Biblio

Distributed banking platforms and services forgo centralized banks to process financial transactions. For example, M-Pesa provides distributed banking service in the developing regions so that the people without a bank account can deposit, withdraw, or transfer money. The current distributed banking systems lack the transparency in monitoring and tracking of distributed banking transactions and thus do not support auditing of distributed banking transactions for accountability. To address this issue, this paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed banking (BDB) scheme, which uses blockchain technology to leverage its built-in properties to record and track immutable transactions. BDB supports distributed financial transaction processing but is significantly different from cryptocurrencies in its design properties, simplicity, and computational efficiency. We implement a prototype of BDB using smart contract and conduct experiments to show BDB's effectiveness and performance. We further compare our prototype with the Ethereum cryptocurrency to highlight the fundamental differences and demonstrate the BDB's superior computational efficiency.

Cloud forensics investigates the crime committed over cloud infrastructures like SLA-violations and storage privacy. Cloud storage forensics is the process of recording the history of the creation and operations performed on a cloud data object and investing it. Secure data provenance in the Cloud is crucial for data accountability, forensics, and privacy. Towards this, we present a Cloud-based data provenance framework using Blockchain, which traces data record operations and generates provenance data. Initially, we design a dropbox like application using AWS S3 storage. The application creates a cloud storage application for the students and faculty of the university, thereby making the storage and sharing of work and resources efficient. Later, we design a data provenance mechanism for confidential files of users using Ethereum blockchain. We also evaluate the proposed system using performance parameters like query and transaction latency by varying the load and number of nodes of the blockchain network.

In order to significantly improve the reliable interaction and fast processing when TT&C(Tracking, Telemetry and Command) Resource Scheduling and Management System (TRSMS) communicate with external systems which are diverse, multiple directional and high concurrent, this paper designs and implements a highly concurrent and secure middleware for TT&C Resource Automatic Scheduling Interface (TRASI). The middleware designs memory pool, data pool, thread pool and task pool to improve the efficiency of concurrent processing, uses the rule dictionary, communication handshake and wait retransmission mechanism to ensure the data interaction security and reliability. This middleware can effectively meet the requirements of TRASI for data exchange with external users and system, significantly improve the data processing speed and efficiency, and promote the information technology and automation level of Aerospace TT&C Network Management Center (TNMC).

State estimation is of considerable significance for the power system operation and control. However, well-designed false data injection attacks can utilize blind spots in conventional residual-based bad data detection methods to manipulate measurements in a coordinated manner and thus affect the secure operation and economic dispatch of grids. In this paper, we propose a detection approach based on an autoencoder neural network. By training the network on the dependencies intrinsic in `normal' operation data, it effectively overcomes the challenge of unbalanced training data that is inherent in power system attack detection. To evaluate the detection performance of the proposed mechanism, we conduct a series of experiments on the IEEE 118-bus power system. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed autoencoder detector displays robust detection performance under a variety of attack scenarios.

To our best knowledge, the p-sensitive k-anonymity model is a sophisticated model to resist linking attacks and homogeneous attacks in data publishing. However, if the distribution of sensitive values is skew, the model is difficult to defend against skew attacks and even faces sensitive attacks. In practice, the privacy requirements of different sensitive values are not always identical. The “one size fits all” unified privacy protection level may cause unnecessary information loss. To address these problems, the paper quantifies privacy requirements with the concept of IDF and concerns more about sensitive groups. Two enhanced anonymous models with personalized protection characteristic, that is, (p,αisg) -sensitive k-anonymity model and (pi,αisg)-sensitive k-anonymity model, are then proposed to resist skew attacks and sensitive attacks. Furthermore, two clustering algorithms with global search and local search are designed to implement our models. Experimental results show that the two enhanced models have outstanding advantages in better privacy at the expense of a little data utility.

Analyzing multi-dimensional geospatial data is difficult and immersive analytics systems are used to visualize geospatial data and models. There is little previous work evaluating when immersive and non-immersive visualizations are the most suitable for data analysis and more research is needed.

