Biblio

The evolving of context-aware applications are becoming more readily available as a major driver of the growth of future connected smart, autonomous environments. However, with the increasing of security risks in critical shared massive data capabilities and the increasing regulation requirements on privacy, there is a significant need for new paradigms to manage security and privacy compliances. These challenges call for context-aware and fine-grained security policies to be enforced in such dynamic environments in order to achieve efficient real-time authorization between applications and connected devices. We propose in this work a novel solution that aims to provide context-aware security model for Android applications. Specifically, our proposition provides automated context-aware access control model and leverages Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) to secure data communications. Thorough experiments have been performed and the evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed solution provides an effective lightweight adaptable context-aware encryption model.

Digital connectivity is fundamental to the health care system to deliver safe and effective care. However, insecure connectivity could be a major threat to patient safety and privacy (e.g., in August 2017, FDA recalled 465,000 pacemakers because of discovering security flaws). Although connecting a patient's pacemaker to the Internet has many advantages for monitoring the patient, this connectivity opens a new door for cyber-attackers to steal the patient data or even control the pacemaker or damage it. Therefore, patients are forced to choose between connectivity and security. This paper presents a framework for secure and private communications between wearable medical devices and patient monitoring systems. The primary objective of this research is twofold, first to identify and analyze the communication vulnerabilities, second, to develop a framework for combating unauthorized access to data through the compromising of computer security. Specifically, hiding targets from cyber-attackers could prevent our system from future cyber-attacks. This is the most effective way to stop cyber-attacks in their first step.

The solution of using existing WiFi devices for measurement and maintenance, and establishing a WiFi fingerprint database for precise localization has become a popular method for indoor localization. The traditional WiFi fingerprint privacy protection scheme increases the calculation amount of the client, but cannot completely protect the security of the client and the fingerprint database. In this paper, we make use of WiFi devices to present a Practical Privacy Protection Scheme In WiFi Fingerprint-based Localization PPWFL. In PPWFL, the localization server establishes a pre-partition in the fingerprint database through the E-M clustering algorithm, we divide the entire fingerprint database into several partitions. The server uses WiFi fingerprint entries with partitions as training data and trains a machine learning model. This model can accurately predict the client's partition based on fingerprint entries. The client uses the trained machine learning model to obtain its partition location accurately, picks up WiFi fingerprint entries in its partition, and calculates its geographic location with the localization server through secure multi-party computing. Compared with the traditional solution, our solution only uses the WiFi fingerprint entries in the client's partition rather than the entire fingerprint database. PPWFL can reduce not only unnecessary calculations but also avoid accidental errors (Unexpected errors in fingerprint similarity between non-adjacent locations due to multipath effects of electromagnetic waves during the propagation of complex indoor environments) in fingerprint distance calculation. In particular, due to the use of Secure Multi-Party Computation, most of the calculations are performed in the local offline phase, the client only exchanges data with the localization server during the distance calculation phase. No additional equipment is needed; our solution uses only existing WiFi devices in the building to achieve fast localization based on privacy protection. We prove that PPWFL is secure under the honest but curious attacker. Experiments show that PPWFL achieves efficiency and accuracy than the traditional WiFi fingerprint localization scheme.

This paper presents a proximity coupled wideband wearable antenna operating between 4.71 GHz and 5.81 GHz with 5.2 GHz as centre frequency for biomedical telemetry applications in ISM band (IEEE 802.11 Standard). Two layers of different flexible substrate materials, ethylene-vinyl acetate and felt make the design mechanically stable. Bandwidth improvement is achieved by introducing two slots on elliptical ground plane. Highest gain of 3.72 dB and front to back ratio (FBR) of 6.55 is obtained in the given frequency band. The dimensions of antenna have been optimized to have desired bandwidth of 1100 MHz (\$\textbackslashtextbackslashsimeq\$21%). The specific absorption rate (SAR) value is 1.12 \$W/Kg\$ for 1 g of human body tissue. Both simulated and measured results are presented for the structure.

