Biblio

Intelligent transportation systems, such as connected vehicles, are able to establish real-time, optimized and collision-free communication with the surrounding ecosystem. Introducing the internet of things (IoT) in connected vehicles relies on deployment of massive scale sensors, actuators, electronic control units (ECUs) and antennas with embedded software and communication technologies. Combined with the lack of designed-in security for sensors and ECUs, this creates challenges for security engineers and architects to identify, understand and analyze threats so that actions can be taken to protect the system assets. This paper proposes a novel STRIDE-based threat model for IoT sensors in connected vehicle networks aimed at addressing these challenges. Using a reference architecture of a connected vehicle, we identify system assets in connected vehicle sub-systems such as devices and peripherals that mostly involve sensors. Moreover, we provide a prioritized set of security recommendations, with consideration to the feasibility and deployment challenges, which enables practical applicability of the developed threat model to help specify security requirements to protect critical assets within the sensor network.

To train new staff to be efficient and ready for the tasks assigned is vital. They must be equipped with knowledge and skills so that they can carry out their responsibility to ensure smooth daily working activities. As transitioning to IPv6 has taken place for more than a decade, it is understood that having a dual-stack network is common in any organization or enterprise. However, many Internet users may not realize the importance of IPv6 security due to a lack of awareness and knowledge of cyber and computer security. Therefore, this paper presents an approach to educating people by introducing a security mechanisms model that can be applied in handling security challenges via network sandboxing by setting up an isolated dual stack network testbed using GNS3 to perform network security analysis. The finding shows that applying security mechanisms such as access control lists (ACLs) and host-based firewalls can help counter the attacks. This proves that knowledge and skills to handle dual-stack security are crucial. In future, more kinds of attacks should be tested and also more types of security mechanisms can be applied on a dual-stack network to provide more information and to provide network engineers insights on how they can benefit from network sandboxing to sharpen their knowledge and skills.

Topic modeling algorithms from the natural language processing (NLP) discipline have been used for various applications. For instance, topic modeling for the product recommendation systems in the e-commerce systems. In this paper, we briefly reviewed topic modeling applications and then described our proposed idea of utilizing topic modeling approaches for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) applications. We improved the previous work by implementing BERTopic and Top2Vec approaches, enabling users to select their preferred pre-trained text/sentence embedding model, and supporting various languages. We implemented our proposed idea as the new topic modeling module for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Maryam: Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) framework. We also described our experiment results using a leaked hacker forum dataset (nulled.io) to attract more researchers and open-source communities to participate in the Maryam project of OWASP Foundation.

Key management for self-organized wireless ad-hoc networks using peer-to-peer (P2P) keys is the primary goal of this article (SOWANs). Currently, wireless networks have centralized security architectures, making them difficult to secure. In most cases, ad-hoc wireless networks are not connected to trusted authorities or central servers. They are more prone to fragmentation and disintegration as a result of node and link failures. Traditional security solutions that rely on online trusted authorities do not work together to protect networks that are not planned. With open wireless networks, anyone can join or leave at any time with the right equipment, and no third party is required to verify their identity. These networks are best suited for this proposed method. Each node can make, distribute, and revoke its keying material in this paper. A minimal amount of communication and computation is required to accomplish this task. So that they can authenticate one another and create shared keys, nodes in the self-organized version of the system must communicate via a secure side channel between the users' devices.

DDoS attacks produce a lot of traffic on the network. DDoS attacks may be fought in a novel method thanks to the rise of Software Defined Networking (SDN). DDoS detection and data gathering may lead to larger system load utilization among SDN as well as systems, much expense of SDN, slow reaction period to DDoS if they are conducted at regular intervals. Using the Identification Retrieval algorithm, we offer a new DDoS detection framework for detecting resource scarcity type DDoS attacks. In designed to check low-density DDoS attacks, we employ a combination of network traffic characteristics. The KSVD technique is used to generate a dictionary of network traffic parameters. In addition to providing legitimate and attack traffic models for dictionary construction, the suggested technique may be used to network traffic as well. Matching Pursuit and Wavelet-based DDoS detection algorithms are also implemented and compared using two separate data sets. Despite the difficulties in identifying LR-DoS attacks, the results of the study show that our technique has a detection accuracy of 89%. DDoS attacks are explained for each type of DDoS, and how SDN weaknesses may be exploited. We conclude that machine learning-based DDoS detection mechanisms and cutoff point DDoS detection techniques are the two most prevalent methods used to identify DDoS attacks in SDN. More significantly, the generational process, benefits, and limitations of each DDoS detection system are explained. This is the case in our testing environment, where the intrusion detection system (IDS) is able to block all previously identified threats