Heterogeneous system-on-chip platforms with multiple processing cores are becoming increasingly common in safety-and security-critical embedded systems. To facilitate a logical isolation of physically connected on-chip components, internal communication links of such platforms are often equipped with dedicated access protection units. When performed manually, however, the configuration of these units can be both time-consuming and error-prone. To resolve this issue, we present a formal model and a corresponding design methodology that allows developers to specify access permissions and information flow requirements for embedded systems in a mostly platform-independent manner. As part of the methodology, the consistency between the permissions and the requirements is automatically verified and an extensible generation framework is used to transform the abstract permission declarations into configuration code for individual access protection units. We present a prototypical implementation of this approach and validate it by generating configuration code for the access protection unit of a commercially available multiprocessor system-on-chip.

In this paper, we consider a novel method of mining biometric data for user authentication by replacing traditional captchas with game-like captchas. The game-like captchas present the user with a short game in which they attempt to get a high score. The data produced from a user's game play will be used to produce a behavior biometric based on user interactions, such as mouse movement, click patterns and game choices. The baseline expectation of interactive behavior will be used as a single factor in an intrusion detection system providing continuous authentication, considering the factors such as IP address, location, time of use, website interactions, and behavior anomalies. In addition to acting as a source of data, game-like captchas are expected to deter bots and automated systems from accessing web-based services and improving the user experience for the end-users who have become accustomed to monotonous alternatives, such as Google's re-captcha.

A critical need exists for collaboration and action by government, industry, and academia to address cyber weaknesses or vulnerabilities inherent to embedded or cyber physical systems (CPS). These vulnerabilities are introduced as we leverage technologies, methods, products, and services from the global supply chain throughout a system's lifecycle. As adversaries are exploiting these weaknesses as access points for malicious purposes, solutions for system security and resilience become a priority call for action. The SAE G-32 Cyber Physical Systems Security Committee has been convened to address this complex challenge. The SAE G-32 will take a holistic systems engineering approach to integrate system security considerations to develop a Cyber Physical System Security Framework. This framework is intended to bring together multiple industries and develop a method and common language which will enable us to more effectively, efficiently, and consistently communicate a risk, cost, and performance trade space. The standard will allow System Integrators to make decisions utilizing a common framework and language to develop affordable, trustworthy, resilient, and secure systems.

Attack-awareness recognizes self-awareness for security systems regarding the occurring attacks. More frequent and intense attacks on cloud and network infrastructures are pushing security systems to the limit. With the end of Moore's Law, merely scaling against these attacks is no longer economically justified. Previous works have already dealt with the adoption of Software-defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization in security systems and used both approaches to optimize performance by the intelligent placement of security functions. In our previous works, we already made a case for taking the order of security functions into account and dynamically adapt this order. In this work, we propose a reordering framework, provide a proof-of-concept implementation, and validate this implementation in an evaluation environment. The framework's evaluation proves the feasibility of our concept.

In this paper, we design a technique for mapping the source code into a vector space and we show its application in the recognition of security weaknesses. By applying ideas commonly used in Natural Language Processing, we train a model for producing an embedding of programs starting from their Abstract Syntax Trees. We then show how such embedding is able to infer clusters roughly separating different classes of software weaknesses. Even if the training of the embedding is unsupervised and made on a generic Java dataset, we show that the model can be used for supervised learning of specific classes of vulnerabilities, helping to capture some features distinguishing them in code. Finally, we discuss how our model performs over the different types of vulnerabilities categorized by the CWE initiative.

Development of quality object-oriented software contains security as an integral aspect of that process. During that process, a ceaseless burden on the developers was posed in order to maximize the development and at the same time to reduce the expense and time invested in security. In this paper, the authors analyzed metrics for object-oriented software in order to evaluate and identify the relation between metric value and security of the software. Identification of these relations was achieved by study of software vulnerabilities with code level metrics. By using OWASP classification of vulnerabilities and experimental results, we proved that there was relation between metric values and possible security issues in software. For experimental code analysis, we have developed special software called SOFTMET.

