Biblio

Searchable Symmetric Encryption is a mechanism that facilitates search over encrypted data that are outsourced to an untrusted server. SSE schemes are practical as they trade nicely security for efficiency. However, the supported functionalities are mainly limited to single keyword queries. In this paper, we present a new efficient SSE scheme, called REX, that supports range queries. REX is a no interactive (single round) and response-hiding scheme. It has optimal communication and search computation complexity, while it is much more secure than traditional Order Preserving Encryption based range SSE schemes.

The effectiveness of supervised learning techniques has made them ubiquitous in research and practice. In high-dimensional settings, supervised learning commonly relies on dimensionality reduction to improve performance and identify the most important factors in predicting outcomes. However, the economic importance of learning has made it a natural target for adversarial manipulation of training data, which we term poisoning attacks. Prior approaches to dealing with robust supervised learning rely on strong assumptions about the nature of the feature matrix, such as feature independence and sub-Gaussian noise with low variance. We propose an integrated method for robust regression that relaxes these assumptions, assuming only that the feature matrix can be well approximated by a low-rank matrix. Our techniques integrate improved robust low-rank matrix approximation and robust principle component regression, and yield strong performance guarantees. Moreover, we experimentally show that our methods significantly outperform state of the art both in running time and prediction error.

As modern attacks become more stealthy and persistent, detecting or preventing them at their early stages becomes virtually impossible. Instead, an attack investigation or provenance system aims to continuously monitor and log interesting system events with minimal overhead. Later, if the system observes any anomalous behavior, it analyzes the log to identify who initiated the attack and which resources were affected by the attack and then assess and recover from any damage incurred. However, because of a fundamental tradeoff between log granularity and system performance, existing systems typically record system-call events without detailed program-level activities (e.g., memory operation) required for accurately reconstructing attack causality or demand that every monitored program be instrumented to provide program-level information. To address this issue, we propose RAIN, a Refinable Attack INvestigation system based on a record-replay technology that records system-call events during runtime and performs instruction-level dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) during on-demand process replay. Instead of replaying every process with DIFT, RAIN conducts system-call-level reachability analysis to filter out unrelated processes and to minimize the number of processes to be replayed, making inter-process DIFT feasible. Evaluation results show that RAIN effectively prunes out unrelated processes and determines attack causality with negligible false positive rates. In addition, the runtime overhead of RAIN is similar to existing system-call level provenance systems and its analysis overhead is much smaller than full-system DIFT.

Wireless sensor networks are responsible for sensing, gathering and processing the information of the objects in the network coverage area. Basic data fusion technology generally does not provide data privacy protection mechanism, and the privacy protection mechanism in health care, military reconnaissance, smart home and other areas of the application is usually indispensable. In this paper, we consider the privacy, confidentiality, and the accuracy of fusion results, and propose a data fusion algorithm for privacy preserving. This algorithm relies on the characteristics of data fusion, and uses the method of pre-distribution random number in the node to get the privacy protection requirements of the original data. Theoretical analysis shows that the malicious attacker attempts to steal the difficulty of node privacy in PPND algorithm. At the same time in the TOSSIM simulation results also show that, compared with TAG, SMART algorithm, PPND algorithm in the data traffic, the convergence accuracy of the good performance.

A common approach for designing scalable algorithms for massive data sets is to distribute the computation across, say k, machines and process the data using limited communication between them. A particularly appealing framework here is the simultaneous communication model whereby each machine constructs a small representative summary of its own data and one obtains an approximate/exact solution from the union of the representative summaries. If the representative summaries needed for a problem are small, then this results in a communication-efficient and $\backslash$emph\round-optimal\ (requiring essentially no interaction between the machines) protocol. Some well-known examples of techniques for creating summaries include sampling, linear sketching, and composable coresets. These techniques have been successfully used to design communication efficient solutions for many fundamental graph problems. However, two prominent problems are notably absent from the list of successes, namely, the maximum matching problem and the minimum vertex cover problem. Indeed, it was shown recently that for both these problems, even achieving a modest approximation factor of $\backslash$polylog\(n)\ requires using representative summaries of size $\backslash$widetilde\$\backslash$Omega\(ntextasciicircum2) i.e. essentially no better summary exists than each machine simply sending its entire input graph. The main insight of our work is that the intractability of matching and vertex cover in the simultaneous communication model is inherently connected to an adversarial partitioning of the underlying graph across machines. We show that when the underlying graph is randomly partitioned across machines, both these problems admit $\backslash$emph\randomized composable coresets\ of size $\backslash$widetildeØ\(n) that yield an $\backslash$widetildeØ\(1)-approximate solution$\backslash$footnote\Here and throughout the paper, we use $\backslash$Ot($\backslash$cdot) notation to suppress $\backslash$polylog\(n)\ factors, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. In other words, a small subgraph of the input graph at each machine can be identified as its representative summary and the final answer then is obtained by simply running any maximum matching or minimum vertex cover algorithm on these combined subgraphs. This results in an Õ(1)-approximation simultaneous protocol for these problems with Õ(nk) total communication when the input is randomly partitioned across k machines. We also prove our results are optimal in a very strong sense: we not only rule out existence of smaller randomized composable coresets for these problems but in fact show that our $\backslash$Ot(nk) bound for total communication is optimal for em any simultaneous communication protocol (i.e. not only for randomized coresets) for these two problems. Finally, by a standard application of composable coresets, our results also imply MapReduce algorithms with the same approximation guarantee in one or two rounds of communication, improving the previous best known round complexity for these problems.\vphantom\

