Biblio

As organizations increasingly view information as one of their most valuable assets, which supports the creation and distribution of their products and services, information security will be an integral part of the design and operation of organizational business processes. Yet, risks associated with cyber-attacks are on the rise. Organizations that are subjected to attacks can suffer significant reputational damage as well as loss of information and knowledge. As a consequence, effective leadership is cited as a critical factor for ensuring corporate level attention for information security. However, there is a lack of empirical understanding as to the roles strategic leaders play in shaping and supporting the cyber-security strategy. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature by focusing on how senior leaders support the cyber-security strategy. The authors conducted a series of exploratory interviews with leaders in the positions of Chief Information Officer, Chief Security Information Officer, and Chief Technology Officer. The findings revealed that leaders are engaged in both transitional, where the focus is on improving governance and integration and transformational support, which involves fostering a new cultural mindset for cyber-resiliency and the development of an ecosystem approach to security thinking.

This work aims to formulate an effective scheme which can detect and mitigate of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in Software Defined Networks. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are one of the most destructive attacks in the internet. Whenever you heard of a website being hacked, it would have probably been a victim of a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is aimed at disrupting the normal operation of a system by making service and resources unavailable to legitimate users by overloading the system with excessive superfluous traffic from distributed source. These distributed set of compromised hosts that performs the attack are referred as Botnet. Software Defined Networking being an emerging technology, offers a solution to reduce network management complexity. It separates the Control plane and the data plane. This decoupling provides centralized control of the network with programmability and flexibility. This work harness this programming ability and centralized control of SDN to obtain the randomness of the network flow data. This statistical approach utilizes the source IP in the network and various attributes of TCP flags and calculates entropy from them. The proposed technique can detect volume based and application based DDoS attacks like TCP SYN flood, Ping flood and Slow HTTP attacks. The methodology is evaluated through emulation using Mininet and Detection and mitigation strategies are implemented in POX controller. The experimental results show the proposed method have improved performance evaluation parameters including the Attack detection time, Delay to serve a legitimate request in the presence of attacker and overall CPU utilization.

In this study, it was aimed to recognize the emotional state from facial images using the deep learning method. In the study, which was approved by the ethics committee, a custom data set was created using videos taken from 20 male and 20 female participants while simulating 7 different facial expressions (happy, sad, surprised, angry, disgusted, scared, and neutral). Firstly, obtained videos were divided into image frames, and then face images were segmented using the Haar library from image frames. The size of the custom data set obtained after the image preprocessing is more than 25 thousand images. The proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture which is mimics of LeNet architecture has been trained with this custom dataset. According to the proposed CNN architecture experiment results, the training loss was found as 0.0115, the training accuracy was found as 99.62%, the validation loss was 0.0109, and the validation accuracy was 99.71%.

Modbus TCP/IP protocol is a commonly used protocol in industrial automation control systems, systems responsible for sensitive operations such as gas turbine operation and refinery control. The protocol was designed decades ago with no security features in mind. Denial of service attack and malicious parameter command injection are examples of attacks that can exploit vulnerabilities in industrial control systems that use Modbus/TCP protocol. This paper discusses and explores the use of intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) with deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities and DPI industrial firewalls that have capability to detect and stop highly specialized attacks hidden deep in the communication flow. The paper has the following objectives: (i) to develop signatures for IDPS for common attacks on Modbus/TCP based network architectures; (ii) to evaluate performance of three IDPS - Snort, Suricata and Bro - in detecting and preventing common attacks on Modbus/TCP based control systems; and (iii) to illustrate and emphasize that the IDPS and industrial firewalls with DPI capabilities are not preventing but only mitigating likelihood of exploitation of Modbus/TCP vulnerabilities in the industrial and automation control systems. The results presented in the paper illustrate that it might be challenging task to achieve requirements on real-time communication in some industrial and automation control systems in case the DPI is implemented because of the latency and jitter introduced by these IDPS and DPI industrial firewall.

