Biblio

The need of more secured and environmental energy is becoming a necessity and priority in an environment suffering from serious problems due to technological development. Since the Smart Grid is a promising alternative that supports green energy and enhances a better management of electricity, the security side has became one of the major and critical associated issues in building the communication network in the microgrid.In this paper we will present the Smart Grid Cyber security challenges and propose a distributed algorithm that face one of the biggest problems threatening the smart grid which is fires.

With the rapid development of smart grids and the continuous deepening of informatization, while realizing remote telemetry and remote control of massive data-based grid operation, electricity information network security problems have become more serious and prominent. A method for electricity information network security situation prediction method based on improved deep belief network is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the affinity propagation clustering algorithm is used to determine the depth of the deep belief network and the number of hidden layer nodes based on sample parameters. Secondly, continuously adjust the scaling factor and crossover probability in the differential evolution algorithm according to the population similarity. Finally, a chaotic search method is used to perform a second search for the best individuals and similarity centers of each generation of the population. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm not only enhances the generalization ability of electricity information network security situation prediction, but also has higher prediction accuracy.

With the improvement of people's living standards, more and more network users access the network, including a large number of infrastructure, these devices constitute the Internet of things(IoT). With the rapid expansion of devices in the IoT, the data transmission between the IoT has become more complex, and the security issues are facing greater challenges. SDN as a mature network architecture, its security has been affirmed by the industry, it separates the data layer from the control layer, thus greatly improving the security of the network. In this paper, we apply the SDN to the IoT, and propose a IoT network architecture based on SDN. In this architecture, we not only make use of the security features of SDN, but also deploy different security modules in each layer of SDN to integrate, analyze and plan various data through the IoT, which undoubtedly improves the security performance of the network. In the end, we give a comprehensive introduction to the system and verify its performance.

The aim of the study was to investigate the privacy and security of the user data on Twitter. For gathering the essential information, more than two million relevant tweets through the span of two years were used to conduct the study. In addition, we are classifying sentiment of Twitter data by exhibiting results of a machine learning by using the Naive Bayes algorithm. Although this algorithm is time consuming compared to the listing method yet can lead to effective estimation relatively. The tweets are extracted and pre-processed and then categorized them in neutral, negative and positive sentiments. By applying the chosen methodology, the study would end up in identifying the most effective mobile operating systems according to the sentiments of social media users. Additionally, the application of the algorithm needs to meet the privacy and security needs of Twitter users in order to optimize the use of social media intelligence. The approach will help in assessing the competitive intelligence of the Twitter data and the challenges in the form of privacy and- security of the user content and their contextual information simultaneously. The findings of the empirical research show that users are more concerned about the privacy and security of iOS compared to Android and Windows phone.

Cloud computing provides an appearing application for compelling vision in managing big-data files and responding queries over a distributed cloud platform. To overcome privacy revealing risks, sensitive documents and private data are usually stored in the clouds in a cipher-based manner. However, it is inefficient to search the data in traditional encryption systems. Searchable encryption is a useful cryptographic primitive to enable users to retrieve data in ciphertexts. However, the traditional searchable encryptions provide lower search efficiency and cannot carry out fuzzy multikeyword queries. To solve this issue, in this article, we propose a searchable encryption that supports privacy-preserving fuzzy multikeyword search (SE-PPFM) in cloud systems, which is built by asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryptions and Hadamard product operations. In order to realize the functionality of efficient fuzzy searches, we employ Word2vec as the primitive of machine learning to obtain a fuzzy correlation score between encrypted data and queries predicates. We analyze and evaluate the performance in terms of token of multikeyword, retrieval and match time, file retrieval time and matching accuracy, etc. The experimental results show that our scheme can achieve a higher efficiency in fuzzy multikeyword ciphertext search and provide a higher accuracy in retrieving and matching procedure.