Since the birth of the Internet, the quality of network service has been a widespread concerned problem. With the continuous development of communication and information technology, people gradually realized that the contradiction between the limited resources and the business requirements of network cannot be fundamentally solved. In this paper, we design and develop a distributed security quality of service testing framework called AweQoS(AwesomeQoS), to adapt to the current complex network environment. This paper puts forward the necessity that some security tests should be closely combined with quality of service testing, and further discusses the basic methods of distributed denial of service attack and defense. We introduce the design idea and working process of AweQoS in detail, and introduce a bandwidth test method based on user datagram protocol. Experimental results show that this new test method has better test performance and potential under the AweQoS framework.

At present, the on-site safety problems of substations and critical power equipment are mainly through inspection methods. Still, manual inspection is difficult, time-consuming, and uninterrupted inspection is not possible. The current safety management is mainly guaranteed by rules and regulations and standardized operating procedures. In the on-site environment, it is very dependent on manual execution and confirmation, and the requirements for safety supervision and operating personnel are relatively high. However, the reliability, the continuity of control and patrol cannot be fully guaranteed, and it is easy to cause security vulnerabilities and cause security accidents due to personnel slackness. In response to this shortcoming, this paper uses edge computing and image processing techniques to discover security risks in time and designs a deep convolution attention mechanism network to perform image processing. Then the network is cropped and compressed so that it can be processed at the edge, and the results are aggregated to the cloud for unified management. A comprehensive security assessment module is designed in the cloud to conduct an overall risk assessment of the results reported by all edges, and give an alarm prompt. The experimental results in the real environment show the effectiveness of this method.

In order to solve the defense problem of wireless network security threats in new energy stations, a new wireless network security risk assessment model which proposes a wireless access security evaluation method for power monitoring system based on fuzzy theory, was established based on the study of security risk assessment methods in this paper. The security evaluation method first divides the security evaluation factor set, then determines the security evaluation weight coefficient, then calculates the network security level membership matrix, and finally combines specific examples to analyze the resulting data. this paper provided new ideas and methods for the wireless access security evaluation of new energy stations.

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), it has been widely deployed. As many embedded devices are connected to the network and massive amounts of security-sensitive data are stored in these devices, embedded devices in IoT have become the target of attackers. The trusted computing is a key technology to guarantee the security and trustworthiness of devices' execution environment. This paper focuses on security problems on IoT devices, and proposes a security architecture for IoT devices based on the trusted computing technology. This paper implements a security management system for IoT devices, which can perform integrity measurement, real-time monitoring and security management for embedded applications, providing a safe and reliable execution environment and whitelist-based security protection for IoT devices. This paper also designs and implements an embedded security protection system based on trusted computing technology, containing a measurement and control component in the kernel and a remote graphical management interface for administrators. The kernel layer enforces the integrity measurement and control of the embedded application on the device. The graphical management interface communicates with the remote embedded device through the TCP/IP protocol, and provides a feature-rich and user-friendly interaction interface. It implements functions such as knowledge base scanning, whitelist management, log management, security policy management, and cryptographic algorithm performance testing.

A time-delay switch (TDS) cyber attack is a deliberate attempt by malicious adversaries aiming at destabilizing a power system by impeding the communication signals to/from the centralized controller from/to the network sensors and generating stations that participate in the load frequency control (LFC). A TDS cyber attack can be targeting the sensing loops (transmitting network measurements to the centralized controller) or the control signals dispatched from the centralized controller to the governor valves of the generating stations. A resilient TDS control strategy is proposed and developed in this work that thwarts network instabilities that are caused by delays in the sensing loops, and control commands, and guarantees normal operation of the LFC mechanism. This will be achieved by augmenting the telemetered control commands with locally generated feedback control laws (i.e., “decentralized” control commands) taking measurements that are available and accessible at the power generating stations (locally) independent from all the telemetered signals to/from the centralized controller. Our objective is to devise a controller that is capable of circumventing all types of TDS and DoS (Denial of Service) cyber attacks as well as a broad class of False Data Injection (FDI) cyber attacks.

This paper describes an approach to the security fault tolerance of access control in which the security breaches of an access control are tolerated by means of a security fault tolerant (SFT) access control. Though an access control is securely designed and implemented, it can contain faults in development or be contaminated in operation. The threats to an access control are analyzed to identify possible security breaches. To tolerate the security breaches, an SFT access control is made to be semantically identical to an access control. Our approach is described using role-based access control (RBAC) and extended access control list (EACL). A healthcare system is used to demonstrate our approach.

