Biblio

Proactive security reviews and test efforts are a necessary component of the software development lifecycle. Resource limitations often preclude reviewing the entire code
base. Making informed decisions on what code to review can improve a team’s ability to find and remove vulnerabilities. Risk-based attack surface approximation (RASA) is a technique that uses crash dump stack traces to predict what code may contain exploitable vulnerabilities. The goal of this research is to help software development teams prioritize security efforts by the efficient development of a risk-based attack surface approximation. We explore the use of RASA using Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Windows stack traces from crash dumps. We create RASA at the file level for Firefox, in which the 15.8% of the files that were part of the approximation contained 73.6% of the vulnerabilities seen for the product. We also explore the effect of random sampling of crashes on the approximation, as it may be impractical for organizations to store and process every crash received. We find that 10-fold random sampling of crashes at a rate of 10% resulted in 3% less vulnerabilities identified than using the entire set of stack traces for Mozilla Firefox. Sampling crashes in Windows 8.1 at a rate of 40% resulted in insignificant differences in vulnerability and file coverage as compared to a rate of 100%.

To keep up with the continuous modernization of web applications and to facilitate their development, a large number of new features are introduced to the web platform every year. Although new web features typically undergo a security review, issues affecting the privacy and security of users could still surface at a later stage, requiring the deprecation and removal of affected APIs. Furthermore, as the web evolves, so do the expectations in terms of security and privacy, and legacy features might need to be replaced with improved alternatives. Currently, this process of deprecating and removing features is an ad-hoc effort that is largely uncoordinated between the different browser vendors. This causes a discrepancy in terms of compatibility and could eventually lead to the deterrence of the removal of an API, prolonging potential security threats. In this paper we propose a progressive security mechanism that aims to facilitate and standardize the deprecation and removal of features that pose a risk to users’ security, and the introduction of features that aim to provide additional security guarantees.

In this work we explore how different cognitive processes af- fected typing patterns through a computer game we call The Typing Game. By manipulating the players’ familiarity with the words in our game through their similarity to dictionary words, and by allowing some players to replay rounds, we found that typing speed improves with familiarity with words, and also with practice, but that these are independent of the number of mistakes that are made when typing. We also found that users who had the opportunity to replay rounds exhibited different typing patterns even before replaying the rounds. 

Phishing is an act of technology-based deception that targets individuals to obtain information. To minimize the number of phishing attacks, factors that influence the ability to identify phishing attempts must be examined. The present study aimed to determine how individual differences relate to performance on a phishing task. Undergraduate students completed a questionnaire designed to assess impulsivity, trust, personality characteristics, and Internet/security habits. Participants performed an email task where they had to discriminate between legitimate emails and phishing attempts. Researchers assessed performance in terms of correctly identifying all email types (overall accuracy) as well as accuracy in identifying phishing emails (phishing accuracy). Results indicated that overall and phishing accuracy each possessed unique trust, personality, and impulsivity predictors, but shared one significant behavioral predictor. These results present distinct predictors of phishing susceptibility that should be incorporated in the development of anti-phishing technology and training.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) improves the efficiency of managing assets in supply chain applications throughout an entire life cycle or while in transport. Transfer of ownership of RFID-tagged items involves replacing information authorizing the old owner with information authorizing the new owner. In this work, we present a two-party, multiple tag, single-owner protocol for ownership transfer: 2P-mtOTP. This two-party protocol depends only on the communication among the two owners and the tags. Further, 2P-mtOTP is robust to attacks on its security, and it preserves the privacy of the owners and tags. We analyze our work in comparison to recent ownership transfer protocols in terms of security, privacy, and efficiency.

