Biblio

With the application of virtualization and multi-core processor in embedded system, the computing capacity of embedded system has been improved comprehensively, but it is also faced with malicious attacks against virtualization technology. First, it was analyzed the security requirements of each layer of embedded virtualization computing platform. Aiming at the security requirements, it was proposed the security architecture of embedded virtualization computing platform based on trusted computing module. It was designed the hardware trusted root on the hardware layer, the virtualization trusted root on the virtual machine manager layer, trusted computing component and security function component on guest operation system layer. Based on the trusted roots, it was built the static extension of the trusted chain on the platform. This security architecture can improve the active security protection capability of embedded virtualization computing platform.

Mobile apps exploit embedded sensors and wireless connectivity of a device to empower users with portable computations, context-aware communication, and enhanced interaction. Specifically, mobile health apps (mHealth apps for short) are becoming integral part of mobile and pervasive computing to improve the availability and quality of healthcare services. Despite the offered benefits, mHealth apps face a critical challenge, i.e., security of health-critical data that is produced and consumed by the app. Several studies have revealed that security specific issues of mHealth apps have not been adequately addressed. The objectives of this study are to empirically (a) investigate the challenges that hinder development of secure mHealth apps, (b) identify practices to develop secure apps, and (c) explore motivating factors that influence secure development. We conducted this study by collecting responses of 97 developers from 25 countries - across 06 continents - working in diverse teams and roles to develop mHealth apps for Android, iOS, and Windows platform. Qualitative analysis of the survey data is based on (i) 8 critical challenges, (ii) taxonomy of best practices to ensure security, and (iii) 6 motivating factors that impact secure mHealth apps. This research provides empirical evidence as practitioners' view and guidelines to develop emerging and next generation of secure mHealth apps.

We consider the problem of protecting cloud services from simultaneous white-box and black-box attacks. Recent research in cryptographic program obfuscation considers the problem of protecting the confidentiality of programs and any secrets in them. In this model, a provable program obfuscation solution makes white-box attacks to the program not more useful than black-box attacks. Motivated by very recent results showing successful black-box attacks to machine learning programs run by cloud servers, we propose and study the approach of augmenting the program obfuscation solution model so to achieve, in at least some class of application scenarios, program confidentiality in the presence of both white-box and black-box attacks.We propose and formally define encrypted-input program obfuscation, where a key is shared between the entity obfuscating the program and the entity encrypting the program's inputs. We believe this model might be of interest in practical scenarios where cloud programs operate over encrypted data received by associated sensors (e.g., Internet of Things, Smart Grid).Under standard intractability assumptions, we show various results that are not known in the traditional cryptographic program obfuscation model; most notably: Yao's garbled circuit technique implies encrypted-input program obfuscation hiding all gates of an arbitrary polynomial circuit; and very efficient encrypted-input program obfuscation for range membership programs and a class of machine learning programs (i.e., decision trees). The performance of the latter solutions has only a small constant overhead over the equivalent unobfuscated program.

It is important to address the physical and cyber security needs of critical infrastructures, including systems, facilities, and assets. Security requirements may include capabilities to prevent and protect against both physical and digital intrusion, hazards, threats, and incidents, and to expeditiously recover and reconstitute critical services. Energy security has serious repercussions for mission critical facilities. Mission critical facilities do not have the luxury of being able to shut down or run at a reduced capacity during outages, whether they last minutes, hours, or days. Disaster recovery plans are a necessity for mission critical facilities, involving the proper training of business continuity personnel to enact enterprise-level plans for business resiliency. Steps need to be taken to improve information security and mitigate the threat of cyber-attacks. The Smart Grid is the convergence of electric distribution systems and modern digital information technology.

This study reviews the development of shared (community) solar and community choice aggregation in the U.S. states of California and New York. Both states are leaders in energy-transition policy in the U.S., but they have different trajectories for the two forms of energy decentralization. Shared solar is more advanced in New York, but community choice is more advanced in California. Using a field theory framework, the comparative review of the trajectories of energy decentralization shows how differences in restructuring and regulatory rules affect outcomes. Differences in the rules for retail competition and authority for utilities to own distributed generation assets, plus the role of civil society and the attention from elected officials, shape the intensity of conflict and outcomes. They also contribute to the development of different types of community choice in the two states. In addition to showing how institutional conditions associated with different types of restructured markets shape the opportunities for decentralized energy, the study also examines how the efforts of actors to gain support for and to legitimate their policy preferences involve reference to broad social values.

