Biblio

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) consists of different configurations, where it deals with the dynamic nature of its creation and also it is a self-configurable type of a network. The primary task in this type of networks is to develop a mechanism for routing that gives a high QoS parameter because of the nature of ad-hoc network. The Ad-hoc-on-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) used here is the on-demand routing mechanism for the computation of the trust. The proposed approach uses the Artificial neural network (ANN) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for the discovery of the black hole attacks in the network. The results are carried out between the black hole AODV and the security mechanism provided by us as the Secure AODV (SAODV). The results were tested on different number of nodes, at last, it has been experimented for 100 nodes which provide an improvement in energy consumption of 54.72%, the throughput is 88.68kbps, packet delivery ratio is 92.91% and the E to E delay is of about 37.27ms.

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems' decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

After several years of research on onion routing, Camenisch and Lysyanskaya, in an attempt at rigorous analysis, defined an ideal functionality in the universal composability model, together with properties that protocols have to meet to achieve provable security. A whole family of systems based their security proofs on this work. However, analyzing HORNET and Sphinx, two instances from this family, we show that this proof strategy is broken. We discover a previously unknown vulnerability that breaks anonymity completely, and explain a known one. Both should not exist if privacy is proven correctly.In this work, we analyze and fix the proof strategy used for this family of systems. After proving the efficacy of the ideal functionality, we show how the original properties are flawed and suggest improved, effective properties in their place. Finally, we discover another common mistake in the proofs. We demonstrate how to avoid it by showing our improved properties for one protocol, thus partially fixing the family of provably secure onion routing protocols.

File timestamps do not receive much attention from information security specialists and computer forensic scientists. It is believed that timestamps are extremely easy to fake, and the system time of a computer can be changed. However, operating system for synchronizing processes and working with file objects needs accurate time readings. The authors estimate that several million timestamps can be stored on the logical partition of a hard disk with the NTFS. The MFT stores four timestamps for each file object in \$STANDARDİNFORMATION and \$FILE\_NAME attributes. Furthermore, each directory in the İNDEX\_ROOT or İNDEX\_ALLOCATION attributes contains four more timestamps for each file within it. File timestamps are set and changed as a result of file operations. At the same time, some file operations differently affect changes in timestamps. This article presents the results of the tool-based observation over the creation and update of timestamps in the MFT resulting from the basic file operations. Analysis of the results is of interest with regard to computer forensic science.

With the traffic growth with different deterministic transport and isolation requirements in radio access networks (RAN), Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) over wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network is as a candidate for next generation RAN transport, and the security issue in RAN transport is much more obvious, especially the eavesdropping attack in physical layer. Therefore, in this work, we put forward a cross-layer design for security enhancement through leveraging universal Hashing based FlexE data block permutation and multiple parallel fibre transmission for anti-eavesdropping in end-to-end FlexE over WDM network. Different levels of attack ability are considered for measuring the impact on network security and resource utilization. Furthermore, the trade-off problem between efficient resource utilization and guarantee of higher level of security is also explored. Numerical results demonstrate the cross-layer defense strategies are effective to struggle against intruders with different levels of attack ability.

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is an effective code-reuse attack in which short code sequences (i.e., gadgets) ending in a ret instruction are found within existing binaries and then executed by taking control of the call stack. The shadow stack, control flow integrity (CFI) and code (re)randomization are three popular techniques for protecting programs against return address overwrites. However, existing runtime rerandomization techniques operate on concrete return addresses, requiring expensive pointer tracking. By adding one level of indirection, we introduce BarRA, the first shadow stack mechanism that applies continuous runtime rerandomization to abstract return addresses for protecting their corresponding concrete return addresses (protected also by CFI), thus avoiding expensive pointer tracking. As a nice side-effect, BarRA naturally combines the shadow stack, CFI and runtime rerandomization in the same framework. The key novelty of BarRA, however, is that once some abstract return addresses are leaked, BarRA will enforce the burn-after-reading property by rerandomizing the mapping from the abstract to the concrete return address space in the order of microseconds instead of seconds required for rerandomizing a concrete return address space. As a result, BarRA can be used as a superior replacement for the shadow stack, as demonstrated by comparing both using the 19 C/C++ benchmarks in SPEC CPU2006 (totalling 2,047,447 LOC) and analyzing a proof-of-concept attack, provided that we can tolerate some slight binary code size increases (by an average of 29.44%) and are willing to use 8MB of dedicated memory for holding up to 220 return addresses (on a 64-bit platform). Under an information leakage attack (for some return addresses), the shadow stack is always vulnerable but BarRA is significantly more resilient (by reducing an attacker's success rate to [1/(220)] on average). In terms of the average performance overhead introduced, both are comparable: 6.09% (BarRA) vs. 5.38% (the shadow stack).

