Biblio

Smart Security Solutions are in high demand with the ever-increasing vulnerabilities within the IT domain. Adjusting to a Work-From-Home (WFH) culture has become mandatory by maintaining required core security principles. Therefore, implementing and maintaining a secure Smart Home System has become even more challenging. ARGUS provides an overall network security coverage for both incoming and outgoing traffic, a firewall and an adaptive bandwidth management system and a sophisticated CCTV surveillance capability. ARGUS is such a system that is implemented into an existing router incorporating cloud and Machine Learning (ML) technology to ensure seamless connectivity across multiple devices, including IoT devices at a low migration cost for the customer. The aggregation of the above features makes ARGUS an ideal solution for existing Smart Home System service providers and users where hardware and infrastructure is also allocated. ARGUS was tested on a small-scale smart home environment with a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B controller. Its intrusion detection system identified an intrusion with 96% accuracy while the physical surveillance system predicts the user with 81% accuracy.

Edge computing is a prospective notion for expanding the potential of cloud computing. It is vital to maintaining a decent atmosphere free of all forms of security and breaches in order to continue utilizing computer services. The security concerns surrounding the edge computing environment has been impeded as a result of the security issues that surround the area. Many researchers have looked into edge computing security issues, however, not all have thoroughly studied the needs. Security requirements are the goals that specify the capabilities and operations that a process that is carried out by a system in order to eliminate various security flaws. The purpose of this study is to give a complete overview of the many different artificial intelligence technologies that are now being utilized for edge computing security with the intention of aiding research in the future in locating research potential. This article analyzed the most recent research and shed light on the following topics: state-of-the-art techniques used to combat security threats, technological trends used by the method, metrics utilize to assess the techniques' ability, and opportunities of research for future researchers in the area of artificial intelligence for edge computing security.

Resilience of urban infrastructure to sudden, system-wide, potentially catastrophic events is a critical need across domains. The growing connectivity of infrastructure, including its cyber-physical components which can be controlled in real time, offers an attractive path towards rapid adaptation to adverse events and adjustment of system objectives. However, existing work in the field often offers disjoint approaches that respond to particular scenarios. On the other hand, abstract work on control of complex systems focuses on attempting to adapt to the changes in the system dynamics or environment, but without understanding that the system may simply not be able to perform its original task after an adverse event. To address this challenge, this programmatic paper proposes a vision for a new paradigm of infrastructure resilience. Such a framework treats infrastructure across domains through a unified theory of controlled dynamical systems, but remains cognizant of the lack of knowledge about the system following a widespread adverse event and aims to identify the system's fundamental limits. As a result, it will enable the infrastructure operator to assess and assure system performance following an adverse event, even if the exact nature of the event is not yet known. Building off ongoing work on assured resilience of control systems, in this paper we identify promising early results, challenges that motivate the development of resilience theory for infrastructure system, and possible paths forward for the proposed effort.

With the rapid development of general cloud services, more and more individuals or collectives use cloud platforms to store data. Assured data deletion deserves investigation in cloud storage. In time-sensitive data storage scenarios, it is necessary for cloud platforms to automatically destroy data after the data owner-specified expiration time. Therefore, assured time-sensitive data deletion should be sought. In this paper, a fine-grained assured time-sensitive data deletion (ATDD) scheme in cloud storage is proposed by embedding the time trapdoor in Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). Time-sensitive data is self-destructed after the data owner-specified expiration time so that the authorized users cannot get access to the related data. In addition, a credential is returned to the data owner for data deletion verification. This proposed scheme provides solutions for fine-grained access control and verifiable data self-destruction. Detailed security and performance analysis demonstrate the security and the practicability of the proposed scheme.

In most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device’s PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a new protocol for supporting distributed authentication while avoiding vulnerability to information leakage where CRPs could be retrieved from hacked devices and collectively used to model the PUF. The main idea is to provision for scrambling the challenge bit-stream in a way that is dependent on the verifier. The scrambling pattern varies per authentication round for each device and independently across devices. In essence, the scrambling function becomes node- and packetspecific and the response received by two verifiers of one device for the same challenge bit-stream could vary. Thus, neither the scrambling function can be reverted, nor the PUF can be modeled even by a collusive set of malicious nodes. The validation results using data of an FPGA-based implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in thwarting PUF modeling attacks by collusive actors. We also discuss the approach resiliency against impersonation, Sybil, and reverse engineering attacks.