Existing logic-locking attacks are known to successfully decrypt functionally correct key of a locked combinational circuit. It is possible to extend these attacks to real-world Silicon-based Intellectual Properties (IPs, which are sequential circuits) through scan-chains by selectively initializing the combinational logic and analyzing the responses. In this paper, we propose SeqL, which achieves functional isolation and locks selective flip-flop functional-input/scan-output pairs, thus rendering the decrypted key functionally incorrect. We conduct a formal study of the scan-locking problem and demonstrate automating our proposed defense on any given IP. We show that SeqL hides functionally correct keys from the attacker, thereby increasing the likelihood of the decrypted key being functionally incorrect. When tested on pipelined combinational benchmarks (ISCAS, MCNC), sequential benchmarks (ITC) and a fully-fledged RISC-V CPU, SeqL gave 100% resilience to a broad range of state-of-the-art attacks including SAT [1], Double-DIP [2], HackTest [3], SMT [4], FALL [5], Shift-and-Leak [6] and Multi-cycle attacks [7].

Mobile Edge Computing may become a prevalent platform to support applications where mobile devices have limited compute, storage, energy and/or data privacy concerns. In this paper, we study the efficient provisioning and management of compute resources in the Edge-to-Cloud continuum for different types of real-time applications with timeliness requirements depending on application-level update rates and communication/compute delays. We begin by introducing a highly stylized network model allowing us to study the salient features of this problem including its sensitivity to compute vs. communication costs, application requirements, and traffic load variability. We then propose an online decentralized service placement algorithm, based on estimating network delays and adapting application update rates, which achieves high service availability. Our results exhibit how placement can be optimized and how a load-balancing strategy can achieve near-optimal service availability in large networks.

With the development of the Internet, the amount of information on the Internet is increasing rapidly, which makes it difficult for people to select the information they really want. A recommendation system is an effective way to solve this problem. Fake users can be injected by criminals to attack the recommendation system; therefore, accurate identification of fake users is a necessary feature of the recommendation system. Existing fake user detection algorithms focus on designing recognition methods for different types of attacks and have limited detection capabilities against unknown or hybrid attacks. The use of deep learning models can automate the extraction of false user scoring features, but neural network models are not applicable to discrete user scoring data. In this paper, random walking is used to rearrange the otherwise discrete user rating data into a rating feature matrix with spatial continuity. The rating data and the text data have some similarity in the distribution mode. By effective analogy, the TextCNN model originally used in NLP domain can be improved and applied to the classification task of rating feature matrix. Combining the ideas of random walking and word vector processing, this paper proposes a TextCNN detection model for user rating data. To verify the validity of the proposed model, the model is tested on MoiveLens dataset against 7 different attack detection algorithms, and exhibits better performance when compared with 4 attack detection algorithms. Especially for the Aop attack, the proposed model has nearly 100% detection performance with F1 - value as the evaluation index.

Intent classification is an important and relevant area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with applications ranging from marketing and product design to intelligent communication. This paper explores the performance of various models and techniques for short text intent classification in the context of chatbots. The problem was explored for use within the mental wellness and therapy chatbot application, Wysa, to give improved responses to free-text user input. The authors looked at classifying text samples in-to 4 categories - assertions, refutations, clarifiers and transitions. For this, the suitability of the following techniques was evaluated: count vectors, TF-IDF, sentence embeddings and n-grams, as well as modifications of the same. Each technique was used to train a number of state-of-the-art classifiers, and the results have been compiled and presented. This is the first documented implementation of Arora's modification to sentence embeddings for real world use. It also introduces a technique to generate custom stop words that gave a significant gain in performance (10 percentage points). The best pipeline, using these techniques together, gave an accuracy of 95 percent.

An effective way for building secure software is to embed security into software in the early stages of software development. Thus, we aim to study several evidences of code anomalies introduced during the software development phase, that may be indicators of security issues in software, such as code smells, structural complexity represented by diverse software metrics, the issues detected by static code analysers, and finally missing security best practices. To use such evidences for vulnerability prediction and removal, we first need to understand how they are correlated with security issues. Then, we need to discover how these imperfect raw data can be integrated to achieve a reliable, accurate and valuable decision about a portion of code. Finally, we need to construct a security actuator providing suggestions to the developers to remove or fix the detected issues from the code. All of these will lead to the construction of a framework, including security monitoring, security analyzer, and security actuator platforms, that are necessary for a security-aware integrated development environment (SIDE).

