Biblio

Aviation is a highly sophisticated and complex System-of-Systems (SoSs) with equally complex safety oversight. As novel products with autonomous functions and interactions between component systems are adopted, the number of interdependencies within and among the SoS grows. These interactions may not always be obvious. Understanding how proposed products (component systems) fit into the context of a larger SoS is essential to promote the safe use of new as well as conventional technology.UL 4600, is a Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products specifically written for completely autonomous Load vehicles. The goal-based, technology-neutral features of this standard make it adaptable to other industries and applications.This paper, using the philosophy of UL 4600, gives guidance for creating an assurance case for products in an SoS context. An assurance argument is a cogent structured argument concluding that an autonomous aircraft system possesses all applicable through-life performance and safety properties. The assurance case process can be repeated at each level in the SoS: aircraft, aircraft system, unmodified components, and modified components. The original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) develops the assurance case for the whole aircraft envisioned in the type certification process. Assurance cases are continuously validated by collecting and analyzing Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). SPIs provide predictive safety information, thus offering an opportunity to improve safety by preventing incidents and accidents. Continuous validation is essential for risk-based approval of autonomously evolving (dynamic) systems, learning systems, and new technology. System variants, derivatives, and components are captured in a subordinate assurance case by their developer. These variants of the assurance case inherently reflect the evolution of the vehicle-level derivatives and options in the context of their specific target ecosystem. These subordinate assurance cases are nested under the argument put forward by the OEM of components and aircraft, for certification credit.It has become a common practice in aviation to address design hazards through operational mitigations. It is also common for hazards noted in an aircraft component system to be mitigated within another component system. Where a component system depends on risk mitigation in another component of the SoS, organizational responsibilities must be stated explicitly in the assurance case. However, current practices do not formalize accounting for these dependencies by the parties responsible for design; consequently, subsequent modifications are made without the benefit of critical safety-related information from the OEMs. The resulting assurance cases, including 3rd party vehicle modifications, must be scrutinized as part of the holistic validation process.When changes are made to a product represented within the assurance case, their impact must be analyzed and reflected in an updated assurance case. An OEM can facilitate this by integrating affected assurance cases across their customer’s supply chains to ensure their validity. The OEM is expected to exercise the sphere-of-control over their product even if it includes outsourced components. Any organization that modifies a product (with or without assurance argumentation information from other suppliers) is accountable for validating the conditions for any dependent mitigations. For example, the OEM may manage the assurance argumentation by identifying requirements and supporting SPI that must be applied in all component assurance cases. For their part, component assurance cases must accommodate all spheres-of-control that mitigate the risks they present in their respective contexts. The assurance case must express how interdependent mitigations will collectively assure the outcome. These considerations are much more than interface requirements and include explicit hazard mitigation dependencies between SoS components. A properly integrated SoS assurance case reflects a set of interdependent systems that could be independently developed..Even in this extremely interconnected environment, stakeholders must make accommodations for the independent evolution of products in a manner that protects proprietary information, domain knowledge, and safety data. The collective safety outcome for the SoS is based on the interdependence of mitigations by each constituent component and could not be accomplished by any single component. This dependency must be explicit in the assurance case and should include operational mitigations predicated on people and processes.Assurance cases could be used to gain regulatory approval of conventional and new technology. They can also serve to demonstrate consistency with a desired level of safety, especially in SoSs whose existing standards may not be adequate. This paper also provides guidelines for preserving alignment between component assurance cases along a product supply chain, and the respective SoSs that they support. It shows how assurance is a continuous process that spans product evolution through the monitoring of interdependent requirements and SPI. The interdependency necessary for a successful assurance case encourages stakeholders to identify and formally accept critical interconnections between related organizations. The resulting coordination promotes accountability for safety through increased awareness and the cultivation of a positive safety culture.