One important aspect in protecting Cyber Physical System (CPS) is ensuring that the proper control and measurement signals are propagated within the control loop. The CPS research community has been developing a large set of check blocks that can be integrated within the control loop to check signals against various types of attacks (e.g., false data injection attacks). Unfortunately, it is not possible to integrate all these “checks” within the control loop as the overhead introduced when checking signals may violate the delay constraints of the control loop. Moreover, these blocks do not completely operate in isolation of each other as dependencies exist among them in terms of their effectiveness against detecting a subset of attacks. Thus, it becomes a challenging and complex problem to assign the proper checks, especially with the presence of a rational adversary who can observe the check blocks assigned and optimizes her own attack strategies accordingly. This paper tackles the inherent state-action space explosion that arises in securing CPS through developing DeepBLOC (DB)-a framework in which Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms are utilized to provide optimal/sub-optimal assignments of check blocks to signals. The framework models stochastic games between the adversary and the CPS defender and derives mixed strategies for assigning check blocks to ensure the integrity of the propagated signals while abiding to the real-time constraints dictated by the control loop. Through extensive simulation experiments and a real implementation on a water purification system, we show that DB achieves assignment strategies that outperform other strategies and heuristics.

This is GAO’s 18th annual assessment of DOD acquisition programs. GAO’s prior assessments covered major defense acquisition programs. This year’s assessment expands to include selected major IT systems and rapid prototyping and rapid fielding programs, in response to a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019.

This report (1) summarizes the characteristics of 121 weapon and IT programs, (2) examines cost and schedule measures and other topics for these same programs, and (3) summarizes selected organizational and legislative changes. GAO identified the 121 programs for review based on their cost and acquisition status. GAO selected organizational and legislative changes that it determined related to the execution and oversight of the 121 programs.

GAO reviewed relevant legislation and DOD reports, collected data from program offices through a questionnaire, and interviewed DOD officials.
Additional analyses and assessments of major IT programs are included in a companion report to be issued later this year.

The Department of Defense (DOD) currently plans to invest over $1.8 trillion to acquire new major weapon systems such as aircraft, ships, and satellites. At the same time, the department is investing billions more in information technology (IT) systems and capabilities that it expects to either prototype or field rapidly through a new middle-tier acquisition pathway. (See table.)

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a stealthy, continuous and sophisticated method of network attacks, which can cause serious privacy leakage and millions of dollars losses. In this paper, we introduce a new game-theoretic framework of the interaction between a defender who uses limited Security Resources(SRs) to harden network and an attacker who adopts a multi-stage plan to attack the network. The game model is derived from Stackelberg games called a Multi-stage Maze Network Game (M2NG) in which the characteristics of APT are fully considered. The possible plans of the attacker are compactly represented using attack graphs(AGs), but the compact representation of the attacker's strategies presents a computational challenge and reaching the Nash Equilibrium(NE) is NP-hard. We present a method that first translates AGs into Markov Decision Process(MDP) and then achieves the optimal SRs allocation using the policy hill-climbing(PHC) algorithm. Finally, we present an empirical evaluation of the model and analyze the scalability and sensitivity of the algorithm. Simulation results exhibit that our proposed reinforcement learning-based SRs allocation is feasible and efficient.

The time-varying properties of the wireless channel are a powerful source of information that can complement and enhance traditional security mechanisms. Therefore, we propose a cross-layer authentication mechanism that combines physical layer channel information and traditional authentication mechanism in LTE. To verify the feasibility of the proposed mechanism, we build a cross-layer authentication system that extracts the phase shift information of a typical UE and use the ensemble learning method to train the fingerprint map based on OAI LTE. Experimental results show that our cross-layer authentication mechanism can effectively prompt the security of LTE system.

Zero Trust Model ensures each node is responsible for the approval of the transaction before it gets committed. The data owners can track their data while it’s shared amongst the various data custodians ensuring data security. The consensus algorithm enables the users to trust the network as malicious nodes fail to get approval from all nodes, thereby causing the transaction to be aborted. The use case chosen to demonstrate the proposed consensus algorithm is the college placement system. The algorithm has been extended to implement a diversified, decentralized, automated placement system, wherein the data owner i.e. the student, maintains an immutable certificate vault and the student’s data has been validated by a verifier network i.e. the academic department and placement department. The data transfer from student to companies is recorded as transactions in the distributed ledger or blockchain allowing the data to be tracked by the student.