The construction of polar code refers to selecting K "most reliable polarizing channels" in N polarizing channels to WN(1)transmit information bits. For non-systematic polar code, Arikan proposed a method to measure the channel reliability for BEC channel, which is called Bhattacharyya Parameter method. The calculated complexity of this method is O(N) . In this paper, we find the complementarity of Bhattacharyya Parameter. According to the complementarity, the code construction under a certain channel condition can be quickly deduced from the complementary channel condition.

Intentional interference such as spoofing is an emerging threat to GPS receivers used in both civilian and defense applications. With the majority of smartphones relying on GPS for positioning and navigation, the vulnerability of these phones to spoofing attacks is an issue of security concern. In this paper, it is demonstrated that is easy to successfully spoof a smartphone using a simplistic spoofing technique. A spoofing signal is generated using open-source signal simulator and transmitted using a low-cost SDR. In view of the tremendously increasing usage of GPS enabled smartphones, it is necessary to develop suitable countermeasures for spoofing. This work carries significance as it would help in understanding the effects of spoofing at various levels of signal processing in the receiver and develop advanced spoofing detection and mitigation techniques.

The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates the Internet and electronic devices belonging to different domains, such as smart home automation, industrial processes, military applications, health, and environmental monitoring. Usually, IoT devices have limited resources and Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are being used to interconnect such devices. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is one of the preferred routing protocols for this type of network, since it was specially developed for LLNs, also known as IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). In this paper the most well-known routing attacks against 6LoWPAN networks were studied and implemented through simulation, conducting a behavioral analysis of network components (resources, topology, and data traffic) under attack condition. In order to achieve a better understanding on how attacks in 6LoWPAN work, we first conducted a study on 6LoWPAN networks and RPL protocol functioning. Furthermore, we also studied a series of well-known routing attacks against this type of Wireless Sensor Networks and these attacks were then simulated using Cooja simulator provided by Contiki operating system. The results obtained after the simulations are discussed along with other previous researches. This analysis may be of real interest when it comes to identify indicators of compromise for each type of attack and appropriate countermeasures for prevention and detection of these attacks.

This paper discusses and demonstrates the construction of a quantum modular exponentiation circuit in the Qiskit simulator for use in Shor's Algorithm for integer factorization problem (IFP), which is deemed to be able to crack RSA cryptosystems when a large-qubit quantum computer exists. We base our implementation on Vedral, Barenco, and Ekert (VBE) proposal of quantum modular exponentiation, one of the firsts to explicitly provide the aforementioned circuit. Furthermore, we present an example simulation of how to construct a 7xmod 15 circuit in a step-by-step manner, giving clear and detailed information and consideration that currently not provided in the existing literature, and present the whole circuit for use in Shor's Algorithm. Our present simulation shows that the 4-bit VBE quantum modular exponentiation circuit can be constructed, simulated, and measured in Qiskit, while the Shor's Algorithm incorporating this VBE approach itself can be constructed but not yet simulated due to an overly large number of QASM instructions.

Image authentication techniques are basically used to check whether the received document is accurate or actual as it was transmitted by the source node or not. Image authentication ensures the integrity of the digital images and identify the ownership of the copyright of the digital images. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is method based on spatial domain which is used to extract important features from an image. SVD function decomposes an image into three matrices (U, S, V), the S matrix is a diagonal matrix constitutes singular values. These values are important features of that particular image. The quick response code features are utilized to create QR code from the extracted values. The evaluations produced represents that this designed method is better in producing authenticated image as compared to existing schemes.

The recent development of distribution-level phasor measurement units, a.k.a. micro-PMUs, has been an important step towards achieving situational awareness in power distribution networks. The challenge however is to transform the large amount of data that is generated by micro-PMUs to actionable information and then match the information to use cases with practical value to system operators. This open problem is addressed in this paper. First, we introduce a novel data-driven event detection technique to pick out valuable portion of data from extremely large raw micro-PMU data. Subsequently, a datadriven event classifier is developed to effectively classify power quality events. Importantly, we use field expert knowledge and utility records to conduct an extensive data-driven event labeling. Moreover, certain aspects from event detection analysis are adopted as additional features to be fed into the classifier model. In this regard, a multi-class support vector machine (multi-SVM) classifier is trained and tested over 15 days of real-world data from two micro-PMUs on a distribution feeder in Riverside, CA. In total, we analyze 1.2 billion measurement points, and 10,700 events. The effectiveness of the developed event classifier is compared with prevalent multi-class classification methods, including k-nearest neighbor method as well as decision-tree method. Importantly, two real-world use-cases are presented for the proposed data analytics tools, including remote asset monitoring and distribution-level oscillation analysis.