Recent works have empirically shown that neural network interpretability is susceptible to malicious manipulations. However, existing attacks against Interpretable Deep Learning Systems (IDLSes) all focus on the white-box setting, which is obviously unpractical in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we make the first attempt to attack IDLSes in the decision-based black-box setting. We propose a new framework called Dual Black-box Adversarial Attack (DBAA) which can generate adversarial examples that are misclassified as the target class, yet have very similar interpretations to their benign cases. We conduct comprehensive experiments on different combinations of classifiers and interpreters to illustrate the effectiveness of DBAA. Empirical results show that in all the cases, DBAA achieves high attack success rates and Intersection over Union (IoU) scores.

Classic black-box adversarial attacks can take advantage of transferable adversarial examples generated by a similar substitute model to successfully fool the target model. However, these substitute models need to be trained by target models' training data, which is hard to acquire due to privacy or transmission reasons. Recognizing the limited availability of real data for adversarial queries, recent works proposed to train substitute models in a data-free black-box scenario. However, their generative adversarial networks (GANs) based framework suffers from the convergence failure and the model collapse, resulting in low efficiency. In this paper, by rethinking the collaborative relationship between the generator and the substitute model, we design a novel black-box attack framework. The proposed method can efficiently imitate the target model through a small number of queries and achieve high attack success rate. The comprehensive experiments over six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the state-of-the-art attacks. Especially, we conduct both label-only and probability-only attacks on the Microsoft Azure online model, and achieve a 100% attack success rate with only 0.46% query budget of the SOTA method [49].

DDoS attacks still represent a severe threat to network services. While there are more or less workable solutions to defend against these attacks, there is a significant space for further research regarding automation of reactions and subsequent management. In this paper, we focus on one piece of the whole puzzle. We strive to automatically infer filtering rules which are specific to the current DoS attack to decrease the time to mitigation. We employ a machine learning technique to create a model of the traffic mix based on observing network traffic during the attack and normal period. The model is converted into the filtering rules. We evaluate our approach with various setups of hyperparameters. The results of our experiments show that the proposed approach is feasible in terms of the capability of inferring successful filtering rules.

The design of safety-critical embedded systems is a complex process that involves the reuse of proven solutions to fulfill a set of requirements. While safety is considered as the major requirement to be satisfied in safety-critical embedded systems, the security attacks can affect the security as well as the safety of these systems. Therefore, ensuring the security of the safety-critical embedded systems is as important as ensuring the safety requirements. The concept of design patterns, which provides common solutions to widely recurring design problems, have been extensively engaged in the design of the hardware and software in many fields, including embedded systems. However, there is an inadequacy of experience with security patterns in the field of safety-critical embedded systems. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to integrate security patterns with safety patterns in the design of safety-critical embedded systems. Moreover, it presents a customized representation for security patterns to be more relevant to the common safety patterns in the context of safety-critical embedded systems.

Due to its decentralized trust mechanism, blockchain is increasingly used as a trust intermediary for multi-party cooperation to reduce the cost and risk of maintaining centralized trust nowadays. And as the requirements for privacy and high throughput, consortium blockchain is widely used in data sharing and business cooperation in practical application scenarios. Nowadays, the protection of traditional medicine has been regarded as human intangible cultural heritage in recent years, but this kind of protection still faces the problem that traditional medicine prescriptions are unsuitable for disclosure and difficult to protect. Hyperledger is a consortium blockchain featuring authorized access, high throughput, and tamper-resistance, making it ideal for privacy protection and information depository in traditional medicine protection. This study proposes a solution for intellectual property protection of traditional medicine by using a blockchain platform to record prescription iterations and clinical trial data. The privacy and confidentiality of Hyperledger can keep intellectual property information safe and private. In addition, the author proposes to invite the Patent Offices and legal institutions to join the blockchain network, maintain users' properties and issue certificates, which can provide a legal basis for rights protection when infringement occurs. Finally, the researchers have built a system corresponding to the scheme and tested the system. The test outcomes of the system can explain the usability of the system. And through the test of system throughput, under low system configuration, it can reach about 200 query operations per second, which can meet the application requirements of relevant organizations and governments.

