly secure and dependable. The Kerberos convention is one of the most generally utilized security conventions on the planet. The security conventions of Kerberos have been around for a considerable length of time for programmers and other malware to Figure out how to sidestep it. This has required a quick support of the Kerberos convention to make it progressively dependable and productive. Right now, endeavor to help explain this by strengthening Kerberos with the assistance of multifaceted verification.

In order to improve the concealment of image steganography, a new method is proposed. The algorithm firstly adopted GM (1, 1) model to detect texture and edge points of carrier image, then embedded secret information in them. GM (1, 1) model of optimized parameters can make full use of pixels information. These pixels are the nearest to the detected point, so it improves the detection accuracy. The method is a kind of steganography based on human visual system. By testing the stegano images with different embedding capacities, the result indicates concealment and image quality of the proposed algorithm are better than BPCS (Bit-plane Complexity Segmentation) and PVD (Pixel-value Differencing), which are also based on visual characteristics.

The paper discusses the use of virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality for visual analytics in information security. Paper answers two questions: “In which areas of information security visualization VR/AR can be useful?” and “What is the difference of the VR/AR from similar methods of visualization at the level of perception of information?”. The first answer is based on the investigation of information security areas and visualization models that can be used in VR/AR security visualization. The second answer is based on experiments that evaluate perception of visual components in VR.

The goal of this project is to create a realistic VR experience of solitary confinement and study its impact on users. Although there have been active debates and studies on this subject, very few people have personal experience of solitary confinement. Our first aim is to create such an experience in VR to raise the awareness of solitary confinement. We also want to conduct user studies to compare the VR solitary confinement experience with other types of media experiences, such as films or personal narrations. Finally, we want to study people’s sense of time in such a VR environment.

Military supply chains play a critical role in the acquisition and movement of goods for defence purposes. The disruption of these supply chain processes can have potentially devastating affects to the operational capability of military forces. The introduction and integration of new technologies into defence supply chains can serve to increase their effectiveness. However, the benefits posed by these technologies may be outweighed by significant consequences to the cyber security of the entire defence supply chain. Supply chains are complex Systems of Systems, and the introduction of an insecure technology into such a complex ecosystem may induce cascading system-wide failure, and have catastrophic consequences to military mission assurance. Subsequently, there is a need for an evaluative process to determine the extent to which a new technology will affect the cyber security of military supply chains. This work proposes a new model, the Military Supply Chain Cyber Implications Model (M-SCCIM), that serves to aid military decision makers in understanding the potential cyber security impact of introducing new technologies to supply chains. M-SCCIM is a multiphase model that enables understanding of cyber security and supply chain implications through the lenses of theoretical examinations, pilot applications and system wide implementations.

The following topics are dealt with: diseases; medical signal processing; learning (artificial intelligence); security of data; blood; patient treatment; patient monitoring; bioelectric phenomena; biomedical electrodes; biological tissues.

Formal languages are ubiquitous wherever software systems need to exchange or store data. Unparsing into and parsing from such languages is an error-prone process that has spawned an entire class of security vulnerabilities. There has been ample research into finding vulnerabilities on the parser side, but outside of language specific approaches, few techniques targeting unparser vulnerabilities exist. This work presents a language-agnostic approach for spotting injection vulnerabilities in unparsers. It achieves this by mining unparse trees using dynamic taint analysis to extract language keywords, which are leveraged for guided fuzzing. Vulnerabilities can thus be found without requiring prior knowledge about the formal language, and in fact, the approach is even applicable where no specification thereof exists at all. This empowers security researchers and developers alike to gain deeper understanding of unparser implementations through examination of the unparse trees generated by the approach, as well as enabling them to find new vulnerabilities in poorly-understood software. This work presents a language-agnostic approach for spotting injection vulnerabilities in unparsers. It achieves this by mining unparse trees using dynamic taint analysis to extract language keywords, which are leveraged for guided fuzzing. Vulnerabilities can thus be found without requiring prior knowledge about the formal language, and in fact, the approach is even applicable where no specification thereof exists at all. This empowers security researchers and developers alike to gain deeper understanding of unparser implementations through examination of the unparse trees generated by the approach, as well as enabling them to find new vulnerabilities in poorly-understood software.

This paper considers the problem of the quickest detection of a change in distribution while taking privacy considerations into account. Our goal is to sanitize the signal to satisfy information privacy requirements while being able to detect a change quickly. We formulate the privacy-aware quickest change detection (QCD) problem by including a privacy constraint to Lorden's minimax formulation. We show that the Generalized Likelihood Ratio (GLR) CuSum achieves asymptotic optimality with a properly designed sanitization channel and formulate the design of this sanitization channel as an optimization problem. For computational tractability, a continuous relaxation for the discrete counting constraint is proposed and the augmented Lagrangian method is applied to obtain locally optimal solutions.

