Biblio
While the existence of many security elements in software can be measured (e.g., vulnerabilities, security controls, or privacy controls), it is challenging to measure their relative security impact. In the physical world we can often measure the impact of individual elements to a system. However, in cyber security we often lack ground truth (i.e., the ability to directly measure significance). In this work we propose to solve this by leveraging human expert opinion to provide ground truth. Experts are iteratively asked to compare pairs of security elements to determine their relative significance. On the back end our knowledge encoding tool performs a form of binary insertion sort on a set of security elements using each expert as an oracle for the element comparisons. The tool not only sorts the elements (note that equality may be permitted), but it also records the strength or degree of each relationship. The output is a directed acyclic ‘constraint’ graph that provides a total ordering among the sets of equivalent elements. Multiple constraint graphs are then unified together to form a single graph that is used to generate a scoring or prioritization system.For our empirical study, we apply this domain-agnostic measurement approach to generate scoring/prioritization systems in the areas of vulnerability scoring, privacy control prioritization, and cyber security control evaluation.
The concept of a microgrid has emerged as a promising solution for the management of local groups of electricity consumers and producers. The use of end-users' energy usage data can help in increasing efficient operation of a microgrid. However, existing data-aggregation schemes for a microgrid suffer different cyber attacks and do not provide high level of accuracy. This work aims at designing a privacy-preserving data-aggregation scheme for a microgrid of prosumers that achieves high level of accuracy, thereby benefiting to the management and control of a microgrid. First, a novel smart meter readings data protection mechanism is proposed to ensure privacy of prosumers by hiding the real energy usage data from other parties. Secondly, a blockchain-based data-aggregation scheme is proposed to ensure privacy of the end-users, while achieving high level of accuracy in terms of the aggregated data. The proposed data-aggregation scheme is evaluated using real smart meter readings data from 100 prosumers. The results show that the proposed scheme ensures prosumers' privacy and achieves high level of accuracy, while it is secure against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle cyber attacks.
Due to the widespread use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, the need for IoT technologies to handle communications with the rest of the globe has grown dramatically. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a vital role in the operation of the IoT. The creation of Internet of Things operating systems (OS), which can handle the newly constructed IoT hardware, as well as new protocols and procedures for all communication levels, all of which are now in development, will pave the way for the future. When compared to other devices, these gadgets require a comparatively little amount of electricity, memory, and other resources. This has caused the scientific community to become more aware of the relevance of IoT device operating systems as a result of their findings. These devices may be made more versatile and powerful by including an operating system that contains real-time capabilities, kernel, networking, and other features, among other things. IEEE 802.15.4 networks are linked together using IPv6, which has a wide address space and so enables more devices to connect to the internet using the 6LoWPAN protocol. It is necessary to address some privacy and security issues that have arisen as a result of the widespread use of the Internet, notwithstanding the great benefits that have resulted. For the Internet of Things operating systems, this research has provided a network security architecture that ensures secure communication by utilizing the Cooja network simulator in combination with the Contiki operating system and demonstrate and explained how the nodes can protect from the network layer and physical layer attacks. Also, this research has depicted the energy consumption results of each designated node type during the authentication and communication process. Finally, proposed a few further improvements for the architecture which will enhance the network layer protection.