In recent decennium, hardware security has gained a lot of attention due to different types of attacks being launched, such as IP theft, reverse engineering, counterfeiting, etc. The critical testing infrastructure incorporated into ICs is very popular among attackers to mount side-channel attacks. The IEEE standard 1687 (IJTAG) is one such testing infrastructure that is the focus of attackers these days. To secure access to the IJTAG network, various techniques based on Locking SIB (LSIB) have been proposed. One such very effective technique makes use of Security Linear Feedback Shift Register (SLFSR) along with LSIB. The SLFSR obfuscates the scan chain information from the attacker and hence makes the brute-force attack against LSIB ineffective.In this work, it is shown that the SLFSR based Locking SIB is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. A power analysis attack along with known-plaintext attack is used to determine the IJTAG network structure. First, the known-plaintext attack is used to retrieve the SLFSR design information. This information is further used along with power analysis attack to determine the exact length of the scan chain which in turn breaks the whole security scheme. Further, a countermeasure is proposed to prevent the aforementioned hybrid attack.

This paper is concered with the nonlinear cyber physical system (CPS) with uncertain parameters under false data injection (FDI) attacks. The interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy model is utilized to approximate the nonlinear system, then the nonlinear system can be represented as a convex combination of linear systems. To detect the FDI attacks, a novel robust fuzzy extended state observer with H∞ preformance is proposed, where the fuzzy rules are utilized to the observer to estimate the FDI attacks. Utilizing the observation of the FDI attacks, a security control scheme is proposed in this paper, in which a compensator is designed to offset the FDI attacks. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the effecitveness of the proposed security scheme.

This research evaluates the accuracy of two methods of authorship prediction: syntactical analysis and n-gram, and explores its potential usage. The proposed algorithm measures n-gram, and counts adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, punctuation, and sentence length from the training data, and normalizes each metric. The proposed algorithm compares the metrics of training samples to testing samples and predicts authorship based on the correlation they share for each metric. The severity of correlation between the testing and training data produces significant weight in the decision-making process. For example, if analysis of one metric approximates 100% positive correlation, the weight in the decision is assigned a maximum value for that metric. Conversely, a 100% negative correlation receives the minimum value. This new method of authorship validation holds promise for future innovation in fraud protection, the study of historical documents, and maintaining integrity within academia.

One of the major concerns in the real-time monitoring systems in a smart grid is the Cyber security threat. The false data injection attack is emerging as a major form of attack in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A False data Injection Attack (FDIA) can lead to severe issues like insufficient generation, physical damage to the grid, power flow imbalance as well as economical loss. The recent advancements in machine learning algorithms have helped solve the drawbacks of using classical detection techniques for such attacks. In this article, we propose to use Autoencoders (AE’s) as a novel Machine Learning approach to detect FDI attacks without any major modifications. The performance of the method is validated through the analysis of the simulation results. The algorithm achieves optimal accuracy owing to the unsupervised nature of the algorithm.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are not secure by design–with recent developments requiring them to connect to the Internet, they tend to be highly vulnerable. Additionally, attacks on critical infrastructures such as power grids and nuclear plants can cause significant damage and loss of lives. Since such attacks tend to generate anomalies in the systems, an efficient way of attack detection is to monitor the systems and identify anomalies in real-time. An automated anomaly detection tool is introduced in this paper. Additionally, the functioning of the systems is viewed as Finite State Automata. Specific sensor measurements are used to determine permissible transitions, and statistical measures such as the Interquartile Range are used to determine acceptable boundaries for the remaining sensor measurements provided by the system. Deviations from the boundaries or permissible transitions are considered as anomalies. An additional feature is the provision of a finite state automata diagram that provides the operational constraints of a system, given a set of regulated input. This tool showed a high anomaly detection rate when tested with three types of ICS. The concepts are also benchmarked against a state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithm called Isolation Forest, and the results are provided.

Network security is a prominent topic that is gaining international attention. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is often regarded as one of the most serious threats to network security. Software Defined Network (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, which can meet various network requirements. But SDN can also become the object of DDoS attacks. This paper proposes an automated DDoS attack mitigation method that is based on the programmability of the Ryu controller and the features of the OpenFlow switch flow tables. The Mininet platform is used to simulate the whole process, from SDN traffic generation to using a K-Nearest Neighbor model for traffic classification, as well as identifying and mitigating DDoS attack. The packet counts of the victim's malicious traffic input port are significantly lower after the mitigation method is implemented than before the mitigation operation. The purpose of mitigating DDoS attack is successfully achieved.