The Automation industries that uses Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are highly vulnerable for Network threats. Systems that are air-gapped and isolated from the internet are highly affected due to insider attacks like Spoofing, DOS and Malware threats that affects confidentiality, integrity and availability of Operational Technology (OT) system elements and degrade its performance even though security measures are taken. In this paper, a behavior-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) is designed for OT networks. The proposed system is implemented on SCADA test bed with two systems replicates automation scenarios in industry. This paper describes 4 main classes of cyber-attacks with their subclasses against SCADA systems and methodology with design of components of IPS system, database creation, Baselines and deployment of system in environment. IPS system identifies not only IT protocols but also Industry Control System (ICS) protocols Modbus and DNP3 with their inside communication fields using deep packet inspection (DPI). The analytical results show 99.89% accuracy on binary classification and 97.95% accuracy on multiclass classification of different attack vectors performed on network with low false positive rate. These results are also validated by actual deployment of IPS in SCADA systems with the prevention of DOS attack.

Learning-enabled components (LECs) are widely used in cyber-physical systems (CPS) since they can handle the uncertainty and variability of the environment and increase the level of autonomy. However, it has been shown that LECs such as deep neural networks (DNN) are not robust and adversarial examples can cause the model to make a false prediction. The paper considers the problem of efficiently detecting adversarial examples in LECs used for regression in CPS. The proposed approach is based on inductive conformal prediction and uses a regression model based on variational autoencoder. The architecture allows to take into consideration both the input and the neural network prediction for detecting adversarial, and more generally, out-of-distribution examples. We demonstrate the method using an advanced emergency braking system implemented in an open source simulator for self-driving cars where a DNN is used to estimate the distance to an obstacle. The simulation results show that the method can effectively detect adversarial examples with a short detection delay.

MANETs are wireless networks, providing properties such as self-configuration, mobility, and flexibility to the network, which make them a popular and widely used technique. As the usage and popularity of the networks increases, security becomes the most important factor to be concerned. For the sake of security, several protocols and methodologies have been developed for the networks. Along with the increase in security mechanisms, the number of attacks and attackers also increases and hence the threat to the network and secure communication within it increases as well. Some of the attacks have been resolved by the proposed methodologies but some are still a severe threat to the framework, one such attack is Black Hole Attack. The proposed work integrates the SUPERMAN (Security Using Pre-Existing Routing for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks) framework with appropriate methodology to detect and prevent the network from the Black Hole Attack. The mechanism is based on the AODV (Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol. In the methodology, the source node uses two network routes, from the source to the destination, one for sending the data packet and another for observing the intermediate nodes of the initial route. If any node is found to be a Black Hole node, then the route is dropped and the node is added to the Black Hole list and a new route to send the data packet to the destination is discovered.

Mobile Adhoc networks (MANETs) comprises of mobile devices or nodes that are connected wirelessly and have no infrastructure. Detecting malicious activities in MANETs is a challenging task as they are vulnerable to attacks where the performance of the entire network degrades. Hence it is necessary to provide security to the network so that the nodes are prone to attack. Selecting a good routing protocol in MANET is also important as frequent change of topology causes the route reply to not arrive at the source node. In this paper, R-AODV (Reverse Adhoc On-Demand Distance Vector) protocol along with ECC (Elliptic Key Cryptography) algorithm is designed and implemented to detect and to prevent the malicious node and to secure data transmission against blackhole attack. The main objective is to keep the data packets secure. ECC provides a smaller key size compared to other public-key encryption and eliminates the requirement of pre-distributed keys also makes the path more secure against blackhole attacks in a MANET. The performance of this proposed system is simulated by using the NS-2.35 network simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol provides good experimental results on various metrics like throughput, end-to-end delay, and PDR. Analysis of the results points to an improvement in the overall network performance.

In recent years, the damage caused by unauthorized access using bots has increased. Compared with attacks on conventional login screens, the success rate is higher and detection of them is more difficult. CAPTCHA is commonly utilized as a technology for avoiding attacks by bots. But user's experience declines as the difficulty of CAPTCHA becomes higher corresponding to the advancement of the bot. As a solution, adaptive difficulty setting of CAPTCHA combining with bot detection technologies is considered. In this research, we focus on Capy puzzle CAPTCHA, which is widely used in commercial service. We use a supervised machine learning approach to detect bots. As a training data, we use access logs to several Web services, and add flags to attacks by bots detected in the past. We have extracted vectors fields like HTTP-User-Agent and some information from IP address (e.g. geographical information) from the access logs, and the dataset is investigated using supervised learning. By using XGBoost and LightGBM, we have achieved high ROC-AUC score more than 0.90, and further have detected suspicious accesses from some ISPs that has no bot discrimination flag.