Differential privacy offers a formal framework for reasoning about privacy and accuracy of computations on private data. It also offers a rich set of building blocks for constructing private data analyses. When carefully calibrated, these analyses simultaneously guarantee the privacy of the individuals contributing their data, and the accuracy of the data analyses results, inferring useful properties about the population. The compositional nature of differential privacy has motivated the design and implementation of several programming languages aimed at helping a data analyst in programming differentially private analyses. However, most of the programming languages for differential privacy proposed so far provide support for reasoning about privacy but not for reasoning about the accuracy of data analyses. To overcome this limitation, in this work we present DPella, a programming framework providing data analysts with support for reasoning about privacy, accuracy and their trade-offs. The distinguishing feature of DPella is a novel component which statically tracks the accuracy of different data analyses. In order to make tighter accuracy estimations, this component leverages taint analysis for automatically inferring statistical independence of the different noise quantities added for guaranteeing privacy. We evaluate our approach by implementing several classical queries from the literature and showing how data analysts can figure out the best manner to calibrate privacy to meet the accuracy requirements.

Compressive sensing (CS) is regarded as one of the promising solutions for IoT data encryption as it achieves simultaneous sampling, compression, and encryption. Theoretical work in the literature has proved that CS provides computational secrecy. It also provides asymptotic perfect secrecy for Gaussian sensing matrix with constraints on input signal. In this paper, we design an attack decoding algorithm based on block compressed sensing decoding algorithm to perform ciphertext-only attack on real-life time series IoT data. It shows that it is possible to retrieve vital information in the plaintext under some conditions. Furthermore, it is also applied to a State-of-the Art CS-based encryption scheme for smart grid, and the power profile is reconstructed using ciphertext-only attack. Additionally, the statistical analysis of Gaussian and Binomial measurements is conducted to investigate the randomness provided by them.

Vehicular networks are vulnerable to a variety of internal attacks. Misbehavior Detection Systems (MDS) are preferred over the cryptography solutions to detect such attacks. However, the existing misbehavior detection systems are static and do not adapt to the context of vehicles. To this end, we exploit the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to propose a context-aware MDS. Based on the context, our proposed system can tune security parameters to provide accurate detection with low false positives. Our system is Sybil attack-resistant and compliant with vehicular privacy standards. The simulation results show that, under different contexts, our system provides a high detection ratio and low false positives compared to a static MDS.

An adversarial attack is an algorithm that perturbs the input of a machine learning model in an intelligent way in order to change the output of the model. An important property of adversarial attacks is transferability. According to this property, it is possible to generate adversarial perturbations on one model and apply it the input to fool the output of a different model. Our work focuses on studying the transferability of adversarial attacks in sound event classification. We are able to demonstrate differences in transferability properties from those observed in computer vision. We show that dataset normalization techniques such as z-score normalization does not affect the transferability of adversarial attacks and we show that techniques such as knowledge distillation do not increase the transferability of attacks.

This paper proposes a Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) based method for the localization of Radio Frequency (RF) emitters working at different carriers, by using wideband spectrum sensors exploiting compressive sampling. The proposed measurement method is based on four or more RF receivers, with known Cartesian positions, performing non uniform sampling on the received signal. By means of simulations, the method has been compared against a localization method adopting RF receivers performing uniform sampling at Nyquist rate. The obtained preliminary results demonstrate that the method is capable of localizing two RF emitters achieving the same results obtained with uniform sampling, with a compression ratio up to CR = 20.

In this paper, we apply machine learning to distributed private data owned by multiple data owners, entities with access to non-overlapping training datasets. We use noisy, differentially-private gradients to minimize the fitness cost of the machine learning model using stochastic gradient descent. We quantify the quality of the trained model, using the fitness cost, as a function of privacy budget and size of the distributed datasets to capture the trade-off between privacy and utility in machine learning. This way, we can predict the outcome of collaboration among privacy-aware data owners prior to executing potentially computationally-expensive machine learning algorithms. Particularly, we show that the difference between the fitness of the trained machine learning model using differentially-private gradient queries and the fitness of the trained machine model in the absence of any privacy concerns is inversely proportional to the size of the training datasets squared and the privacy budget squared. We successfully validate the performance prediction with the actual performance of the proposed privacy-aware learning algorithms, applied to: financial datasets for determining interest rates of loans using regression; and detecting credit card frauds using support vector machines.

We study the optimal control problem of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) state sequence detection of an adversary using smart meter data. The privacy leakage is measured using the Bayesian risk and the privacy-enhancing control is achieved in real-time using an energy storage system. The control strategy is designed to minimize the expected performance of a non-causal adversary at each time instant. With a discrete-state Markov model, we study two detection problems: when the adversary is unaware or aware of the control. We show that the adversary in the former case can be controlled optimally. In the latter case, where the optimal control problem is shown to be non-convex, we propose an adaptive-grid approximation algorithm to obtain a sub-optimal strategy with reduced complexity. Although this work focuses on privacy in smart meters, it can be generalized to other sensor networks.