The present industrial scenario requires frequent transfer of data between remote servers and on premise devices and hence the risk of attacks on these data cannot be overlooked. Such security risk is even aggravated in case of sensitive information being compromised due to inefficient security implementations. Various forms of security implementations are being discussed and experimented for the same. With the introduction of devices with better processing capabilities, Public Key Infrastructure is a very popular technique being widely implemented, wherein symmetric and asymmetric key based encryptions are used inorder to secure the data being transferred and it has proven to be an effective technique. The PKI however suffers certain drawbacks and it is evident from the attacks. A system specifically designed for scenarios such as a factory having a centralised device management system requiring multiple devices to communicate and upload data safely to server is being put forward in this paper.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to control and monitor components within the energy grid, playing a significant role in the stability of the system. As a part of critical infrastructures, components in these systems have to fulfill a variety of different requirements regarding their dependability and must also undergo strict audit procedures in order to comply with all relevant standards. This results in a slow adoption of new functionalities. Due to the emerged threat of cyberattacks against critical infrastructures, extensive security measures are needed within these systems to protect them from adversaries and ensure a stable operation. In this work, a solution is proposed to integrate extensive security measures into current systems. By deploying additional security-gateways into the communication path between two nodes, security features can be integrated transparently for the existing components. The developed security-gateway is compliant to all regulatory requirements and features an internal architecture based on the separation-of-concerns principle to increase its security and longevity. The viability of the proposed solution has been verified in different scenarios, consisting of realistic field tests, security penetration tests and various performance evaluations.

The FAA proposes Safety Continuum that recognizes the public expectation for safety outcomes vary with aviation sectors that have different missions, aircraft, and environments. The purpose is to align the rigor of oversight to the public expectations. An aircraft, its variants or derivatives may be used in operations with different expectations. The differences in mission might bring immutable risks for some applications that reuse or revise the original aircraft type design. The continuum enables a more agile design approval process for innovations in the context of a dynamic ecosystems, addressing the creation of variants for different sectors and needs. Since an aircraft type design can be reused in various operations under part 91 or 135 with different mission risks the assurance case will have many branches reflecting the variants and derivatives.This paper proposes a model for the holistic, performance-based, through-life safety assurance case that focuses applicant and oversight alike on achieving the safety outcomes. This paper describes the application of goal-based, technology-neutral features of performance-based assurance cases extending the philosophy of UL 4600, to the Safety Continuum. This paper specifically addresses component reuse including third-party vehicle modifications and changes to operational concept or eco-system. The performance-based assurance argument offers a way to combine the design approval more seamlessly with the oversight functions by focusing all aspects of the argument and practice together to manage the safety outcomes. The model provides the context to assure mitigated risk are consistent with an operation’s place on the safety continuum, while allowing the applicant to reuse parts of the assurance argument to innovate variants or derivatives. The focus on monitoring performance to constantly verify the safety argument complements compliance checking as a way to assure products are "fit-for-use". The paper explains how continued operational safety becomes a natural part of monitoring the assurance case for growing variety in a product line by accounting for the ecosystem changes. Such a model could be used with the Safety Continuum to promote applicant and operator accountability delivering the expected safety outcomes.

The digitalization of safety-critical railroad infrastructure enables new types of attacks. This increases the need to integrate Information Technology (IT) security measures into railroad systems. For that purpose, we rely on a security architecture for a railway object controller which controls field elements that we developed in previous work. Our architecture enables the integration of security mechanisms into a safety-certified railway system. In this paper, we demonstrate the practical feasibility of our architecture by using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and a Multiple Independent Levels of Safety and Security (MILS) Separation Kernel (SK) for our implementation. Our evaluation includes a test bed and shows how certification and homologation can be achieved.

Content-centric networking is emerging as a credible alternative to host-centric networking, especially in scenarios of large-scale content distribution and where privacy requirements are crucial. Recently, research on content-centric networking has focused on security aspects and proposed solutions aimed to protect the network from attacks targeting the content delivery protocols. Content-centric networks are based on the strong assumption of being able to access genuine content from genuine nodes, which is however unrealistic and could open the door to disruptive attacks. Network node misbehavior, either due to poisoning attacks or malfunctioning, can act as a persistent threat that goes unnoticed and causes dangerous consequences. In this paper, we propose a novel certification methodology for content-centric networks that improves transparency and increases trustworthiness of the network and its nodes. The proposed approach builds on behavioral analysis and implements a continuous certification process that collects evidence from the network nodes and verifies their non-functional properties using a rule-based inference model. Utility, performance, and soundness of our approach have been experimentally evaluated on a simulated Named Data Networking (NDN) network targeting properties availability, integrity, and non-repudiation.

In this extended abstract, we outline an approach for security certification of products or services for modern commercial systems that are characterized by agile development, the integration of development and operations, and high dynamics of system features and structures. The proposed scheme rather evaluates the processes applied in development and operations than investigates into the validity of the product properties itself. We argue that the resulting claims are still suitable to increase the confidence in the security of products and services resulting from such processes.