Undamped power system oscillations are detrimental to stable and security of the electric grid. Historically, poorly damped low frequency rotor oscillations have caused system blackouts or brownouts. It is required to monitor the oscillation damping controllers such as power system stabilizers' (PSS) performance at energy control centers as well as at power plant control centers. Phasor measurement units (PMUs) based time response and frequency response information on PSS performance is collected. A fuzzy logic system is developed to combine the time and frequency response information to derive the situational awareness on PSS performance on synchronous generator's oscillation(s). A two-area four-machine benchmark power system is simulated on a real-time digital simulator platform. Fuzzy logic system developed is evaluated for different system disturbances. Situational awareness on PSS performance on synchronous generator's oscillation(s) allows the control center operator to enhance the power system operation more stable and secure.

Trust among humans affects the way we interact with each other. In autonomous systems, this trust is often predefined and hard-coded before the systems are deployed. However, when systems encounter unfolding situations, requiring them to interact with others, a notion of trust will be inevitable. In this paper, we discuss trust as a fundamental measure to enable an autonomous system to decide whether or not to interact with another system, whether biological or artificial. These decisions become increasingly important when continuously integrating with others during runtime.

SM9 is an identity-based cryptography algorithm published by the State Cryptography Administration of China. With SM9, a user's private key for signing is generated by a central system called key generation center (KGC). When the owner of the private key wants to shirk responsibility by denying that the signature was generated by himself, he can claim that the operator of KGC forged the signature using the generated private key. To address this issue, in this paper, two schemes of SM9 digital signature with non-repudiation are proposed. With the proposed schemes, the user's private key for signing is collaboratively generated by two separate components, one of which is deployed in the private key service provider's site while the other is deployed in the user's site. The private key can only be calculated in the user's site with the help of homomorphic encryption. Therefore, only the user can obtain the private key and he cannot deny that the signature was generated by himself. The proposed schemes can achieve the non-repudiation of SM9 digital signature.

When using deep learning for DDoS attack detection, there is a general degradation in detection performance due to small sample size. This paper proposes a small-sample DDoS attack detection method based on deep transfer learning. First, deep learning techniques are used to train several neural networks that can be used for transfer in DDoS attacks with sufficient samples. Then we design a transferability metric to compare the transfer performance of different networks. With this metric, the network with the best transfer performance can be selected among the four networks. Then for a small sample of DDoS attacks, this paper demonstrates that the deep learning detection technique brings deterioration in performance, with the detection performance dropping from 99.28% to 67%. Finally, we end up with a 20.8% improvement in detection performance by deep transfer of the 8LANN network in the target domain. The experiment shows that the detection method based on deep transfer learning proposed in this paper can well improve the performance deterioration of deep learning techniques for small sample DDoS attack detection.

Series DC electric springs (DCESs) are a state-of-the-art demand-side management (DSM) technology with the capability to reduce energy storage requirements of DC microgrids by manipulating the power of non-critical loads (NCLs). As the stability of DC microgrids is highly prone to dynamic interactions between the system active and passive components, this study intends to conduct a comprehensive small-signal stability analysis of a community DC microgrid integrated with distributed DCESs considering the effect of destabilizing constant power loads (CPLs). For this purpose, after deriving the small-signal model of a DCES-integrated microgrid, the sensitivity of the system dominant frequency modes to variations of various physical and control parameters is evaluated by means of eigenvalue analysis. Next, an active damping control method based on virtual RC parallel impedance is proposed for series DCESs to compensate for their slow dynamic response and to provide a dynamic stabilization function within the microgrid. Furthermore, impedance-based stability analysis is utilized to study the DC microgrid expandability in terms of integration with multiple DCESs. Finally, several case studies are presented to verify analytical findings of the paper and to evaluate the dynamic performance of the DC microgrid.