Throughout the life cycle of any technical project, the enterprise needs to assess the risks associated with its development, commissioning, operation and decommissioning. This article defines the task of researching risks in relation to the operation of a data storage subsystem in the cloud infrastructure of a geographically distributed company and the tools that are required for this. Analysts point out that, compared to 2018, in 2019 there were 3.5 times more cases of confidential information leaks from storages on unprotected (freely accessible due to incorrect configuration) servers in cloud services. The total number of compromised personal data and payment information records increased 5.4 times compared to 2018 and amounted to more than 8.35 billion records. Moreover, the share of leaks of payment information has decreased, but the percentage of leaks of personal data has grown and accounts for almost 90% of all leaks from cloud storage. On average, each unsecured service identified resulted in 33.7 million personal data records being leaked. Leaks are mainly related to misconfiguration of services and stored resources, as well as human factors. These impacts can be minimized by improving the skills of cloud storage administrators and regularly auditing storage. Despite its seeming insecurity, the cloud is a reliable way of storing data. At the same time, leaks are still occurring. According to Kaspersky Lab, every tenth (11%) data leak from the cloud became possible due to the actions of the provider, while a third of all cyber incidents in the cloud (31% in Russia and 33% in the world) were due to gullibility company employees caught up in social engineering techniques. Minimizing the risks associated with the storage of personal data is one of the main tasks when operating a company's cloud infrastructure.

Blockchain is being pursued by a growing number of people with its characteristics of openness, transparency, and decentralization. At the same time, how to secure privacy protection in such an open and transparent ledger is an urgent issue to be solved for deep study. Therefore, this paper proposes a protocol based on Secure multi-party computation, which can merge and sign different transaction messages under the anonymous condition by using Pedersen commitment and Schnorr Signature. Through the rationality proof and security analysis, this paper demonstrates the private transaction is safe under the semi-honest model. And its computational cost is less than the equivalent multi-signature model. The research has made some innovative contributions to the privacy computing theory.

The massive boom of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the explosion of smart IoT devices and the emergence of various applications such as smart cities, smart grids, smart mining, connected health, and more. While the proliferation of IoT systems promises many benefits for different sectors, it also exposes a large attack surface, raising an imperative need to put security in the first place. It is impractical to heavily rely on manual operations to deal with security of massive IoT devices and applications. Hence, there is a strong need for securing IoT systems with minimum human intervention. In light of this situation, in this paper, we envision security automation and orchestration for IoT systems. After conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and having conversations with industry partners, we envision a framework integrating key elements towards this goal. For each element, we investigate the existing landscapes, discuss the current challenges, and identify future directions. We hope that this paper will bring the attention of the academic and industrial community towards solving challenges related to security automation and orchestration for IoT systems.

Differentially private location trace synthesis (DPLTS) has recently emerged as a solution to protect mobile users' privacy while enabling the analysis and sharing of their location traces. A key challenge in DPLTS is to best preserve the utility in location trace datasets, which is non-trivial considering the high dimensionality, complexity and heterogeneity of datasets, as well as the diverse types and notions of utility. In this paper, we present OptaTrace: a utility-optimized and targeted approach to DPLTS. Given a real trace dataset D, the differential privacy parameter ε controlling the strength of privacy protection, and the utility/error metric Err of interest; OptaTrace uses Bayesian optimization to optimize DPLTS such that the output error (measured in terms of given metric Err) is minimized while ε-differential privacy is satisfied. In addition, OptaTrace introduces a utility module that contains several built-in error metrics for utility benchmarking and for choosing Err, as well as a front-end web interface for accessible and interactive DPLTS service. Experiments show that OptaTrace's optimized output can yield substantial utility improvement and error reduction compared to previous work.

Nowadays, smartphones are everywhere. They play an indispensable role in our lives and makes people convenient to communicate, pay, socialize, etc. However, they also bring a lot of security and privacy risks. Keystroke operations of numeric keypad are often required when users input password to perform mobile payment or input other privacy-sensitive information. Different keystrokes may cause different finger movements that will bring different interference to WiFi signal, which may be reflected by channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose WiPass, a password-keystroke recognition system for numerical keypad input on smartphones, which especially occurs frequently in mobile payment APPs. Based on only a public WiFi hotspot deployed in the victim payment scenario, WiPass would extracts and analyzes the CSI data generated by the password-keystroke operation of the smartphone user, and infers the user's payment password by comparing the CSI waveforms of different keystrokes. We implemented the WiPass system by using COTS WiFi AP devices and smartphones. The average keystroke segmentation accuracy was 80.45%, and the average keystroke recognition accuracy was 74.24%.