The Ad-hoc Vehicular networks (VANET) was developed through the implementation of the concepts of ad-hoc mobile networks(MANET), which is swiftly maturing, promising, emerging wireless communication technology nowadays. Vehicular communication enables us to communicate with other vehicles and Roadside Infrastructure Units (RSU) to share information pertaining to the safety system, traffic analysis, Authentication, privacy, etc. As VANETs operate in an open wireless connectivity system, it increases permeable of variant type's security issues. Security concerns, however, which are either generally seen in ad-hoc networks or utterly unique to VANET, present significant challenges. Access Control List (ACL) can be an efficient feature to solve such security issues by permitting statements to access registered specific IP addresses in the network and deny statement unregistered IP addresses in the system. To establish such secured VANETs, the License number of the vehicle will be the Identity Number, which will be assigned via a DNS server by the Traffic Certification Authority (TCA). TCA allows registered vehicles to access the nearest two or more regions. For special vehicles, public access should be restricted by configuring ACL on a specific IP. Smart-card given by TCA can be used to authenticate a subscriber by checking previous records during entry to a new network area. After in-depth analysis of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Packet Loss Ratio (PLR), Average Delay, and Handover Delay, this research offers more secure and reliable communication in VANETs.

The industrial Internet has built a new industrial manufacturing and service system with all elements, all industrial chains and all value chains connected through the interconnection of people, machines and things. It breaks the relatively closed and credible production environment of traditional industry. But at the same time, the full interconnection of cross-device, cross-system, and cross-region in the industrial Internet also brings a certain network trust crisis. The method proposed in this paper breaking the relatively closed manufacturing environment of traditional industries, extends the network connection object from human to machine equipment, industrial products and industrial services. It provides a safe and credible environment for the development of industrial Internet, and a trust guarantee for the across enterprises entities and data sharing.

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems' decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The next generation of dependable embedded systems feature autonomy and higher levels of interconnection. Autonomy is commonly achieved with the support of artificial intelligence algorithms that pose high computing demands on the hardware platform, reaching a high performance scale. This involves a dramatic increase in software and hardware complexity, fact that together with the novelty of the technology, raises serious concerns regarding system dependability. Traditional approaches for certification require to demonstrate that the system will be acceptably safe to operate before it is deployed into service. The nature of autonomous systems, with potentially infinite scenarios, configurations and unanticipated interactions, makes it increasingly difficult to support such claim at design time. In this context, the extended networking technologies can be exploited to collect post-deployment evidence that serve to oversee whether safety assumptions are preserved during operation and to continuously improve the system through regular software updates. These software updates are not only convenient for critical bug fixing but also necessary for keeping the interconnected system resilient against security threats. However, such approach requires a recondition of the traditional certification practices.

Due to high availability and easy accessibility of information, it has become quite difficult to assure security of data. Even though watermarking seems to be an effective solution to protect data, it is still challenging to be used with relational databases. Moreover, inserting a watermark in database may lead to distortion. As a result, the contents of database can no longer remain useful. Our proposed distortion-free watermarking approach ensures that integrity of database can be preserved by generating an image watermark from its contents. This image is registered with Certification Authority (CA) before the database is distributed for use. In case, the owner suspects any kind of tampering in the database, an image watermark is generated and compared with the registered image watermark. If both do not match, it can be concluded that the integrity of database has been compromised. Experiments are conducted on Forest Cover Type data set to localize tampering to the finest granularity. Results show that our approach can detect all types of attack with 100% accuracy.

"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.