The regularity of devastating cyber-attacks has made cybersecurity a grand societal challenge. Many cybersecurity professionals are closely examining the international Dark Web to proactively pinpoint potential cyber threats. Despite its potential, the Dark Web contains hundreds of thousands of non-English posts. While machine translation is the prevailing approach to process non-English text, applying MT on hacker forum text results in mistranslations. In this study, we draw upon Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer (CLKT), and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) principles to design a novel Adversarial CLKT (A-CLKT) approach. A-CLKT operates on untranslated text to retain the original semantics of the language and leverages the collective knowledge about cyber threats across languages to create a language invariant representation without any manual feature engineering or external resources. Three experiments demonstrate how A-CLKT outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning, deep learning, and CLKT algorithms in identifying cyber-threats in French and Russian forums.

The existing anonymized differential privacy model adopts a unified anonymity method, ignoring the difference of personal privacy, which may lead to the problem of excessive or insufficient protection of the original data [1]. Therefore, this paper proposes a personalized k-anonymity model for tuples (PKA) and proposes a differential privacy data publishing algorithm (DPPA) based on personalized anonymity, firstly based on the tuple personality factor set by the user in the original data set. The values are classified and the corresponding privacy protection relevance is calculated. Then according to the tuple personality factor classification value, the data set is clustered by clustering method with different anonymity, and the quasi-identifier attribute of each cluster is aggregated and noise-added to realize anonymized differential privacy; finally merge the subset to get the data set that meets the release requirements. In this paper, the correctness of the algorithm is analyzed theoretically, and the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are verified by comparison with similar algorithms.

Bluetooth Classic (BT) remains the de facto connectivity technology in car stereo systems, wireless headsets, laptops, and a plethora of wearables, especially for applications that require high data rates, such as audio streaming, voice calling, tethering, etc. Unlike in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), where address randomization is a feature available to manufactures, BT addresses are not randomized because they are largely believed to be immune to tracking attacks. We analyze the design of BT and devise a robust de-anonymization technique that hinges on the apparently benign information leaking from frame encoding, to infer a piconet's clock, hopping sequence, and ultimately the Upper Address Part (UAP) of the master device's physical address, which are never exchanged in clear. Used together with the Lower Address Part (LAP), which is present in all frames transmitted, this enables tracking of the piconet master, thereby debunking the privacy guarantees of BT. We validate this attack by developing the first Software-defined Radio (SDR) based sniffer that allows full BT spectrum analysis (79 MHz) and implements the proposed de-anonymization technique. We study the feasibility of privacy attacks with multiple testbeds, considering different numbers of devices, traffic regimes, and communication ranges. We demonstrate that it is possible to track BT devices up to 85 meters from the sniffer, and achieve more than 80% device identification accuracy within less than 1 second of sniffing and 100% detection within less than 4 seconds. Lastly, we study the identified privacy attack in the wild, capturing BT traffic at a road junction over 5 days, demonstrating that our system can re-identify hundreds of users and infer their commuting patterns.

Humans are a key part of software development, including customers, designers, coders, testers and end users. In this keynote talk I explain why incorporating human-centric issues into software engineering for next-generation applications is critical. I use several examples from our recent and current work on handling human-centric issues when engineering various `smart living' cloud- and edge-based software systems. This includes using human-centric, domain-specific visual models for non-technical experts to specify and generate data analysis applications; personality impact on aspects of software activities; incorporating end user emotions into software requirements engineering for smart homes; incorporating human usage patterns into emerging edge computing applications; visualising smart city-related data; reporting diverse software usability defects; and human-centric security and privacy requirements for smart living systems. I assess the usefulness of these approaches, highlight some outstanding research challenges, and briefly discuss our current work on new human-centric approaches to software engineering for smart living applications.

With the rapid technological advancement of the universal internet of vehicles (UIoV), it becomes crucial to ensure safe and secure communication over the network, in an effort to achieve the implementation objective of UIoV effectively. A UIoV is characterized by highly dynamic topology, scalability, and thus vulnerable to various types of security and privacy attacks (i.e., replay attack, impersonation attack, man-in-middle attack, non-repudiation, and modification). Since the components of UIoV are constrained by numerous factors (e.g., low memory devices, low power), which makes UIoV highly susceptible. Therefore, existing schemes to address the privacy and security facets of UIoV exhibit an enormous scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and efficiency. This paper presents a lightweight authentication and batch verification scheme (LABVS) for UIoV using a bilinear map and cryptographic operations (i.e., one-way hash function, concatenation, XOR) to minimize the rate of message loss occurred due to delay in response time as in single message verification scheme. Subsequently, the scheme results in a high level of security and privacy. Moreover, the performance analysis substantiates that LABVS minimizes the computational delay and has better performance in the delay-sensitive network in terms of security and privacy as compared to the existing schemes.