Secured data transmission between one to many authorized users is achieved through Broadcast Encryption (BE). In BE, the source transmits encrypted data to multiple registered users who already have their decrypting keys. The Untrustworthy users, known as Traitors, can give out their secret keys to a hacker to form a pirate decoding system to decrypt the original message on the sly. The process of detecting the traitors is known as Traitor Tracing in cryptography. This paper presents a new Black Box Tracing method that is fully collusion resistant and it is designated as Traitor Tracing in Broadcast Encryption using Vector Keys (TTBE-VK). The proposed method uses integer vectors in the finite field Zp as encryption/decryption/tracing keys, reducing the computational cost compared to the existing methods.

MQTT is widely adopted by IoT devices because it allows for the most efficient data transfer over a variety of communication lines. The security of MQTT has received increasing attention in recent years, and several studies have demonstrated the configurations of many MQTT brokers are insecure. Adversaries are allowed to exploit vulnerable brokers and publish malicious messages to subscribers. However, little has been done to understanding the security issues on the device side when devices handle unauthorized MQTT messages. To fill this research gap, we propose a fuzzing framework named ShadowFuzzer to find client-side vulnerabilities when processing incoming MQTT messages. To avoiding ethical issues, ShadowFuzzer redirects traffic destined for the actual broker to a shadow broker under the control to monitor vulnerabilities. We select 15 IoT devices communicating with vulnerable brokers and leverage ShadowFuzzer to find vulnerabilities when they parse MQTT messages. For these devices, ShadowFuzzer reports 34 zero-day vulnerabilities in 11 devices. We evaluated the exploitability of these vulnerabilities and received a total of 44,000 USD bug bounty rewards. And 16 CVE/CNVD/CN-NVD numbers have been assigned to us.

Transient stability accidents induced by converter-based resources have been emerging frequently around the world. In this paper, the transient stability of the grid-tied voltage source converter (VSC) system is studied through estimating the basin of attraction (BOA) based on the hyperplane or hypersurface method. Meanwhile, fault critical clearing times are estimated, based on the approximated BOA and numerical fault trajectory. Further, the dynamic security region (DSR), an important index in traditional power systems, is extended to power-electronics-dominated power systems in this paper. The DSR of VSC is defined in the space composed of active current references. Based on the estimated BOA, the single-VSC-infinite-bus system is taken as an example and its DSR is evaluated. Finally, all these analytical results are well verified by several numerical simulations in MATLAB/Simulink.

With the global transition to the IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), IP (Internet Protocol) validation efficiency and IPv6 support from the aspect of network programming are gaining more importance. As global computer networks grow in the era of IoT (Internet of Things), IP address validation is an inevitable process for assuring strong network privacy and security. The complexity of IP validation has been increased due to the rather drastic change in the memory architecture needed for storing IPv6 addresses. Low-level programming languages like C/C++ are a great choice for handling memory spaces and working with simple devices connected in an IoT (Internet of Things) network. This paper analyzes some user-defined and open-source implementations of IP validation codes in Boost. Asio and POCO C++ networking libraries, as well as the IP security support provided for general networking purposes and IoT. Considering a couple of sample codes, the paper gives a conclusion on whether these C++ implementations answer the needs for flexibility and security of the upcoming era of IPv6 addressed computers.

The vast proliferation of the connected devices makes the operation of the traditional networks so complex and drops the network performance, particularly, failure cases. In fact, a novel solution is proposed to enable the management of the network resources and services named software defined network (SDN). SDN splits the data plane and the control plane by centralizing all the control plane on one common platform. Further, SDN makes the control plane programmable by offering high flexibility for the network management and monitoring mostly in failure cases. However, the main challenge in SDN is security that is presented as the first barrier for its development. Security in SDN is presented at various levels and forms, particularly, the communication between the data plane and control plane that presents a weak point in SDN framework. In this article, we suggest a new security framework focused on the combination between the trust and awareness concepts (TAS-SDN) for a dynamic southbound communication SDN. Further, TAS-SDN uses trust levels to establish a secure communication between the control plane and data plane. As a result, we discuss the implementation and the performance of TAS-SDN which presents a promote security solution in terms of time execution, complexity and scalability for SDN.

This paper proposes a new two-stage encryption method to increase the cryptographic strength of the AES algorithm, which is based on stochastic error of a neural network. The composite encryption key in AES neural network cryptosystem are the weight matrices of synaptic connections between neurons and the metadata about the architecture of the neural network. The stochastic nature of the prediction error of the neural network provides an ever-changing pair key-ciphertext. Different topologies of the neural networks and the use of various activation functions increase the number of variations of the AES neural network decryption algorithm. The ciphertext is created by the forward propagation process. The encryption result is reversed back to plaintext by the reverse neural network functional operator.