The JavaCard multi-application platform is now deployed to over twenty billion smartcards, used in various applications ranging from banking payments and authentication tokens to SIM cards and electronic documents. In most of those use cases, access to various cryptographic primitives is required. The standard JavaCard API provides a basic level of access to such functionality (e.g., RSA encryption) but does not expose low-level cryptographic primitives (e.g., elliptic curve operations) and essential data types (e.g., Integers). Developers can access such features only through proprietary, manufacturer-specific APIs. Unfortunately, such APIs significantly reduce the interoperability and certification transparency of the software produced as they require non-disclosure agreements (NDA) that prohibit public sharing of the applet's source code.We introduce JCMathLib, an open library that provides an intermediate layer realizing essential data types and low-level cryptographic primitives from high-level operations. To achieve this, we introduce a series of optimization techniques for resource-constrained platforms that make optimal use of the underlying hardware, while having a small memory footprint. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first generic library for low-level cryptographic operations in JavaCards that does not rely on a proprietary API.Without any disclosure limitations, JCMathLib has the potential to increase transparency by enabling open code sharing, release of research prototypes, and public code audits. Moreover, JCMathLib can help resolve the conflict between strict open-source licenses such as GPL and proprietary APIs available only under an NDA. This is of particular importance due to the introduction of JavaCard API v3.1, which targets specifically IoT devices, where open-source development might be more common than in the relatively closed world of government-issued electronic documents.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) applications are digital versions of paper-based patient's health information. They are increasingly adopted to improved quality in healthcare, such as convenient access to histories of patient medication and clinic visits, easier follow up of patient treatment plans, and precise medical decision-making process. EHR applications are guided by measures of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Furthermore, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT) certification criteria for usability of EHRs. A compliance checking approach attempts to identify whether or not an adopted EHR application meets the security and privacy criteria. There is no study in the literature to understand whether traditional static code analysis-based vulnerability discovered can assist in compliance checking of regulatory requirements of HIPAA and ONC. This paper attempts to address this issue. We identify security and privacy requirements for HIPAA technical requirements, and identify a subset of ONC criteria related to security and privacy, and then evaluate EHR applications for security vulnerabilities. Finally propose mitigation of security issues towards better compliance and to help practitioners reuse open source tools towards certification compliance.

Decentralized attestation methods for blockchains are currently being discussed and standardized for use cases such as certification, identity and existence proofs. In a blockchain-based attestation, a claim made about the existence of information can be cryptographically verified publicly and transparently. In this paper we explore the attestation of models through globally unique identifiers as a first step towards decentralized applications based on models. As a proof-of-concept we describe a prototypical implementation of a software connector for the ADOxx metamodeling platform. The connector allows for (a.) the creation of claims bound to the identity of an Ethereum account and (b.) their verification on the blockchain by anyone at a later point in time. For evaluating the practical applicability, we demonstrate the application on the Ethereum network and measure and evaluate limiting factors related to transaction cost and confirmation times.

This article describes an approach to identification and certification in decentralized environment. The protocol proposes a way of integration for blockchain technology and web-of-trust concept to create decentralized public key infrastructure with flexible management for user identificators. Besides changing the current public key infrastructure, this system can be used in the Internet of Things (IoT). Each individual IoT sensor must correctly communicate with other components of the system it's in. To provide safe interaction, components should exchange encrypted messages with ability to check their integrity and authenticity, which is presented by this scheme.

With the continuous development of information technology, our country has achieved great progress and development in Electronic Science and technology. Nowadays mobile embedded systems are gradually coming into people's vision. Mobile embedded system is a brand-new computer technology in the current computer technology. Now it has been widely used in enterprises. Mobile embedded system extends its functions mainly by combining the access capability of the Internet. Nowadays, embedded system network is widely welcomed by people. But for the embedded system network, there are also a variety of network attacks. Therefore, in the research process of this paper, we mainly start with the way of embedded network security and network attack, and then carry out the countermeasures to improve the network security of embedded system, which is to provide a good reference for improving the security and stability of embedded system.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm which provides the flexibility of programming the network interface as per the need and demand of the user. Software Defined Network (SDN) is independent of vendor specific hardware or protocols and offers the easy extensions in the networking. A customized network as per on user demand facilitates communication control via a single entity i.e. SDN controller. Due to this SDN Controller has become more vulnerable to SDN security attacks and more specifically a single point of failure. It is worth noticing that vulnerabilities were identified because of customized applications which are semi-independent of underlying network infrastructure. No doubt, SDN has provided numerous benefits like breaking vendor lock-ins, reducing overhead cost, easy innovations, increasing programmability among devices, introducing new features and so on. But security of SDN cannot be neglected and it has become a major topic of debate. The communication channel used in SDN is OpenFlow which has made TLS implementation an optional approach in SDN. TLS adoption is important and still vulnerable. This paper focuses on making SDN OpenFlow communication more secure by following extended TLS support and defensive algorithm.