Artificial Intelligence systems have enabled significant benefits for users and society, but whilst the data for their feeding are always increasing, a side to privacy and security leaks is offered. The severe vulnerabilities to the right to privacy obliged governments to enact specific regulations to ensure privacy preservation in any kind of transaction involving sensitive information. In the case of digital and/or physical documents comprising sensitive information, the right to privacy can be preserved by data obfuscation procedures. The capability of recognizing sensitive information for obfuscation is typically entrusted to the experience of human experts, who are over-whelmed by the ever increasing amount of documents to process. Artificial intelligence could proficiently mitigate the effort of the human officers and speed up processes. Anyway, until enough knowledge won't be available in a machine readable format, automatic and effectively working systems can't be developed. In this work we propose a methodology for transferring and leveraging general knowledge across specific-domain tasks. We built, from scratch, specific-domain knowledge data sets, for training artificial intelligence models supporting human experts in privacy preserving tasks. We exploited a mixture of natural language processing techniques applied to unlabeled domain-specific documents corpora for automatically obtain labeled documents, where sensitive information are recognized and tagged. We performed preliminary tests just over 10.000 documents from the healthcare and justice domains. Human experts supported us during the validation. Results we obtained, estimated in terms of precision, recall and F1-score metrics across these two domains, were promising and encouraged us to further investigations.

Code randomization is considered as the basis of mitigation against code reuse attacks, fundamentally supporting some recent proposals such as execute-only memory (XOM) that aims at dynamic return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks. However, existing code randomization methods are hard to achieve a good balance between high-randomization entropy and semantic consistency. In particular, they always ignore code semantic consistency, incurring performance loss and incompatibility with current security schemes, e.g., control flow integrity (CFI). In this paper, we present an enhanced code randomization method termed as HCRESC, which can improve the randomization entropy significantly, meanwhile ensure the semantic consistency between variants and the original code. HCRESC reschedules instructions within the range of functions rather than basic blocks, thus producing more variants of the original code and preserving the code's semantic. We implement HCRESC on Linux platform of x86-64 architecture and demonstrate that HCRESC can increase the randomization entropy of x86-64 code over than 120% compared with existing methods while ensuring control flow and size of the code unaltered.

In order to solve the problems of unreasonable fusion results of high conflict evidence and ineffectiveness of coefficient weighting in classical evidence theory, a method of evidence fusion based on evidence trust degree and exponential weighting is proposed. Firstly, the fusion factor is constructed based on probability distribution function and evidence trust degree, then the fusion factor is exponentially weighted by evidence weight, and then the evidence fusion rule based on fusion factor is constructed. The results show that this method can effectively solve the problems of unreasonable fusion results of high conflict evidence and ineffectiveness of coefficient weighting. It shows that the new fusion method are more reasonable, which provides a new idea and method for solving the problems in evidence theory.

Experimentation focused on assessing the value of complex visualisation approaches when compared with alternative methods for data analysis is challenging. The interaction between participant prior knowledge and experience, a diverse range of experimental or real-world data sets and a dynamic interaction with the display system presents challenges when seeking timely, affordable and statistically relevant experimentation results. This paper outlines a hybrid approach proposed for experimentation with complex interactive data analysis tools, specifically for computer network traffic analysis. The approach involves a structured survey completed after free engagement with the software platform by expert participants. The survey captures objective and subjective data points relating to the experience with the goal of making an assessment of software performance which is supported by statistically significant experimental results. This work is particularly applicable to field of network analysis for cyber security and also military cyber operations and intelligence data analysis.

The generation, transmission, distribution, and storage of electric power is becoming increasingly decentralized. Advances in Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are rapidly changing the nature of the power grid. Moreover, the accommodation of these new technologies by the legacy grid requires that an increasing number of devices be Internet connected so as to allow for sensor and actuator information to be collected, transmitted, and processed. With the wide adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of smart grid devices that can potentially affect the stability, reliability, and resilience of the power grid need to be carefully examined and addressed. This is especially true in situations in which smart grid devices are deployed with default configurations or without reasonable protections against malicious activities. While much work has been done to characterize the vulnerabilities associated with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Industrial Control System (ICS) devices, this paper demonstrates that similar vulnerabilities associated with the newer class of IoT smart grid devices are becoming a concern. Specifically, this paper first performs an evaluation of such devices using the Shodan platform and text processing techniques to analyze a potential vulnerability involving the lack of password protection. This work further explores several Shodan search terms that can be used to identify additional smart grid components that can be evaluated in terms of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Finally, this paper presents recommendations for the more secure deployment of such smart grid devices.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has contributed a lot to the technology world. As the traditional algorithms failed to meet the human needs in real time, Machine learning and deep learning algorithms have gained great success in different applications such as classification systems, recommendation systems, pattern recognition etc. Emotion plays a vital role in determining the thoughts, behaviour and feeling of a human. An emotion recognition system can be built by utilizing the benefits of deep learning and different applications such as feedback analysis, face unlocking etc. can be implemented with good accuracy. The main focus of this work is to create a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) model that classifies 5 different human facial emotions. The model is trained, tested and validated using the manually collected image dataset.

