Biblio

Acoustic communication is a key enabler for underwater Internet of Things networks between autonomous underwater platforms. Underwater Internet of Things networks face a harsh communications environment and limited energy resources which makes them susceptible to interference, whether intentional (i.e., jamming) or unintentional. Resilient, power efficient waveforms and modulation schemes are needed for underwater acoustic communications in order to avoid outages and excessive power drain. We explore the impact of modulation scheme on the resiliency of underwater acoustic communications in the presence of channel impairments, interference, and jamming. In particular, we consider BFSK and OFDM schemes for underwater acoustic communications and assess the utility of Polar coding for strengthening resiliency.

With the rapid development of multimedia and short video, there is a growing concern for video copyright protection. Some work has been proposed to add some copyright or fingerprint information to the video to trace the source of the video when it is stolen and protect video copyright. This paper proposes a video watermarking method based on a deep neural network and curriculum learning for watermarking of sliced videos. The first frame of the segmented video is perturbed by an encoder network, which is invisible and can be distinguished by the decoder network. Our model is trained and tested on an online educational video dataset consisting of 2000 different video clips. Experimental results show that our method can successfully discriminate most watermarked and non-watermarked videos with low visual disturbance, which can be achieved even under a relatively high video compression rate(H.264 video compress with CRF 32).

Embedded systems involve an integration of a large number of intellectual property (IP) blocks to shorten chip's time to market, in which, many IPs are acquired from the untrusted third-party suppliers. However, existing IP trust verification techniques cannot provide an adequate security assurance that no hardware Trojan was implanted inside the untrusted IPs. Hardware Trojans in untrusted IPs may cause processor program execution failures by tampering instruction code and return address. Therefore, this paper presents a secure RISC-V embedded system by integrating a Security Monitoring Unit (SMU), in which, instruction integrity monitoring by the fine-grained program basic blocks and function return address monitoring by the shadow stack are implemented, respectively. The hardware-assisted SMU is tested and validated that while CPU executes a CoreMark program, the SMU does not incur significant performance overhead on providing instruction security monitoring. And the proposed RISC-V embedded system satisfies good balance between performance overhead and resource consumption.

Volumetric Distributed Denial of Service attacks forcefully disrupt the availability of online services by congesting network links with arbitrary high-volume traffic. This brute force approach has collateral impact on the upstream network infrastructure, making early attack traffic removal a key objective. To reduce infrastructure load and maintain service availability, we introduce ReCEIF, a topology-independent mitigation strategy for early, rule-based ingress filtering leveraging deep reinforcement learning. ReCEIF utilizes hierarchical heavy hitters to monitor traffic distribution and detect subnets that are sending high-volume traffic. Deep reinforcement learning subsequently serves to refine hierarchical heavy hitters into effective filter rules that can be propagated upstream to discard traffic originating from attacking systems. Evaluating all filter rules requires only a single clock cycle when utilizing fast ternary content-addressable memory, which is commonly available in software defined networks. To outline the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comparative evaluation to reinforcement learning-based router throttling.

The electromagnetic energy harvesting technology is a new and effective way to supply power to the condition monitoring sensors installed on or near the transmission line. We will use Computer Simulation Technology Software to simulate the different designs of stand-alone electromagnetic energy harvesters The power generated by energy harvesters of different design structures is compared and analyzed through simulation and experimental results. We then propose an improved design of energy harvester.

Cybersecurity for complex systems operating in cyber-physical environment is becoming more and more critical because of the increasing cyber threats and systems' vulnerabilities. Security by design is quite an important method to ensure the systems' normal operations and services supply. For the aim of coping with cyber-attack affections properly, this paper studies the resilient security control issue for time-varying delay systems in cyber-physical environment with state estimation and moving defense approach. Time-varying delay factor induced by communication and network transmission, or data acquisition and processing, or certain cyber-attacks, is considered. To settle the cyber-attacks from the perspective of system control, a dynamic system model considering attacks is presented, and the corresponding switched control model with time-varying delay against attacks is formulated. Then the state estimator for system states is designed to overcome the problem that certain states cannot be measured directly. Estimated states serve as the input of the resilient security controller. Sufficient conditions of the stability of the observer and control system are derived out with the Lyapunov stability analysis method jointly. A moving defense strategy based on anomaly detection and random switching is presented, in which an optimization problem for calculating the proper switching probability of each candidate actuator-controller pair is given. Simulation experimental results are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented scheme.