SSL certificates are a core component of the public key infrastructure that underpins encrypted communication in the Internet. In this paper, we report the results of a longitudinal study of the characteristics of SSL certificate chains presented to clients during secure web (HTTPS) connection setup. Our data set consists of 23B SSL certificate chains collected from a global panel consisting of over 2M residential client machines over a period of 6 months. The data informing our analyses provide perspective on the entire chain of trust, including root certificates, across a wide distribution of client machines. We identify over 35M unique certificate chains with diverse relationships at all levels of the PKI hierarchy. We report on the characteristics of valid certificates, which make up 99.7% of the total corpus. We also examine invalid certificate chains, finding that 93% of them contain an untrusted root certificate and we find they have shorter average chain length than their valid counterparts. Finally, we examine two unintended but prevalent behaviors in our data: the deprecation of root certificates and secure traffic interception. Our results support aspects of prior, scan-based studies on certificate characteristics but contradict other findings, highlighting the importance of the residential client-side perspective.

Research into the established area of ITS is evolving into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), itself a fast-moving research area, fuelled in part by rapid changes in computing and communication technologies. Using pseudonym certificate is a popular way to address privacy issues in IoV. Therefore, the certificate management scheme is considered as a feasible technique to manage system and maintain the lifecycle of certificate. In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudonym certificate management scheme in IoV. The Blockchain concept is introduced to simplify the network structure and distributed maintenance of the Certificate Revocation List (CRL). The proposed scheme embeds part of the certificate revocation functions within the security and privacy applications, aiming to reduce the communication overhead and shorten the processing time cost. Extensive simulations and analysis show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, in which the Blockchain structure costs fewer network resources and gives a more economic solution to against further cybercrime attacks.

This paper presents an overview of the H2020 project VESSEDIA [9] aimed at verifying the security and safety of modern connected systems also called IoT. The originality relies in using Formal Methods inherited from high-criticality applications domains to analyze the source code at different levels of intensity, to gather possible faults and weaknesses. The analysis methods are mostly exhaustive an guarantee that, after analysis, the source code of the application is error-free. This paper is structured as follows: after an introductory section 1 giving some factual data, section 2 presents the aims and the problems addressed; section 3 describes the project's use-cases and section 4 describes the proposed approach for solving these problems and the results achieved until now; finally, section 5 discusses some remaining future work.

In the modern security-conscious world, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) proxies are increasingly often used on industrial and enterprise networks to perform TLS unwrapping on all outbound connections. However, enabling TLS unwrapping requires local devices to have the DPI proxy Certificate Authority certificates installed. While for conventional computing devices this is addressed via enterprise management, it's a difficult problem for Internet of Things ("IoT") devices which are generally not under enterprise management, and may not even be capable of it due to their resource-constrained nature. Thus, for typical IoT devices, being installed on a network with DPI requires either manual device configuration or custom DPI proxy configuration, both of which solutions have significant shortcomings. This poses a serious challenge to the deployment of IoT devices on DPI-enabled intranets. The authors propose a solution to this problem: a method of installing on IoT devices the CA certificates for DPI proxy CAs, as well as other security configuration ("security bootstrapping"). The proposed solution respects the DPI policies, while allowing the commissioning of IoT and IIoT devices without the need for additional manual configuration either at device scope or at network scope. This is accomplished by performing the bootstrap operation over unsecured connection, and downloading certificates using TLS validation at application level. The resulting solution is light-weight and secure, yet does not require validation of the DPI proxy's CA certificates in order to perform the security bootstrapping, thus avoiding the chicken-and-egg problem inherent in using TLS on DPI-enabled intranets.

HTTPS provides authentication, data confidentiality, and integrity for secure web applications in the Internet. In order to establish secure connections with the target website but not a man-in-the-middle or impersonation attacker, a browser shows security warnings to users, when different HTTPS errors happen (e.g., it fails to build a valid certificate chain, or the certificate subject does not match the domain visited). Each browser implements its own design of warnings on HTTPS errors, to balance security and usability. This paper presents a list of common HTTPS errors, and we investigate the browser behaviors on each error. Our study discloses browser defects on handling HTTPS errors in terms of cryptographic algorithm, certificate verification, name validation, HPKP, and HSTS.

Complex military systems are typically cyber-physical systems which are the targets of high level threat actors, and must be able to operate within a highly contested cyber environment. There is an emerging need to provide a strong level of assurance against these threat actors, but the process by which this assurance can be tested and evaluated is not so clear. This paper outlines an initial framework developed through research for evaluating the cyber-worthiness of complex mission critical systems using threat models developed in SysML. The framework provides a visual model of the process by which a threat actor could attack the system. It builds on existing concepts from system safety engineering and expands on how to present the risks and mitigations in an understandable manner.