The dynamic and adaptable characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks have made it a significant field for deploying various applications in wireless sensor networks. Increasing popularity of the portable devices is the main reason for the development of mobile ad hoc networks. Furthermore, the network does not require a fixed architecture and it is easy to deploy. This type of network is highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks as the nodes communicate with each other through a Wireless medium. The most critical attack in ad hoc network is jellyfish attack. In this research we have proposed a Direct Trust-based Detection Algorithm to detect and prevent jellyfish attack in MANET.

Biometric authentication is the preferred authentication scheme in modern computing systems. While it offers enhanced usability, it also requires cautious handling of sensitive users' biometric templates. In this paper, a distributed scheme that eliminates the requirement for a central node that holds users' biometric templates is presented. This is replaced by an Ethereum/IPFS combination to which the templates of the users are stored in a homomorphically encrypted form. The scheme enables the biometric authentication of the users by any third party service, while the actual biometric templates of the user never leave his device in non encrypted form. Secure authentication of users in enabled, while sensitive biometric data are not exposed to anyone. Experiments show that the scheme can be applied as an authentication mechanism with minimal time overhead.

In this paper, a novel DNA based computing method is proposed for encryption of biometric color(face)and gray fingerprint images. In many applications of present scenario, gray and color images are exhibited major role for authenticating identity of an individual. The values of aforementioned images have considered as two separate matrices. The key generation process two level mathematical operations have applied on fingerprint image for generating encryption key. For enhancing security to biometric image, DNA computing has done on the above matrices generating DNA sequence. Further, DNA sequences have scrambled to add complexity to biometric image. Results of blending images, image of DNA computing has shown in experimental section. It is observed that the proposed substitution DNA computing algorithm has shown good resistant against statistical and differential attacks.

In this paper, a novel Dynamic Chaotic Biometric Identity Isomorphic Elliptic Curve (DCBI-IEC) has been introduced for Image Encryption. The biometric digital identity is extracted from the user fingerprint image as fingerprint minutia data incorporated with the chaotic logistic map and hence, a new DCBDI-IEC has been suggested. DCBI-IEC is used to control the key schedule for all encryption and decryption processing. Statistical analysis, differential analysis and key sensitivity test are performed to estimate the security strengths of the proposed DCBI-IEC system. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust against common signal processing attacks and provides a high security level for image encryption application.

We study the problem of designing a dynamic mechanism for security management in an interconnected multi-agent system with N strategic agents and one coordinator. The system is modeled as a network of N vertices. Each agent resides in one of the vertices of the network and has a privately known security state that describes its safety level at each time. The evolution of an agent's security state depends on its own state, the states of its neighbors in the network and on actions taken by a network coordinator. Each agent's utility at time instant t depends on its own state, the states of its neighbors in the network and on actions taken by a network coordinator. The objective of the network coordinator is to take security actions in order to maximize the long-term expected social surplus. Since agents are strategic and their security states are private information, the coordinator needs to incentivize agents to reveal their information. This results in a dynamic mechanism design problem for the coordinator. We leverage the inter-temporal correlations between the agents' security states to identify sufficient conditions under which an incentive compatible expected social surplus maximizing mechanism can be constructed. We then identify two special cases of our formulation and describe how the desired mechanism is constructed in these cases.

Fog Computing is one of the edge computing paradigms that envisages being the proximate processing and storage infrastructure for a multitude of IoT appliances. With its dynamic deployability as a medium level cloud service, fog nodes are enabling heterogeneous service provisioning infrastructure that features scalability, interoperability, and adaptability. Out of the various 5G based services possible with the fog computing platforms, security services are imperative but minimally investigated direct live. Thus, in this research, we are focused on launching security services in a fog node with an architecture capable of provisioning on-demand service requests. As the fog nodes are constrained on resources, our intention is to integrate light-weight virtualization technology such as Docker for forming the service provisioning infrastructure. We managed to launch multiple security instances configured to be Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPSs) on the fog infrastructure emulated via a Raspberry Pi-4 device. This environment was tested with multiple network flows to validate its feasibility. In our proposed architecture, orchestration strategies performed by the security orchestrator were stated as guidelines for achieving pragmatic, dynamic orchestration with fog in IoT deployments. The results of this research guarantee the possibility of developing an ambient security service model that facilitates IoT devices with enhanced security.