Facial expressions are one of the most powerful, natural and immediate means for human being to present their emotions and intensions. In this paper, we present a novel method for fully automatic facial expression recognition. The facial landmarks are detected for characterizing facial expressions. A graph convolutional neural network is proposed for feature extraction and facial expression recognition classification. The experiments were performed on the three facial expression databases. The result shows that the proposed FER method can achieve good recognition accuracy up to 95.85% using the proposed method.

As a part of body language, facial expression is a psychological state that reflects the current emotional state of the person. Recognition of facial expressions can help to understand others and enhance communication with others. We propose a facial expression recognition method based on convolutional neural network ensemble learning in this paper. Our model is composed of three sub-networks, and uses the SVM classifier to Integrate the output of the three networks to get the final result. The recognition accuracy of the model's expression on the FER2013 dataset reached 71.27%. The results show that the method has high test accuracy and short prediction time, and can realize real-time, high-performance facial recognition.

This study extends previous advances in soft biometrics and describes to what extent soft biometrics can be used for facial profile recognition. The purpose of this research is to explore human recognition based on facial profiles in a comparative setting based on soft biometrics. Moreover, in this work, we describe and use a ranking system to determine the recognition rate. The Elo rating system is employed to rank subjects by using their face profiles in a comparative setting. The crucial features responsible for providing useful information describing facial profiles have been identified by using relative methods. Experiments based on a subset of the XM2VTSDB database demonstrate a 96% for recognition rate using 33 features over 50 subjects.

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Anomaly detection classification technology based on deep learning is one of the crucial technologies supporting network security. However, as the data increasing, this traditional model cannot guarantee that the false alarm rate is minimized while meeting the high detection rate. Additionally, distribution of imbalanced abnormal samples will lead to an increase in the error rate of the classification results. In this work, since CNN is effective in network intrusion classification, we embed a compressed feature layer in CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks). The purpose is to improve the efficiency of network intrusion detection. After our model was trained for 55 epochs and we set the learning rate of the model to 0.01, the detection rate reaches over 98%.

Existing cyber security solutions have been basically developed using knowledge-based models that often cannot trigger new cyber-attack families. With the boom of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, those security solutions have been plugged-in with AI models to discover, trace, mitigate or respond to incidents of new security events. The algorithms demand a large number of heterogeneous data sources to train and validate new security systems. This paper presents the description of new datasets, the so-called ToNİoT, which involve federated data sources collected from Telemetry datasets of IoT services, Operating system datasets of Windows and Linux, and datasets of Network traffic. The paper introduces the testbed and description of TONİoT datasets for Windows operating systems. The testbed was implemented in three layers: edge, fog and cloud. The edge layer involves IoT and network devices, the fog layer contains virtual machines and gateways, and the cloud layer involves cloud services, such as data analytics, linked to the other two layers. These layers were dynamically managed using the platforms of software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network-Function Virtualization (NFV) using the VMware NSX and vCloud NFV platform. The Windows datasets were collected from audit traces of memories, processors, networks, processes and hard disks. The datasets would be used to evaluate various AI-based cyber security solutions, including intrusion detection, threat intelligence and hunting, privacy preservation and digital forensics. This is because the datasets have a wide range of recent normal and attack features and observations, as well as authentic ground truth events. The datasets can be publicly accessed from this link [1].

We leverage deep learning algorithms on various user behavioral information gathered from end-user devices to classify a subject of interest. In spite of the ability of these techniques to counter spoofing threats, they are vulnerable to adversarial learning attacks, where an attacker adds adversarial noise to the input samples to fool the classifier into false acceptance. Recently, a handful of mature techniques like Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) have been proposed to aid white-box attacks, where an attacker has a complete knowledge of the machine learning model. On the contrary, we exploit a black-box attack to a behavioral biometric system based on gait patterns, by using FGSM and training a shadow model that mimics the target system. The attacker has limited knowledge on the target model and no knowledge of the real user being authenticated, but induces a false acceptance in authentication. Our goal is to understand the feasibility of a black-box attack and to what extent FGSM on shadow models would contribute to its success. Our results manifest that the performance of FGSM highly depends on the quality of the shadow model, which is in turn impacted by key factors including the number of queries allowed by the target system in order to train the shadow model. Our experimentation results have revealed strong relationships between the shadow model and FGSM performance, as well as the effect of the number of FGSM iterations used to create an attack instance. These insights also shed light on deep-learning algorithms' model shareability that can be exploited to launch a successful attack.