This paper describes a prototype of a novel Permanent Magnetic Elastomer (PME) sheet based skin sensor for robotic applications. Its working principle is to use a Hall effect transducer to measure the change of magnetic field. PME is a polymer that has Neodymium particles distributed inside it, after strong magnetization for anisotropy, the PME acquires strong remanent magnetization that can be comparable to that of a permanent magnet, in this work, we made improvement of the strength of the magnetic field of PME, so it achieved magnetic strength as high as 25 mT when there is no deformation. When external forces apply on the sensor, the deformation of PME causes a change in the magnetic field due to the change in the alignment of the magnetic particles. Compared with other soft magnetic sensors that employ similar technology, we implemented linear regression method to simplify the calibration, so we focus on the point right above the magnetometer. An MLX90393 chip is installed at the bottom of the PME as the magnetometer. Experimental results show that it can measure forces from 0.01–10 N. Calibration is confirmed effective even for shear directions when the surface of PME is less than 15 x 15 mm.

The 6G wireless communication networks are being studied to build a powerful networking system with global coverage, enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligent level and security. This paper presents a four-in-one networking paradigm named 3CL-Net that would broaden and strengthen the capabilities of current networking by introducing ubiquitous computing, caching, and intelligence over the communication connection to build 6G-required capabilities. To evaluate the practicability of 3CL-Net, this paper designs a platform based on the 3CL-Net architecture. The platform adopts leader-followers structure that could support all functions of 3CL-Net, but separate missions of 3CL-Net into two parts. Moreover, this paper has implemented part of functions as a prototype, on which some experiments are carried out. The results demonstrate that 3CL-Net is potential to be a practical and effective network paradigm to meet future requirements, meanwhile, 3CL-Net could motivate designs of related platforms as well.

Metaverse opens up a new social networking paradigm where people can experience a real interactive feeling without physical space constraints. Social interactions are gradually evolving from text combined with pictures and videos to 3-dimensional virtual reality, making the social experience increasingly physical, implying that more metaverse applications with immersive experiences will be developed in the future. However, the increasing data dimensionality and volume for new metaverse applications present a significant challenge in data acquisition, security, and sharing. Furthermore, metaverse applications require high capacity and ultrareliability for the wireless system to guarantee the quality of user experience, which cannot be addressed in the current fifth-generation system. Therefore, reaching the metaverse is dependent on the revolution in the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication, which is expected to provide low-latency, high-throughput, and secure services. This article provides a comprehensive view of metaverse applications and investigates the fundamental technologies for the 6G toward metaverse.

CAPTCHAs are designed to prevent malicious bot programs from abusing websites. Most online service providers deploy audio CAPTCHAs as an alternative to text and image CAPTCHAs for visually impaired users. However, prior research investigating the security of audio CAPTCHAs found them highly vulnerable to automated attacks using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. To improve the robustness of audio CAPTCHAs against automated abuses, we present the design and implementation of an audio adversarial CAPTCHA (aaeCAPTCHA) system in this paper. The aaeCAPTCHA system exploits audio adversarial examples as CAPTCHAs to prevent the ASR systems from automatically solving them. Furthermore, we conducted a rigorous security evaluation of our new audio CAPTCHA design against five state-of-the-art DNN-based ASR systems and three commercial Speech-to-Text (STT) services. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that aaeCAPTCHA is highly secure against these speech recognition technologies, even when the attacker has complete knowledge of the current attacks against audio adversarial examples. We also conducted a usability evaluation of the proof-of-concept implementation of the aaeCAPTCHA scheme. Our results show that it achieves high robustness at a moderate usability cost compared to normal audio CAPTCHAs. Finally, our extensive analysis highlights that aaeCAPTCHA can significantly enhance the security and robustness of traditional audio CAPTCHA systems while maintaining similar usability.

Model checking is one of the most commonly used technique in formal verification. However, the exponential scale state space renders exhaustive state enumeration inefficient even for a moderate System on Chip (SoC) design. In this paper, we propose a method that leverages symbolic execution to accelerate state space search and pinpoint security vulnerabilities. We automatically convert the hardware design to functionally equivalent C++ code and utilize the KLEE symbolic execution engine to perform state exploration through heuristic search. To reduce the search space, we symbolically represent essential input signals while making non-critical inputs concrete. Experiment results have demonstrated that our method can precisely identify security vulnerabilities at significantly lower computation cost.