The world’s most important industrial economy is particularly vulnerable to both external and internal threats, such as the one uncovered in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Upon those systems, the success criteria for security are quite dynamic. Security flaws in these automated SCADA systems have already been discovered by infiltrating the entire network in addition to reducing production line hazards. The objective of our review article is to show various potential future research voids that recent studies have, as well as how many methods are available to concentrate on specific aspects of risk assessment of manufactured systems. The state-of-the-art methods in cyber security risk assessment of SCADA systems are reviewed and compared in this research. Multiple contemporary risk assessment approaches developed for or deployed in the settings of a SCADA system are considered and examined in detail. We outline the approaches’ main points before analyzing them in terms of risk assessment, conventional analytical procedures, and research challenges. The paper also examines possible risk regions or locations where breaches in such automated SCADA systems can emerge, as well as solutions as to how to safeguard and eliminate the hazards when they arise during production manufacturing.

Currently, many organizations are moving to new digital management systems, which is accompanied not only by the introduction of new approaches based on the use of information technology, but also by a change in the organizational and management environment. Risk management is a process necessary to maintain the competitive advantage of an organization, but it can also become involved in the course of digitalization itself, which means that risk management also needs to change to meet modern conditions and ensure the effectiveness of the organization. This article discusses the risk management process in the digital environment. The main approach to the organization of this process is outlined, taking into account the use of information tools, together with the stages of this process, which directly affect the efficiency of the company. The risks that are specific to a digital organization are taken into account. Modern requirements for risk management for organizations are studied, ways of their implementation are outlined. The result is a risk management process that functions in a digital organization.

In order to solve the problem of large data volume brought by the traditional Nyquist sampling theorem in radar signal detection, a compressive detection (CD) model based on compressed sensing (CS) theory is proposed by analyzing the sparsity of the radar target in the range domain. The lower sampling rate completes the compressive sampling of the radar signal on the range field. On this basis, the two-dimensional distribution of the Doppler unit is established by moving target detention moving target detention (MTD), and the detection of the target is achieved with the two-dimensional constant false alarm rate (2D-CFAR) detection algorithm. The simulation experiment results prove that the algorithm can effectively detect the target without the need for reconstruction signals, and has good detection performance.

The cryptology science has gradually gained importance with our digitalized lives. Ensuring the security of data transmitted, processed and stored across digital channels is a major challenge. One of the frequently used components in cryptographic algorithms to ensure security is substitution-box structures. Random selection-based substitution-box structures have become increasingly important lately, especially because of their advantages to prevent side channel attacks. However, the low nonlinearity value of these designs is a problem. In this study, a dataset consisting of twenty different substitution-box structures have been publicly presented to the researchers. The fact that the proposed dataset has high nonlinearity values will allow it to be used in many practical applications in the future studies. The proposed dataset provides a contribution to the literature as it can be used both as an input dataset for the new post-processing algorithm and as a countermeasure to prevent the success of side-channel analyzes.