This research provides security and safety extensions to a blockchain based solution whose target is e-health. The Advanced Blockchain platform is extended with intelligent monitoring for security and machine learning for detecting patient treatment medication safety issues. For the reasons of stringent HIPAA, HITECH, EU-GDPR and other regional regulations dictating security, safety and privacy requirements, the e-Health blockchains have to cover mandatory disclosure of violations or enforcements of policies during transaction flows involving healthcare. Our service solution further provides the benefits of resolving the abnormal flows of a medical treatment process, providing accountability of the service providers, enabling a trust health information environment for institutions to handle medication safely, giving patients a better safety guarantee, and enabling the authorities to supervise the security and safety of e-Health blockchains. The capabilities can be generalized to support a uniform smart solution across industry in a variety of blockchain applications.

Vulnerabilities in privileged software layers have been exploited with severe consequences. Recently, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) based technologies have emerged as a promising approach since they claim strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees regardless of the trustworthiness of the underlying system software. In this paper, we consider one of the most prominent TEE technologies, referred to as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Despite many formal approaches, there is still a lack of formal proof of some critical processes of Intel SGX, such as remote attestation. To fill this gap, we propose a fully automated, rigorous, and sound formal approach to specify and verify the Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID)-based remote attestation in Intel SGX under the assumption that there are no side-channel attacks and no vulnerabilities inside the enclave. The evaluation indicates that the confidentiality of attestation keys is preserved against a Dolev-Yao adversary in this technology. We also present a few of the many inconsistencies found in the existing literature on Intel SGX attestation during formal specification.

As the increasing demands of social services, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted networks promote the promising prospect for implementing high-rate information transmission and applications. The sensing data can be collected by UAVs, a large number of applications based on UAVs have been realized in the 5G networks. However, the malicious UAVs may provide false information and destroy the services. The 5G UAV communication systems face the security threats. Therefore, this paper develops a novel trust-based security scheme for 5G UAV communication systems. Firstly, the architecture of the 5G UAV communication system is presented to improve the communication performance. Secondly, the trust evaluation scheme for UAVs is developed to evaluate the reliability of UAVs. By introducing the trust threshold, the malicious UAVs will be filtered out from the systems to protect the security of systems. Finally, the simulation results have been demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Security has become a crucial consideration and is one of the most important design goals for an embedded system. This paper examines the type of boot sequence, and more specifically a trusted boot which utilizes the method of chain of trust. After defining these terms, this paper will examine the limitations of the existing safe boot, and finally propose the method of trusted boot based on hypothesis testing benchmark and the cost it takes to perform this method.

Protecting critical infrastructure from cyber threats is one of the most important obligations of governments to ensure the national and social security of the society. Developing national cyber situational awareness platform provides a protection of critical infrastructures. In such a way, each infrastructure, independently, generates its own situational awareness and shares it with other infrastructures through a national sharing and alerting center. The national information sharing and alerting center collects cyber information of infrastructures and draws a picture of national situational awareness by examining the potential effects of received threats on other infrastructures and predicting the national cyber status in near future. This paper represents the conceptual architecture for such national sharing system and suggests some brief description of its implementation.

As a current disruptive and transformative technology, artificial intelligence is constantly infiltrating all aspects of production and life. However, with the in-depth development and application of artificial intelligence, the security challenges it faces have become more and more prominent. In the real world, attacks against intelligent systems such as the Internet of Things, smart homes, and driverless cars are constantly appearing, and incidents of artificial intelligence being used in cyber-attacks and cybercrimes frequently occur. This article aims to discuss artificial intelligence security issues and propose some countermeasures.

Low accuracy and slow speed of predictions for cyber security situational awareness. This paper proposes a network security situational awareness model based on accelerated accurate k-means radial basis function (RBF) neural network, the model uses the ball k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the input samples, to get the nodes of the hidden layer of the RBF neural network, speeding up the selection of the initial center point of the RBF neural network, and optimize the parameters of the RBF neural network structure. Finally, use the training data set to train the neural network, using the test data set to test the accuracy of this neural network structure, the results show that this method has a greater improvement in training speed and accuracy than other neural networks.