Inter-networked control systems make smart buildings increasingly efficient but can lead to severe operational disruptions and infrastructure damage. It is vital the security state of smart buildings is properly assessed so that thorough and cost effective risk management can be established. This paper uniquely reports on an actual risk assessment performed in 2018 on one of the world's most densely monitored, state-of-the-art, smart buildings. From our observations, we suggest that current practice may be inadequate due to a number of challenges and deficiencies, including the lack of a recognised smart building risk assessment methodology. As a result, the security posture of many smart buildings may not be as robust as their risk assessments suggest. Crucially, we highlight a number of key recommendations for a more comprehensive risk assessment process for smart buildings. As a whole, we believe this practical experience report will be of interest to a range of smart building stakeholders.

Smart grid consists of multiple different entities related to various energy management systems which share fine-grained energy measurements among themselves in an optimal and reliable manner. Such delivery is achieved through intelligent transmission and distribution networks composed of various stakeholders like Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), Master and Remote Terminal Units (MTU and RTU), Storage Centers and users in power utility departments subject to volatile changes in requirements. Hence, secure accessibility of data becomes vital in the context of efficient functioning of the smart grid. In this paper, we propose a practical attribute-based encryption scheme for securing data sharing and data access in Smart Grid architectures with the added advantage of obfuscating the access policy. This is aimed at preserving data privacy in the context of competing smart grid operators. We build our scheme on Linear Secret Sharing (LSS) Schemes for supporting any monotone access structures and thus enhancing the expressiveness of access policies. Lastly, we analyze the security, access policy privacy and collusion resistance properties of our cryptosystem and provide an efficiency comparison as well as experimental analysis using the Charm-Crypto framework to validate the proficiency of our proposed solution.

A significant challenge in modern computer security is the growing skill gap as intruder capabilities increase, making it necessary to begin automating elements of penetration testing so analysts can contend with the growing number of cyber threats. In this paper, we attempt to assist human analysts by automating a single host penetration attack. To do so, a smart agent performs different attack sequences to find vulnerabilities in a target system. As it does so, it accumulates knowledge, learns new attack sequences and improves its own internal penetration testing logic. As a result, this agent (AgentPen for simplicity) is able to successfully penetrate hosts it has never interacted with before. A computer security administrator using this tool would receive a comprehensive, automated sequence of actions leading to a security breach, highlighting potential vulnerabilities, and reducing the amount of menial tasks a typical penetration tester would need to execute. To achieve autonomy, we apply an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, Q-learning, with an approximator that incorporates a deep neural network architecture. The security audit itself is modelled as a Markov Decision Process in order to test a number of decision-making strategies and compare their convergence to optimality. A series of experimental results is presented to show how this approach can be effectively used to automate penetration testing using a scalable, i.e. not exhaustive, and adaptive approach.

Mobile Device Security is an important factor as all the user's sensitive information is stored on the mobile device. The problem of mobile devices getting lost or stolen has only been increasing. There are various systems which provide Online Mobile Device Security which require internet to perform their required functions. Our proposed system SMS Based Offline Mobile Device Security System provides mobile device users with a wide range of security features that help protect the mobile device from theft and also acts as an assistant that helps the users in any problems they may face in their day-to-day lives. The project aims to develop a mobile security system that will allow the user to manipulate his mobile device from any other device through SMS which can be used to get contact information from the user's mobile device remotely, help find the phone by maximizing the volume and playing a tone, trace the current location of the mobile device, get the IMEI No of the device, lock the device, send a message that will be converted to speech and played on the user's mobile device, call forwarding, message forwarding and various other features. It also has an additional security feature that will detect a sim card change and send the new SIM card mobile no to the recovery mobile numbers specified during initial setup automatically. Hence, the user will be able to manipulate his phone even after the SIM card has been changed. Therefore, the SMS-Based Offline Mobile Device Security System provides much more security for the mobile device than the existing online device security methods.