This research investigates efficient architectures for the implementation of the CRYSTALS-Dilithium post-quantum digital signature scheme on reconfigurable hardware, in terms of speed, memory usage, power consumption and resource utilisation. Post quantum digital signature schemes involve a significant computational effort, making efficient hardware accelerators an important contributor to future adoption of schemes. This is work in progress, comprising the establishment of a comprehensive test environment for operational profiling, and the investigation of the use of novel architectures to achieve optimal performance.

In order to control users’ access to the information system, it is necessary to develop a security system that can work in real time and easily reconfigure. This problem can be solved using a fuzzy logic. In this paper the authors propose a fuzzy distribution system for access to the student assessment system, which takes into account the level of user access, identifier and the risk of attack during the request. This approach allows process fuzzy or incomplete information about the user and implement a sufficient level of confidential information protection.

To detect human behaviour and measure accuracy of classification rate. Materials and Methods: A novel deep belief network with sample size 10 and support vector machine with sample size of 10. It was iterated at different times predicting the accuracy percentage of human behaviour. Results: Human behaviour detection utilizing novel deep belief network 87.9% accuracy compared with support vector machine 87.0% accuracy. Deep belief networks seem to perform essentially better compared to support vector machines \$(\textbackslashmathrmp=0.55)(\textbackslashtextPiˆ0.05)\$. The deep belief algorithm in computer vision appears to perform significantly better than the support vector machine algorithm. Conclusion: Within this human behaviour detection novel deep belief network has more precision than support vector machine.

An accurate state estimation (SE) considering increased uncertainty by the high penetration of renewable energy systems (RESs) is more and more important to enhance situational awareness, and the optimal and resilient operation of the renewable-rich power grids. However, it is anticipated that adversaries who plan to manipulate the target power grid will generate attacks that inject inaccurate data to the SE using the vulnerabilities of the devices and networks. Among potential attack types, false data injection attack (FDIA) is gaining popularity since this can bypass bad data detection (BDD) methods implemented in the SE systems. Although numerous FDIA detection methods have been recently proposed, the uncertainty of system configuration that arises by the continuously increasing penetration of RESs has been been given less consideration in the FDIA algorithms. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new FDIA detection scheme that is applicable to renewable energy-rich power grids. A deep learning framework is developed in particular by synergistically constructing a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) with modern smart grid characteristics. The developed framework is evaluated on the IEEE 14-bus system integrating several RESs by using several attack scenarios. A comparison of the numerical results shows that the proposed FDIA detection mechanism outperforms the existing deep learning-based approaches in a renewable energy-rich grid environment.

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, it provides a new technical solution for secure storage of data and trusted computing. However, in the actual application of data traceability, blockchain technology has an obvious disadvantage: the large amount of data stored in the blockchain system will lead to a long response time for users to query data. Higher query delay severely restricts the development of block chain technology in the traceability system. In order to solve this problem, we propose an efficient, secure and low storage overhead blockchain query scheme. Specifically, we design an index structure independent of Merkle tree to support efficient intra-block query, and create new fields in the block header to optimize inter-block query. Compared with several existing schemes, our scheme ensures the security of data. Finally, we simulate and evaluate our proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme has better execution efficiency while reducing additional overhead.

With the advent of the era of Internet of Things (IoT), the increasing data volume leads to storage outsourcing as a new trend for enterprises and individuals. However, data breaches frequently occur, bringing significant challenges to the privacy protection of the outsourced data management system. There is an urgent need for efficient and secure data sharing schemes for the outsourced data management infrastructure, such as the cloud. Therefore, this paper designs a dual-server-based data sharing scheme with data privacy and high efficiency for the cloud, enabling the internal members to exchange their data efficiently and securely. Dual servers guarantee that none of the servers can get complete data independently by adopting secure two-party computation. In our proposed scheme, if the data is destroyed when sending it to the user, the data will not be restored. To prevent the malicious deletion, the data owner adds a random number to verify the identity during the uploading procedure. To ensure data security, the data is transmitted in ciphertext throughout the process by using searchable encryption. Finally, the black-box leakage analysis and theoretical performance evaluation demonstrate that our proposed data sharing scheme provides solid security and high efficiency in practice.