The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) allows heterogeneous and lightweight smart devices to collaboratively provide services with or without human intervention. With an ever-increasing presence of IoT-based smart applications and their ubiquitous visibility from the Internet, user data generated by highly connected smart IoT devices also incur more concerns on security and privacy. While a lot of efforts are reported to develop lightweight information assurance approaches that are affordable to resource-constrained IoT devices, there is not sufficient attention paid from the aspect of security solutions against hardware-oriented attacks, i.e. side channel attacks. In this paper, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) based Randomized Switched-Mode Voltage Regulation System (RSMVRS) is proposed to prevent power analysis based side channel attacks (P-SCA) on bare metal IoT edge device. The RSMVRS is implemented to direct power to IoT edge devices. The power is supplied to the target device by randomly activating power stages with random time delays. Therefore, the cryptography algorithm executing on the IoT device will not correlate to a predictable power profile, if an adversary performs a SCA by measuring the power traces. The RSMVRS leverages COTS components and experimental study has verified the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Maintaining critical data and process availability is an important challenge of Industry 4.0. Given the variety of smart nodes, data and the access latency that can be tolerated by consumers in modern IoT-based industry, we propose a method for analyzing the resiliency of an IoT network. Due to the complexity of modern system structures, different components in the system can affect the system’s resiliency. Therefore, a fundamental problem is to propose methods to quantify the value of resilience contribution of a node in each system effectively. This paper aims to identify the most critical vertices of the network with respect to the latency constraint resiliency metric. Using important centrality metrics, we identify critical nodes in industrial IoT networks to analyze the degree of resiliency in the IoT environments. The results show that when nodes with the highest value of Closeness Centrality (CC) were disrupted Resiliency of Latency (RL) would have the lowest value. In other words, the results indicate the nodes with the high values for CC are most critical in an IoT network.

The data-driven period produces more and more security-related challenges that even experts can hardly deal with. One of the most complex threats is ransomware, which is very taxing and devastating to detect and mainly prevent. Our research methods showed significant results in identifying ransomware processes using the honeypot concept augmented with symbolic linking to reduce damage made to the file system. The CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) metrics have been adhered to. We propose to optimize the malware process termination procedure and introduce an artificial intelligence-human collaboration to enhance ransomware classification and detection.

A new method for the detection of ransomware in an infected host is described and evaluated. The method utilizes data streams from on-board sensors to fingerprint the initiation of a ransomware infection. These sensor streams, which are common in modern computing systems, are used as a side channel for understanding the state of the system. It is shown that ransomware detection can be achieved in a rapid manner and that the use of slight, yet distinguishable changes in the physical state of a system as derived from a machine learning predictive model is an effective technique. A feature vector, consisting of various sensor outputs, is coupled with a detection criteria to predict the binary state of ransomware present versus normal operation. An advantage of this approach is that previously unknown or zero-day version s of ransomware are vulnerable to this detection method since no apriori knowledge of the malware characteristics are required. Experiments are carried out with a variety of different system loads and with different encryption methods used during a ransomware attack. Two test systems were utilized with one having a relatively low amount of available sensor data and the other having a relatively high amount of available sensor data. The average time for attack detection in the "sensor-rich" system was 7.79 seconds with an average Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.8905 for binary system state predictions regardless of encryption method and system load. The model flagged all attacks tested.

Security of physical layer key generation is based on the randomness and reciprocity of wireless fading channel, which has attracted more and more attention in recent years. This paper proposes a rate adaptive key agreement scheme and utilizes the received signal strength (RSS) of the channel between two wireless devices to generate the key. In conventional information reconciliation process, the bit inconsistency rate is usually eliminated by using the filter method, which increases the possibility of exposing the generated key bit string. Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, this paper develops a scheme that uses Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, one of forward error correction channel codes, for information reconciliation. Owing to strong error correction performance of RS codes, the proposed scheme can solve the problem of inconsistent key bit string in the process of channel sensing. At the same time, the composition of RS codes can help the scheme realize rate adaptation well due to the construction principle of error correction code, which can freely control the code rate and achieve the reconciliation method of different key bit string length. Through experiments, we find that when the number of inconsistent key bits is not greater than the maximum error correction number of RS codes, it can well meet the purpose of reconciliation.

Smart grids can be exposed to relay attacks (or wormhole attacks) resulting from weaknesses in cryptographic operations such as authentication and key derivation associated with process automation protocols. Relay attacks refer to attacks in which authentication is evaded without needing to attack the smart grid itself. By using a universal composability model that provides a strong security notion for designing cryptographic operations, we formulate the necessary relay resilience settings for strengthening authentication and key derivation and enhancing relay security in process automation protocols in this paper. We introduce R-Chain, a universally composable relay resilience framework that prevents bypass of cryptographic operations. Our framework provides an ideal chaining functionality that integrates all cryptographic operations such that all outputs from a preceding operation are used as input to the subsequent operation to support relay resilience. We apply R-Chain to provide relay resilience in a practical smart grid process automation protocol, namely WirelessHART.