Ransomware is one of the most increasing malwares used by cyber-criminals in recent days. This type of malware uses cryptographic technology that encrypts a user's important files, folders makes the computer systems unusable, holds the decryption key and asks for the ransom from the victims for recovery. The recent ransomware families are very sophisticated and difficult to analyze & detect using static features only. On the other hand, latest crypto-ransomwares having sandboxing and IDS evading capabilities. So obviously, static or dynamic analysis of the ransomware alone cannot provide better solution. In this paper, we will present a Machine Learning based approach which will use integrated method, a combination of static and dynamic analysis to detect ransomware. The experimental test samples were taken from almost all ransomware families including the most recent ``WannaCry''. The results also suggest that combined analysis can detect ransomware with better accuracy compared to individual analysis approach. Since ransomware samples show some ``run-time'' and ``static code'' features, it also helps for the early detection of new and similar ransomware variants.

Cloud computing presents unlimited prospects for Information Technology (IT) industry and business enterprises alike. Rapid advancement brings a dark underbelly of new vulnerabilities and challenges unfolding with alarming regularity. Although cloud technology provides a ubiquitous environment facilitating business enterprises to conduct business across disparate locations, security effectiveness of this platform interspersed with threats which can bring everything that subscribes to the cloud, to a halt raises questions. However advantages of cloud platforms far outweighs drawbacks and study of new challenges helps overcome drawbacks of this technology. One such emerging security threat is of ransomware attack on the cloud which threatens to hold systems and data on cloud network to ransom with widespread damaging implications. This provides huge scope for IT security specialists to sharpen their skillset to overcome this new challenge. This paper covers the broad cloud architecture, current inherent cloud threat mechanisms, ransomware vulnerabilities posed and suggested methods to mitigate it.

This paper proposes a prototype of a level 3 autonomous vehicle using Raspberry Pi, capable of detecting the nearby vehicles using an IR sensor. We make the first attempt to analyze autonomous vehicles from a microscopic level, focusing on each vehicle and their communications with the nearby vehicles and road-side units. Two sets of passive and active experiments on a pair of prototypes were run, demonstrating the interconnectivity of the developed prototype. Several sensors were incorporated into an emulation based on System-on-Chip to further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.

Robust Adaptive Secure Secret Sharing (RASSS) is a protocol for reconstructing secrets and information in distributed computing systems even in the presence of a large number of untrusted participants. Since the original Shamir's Secret Sharing scheme, there have been efforts to secure the technique against dishonest shareholders. Early on, researchers determined that the Reed-Solomon encoding property of the Shamir's share distribution equation and its decoding algorithm could tolerate cheaters up to one third of the total shareholders. However, if the number of cheaters grows beyond the error correcting capability (distance) of the Reed-Solomon codes, the reconstruction of the secret is hindered. Untrusted participants or cheaters could hide in the decoding procedure, or even frame up the honest parties. In this paper, we solve this challenge and propose a secure protocol that is no longer constrained by the limitations of the Reed-Solomon codes. As long as there are a minimum number of honest shareholders, the RASSS protocol is able to identify the cheaters and retrieve the correct secret or information in a distributed system with a probability close to 1 with less than 60% of hardware overhead. Furthermore, the adaptive nature of the protocol enables considerable hardware and timing resource savings and makes RASSS highly practical.

Ransomware attacks are becoming prevalent nowadays with the flourishing of crypto-currencies. As the most harmful variant of ransomware crypto-ransomware encrypts the victim's valuable data, and asks for ransom money. Paying the ransom money, however, may not guarantee recovery of the data being encrypted. Most of the existing work for ransomware defense purely focuses on ransomware detection. A few of them consider data recovery from ransomware attacks, but they are not able to defend against ransomware which can obtain a high system privilege. In this work, we design RDS3, a novel Ransomware Defense Strategy, in which we Stealthily back up data in the Spare space of a computing device, such that the data encrypted by ransomware can be restored. Our key idea is that the spare space which stores the backup data is fully isolated from the ransomware. In this way, the ransomware is not able to ``touch'' the backup data regardless of what privilege it can obtain. Security analysis and experimental evaluation show that RDS3 can mitigate ransomware attacks with an acceptable overhead.