The Case Studies in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management series engaged with several companies that are leaders in managing cyber supply chain risk. These case studies build on the Best Practices in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management case studies originally published in 2015 with the goals of covering new organizations in new industries and bringing to light any changes in cyber supply chain risk management practices. This case study is for the Mayo Clinic.

The Case Studies in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management series engaged with several companies that are mature in managing cyber supply chain risk. These case studies build on the Best Practices in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management case studies originally published in 2015 with the goals of covering new organizations in new industries and bringing to light any changes in cyber supply chain risk management practices.

The Case Studies in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management series engaged with several companies that are mature in managing cyber supply chain risk. These case studies build on the Best Practices in Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management case studies originally published in 2015 with the goals of covering new organizations in new industries and bringing to light any changes in cyber supply chain risk management practices.

 

In the context of insiders, preventive security measures have a high likelihood of failing because insiders ought to have sufficient privileges to perform their jobs. Instead, in this paper, we propose to treat the insider threat by a detective measure that holds an insider accountable in case of violations. However, to enable accountability, we need to create causal models that support reasoning about the causality of a violation. Current security models (e.g., attack trees) do not allow that. Still, they are a useful source for creating causal models. In this paper, we discuss the value added by causal models in the security context. Then, we capture the interaction between attack trees and causal models by proposing an automated approach to extract the latter from the former. Our approach considers insider-specific attack classes such as collusion attacks and causal-model-specific properties like preemption relations. We present an evaluation of the resulting causal models’ validity and effectiveness, in addition to the efficiency of the extraction process.
 

This study examines the results of field experiments of transactive energy systems (TESs) in order to identify challenges that occur with the integration of TESs with existing software, hardware, appliances, and customer practices. Three types of challenges, and potential responses and solutions, are identified for the implementation phase of TESs: systematic risk to existing building functions, lack of readiness of users and connected systems, and lack of competitiveness with existing demand-management systems and products.

This paper shows how the Xtensa architecture can be attacked with Return-Oriented-Programming (ROP). The presented techniques include possibilities for both supported Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs). Especially for the windowed ABI a powerful mechanism is presented that not only allows to jump to gadgets but also to manipulate registers without relying on specific gadgets. This paper purely focuses on how the properties of the architecture itself can be exploited to chain gadgets and not on specific attacks or a gadget catalog.

Most cyber-attacks and data breaches in cloud infrastructure are due to human errors and misconfiguration vulnerabilities. Cloud customer-centric tools are imperative for mitigating these issues, however existing cloud security models are largely unable to tackle these security challenges. Therefore, novel security mechanisms are imperative, we propose Risk-driven Fault Injection (RDFI) techniques to address these challenges. RDFI applies the principles of chaos engineering to cloud security and leverages feedback loops to execute, monitor, analyze and plan security fault injection campaigns, based on a knowledge-base. The knowledge-base consists of fault models designed from secure baselines, cloud security best practices and observations derived during iterative fault injection campaigns. These observations are helpful for identifying vulnerabilities while verifying the correctness of security attributes (integrity, confidentiality and availability). Furthermore, RDFI proactively supports risk analysis and security hardening efforts by sharing security information with security mechanisms. We have designed and implemented the RDFI strategies including various chaos engineering algorithms as a software tool: CloudStrike. Several evaluations have been conducted with CloudStrike against infrastructure deployed on two major public cloud infrastructure: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The time performance linearly increases, proportional to increasing attack rates. Also, the analysis of vulnerabilities detected via security fault injection has been used to harden the security of cloud resources to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security information provided by CloudStrike. Therefore, we opine that our approaches are suitable for overcoming contemporary cloud security issues.