Internet of Things (IoT) networks are often attacked to compromise the security and privacy of application data and disrupt the services offered by them. The attacks are being launched at different layers of IoT protocol stack by exploiting their inherent weaknesses. Forensic investigations need substantial artifacts and datasets to support the decisions taken during analysis and while attributing the attack to the adversary. Network provenance plays a crucial role in establishing the relationships between network entities. Hence IoT networks can be made forensic ready so that network provenance may be collected to help in constructing these artifacts. The paper proposes Ready-IoT, a novel forensic readiness model for IoT environment to collect provenance from the network which comprises of both network parameters and traffic. A link layer dataset, Link-IoT Dataset is also generated by querying provenance graphs. Finally, Link-IoT dataset is compared with other IoT datasets to draw a line of difference and applicability to IoT environments. We believe that the proposed features have the potential to detect the attacks performed on the IoT network.

In recent times, attackers are continuously developing advanced techniques for evading security, stealing personal financial data, Intellectual Property (IP) and sensitive information. These attacks often employ multiple attack vectors for gaining initial access to the systems. Analysts are often challenged to identify malware objective, initial attack vectors, attack propagation, evading techniques, protective mechanisms and unseen techniques. Most of these attacks are frequently referred to as Multi stage attacks and pose a grave threat to organizations, individuals and the government. Early multistage attack detection is a crucial measure to counter malware and deactivate it. Most traditional security solutions use signature-based detection, which frequently fails to thwart zero-day attacks. Manual analysis of these samples requires enormous effort for effectively counter exponential growth of malware samples. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging Machine Learning and MITRE Adversary Tactic Technique and Common knowledge (ATT&CK) framework for early multistage attack detection in real time. Firstly, we have developed a run-time engine that receives notification while malicious executable is downloaded via browser or a launch of a new process in the system. Upon notification, the engine extracts the features from static executable for learning if the executable is malicious. Secondly, we use the MITRE ATT&CK framework, evolved based on the real-world observations of the cyber attacks, that best describes the multistage attack with respect to the adversary Tactics, Techniques and Procedure (TTP) for detecting the malicious executable as well as predict the stages that the malware executes during the attack. Lastly, we propose a real-time system that combines both these techniques for early multistage attack detection. The proposed model has been tested on 6000 unpacked malware samples and it achieves 98 % accuracy. The other major contribution in this paper is identifying the Windows API calls for each of the adversary techniques based on the MITRE ATT&CK.

In recent years, one of the important and interesting tasks has become the protection of civilian and military objects from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying a potential threat. To solve this problem, it is required to detect UAVs and activate protective systems. UAVs can be represented as aerodynamic objects of the monoplane or multicopter type with acoustic fingerprints. In this paper we consider algorithm for UAV acoustic detection and recognition system. Preliminary results of analysis of experimental data show effectiveness of proposed approach.

Modern power grids are dependent on communication systems for data collection, visualization, and control. Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3) is commonly used in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in power systems to allow control system software and hardware to communicate. To study the dependencies between communication network security, power system data collection, and industrial hardware, it is important to enable communication capabilities with real-time power system simulation. In this paper, we present the integration of new functionality of a power systems dynamic simulation package into our cyber-physical power system testbed that supports real-time power system data transfer using DNP3, demonstrated with an industrial real-time automation controller (RTAC). The usage and configuration of DNP3 with real-world equipment in to achieve power system monitoring and control of a large-scale synthetic electric grid via this DNP3 communication is presented. Then, an exemplar of DNP3 data collection and control is achieved in software and hardware using the 2000-bus Texas synthetic grid.

Cloud computing has changed the paradigm of using computing resources. It has shifted from traditional storage and computing to Internet based computing leveraging economy of scale, cost saving, elimination of data redundancy, scalability, availability and regulatory compliance. With these, cloud also brings plenty of security issues. As security is not a one-time solution, there have been efforts to investigate and provide countermeasures. In the wake of emerging quantum computers, the aim of post-quantum cryptography is to develop cryptography schemes that are secure against both classical computers and quantum computers. Since cloud is widely used across the globe for outsourcing data, it is essential to strive at providing betterment of security schemes from time to time. This paper reviews recent development, methods of cloud data security in post-quantum perspectives. It provides useful insights pertaining to the security schemes used to safeguard data dynamics associated with cloud computing. The findings of this paper gives directions for further research in pursuit of more secure cloud data storage and retrieval.

Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) are susceptible to non-invasive physical attacks such as sensor spoofing attacks that are beyond the classical cybersecurity domain. These attacks have motivated numerous research efforts on attack detection, but little attention on what to do after detecting an attack. The importance of attack recovery is emphasized by the need to mitigate the attack’s impact on a system and restore it to continue functioning. There are only a few works addressing attack recovery, but they all rely on prior knowledge of system dynamics. To overcome this limitation, we propose Recovery-by-Learning, a data-driven attack recovery framework that restores CPS from sensor attacks. The framework leverages natural redundancy among heterogeneous sensors and historical data for attack recovery. Specially, the framework consists of two major components: state predictor and data checkpointer. First, the predictor is triggered to estimate systems states after the detection of an attack. We propose a deep learning-based prediction model that exploits the temporal correlation among heterogeneous sensors. Second, the checkpointer executes when no attack is detected. We propose a double sliding window based checkpointing protocol to remove compromised data and keep trustful data as input to the state predictor. Third, we implement and evaluate the effectiveness of our framework using a realistic data set and a ground vehicle simulator. The results show that our method restores a system to continue functioning in presence of sensor attacks.

Containerization technology becomes one of alternatives in virtualization. Docker requires docker daemon to build, distribute and run the container and this makes the docker vulnerable to an attack surface called Docker daemon Attack Surface - an attack against docker daemon taking over the access (root). Using rootless mode is one way to prevent the attack. Therefore, this research demonstrates the attack prevention by making and running the docker container in the rootless mode. The success of the attack can be proven when the user is able to access the file /etc/shadow that is supposed to be only accessible for the rooted users. Findings of this research demonstrated that the file is inaccessible when the docker is run using the rootless mode. CPU usage is measured when the attack is being simulated using the docker run through root privileges and rootless mode, to identify whether the use of rootless mode in the docker adds the load of CPU usage and to what extent its increased. Results showed that the CPU use was 39% when using the docker with the rootless mode. Meanwhile, using the docker with the right of the root access was only 0%. The increase of 39% is commensurate with the benefit that can prevent the docker daemon attack surface.

The 2020 Corona pandemic has shown that on-line real-time multimedia communication is of vital importance when regular face-to-face meetings are not possible. One popular choice for conducting these meetings is the open standard WebRTC which is implemented in every major web browser. Even though this technology has found widespread use, there are still open issues with how different congestion control (CC) algorithms of Media- and DataChannels interact. In 2018 we have shown that the issue of self-inflicted queuing delay can be mitigated by introducing a CC coupling mechanism called FSE-NG. Originally, this solution was only capable of linking DataChannel flows controlled by TCP-style CCs and MediaChannels controlled by NADA CC. Standardization has progressed and along with NADA, IETF has also standardized the RTP CC SCReAM. This work extends the FSE-NG algorithm to also incorporate flows controlled by the latter algorithm. By means of simulation, we show that our approach is capable of drastically reducing end-to-end delays while also increasing RTP throughput and thus enabling WebRTC communication in scenarios where it has not been applicable before.

Smart grids have to protect meter measurements against false data injection attacks. By modifying the meter measurements, the attacker misleads the control decisions of the control center, which results in physical damages of power systems. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based vulnerability analysis scheme for data injection attack without relying on the power system topology. This scheme enables the attacker to choose the data injection attack vector based on the meter measurements, the power system status, the previous injected errors and the number of meters to compromise. By combining deep reinforcement learning with prioritized experience replay, the proposed scheme more frequently replays the successful vulnerability detection experiences while bypassing the bad data detection, which is able to accelerate the learning speed. Simulation results based on the IEEE 14 bus system show that this scheme increases the probability of successful vulnerability detection and reduce the number of meters to compromise compared with the benchmark scheme.