Electronic control units (ECU) have been widely used in modern resource-constrained automotive systems, com-municating through the controller area network (CAN) bus. However, they are still facing man-in-the-middle attacks in CAN bus due to the absence of a more effective authenti-cation/encryption mechanism. In this paper, to defend against the attacks more effectively, we propose a unified lightweight authenticated encryption that integrates recent prevalent cryp-tography standardization Isap and Ascon.First, we reuse the common permutation block of ISAP and Asconto support authenticated encryption and encryption/decryption. Second, we provide a flexible and independent switch between authenticated encryption and encryption/decryption to support specific application requirements. Third, we adopt standard CAESAR hardware API as the interface standard to support compatibility between different interfaces or platforms. Experimental results show that our proposed unified lightweight authenticated encryption can reduce 26.09% area consumption on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA board compared with the state-of-the-arts. In addition, the encryption overhead of the proposed design for transferring one CAN data frame is \textbackslashmathbf10.75 \textbackslashmu s using Asconand \textbackslashmathbf72.25 \textbackslashmu s using ISAP at the frequency of 4 MHz on embedded devices.

The success of the web and the consequent rise in data sharing have made network security a challenge. Attackers from all around the world target PC installations. When an attack is successful, an electronic device's security is jeopardised. The intrusion implicitly includes any sort of behaviours that purport to think twice about the respectability, secrecy, or accessibility of an asset. Information is shielded from unauthorised clients' scrutiny by the integrity of a certain foundation. Accessibility refers to the framework that gives users of the framework true access to information. The word "classification" implies that data within a given frame is shielded from unauthorised access and public display. Consequently, a PC network is considered to be fully completed if the primary objectives of these three standards have been satisfactorily met. To assist in achieving these objectives, Intrusion Detection Systems have been developed with the fundamental purpose of scanning incoming traffic on computer networks for malicious intrusions.

Similar to any spoof detection systems, power grid monitoring systems and devices are subject to various cyberattacks by determined and well-funded adversaries. Many well-publicized real-world cyberattacks on power grid systems have been publicly reported. Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) networks with Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) are the main building blocks of the overall wide area monitoring and situational awareness systems in the power grid. The data between PMUs and PDC(s) are sent through the legacy networks, which are subject to many attack scenarios under with no, or inadequate, countermeasures in protocols, such as IEEE 37.118-2. In this paper, we consider a stealthier data spoofing attack against PMU networks, called a mirroring attack, where an adversary basically injects a copy of a set of packets in reverse order immediately following their original positions, wiping out the correct values. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time in the literature, we consider a more challenging attack both in terms of the strategy and the lower percentage of spoofed attacks. As part of our countermeasure detection scheme, we make use of novel framing approach to make application of a 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based approach which avoids the computational overhead of the classical sample-based classification algorithms. Our experimental evaluation results show promising results in terms of both high accuracy and true positive rates even under the aforementioned stealthy adversarial attack scenarios.

Machine learning (ML) has been applied in prognostics and health management (PHM) to monitor and predict the health of industrial machinery. The use of PHM in production systems creates a cyber-physical, omni-layer system. While ML offers statistical improvements over previous methods, and brings statistical models to bear on new systems and PHM tasks, it is susceptible to performance degradation when the behavior of the systems that ML is receiving its inputs from changes. Natural changes such as physical wear and engineered changes such as maintenance and rebuild procedures are catalysts for performance degradation, and are both inherent to production systems. Drawing from data on the impact of maintenance procedures on ML performance in hydraulic actuators, this paper presents a simulation study that investigates how long it takes for ML performance degradation to create a difference in the throughput of serial production system. In particular, this investigation considers the performance of an ML model learned on data collected before a rebuild procedure is conducted on a hydraulic actuator and an ML model transfer learned on data collected after the rebuild procedure. Transfer learning is able to mitigate performance degradation, but there is still a significant impact on throughput. The conclusion is drawn that ML faults can have drastic, non-linear effects on the throughput of production systems.