The usage of K-anonymity to preserve location privacy for wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring systems, where sensor nodes operate together to notify a server with anonymous shared positions. That k-anonymous position is a coated region with at least k people. However, we identify an attack model to show that overlapping aggregate locations remain privacy-risk because the enemy can infer certain overlapping areas with persons under k who violate the privacy requirement for anonymity. Within this paper we suggest a mutual WSN privacy protocol (REAL). Actual needs sensor nodes to arrange their sensing areas separately into a variety of non-overlapping, extremely precise anonymous aggregate positions. We also developed a state transfer framework, a locking mechanism and a time delay mechanism to address the three main REAL challenges, namely self-organisation, shared assets and high precision. We equate REAL's output with current protocols through virtual experiments. The findings demonstrate that REAL preserves the privacy of sites, offers more precise question answers and decreases connectivity and device expense.

Despite advances regarding autonomous functionality for robots, teleoperation remains a means for performing delicate tasks in safety critical contexts like explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and ambiguous environments. Immersive stereoscopic displays have been proposed and developed in this regard, but bring about their own specific problems, e.g., simulator sickness. This work builds upon standardized test environments to yield reproducible comparisons between different robotic platforms. The focus was placed on testing three optronic systems of differing degrees of immersion: (1) A laptop display showing multiple monoscopic camera views, (2) an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset coupled with a pantilt-based stereoscopic camera, and (3) a so-called Telepresence Unit, providing fast pan, tilt, yaw rotation, stereoscopic view, and spatial audio. Stereoscopic systems yielded significant faster task completion only for the maneuvering task. As expected, they also induced Simulator Sickness among other results. However, the amount of Simulator Sickness varied between both stereoscopic systems. Collected data suggests that a higher degree of immersion combined with careful system design can reduce the to-be-expected increase of Simulator Sickness compared to the monoscopic camera baseline while making the interface subjectively more effective for certain tasks.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often rely on network boundary defence as a primary means of access control; therefore, the compromise of one device threatens the security of all devices within the boundary. Resource and real-time constraints, tight hardware/software coupling, and decades-long service lifetimes complicate efforts for more robust, host-based access control mechanisms. Distributed capability systems provide opportunities for restoring access control to resource-owning devices; however, such a protection model requires a capability-based architecture for CPS devices as well as task compartmentalisation to be effective.This paper demonstrates hardware enforcement of network bearer tokens using an efficient translation between CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) architectural capabilities and Macaroon network tokens. While this method appears to generalise to any network-based access control problem, we specifically consider CPS, as our method is well-suited for controlling resources in the physical domain. We demonstrate the method in a distributed robotics application and in a hierarchical industrial control application, and discuss our plans to evaluate and extend the method.

Differential privacy is fast becoming the gold standard in enabling statistical analysis of data while protecting the privacy of individuals. However, practical use of differential privacy still lags behind research progress because research prototypes cannot satisfy the scalability requirements of production deployments. To address this challenge, we present Chorus, a framework for building scalable differential privacy mechanisms which is based on cooperation between the mechanism itself and a high-performance production database management system (DBMS). We demonstrate the use of Chorus to build the first highly scalable implementations of complex mechanisms like Weighted PINQ, MWEM, and the matrix mechanism. We report on our experience deploying Chorus at Uber, and evaluate its scalability on real-world queries.

The Internet of Things (IoT) as a demanding technology require the best features of information security for effective development of the IoT based smart city and technological activity. There are huge number of recent security threats searching for some loopholes which are ready to exploit any network. Against the back-drop of recent rapidly growing technological advancement of IoT, security-threats have become a critical challenge which demand responsive and continuous action. As privacy and security exhibit an ever-present flourishing issue, so loopholes detection and analysis are indispensable process in the network. This paper presents Block chain based security analysis of data generated from IoT devices to prevent malicious attacks and intrusion in the IoT network.

FinBots are chatbots built on automated decision technology, aimed to facilitate accessible banking and to support customers in making financial decisions. Chatbots are increasing in prevalence, sometimes even equipped to mimic human social rules, expectations and norms, decreasing the necessity for human-to-human interaction. As banks and financial advisory platforms move towards creating bots that enhance the current state of consumer trust and adoption rates, we investigated the effects of chatbot vignettes with and without socio-emotional features on intention to use the chatbot for financial support purposes. We conducted a between-subject online experiment with N = 410 participants. Participants in the control group were provided with a vignette describing a secure and reliable chatbot called XRO23, whereas participants in the experimental group were presented with a vignette describing a secure and reliable chatbot that is more human-like and named Emma. We found that Vignette Emma did not increase participants' trust levels nor lowered their privacy concerns even though it increased perception of social presence. However, we found that intention to use the presented chatbot for financial support was positively influenced by perceived humanness and trust in the bot. Participants were also more willing to share financially-sensitive information such as account number, sort code and payments information to XRO23 compared to Emma - revealing a preference for a technical and mechanical FinBot in information sharing. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the intention to use chatbots with different features as financial technology, in particular that socio-emotional support may not be favoured when designed independently of financial function.