New research fields and applications on human computer interaction will emerge based on the recognition of emotions on faces. With such aim, our study evaluates the features extracted from faces to recognize emotions. To increase the success rate of these features, we have run several tests to demonstrate how age and gender affect the results. The artificial neural networks were trained by the apparent regions on the face such as eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and jawline and then the networks are tested with different age and gender groups. According to the results, faces of older people have a lower performance rate of emotion recognition. Then, age and gender based groups are created manually, and we show that performance rates of facial emotion recognition have increased for the networks that are trained using these particular groups.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) ensure improvement in road safety and traffic management by allowing the vehicles and infrastructure that are connected to them to exchange safety messages. Due to the open wireless communication channels, security and privacy issues are a major concern in VANETs. A typical attack consists of a malicious third party intercepting, modifying and retransmitting messages. Heterogeneous vehicular communication in VANETs occurs when vehicles (only) or vehicles and other infrastructure communicate using different cryptographic techniques. To address the security and privacy issues in heterogeneous vehicular communication, some heterogeneous signcryption schemes have been proposed. These schemes simultaneously satisfy the confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation security requirements. They however fail to properly address the efficiency with respect to the computational cost involved in unsigncrypting ciphertexts, which is often affected by the speeds at which vehicles travel in VANETs. In this paper, we propose an efficient conditional privacy-preserving hybrid signcryption (CPP-HSC) scheme that uses bilinear pairing to satisfy the security requirements of heterogeneous vehicular communication in a single logical step. Our scheme ensures the transmission of a message from a vehicle with a background of an identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) to a receiver with a background of a public-key infrastructure (PKI). Furthermore, it supports a batch unsigncryption method, which allows the receiver to speed up the process by processing multiple messages simultaneously. The security of our CPP-HSC scheme ensures the indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2) under the intractability assumption of q-bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion (q-BDHI) problem and the existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attack (EUF-CMA) under the intractability assumption of q-strong Diffie-Hellman (q-SDH) problem in the random oracle model (ROM). The performance analysis indicates that our scheme has an improvement over the existing related schemes with respect to the computational cost without an increase in the communication cost.

Though the deep penetration of cyber systems across the smart grid sub-domains enrich the operation of the wide-area protection, control, and smart grid applications, the stochastic nature of cyber-attacks by adversaries inflict their performance and the system operation. Various hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) cyber-physical system (CPS) testbeds have attempted to evaluate the cyberattack dynamics and power system perturbations for robust wide-area protection algorithms. However, physical resource constraints and modular integration designs have been significant barriers while modeling large-scale grid models (scalability) and have limited many of the CPS testbeds to either small-scale HIL environment or complete simulation environments. This paper proposes a meticulous design and efficient modeling of IEC-61850 logical nodes in physical relays to simulate large-scale grid models in a HIL real-time digital simulator environment integrated with industry-grade hardware and software systems for wide-area power system applications. The proposed meticulous design includes multi-breaker emulation in the physical relays, which extends the capacity of a physical relay to accommodate more number of CPS interfaces in the HIL CPS security testbed environment. We have used our existing HIL CPS security testbed to demonstrate scalability by the real-time performance of ten simultaneous IEEE-39 CPS grid models. The experiments demonstrated significant results by 100% real-time performance with zero overruns, and low latency while receiving and executing control signals from physical SEL relays via IEC-61850 and DNP-3 protocols to real-time digital simulator, substation remote terminal unit (RTU) software and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software at control center.

Privacy-preserving frequency computation is critical to privacy-preserving data mining in 2-Part Fully Distributed Setting (such as association rule analysis, clustering, and classification analysis) and has been investigated in many researches. However, these solutions are based on the Elgamal Cryptosystem, making computation and communication efficiency low. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved protocol using an Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem. The theoretical and experimental analysis shows that the proposed method is effective in both computing and communication compared to other methods.