An approach to creating secure virtual private networks for the Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol suite is described. It encrypts and encapsulates NDN packets from higher security domains and places them as the payload in unencrypted NDN packets, much as IPsec encapsulates encrypted IP datagrams in unencrypted IP datagrams. We then leverage the well-known properties of the IP-in-IP approach, taken by IPsec in tunnel mode, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed NDN-in-NDN approach.

Image and video super-resolution (SR) has been explored for several decades. However, few works are integrated into practical systems for real-time image and video SR. In this work, we present a real-time deep video SpaTial Resolution UpConversion SysTem (STRUCT++). Our demo system achieves real-time performance (50 fps on CPU for CIF sequences and 45 fps on GPU for HDTV videos) and provides several functions: 1) batch processing; 2) full resolution comparison; 3) local region zooming in. These functions are convenient for super-resolution of a batch of videos (at most 10 videos in parallel), comparisons with other approaches and observations of local details of the SR results. The system is built on a Global context aggregation and Local queue jumping Network (GLNet). It has a thinner and deeper network structure to aggregate global context with an additional local queue jumping path to better model local structures of the signal. GLNet achieves state-of-the-art performance for real-time video SR.

The Modbus/TCP protocol is commonly used in the industrial control systems for communications between the human-machine interface and the industrial controllers. This paper proposes a real-time intrusion detection method based on bidirectional access of the Modbus/TCP protocol. The method doesnt require key observation that Modbus/TCP traffic to and from master device or slave device is periodic. Anomaly detection can be realized in time by the method after checking only two packets. And even though invader modifies the legal function code to another legal one in the packet from master device to slave device, the method can also figure it out. The test results show that the presented method has traits of timeliness, low false positive rate and low false negative rate.

A hidden dimension of software and hardware security is secret-revealing information disseminated through side channels. Even the most secure systems tend to reveal their secrets through secret-dependent computation. Secret-dependent computation is detectable by monitoring a system's time, power, outputs, and electromagnetic signature. Common defenses to side channel emanations include adding noise to the channel or making algorithmic changes to eliminate specific side channels. Unfortunately, existing solutions are either, not automatic, not comprehensive, and/or not practical. We propose an isolation-based approach for eliminating power and timing side-channels that is automatic, comprehensive, and practical. Our approach eliminates side channels by leveraging energy harvesting techniques to isolate trusted computation from the rest of the system. Software has the ability to request a fixed-power and fixed-time quantum of isolated computation. By discretizing power and time, our approach controls the granularity of side channel leakage; the only burden on programmers is to ensure that all secret-dependent execution differences converge within a single power/time quantum. We design and implement three approaches to power/time-based quantization and isolation: a wholly-digital version, a hybrid version that uses capacitors for time tracking, and a full-custom version. A key insight we leverage is that capacitors act as resource efficient, workload and environment independent time trackers. We explore the trade-offs of the three designs and look at the challenges ahead.

We present a framework for learning to describe finegrained visual differences between instances using attribute phrases. Attribute phrases capture distinguishing aspects of an object (e.g., “propeller on the nose” or “door near the wing” for airplanes) in a compositional manner. Instances within a category can be described by a set of these phrases and collectively they span the space of semantic attributes for a category. We collect a large dataset of such phrases by asking annotators to describe several visual differences between a pair of instances within a category. We then learn to describe and ground these phrases to images in the context of a reference game between a speaker and a listener. The goal of a speaker is to describe attributes of an image that allows the listener to correctly identify it within a pair. Data collected in a pairwise manner improves the ability of the speaker to generate, and the ability of the listener to interpret visual descriptions. Moreover, due to the compositionality of attribute phrases, the trained listeners can interpret descriptions not seen during training for image retrieval, and the speakers can generate attribute-based explanations for differences between previously unseen categories. We also show that embedding an image into the semantic space of attribute phrases derived from listeners offers 20% improvement in accuracy over existing attributebased representations on the FGVC-aircraft dataset.

Ransomware techniques have evolved over time with the most resilient attacks making data recovery practically impossible. This has driven countermeasures to shift towards recovery against prevention but in this paper, we model ransomware attacks from an infection vector point of view. We follow the basic infection chain of crypto ransomware and use Bayesian network statistics to infer some of the most common ransomware infection vectors. We also employ the use of attack and sensor nodes to capture uncertainty in the Bayesian network.