This article describes attacks methods, vectors and technics used by threat actors during pandemic situations in the world. Identifies common targets of threat actors and cyber-attack tactics. The article analyzes cybersecurity challenges and specifies possible solutions and improvements in cybersecurity. Defines cybersecurity controls, which should be taken against analyzed attack vectors.

Human behaviors are often prohibited, or permitted by social norms. Therefore, if autonomous agents interact with humans, they also need to reason about various legal rules, social and ethical social norms, so they would be trusted and accepted by humans. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) can be used for the autonomous agents to learn social norm-compliant behavior via expert demonstrations. However, norms are context-sensitive, i.e. different norms get activated in different contexts. For example, the privacy norm is activated for a domestic robot entering a bathroom where a person may be present, whereas it is not activated for the robot entering the kitchen. Representing various contexts in the state space of the robot, as well as getting expert demonstrations under all possible tasks and contexts is extremely challenging. Inspired by recent work on Modularized Normative MDP (MNMDP) and early work on context-sensitive RL, we propose a new IRL framework, Context-Sensitive Norm IRL (CNIRL). CNIRL treats states and contexts separately, and assumes that the expert determines the priority of every possible norm in the environment, where each norm is associated with a distinct reward function. The agent chooses the action to maximize its cumulative rewards. We present the CNIRL model and show that its computational complexity is scalable in the number of norms. We also show via two experimental scenarios that CNIRL can handle problems with changing context spaces.

"Moving fast, and breaking things", instead of "being safe and secure", is the credo of the IT industry. However, if we look at the wide societal impact of IT security incidents in the past years, it seems like it is no longer sustainable. Just like in the case of Equifax, people simply forget updates, just like in the case of Maersk, companies do not use sufficient network segmentation. Security certification does not seem to help with this issue. After all, Equifax was IS027001 compliant.In this paper, we take a look at how we handle and (do not) learn from security incidents in IT security. We do this by comparing IT security incidents to early and later aviation safety. We find interesting parallels to early aviation safety, and outline the governance levers that could make the world of IT more secure, which were already successful in making flying the most secure way of transportation.

When communication about security to end users is ineffective, people frequently misinterpret the protection offered by a system. The discrepancy between the security users perceive a system to have and the actual system state can lead to potentially risky behaviors. It is thus crucial to understand how security perceptions are shaped by interface elements such as text-based descriptions of encryption. This article addresses the question of how encryption should be described to non-experts in a way that enhances perceived security. We tested the following within-subject variables in an online experiment (N=309): a) how to best word encryption, b) whether encryption should be described with a focus on the process or outcome, or both c) whether the objective of encryption should be mentioned d) when mentioning the objective of encryption, how to best describe it e) whether a hash should be displayed to the user. We also investigated the role of context (between subjects). The verbs "encrypt" and "secure" performed comparatively well at enhancing perceived security. Overall, participants stated that they felt more secure not knowing about the objective of encryption. When it is necessary to state the objective, positive wording of the objective of encryption worked best. We discuss implications and why using these results to design for perceived lack of security might be of interest as well. This leads us to discuss ethical concerns, and we give guidelines for the design of user interfaces where encryption should be communicated to end users.

Payment channel networks have been introduced to mitigate the scalability issues inherent to permissionless decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Launched in 2018, the Lightning Network (LN) has been gaining popularity and consists today of more than 5000 nodes and 35000 payment channels that jointly hold 965 bitcoins (9.2M USD as of June 2020). This adoption has motivated research from both academia and industryPayment channels suffer from security vulnerabilities, such as the wormhole attack [39], anonymity issues [38], and scalability limitations related to the upper bound on the number of concurrent payments per channel [28], which have been pointed out by the scientific community but never quantitatively analyzedIn this work, we first analyze the proneness of the LN to the wormhole attack and attacks against anonymity. We observe that an adversary needs to control only 2% of nodes to learn sensitive payment information (e.g., sender, receiver, and amount) or to carry out the wormhole attack. Second, we study the management of concurrent payments in the LN and quantify its negative effect on scalability. We observe that for micropayments, the forwarding capability of up to 50% of channels is restricted to a value smaller than the channel capacity. This phenomenon hinders scalability and opens the door for denial-of-service attacks: we estimate that a network-wide DoS attack costs within 1.6M USD, while isolating the biggest community costs only 238k USDOur findings should prompt the LN community to consider the issues studied in this work when educating users about path selection algorithms, as well as to adopt multi-hop payment protocols that provide stronger security, privacy and scalability guarantees.