The excess buffering of packets in network elements, also referred to as bufferbloat, results in high latency. Considering the requirements of traffic generated by video conferencing systems like Zoom, cloud rendered gaming platforms like Google Stadia, or even video streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, timeliness of such traffic is important. Ensuring low latency to IP flows with a high throughput calls for the application of Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes. This introduces yet another problem as the co-existence of scalable and classic congestion controls leads to the starvation of classic TCP flows. Technologies such as Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput (L4S) and the corresponding dual queue coupled AQM, DualPI2, provide a robust solution to these problems. However, their deployment on hardware targets such as programmable switches is quite challenging due to the complexity of algorithms and architectural constraints of switching ASICs. In this study, we provide proof of concept implementations of two AQMs that enable the co-existence of scalable and traditional TCP traffic, namely DualPI2 and the preceding single-queue PI2 AQM, on an Intel Tofino switching ASIC. Given the fixed operation of the switch’s traffic manager, we investigate to what extent it is possible to implement a fully RFC-compliant version of the two AQMs on the Tofino ASIC. The study shows that an appropriate split between control and data plane operations is required while we also exploit fixed functionality of the traffic manager to support such solutions.

This paper studies adaptive control of bilateral teleoperation systems with false data injection attacks. The model of bilateral teleoperation system with false data injection attacks is presented. An off-line identification approach based on the least squares is used to detect whether false data injection attacks occur or not in the communication channel. Two Bernoulli distributed variables are introduced to describe the packet dropouts and false data injection attacks in the network. An adaptive controller is proposed to deal stability of the system with false data injection attacks. Some sufficient conditions are proposed to ensure the globally asymptotical stability of the system under false data injection attacks by using Lyapunov functional methods. A bilateral teleoperation system with two degrees of freedom is used to show the effectiveness of gained results.

This paper deals with the implementation of robust control, based on the finite time Lyapunov stability theory, to solve the trajectory tracking problem of an unconventional quadrotor with rotating arms (also known as foldable drone). First, the model of this Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) taking into consideration the variation of the inertia, the Center of Gravity (CoG) and the control matrix is presented. The theoretical foundations of backstepping control enhanced by a Super-Twisting (ST) algorithm are then discussed. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Finally, a qualitative and quantitative comparative study is made between the proposed controller and the classical backstepping controller. Overall, the results obtained show that the proposed control approach provides better performance in terms of accuracy and resilience.

Security and Controls with Data privacy in Internet of Things (IoT) devices is not only a present and future technology that is projected to connect a multitude of devices, but it is also a critical survival factor for IoT to thrive. As the quantity of communications increases, massive amounts of data are expected to be generated, posing a threat to both physical device and data security. In the Internet of Things architecture, small and low-powered devices are widespread. Due to their complexity, traditional encryption methods and algorithms are computationally expensive, requiring numerous rounds to encrypt and decode, squandering the limited energy available on devices. A simpler cryptographic method, on the other hand, may compromise the intended confidentiality and integrity. This study examines two lightweight encryption algorithms for Android devices: AES and RSA. On the other hand, the traditional AES approach generates preset encryption keys that the sender and receiver share. As a result, the key may be obtained quickly. In this paper, we present an improved AES approach for generating dynamic keys.

Operating systems are essential software components for any computer. The goal of computer system manu-facturers is to provide a safe operating system that can resist a range of assaults. APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) are merely one kind of attack used by hackers to penetrate organisations (APT). Here, we will apply the MITRE ATT&CK approach to analyze the security of Windows and Linux. Using the results of a series of vulnerability tests conducted on Windows 7, 8, 10, and Windows Server 2012, as well as Linux 16.04, 18.04, and its most current version, we can establish which operating system offers the most protection against future assaults. In addition, we have shown adversarial reflection in response to threats. We used ATT &CK framework tools to launch attacks on both platforms.