Visual Question Answering or VQA is a technique used in diverse domains ranging from simple visual questions and answers on short videos to security. Here in this paper, we talk about the video captcha that will be deployed for user authentication. Randomly any short video of length 10 to 20 seconds will be displayed and automated questions and answers will be generated by the system using AI and ML. Automated Programs have maliciously affected gateways such as login, registering etc. Therefore, in today's environment it is necessary to deploy such security programs that can recognize the objects in a video and generate automated MCQs real time that can be of context like the object movements, color, background etc. The features in the video highlighted will be recorded for generating MCQs based on the short videos. These videos can be random in nature. They can be taken from any official websites or even from your own local computer with prior permission from the user. The format of the video must be kept as constant every time and must be cross checked before flashing it to the user. Once our system identifies the captcha and determines the authenticity of a user, the other website in which the user wants to login, can skip the step of captcha verification as it will be done by our system. A session will be maintained for the user, eliminating the hassle of authenticating themselves again and again for no reason. Once the video will be flashed for an IP address and if the answers marked by the user for the current video captcha are correct, we will add the information like the IP address, the video and the questions in our database to avoid repeating the same captcha for the same IP address. In this paper, we proposed the methodology of execution of the aforementioned and will discuss the benefits and limitations of video captcha along with the visual questions and answering.

In recent years, technological advancements in the AI and VR fields have increasingly often been paired with considerations on ethics and safety aimed at mitigating unintentional design failures. However, cybersecurity-oriented AI and VR safety research has emphasized the need to additionally appraise instantiations of intentional malice exhibited by unethical actors at pre- and post-deployment stages. On top of that, in view of ongoing malicious deepfake developments that can represent a threat to the epistemic security of a society, security-aware AI and VR design strategies require an epistemically-sensitive stance. In this vein, this paper provides a theoretical basis for two novel AIVR safety research directions: 1) VR as immersive testbed for a VR-deepfake-aided epistemic security training and 2) AI as catalyst within a deepfake-aided so-called cyborgnetic creativity augmentation facilitating an epistemically-sensitive threat modelling. For illustration, we focus our use case on deepfake text – an underestimated deepfake modality. In the main, the two proposed transdisciplinary lines of research exemplify how AIVR safety to defend against unethical actors could naturally converge toward AIVR ethics whilst counteracting epistemic security threats.

In recent years, the blackout accident shows that the cause of power failure is not only in the power network, but also in the cyber network. Aiming at the problem of cyber network fault Cyber-physical power systems, combined with the structure and functional attributes of cyber network, the comprehensive criticality of information node is defined. By evaluating the vulnerability of ieee39 node system, it is found that the fault of high comprehensive criticality information node will cause greater load loss to the system. The simulation results show that the comprehensive criticality index can effectively identify the key nodes of the cyber network.

Verifiable Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (VDSSE) enables users to securely outsource databases (document sets) to cloud servers and perform searches and updates. The verifiability property prevents users from accepting incorrect search results returned by a malicious server. However, we discover that the community currently only focuses on preventing malicious behavior from the server but ignores incorrect updates from the client, which are very likely to happen since there is no record on the client to check. Indeed most existing VDSSE schemes are not sufficient to tolerate incorrect updates from the client. For instance, deleting a nonexistent keyword-identifier pair can break their correctness and soundness. In this paper, we demonstrate the vulnerabilities of a type of existing VDSSE schemes that fail them to ensure correctness and soundness properties on incorrect updates. We propose an efficient fault-tolerant solution that can consider any DSSE scheme as a black-box and make them into a fault-tolerant VDSSE in the malicious model. Forward privacy is an important property of DSSE that prevents the server from linking an update operation to previous search queries. Our approach can also make any forward secure DSSE scheme into a fault-tolerant VDSSE without breaking the forward security guarantee. In this work, we take FAST [1] (TDSC 2020), a forward secure DSSE, as an example, implement a prototype of our solution, and evaluate its performance. Even when compared with the previous fastest forward private construction that does not support fault tolerance, the experiments show that our construction saves 9× client storage and has better search and update efficiency.

Nowadays, safety is a first-rate subject for all applications. There has been an exponential growth year by year in the number of businesses going digital since the few decades following the birth of the Internet. In these technologically advanced times, cyber security is a must mainly for internet applications, so we have the notion of diving deeper into the Cyber security domain and are determined to make a complete project. We aim to develop a website portal for ease of communication between us and the end user. Utilizing the power of python scripting and flask server to make independent automated tools for detection of SQLI, XSS & a Spider(Content Discovery Tool). We have also integrated skipfish as a website vulnerability scanner to our project using python and Kali Linux. Since conducting a penetration test on another website without permission is not legal, we thought of building a dummy website prone to OS Command Injection in addition to the above-mentioned attacks. A well-documented report will be generated after the penetration test/ vulnerability scan. In case the website is vulnerable, patching of the website will be done with the user's consent.