Accessing the secured data through the network is a major task in emerging technology. Data needs to be protected from the network vulnerabilities, malicious users, hackers, sniffers, intruders. The novel framework has been designed to provide high security in data transaction through computer network. The implant of network amalgamation in the recent trends, make the way in security enhancement in an efficient manner through the machine learning algorithm. In this system the usage of the biometric authenticity plays a vital role for unique approach. The novel mathematical approach is used in machine learning algorithms to solve these problems and provide the security enhancement. The result shows that the novel method has consistent improvement in enhancing the security of data transactions in the emerging technologies.

Journalists have long been the targets of both physical and cyber-attacks from well-resourced adversaries. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are arguably a new avenue of threat towards journalists through both targeted and generalised cyber-physical exploitation. This study comprises three parts: First, we interviewed 11 journalists and surveyed 5 further journalists, to determine the extent to which journalists perceive threats through the IoT, particularly via consumer IoT devices. Second, we surveyed 34 cyber security experts to establish if and how lay-people can combat IoT threats. Third, we compared these findings to assess journalists' knowledge of threats, and whether their protective mechanisms would be effective against experts' depictions and predictions of IoT threats. Our results indicate that journalists generally are unaware of IoT-related risks and are not adequately protecting themselves; this considers cases where they possess IoT devices, or where they enter IoT-enabled environments (e.g., at work or home). Expert recommendations spanned both immediate and longterm mitigation methods, including practical actions that are technical and socio-political in nature. However, all proposed individual mitigation methods are likely to be short-term solutions, with 26 of 34 (76.5%) of cyber security experts responding that within the next five years it will not be possible for the public to opt-out of interaction with the IoT.

As modern web browsers gain new and increasingly powerful features the importance of impact assessments of the new functionality becomes crucial. A web privacy impact assessment of a planned web browser feature, the Ambient Light Sensor API, indicated risks arising from the exposure of overly precise information about the lighting conditions in the user environment. The analysis led to the demonstration of direct risks of leaks of user data, such as the list of visited websites or exfiltration of sensitive content across distinct browser contexts. Our work contributed to the creation of web standards leading to decisions by browser vendors (i.e. obsolescence, non-implementation or modification to the operation of browser features). We highlight the need to consider broad risks when making reviews of new features. We offer practically-driven high-level observations lying on the intersection of web security and privacy risk engineering and modeling, and standardization. We structure our work as a case study from activities spanning over three years.

With increasing monitoring and regulation by platforms, communities with criminal interests are moving to the dark web, which hosts content ranging from whistle-blowing and privacy, to drugs, terrorism, and hacking. Using post discussion data from six dark web forums we construct six interaction graphs and use social network analysis tools to study these underground communities. We observe the structure of each network to highlight structural patterns and identify nodes of importance through network centrality analysis. Our findings suggest that in the majority of the forums some members are highly connected and form hubs, while most members have a lower number of connections. When examining the posting activities of central nodes we found that most of the central nodes post in sub-forums with broader topics, such as general discussions and tutorials. These members play different roles in the different forums, and within each forum we identified diverse user profiles.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems are currently being prepared for real-world deployment, but they face strong opposition over privacy concerns. Position beacon messages are the main culprit, being broadcast in cleartext and pseudonymously signed up to 10 times per second. So far, no practical solutions have been proposed to encrypt or anonymously authenticate V2V messages. We propose two cryptographic innovations that enhance the privacy of V2V communication. As a core contribution, we introduce zone-encryption schemes, where vehicles generate and authentically distribute encryption keys associated to static geographic zones close to their location. Zone encryption provides security against eavesdropping, and, combined with a suitable anonymous authentication scheme, ensures that messages can only be sent by genuine vehicles, while adding only 224 Bytes of cryptographic overhead to each message. Our second contribution is an authentication mechanism fine-tuned to the needs of V2V which allows vehicles to authentically distribute keys, and is called dynamic group signatures with attributes. Our instantiation features unlimited locally generated pseudonyms, negligible credential download-and-storage costs, identity recovery by a trusted authority, and compact signatures of 216 Bytes at a 128-bit security level.