Budding technologies like IoT requires minimum latency for performing real-time applications. The IoT devices collect a huge amount of big data and stores in the cloud environment, because of its on-demand services and scalability. But processing the needed information of the IoT devices from the cloud computing environment is found to be time-sensitive one. To eradicate this issue fog computing environment was created which acts an intermediate between the IoT devices and cloud computing environment. The fog computing performs intermediate computation and storage which is needed by IoT devices and it eliminates the drawbacks of latency and bandwidth limitation faced by directly using cloud computing for storage and accessing. The fog computing even though more advantageous it is more exposed to security issues by its architecture. This paper concentrates more on the security issues met by fog computing and the present methods used by the researchers to secure fog with their pros and cons.

In image forensics, to determine whether the image is impurely transformed, it extracts and examines the features included in the suspicious image. In general, the features extracted for the detection of forgery images are based on numerical values, so it is somewhat unreasonable to use in the CNN structure for image classification. In this paper, the extraction method of a feature vector is using a least-squares solution. Treat a suspicious image like a matrix and its solution to be coefficients as the feature vector. Get two solutions from two images of the original and its median filter residual (MFR). Subsequently, the two features were formed into a visualized pattern and then fed into CNN deep learning to classify the various transformed images. A new structure of the CNN net layer was also designed by hybrid with the inception module and the residual block to classify visualized feature vector patterns. The performance of the proposed image forensics detection (IFD) scheme was measured with the seven transformed types of image: average filtered (window size: 3 × 3), gaussian filtered (window size: 3 × 3), JPEG compressed (quality factor: 90, 70), median filtered (window size: 3 × 3, 5 × 5), and unaltered. The visualized patterns are fed into the image input layer of the designed CNN hybrid model. Throughout the experiment, the accuracy of median filtering detection was 98% over. Also, the area under the curve (AUC) by sensitivity (TP: true positive rate) and 1-specificity (FP: false positive rate) results of the proposed IFD scheme approached to `1' on the designed CNN hybrid model. Experimental results show high efficiency and performance to classify the various transformed images. Therefore, the grade evaluation of the proposed scheme is “Excellent (A)”.

In order to the development of IoT, IETF developed a standard named 6LoWPAN for increase the usage of IPv6 to the tiny and smart objects with low power. Generally, the 6LoWPAN radio link needs end to end (e2e) security for its IPv6 communication process. 6LoWPAN requires light weight variant of security solutions in IPSec. A new security approach of 6LoWPAN at adaptation layer to provide e2e security with light weight IPSec. The existing security protocol IPsec is not suitable for its 6LoWPAN IoT environment because it has heavy restrictions on memory, power, duty cycle, additional overhead transmission. The IPSec had packet overhead problem due to share the secret key between two communicating peers by IKE (Internet Key Exchange) protocol. Hence the existing security protocol IPSec solutions are not suitable for lightweight-based security need in 6LoWPAN IoT. This paper describes 6LowPSec protocol with AES-CCM (Cipher block chaining Message authentication code with Counter mode) cryptographic algorithm with key size of 128 bits with minimum power consumption and duty cycle.

Power system security assessment and enhancement in grids with high penetration of renewables is critical for pragmatic power system planning. Static Security Assessment (SSA) is a fast response tool to assess system stability margins following considerable contingencies assuming post fault system reaches a steady state. This paper presents a contingency ranking methodology using static security indices to rank credible contingencies considering severity. A Modified IEEE 9 bus system integrating renewables was used to test the approach. The static security indices used independently provides accurate results in identifying severe contingencies but further assessment is needed to provide an accurate picture of static security assessment in an increased time frame of the steady state. The indices driven for static security assessment could accurately capture and rank contingencies with renewable sources but due to intermittency of the renewable source various contingency ranking lists are generated. This implies that using indices in future grids without consideration on intermittent nature of renewables will make it difficult for the grid operator to identify severe contingencies and assist the power system operator to make operational decisions. This makes it necessary to integrate the behaviour of renewables in security indices for practical application in real time security assessment.

Integrated with various electronic control units (ECUs), vehicles are becoming more intelligent with the assistance of essential connections. However, the interaction with the outside world raises great concerns on cyber-attacks. As a main standard for in-vehicle network, Controller Area Network (CAN) does not have any built-in security mechanisms to guarantee a secure communication. This increases risks of denial of service, remote control attacks by an attacker, posing serious threats to underlying vehicles, property and human lives. As a result, it is urgent to develop an effective in-vehicle network intrusion detection system (IDS) for better security. In this paper, we propose a Feature-based Sliding Window (FSW) to extract the feature of CAN Data Field and CAN IDs. Then we construct a convolutional encoder network (CEN) to detect network intrusion of CAN networks. The proposed FSW-CEN method is evaluated on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that compared to traditional data processing methods and convolutional neural networks, our method is able to detect attacks with a higher accuracy in terms of detection accuracy and false negative rate.