Intel has recently offered third-party attestation services, called Data Center Attestation Primitives (DCAP), for a data center to create its own attestation infrastructure. These services address the availability concerns and improve the performance as compared to the remote attestation based on Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID). Practical developments, such as Hyperledger Avalon, have already planned to support DCAP in their roadmap. However, the lack of formal proof for DCAP leads to security concerns. To fill this gap, we propose an automated, rigorous, and sound formal approach to specify and verify the remote at-testation based on Intel SGX DCAP under the assumption that there are no side-channel attacks and no vulnerabilities inside the enclave. In the proposed approach, the data center configuration and operational policies are specified to generate the symbolic model, and security goals are specified as security properties to produce verification results. The evaluation of non-Quoting Verification Enclave-based DCAP indicates that the confidentiality of secrets and integrity of data is preserved against a Dolev-Yao adversary in this technology. We also present a few of the many inconsistencies found in the existing literature on Intel SGX DCAP during formal specification.

Cloud Computing is considered as a business model for providing IT resources as services through the Internet based on pay-as-you-go principle. These IT resources are provided by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and requested by Cloud Service Consumers (CSCs). Selecting the proper CSP to deliver services is a critical and strategic process. According to the work in this paper, a framework for trust management in cloud computing has been introduced. The proposed framework consists of five stages; Filtrating, Trusting, Similarity, Ranking and Monitoring. In the Filtrating stage, the existing CSPs in the system will be filtered based on their parameters. The CSPs trust values are calculated in the Trusting stage. Then, the similarity between the CSC requirements and the CSPs data is calculated in the Similarity stage. The ranking of CSPs will be performed in Ranking stage. According to the Monitoring stage, after finishing the service, the CSC sends his feedbacks about the CSP who delivered the service to be used to monitor this CSP. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, a comparative study has been done for the Ranking and Monitoring stages using Armor dataset. According to the comparative results it is found that the proposed framework increases the reliability and performance of the cloud environment.

Cipher Text Policy Attribute Based Encryption which is a form of Public Key Encryption has become a renowned approach as a Data access control scheme for data security and confidentiality. It not only provides the flexibility and scalability in the access control mechanisms but also enhances security by fuzzy fined-grained access control. However, schemes are there which for more security increases the key size which ultimately leads to high encryption and decryption time. Also, there is no provision for handling the middle man attacks during data transfer. In this paper, a light-weight and more scalable encryption mechanism is provided which not only uses fewer resources for encoding and decoding but also improves the security along with faster encryption and decryption time. Moreover, this scheme provides an efficient key sharing mechanism for providing secure transfer to avoid any man-in-the-middle attacks. Also, due to fuzzy policies inclusion, chances are there to get approximation of user attributes available which makes the process fast and reliable and improves the performance of legitimate users.

Cyber incidents are occurring every day using various attack strategies. Deploying security solutions with strong configurations will reduce the attack surface and improve the forensic readiness, but will increase the security overhead and cost. In contrast, using moderate or low security configurations will reduce that overhead, but will inevitably decrease the investigation readiness. To avoid the use of cost-prohibitive approaches in developing forensic-ready systems, we present in this paper a game theoretic approach for deploying an investigation-ready infrastructure. The proposed game is a non-cooperative two-player game between an adaptive cyber defender that uses a cognitive security solution to increase the investigation readiness and reduce the attackers' untraceability, and a cyber attacker that wants to execute non-provable attacks with a low cost. The cognitive security solution takes its strategic decision, mainly based on its ability to make forensic experts able to differentiate between provable identifiable, provable non-identifiable, and non-provable attack scenarios, starting from the expected evidences to be generated. We study the behavior of the two strategic players, looking for a mixed Nash equilibrium during competition and computing the probabilities of attacking and defending. A simulation is conducted to prove the efficiency of the proposed model in terms of the mean percentage of gained security cost, the number of stepping stones that an attacker creates and the rate of defender false decisions compared to two different approaches.