With the expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) that relies on heterogeneous, dynamic, and massively deployed devices, device management (DM) (i.e., remote administration such as firmware update, configuration, troubleshooting and tracking) is required for proper quality of service and user experience, deployment of new functions, bug corrections and security patches distribution. Existing industrial DM platforms and approaches do not suit IoT devices and are already showing their limits with a few static home devices (e.g., routers, TV Decoders). Indeed, undetected buggy firmware deployment and manual target device identification are common issues in existing systems. Besides, these platforms are manually operated by experts (e.g., system administrators) and require extensive knowledge and skills. Such approaches cannot be applied on massive and diverse devices forming the IoT. To tackle these issues, our work in an industrial research context proposes to apply autonomic computing to DM platforms operation and impact tracking. Specifically, our contribution relies on automated device targeting (i.e., aiming only suitable devices) and impact-aware DM (i.e., error and anomalies detection preceding patch generalization on all suitable devices of a given fleet). Our solution is composed of three coordinated autonomic loops and allows more accurate and faster irregularity diagnosis, vertical scaling along with simpler IoT DM platform administration. For experimental validation, we developed a prototype that demonstrates encouraging results compared to simulated legacy telecommunication operator approaches (namely Orange).

Trustworthy and secure operation of the cyber-power system calls for resilience against malicious and accidental failures. The objective of a resilient system is to withstand and recover operation of the system to supply critical loads despite multiple contingencies in the system. To take timely actions, we need to continuously measure the cyberphysical security of the system. We propose a cyber-physical security assessment metric (CP-SAM) based on quantitative factors affecting resiliency and utilizing concepts from graph theoretic analysis, probabilistic model of availability, attack graph metrics, and vulnerabilities across different layers of the microgrid system. These factors are integrated into a single metric using a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, Choquet Integral to compute CP-SAM. The developed metric will be valuable for i) monitoring the microgrid resiliency considering a holistic cyber-physical model; and ii) enable better decision-making to select best possible mitigation strategies towards resilient microgrid system. Developed CP-SAM can be extended for active distribution system and has been validated in a real-world power-grid test-bed to monitor the microgrid resiliency.

In January 2017 encrypted Internet traffic surpassed non-encrypted traffic. Although encryption increases security, it also masks intrusions and attacks by blocking the access to packet contents and traffic features, therefore making data analysis unfeasible. In spite of the strong effect of encryption, its impact has been scarcely investigated in the field. In this paper we study how encryption affects flow feature spaces and machine learning-based attack detection. We propose a new cross-layer feature vector that simultaneously represents traffic at three different levels: application, conversation, and endpoint behavior. We analyze its behavior under TLS and IPSec encryption and evaluate the efficacy with recent network traffic datasets and by using Random Forests classifiers. The cross-layer multi-key approach shows excellent attack detection in spite of TLS encryption. When IPsec is applied, the reduced variant obtains satisfactory detection for botnets, yet considerable performance drops for other types of attacks. The high complexity of network traffic is unfeasible for monolithic data analysis solutions, therefore requiring cross-layer analysis for which the multi-key vector becomes a powerful profiling core.

Deep neural network (DNN) has demonstrated its success in multiple domains. However, DNN models are inherently vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are generated by adding adversarial perturbations to benign inputs to fool the DNN model to misclassify. In this paper, we present a cross-layer strategic ensemble framework and a suite of robust defense algorithms, which are attack-independent, and capable of auto-repairing and auto-verifying the target model being attacked. Our strategic ensemble approach makes three original contributions. First, we employ input-transformation diversity to design the input-layer strategic transformation ensemble algorithms. Second, we utilize model-disagreement diversity to develop the output-layer strategic model ensemble algorithms. Finally, we create an input-output cross-layer strategic ensemble defense that strengthens the defensibility by combining diverse input transformation based model ensembles with diverse output verification model ensembles. Evaluated over 10 attacks on ImageNet dataset, we show that our strategic ensemble defense algorithms can achieve high defense success rates and are more robust with high attack prevention success rates and low benign false negative rates, compared to existing representative defenses.