Software vulnerabilities are closely monitored by the security community to timely address the security and privacy issues in software systems. Before a vulnerability is published by vulnerability management systems, it needs to be characterized to highlight its unique attributes, including affected software products and versions, to help security professionals prioritize their patches. Associating product names and versions with disclosed vulnerabilities may require a labor-intensive process that may delay their publication and fix, and thereby give attackers more time to exploit them. This work proposes a machine learning method to extract software product names and versions from unstructured CVE descriptions automatically. It uses Word2Vec and Char2Vec models to create context-aware features from CVE descriptions and uses these features to train a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model using bidirectional Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Based on the attributes of the product names and versions in previously published CVE descriptions, we created a set of Expert System (ES) rules to refine the predictions of the NER model and improve the performance of the developed method. Experiment results on real-life CVE examples indicate that using the trained NER model and the set of ES rules, software names and versions in unstructured CVE descriptions could be identified with F-Measure values above 0.95.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) databases contain information about vulnerabilities of software products and source code. If individual elements of CVE descriptions can be extracted and structured, then the data can be used to search and analyze CVE descriptions. Herein we propose a method to label each element in CVE descriptions by applying Named Entity Recognition (NER). For NER, we used BERT, a transformer-based natural language processing model. Using NER with machine learning can label information from CVE descriptions even if there are some distortions in the data. An experiment involving manually prepared label information for 1000 CVE descriptions shows that the labeling accuracy of the proposed method is about 0.81 for precision and about 0.89 for recall. In addition, we devise a way to train the data by dividing it into labels. Our proposed method can be used to label each element automatically from CVE descriptions.

Currently, risk assessment of industrial control systems is static and performed manually. With the increased convergence of operational technology and information technology, risk assessment has to incorporate a combined safety and security analysis along with their interdependency. This paper investigates the data inputs required for safety and security assessments, also if the collection and utilisation of such data can be automated. A particular focus is put on integrated assessment methods which have the potential for automation. In case the overall process to identify potential hazards and threats and analyze what could happen if they occur can be automated, manual efforts and cost of operation can be reduced, thus also increasing the overall performance of risk assessment.

The purpose of this article is to consider one of the options for automating the process of collecting information from open sources when conducting penetration testing in an organization's information security audit using the capabilities of the Python programming language. Possible primary vectors for collecting information about the organization, personnel, software, and hardware are shown. The basic principles of operation of the software product are presented in a visual form, which allows automated analysis of information from open sources about the object under study.

In the world of information technology and the Internet, which has become a part of human life today and is constantly expanding, Attention to the users' requirements such as information security, fast processing, dynamic and instant access, and costs savings has become essential. The solution that is proposed for such problems today is a technology that is called cloud computing. Today, cloud computing is considered one of the most essential distributed tools for processing and storing data on the Internet. With the increasing using this tool, the need to schedule tasks to make the best use of resources and respond appropriately to requests has received much attention, and in this regard, many efforts have been made and are being made. To this purpose, various algorithms have been proposed to calculate resource allocation, each of which has tried to solve equitable distribution challenges while using maximum resources. One of these calculation methods is the DRF algorithm. Although it offers a better approach than previous algorithms, it faces challenges, especially with time-consuming resource allocation computing. These challenges make the use of DRF more complex than ever in the low number of requests with high resource capacity as well as the high number of simultaneous requests. This study tried to reduce the computations costs associated with the DRF algorithm for resource allocation by introducing a new approach to using this DRF algorithm to automate calculations by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms (Autonomic Dominant Resource Fairness or A-DRF).

Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).

At present, the ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) has been widely used in different fields of data sharing such as cross-border paperless trade, digital government and etc. However, there still exist some challenges including single point of failure, key abuse and key unaccountable issues in CP-ABE. To address these problems. We propose an accountable CP-ABE mechanism based on block chain system. First, we establish two authorization agencies MskCA and AttrVN(Attribute verify Network),where the MskCA can realize master key escrow, and the AttrVN manages and validates users' attributes. In this way, our system can avoid the single point of failure and improve the privacy of user attributes and security of keys. Moreover, in order to realize auditability of CP-ABE key parameter transfer, we introduce the did and record parameter transfer process on the block chain. Finally, we theoretically prove the security of our CP-ABE. Through comprehensive comparison, the superiority of CP-ABE is verified. At the same time, our proposed schemes have some properties such as fast decryption and so on.

The accelerated move toward adopting the Smart Grid paradigm has resulted in numerous drawbacks as far as security is concerned. Traditional power grids are becoming more vulnerable to cyberattacks as all the control decisions are generated based on the data the Smart Grid generates during its operation. This data can be tampered with or attacked in communication lines to mislead the control room in decision-making. The false data injection attack (FDIA) is one of the most severe cyberattacks on today’s cyber-physical power system, as it has the potential to cause significant physical and financial damage. However, detecting cyberattacks are incredibly challenging since they have no known patterns. In this paper, we launch a random FDIA on IEEE-39 bus system. Later, we propose a Bagging MLP-based autoencoder to detect the FDIAs in the power system and compare the result with a single ML model. The Bagging MLP-based autoencoder outperforms the Isolation forest while detecting FDIAs.

The outsourcing of databases is very popular among IT companies and industries. It acts as a solution for businesses to ensure availability of the data for their users. The solution of outsourcing the database is to encrypt the data in a form where the database service provider can perform relational operations over the encrypted database. At the same time, the associated security risk of data leakage prevents many potential industries from deploying it. In this paper, we present a secure outsourcing database search scheme (BASDB) with the use of a smart contract for search operation over index of encrypted database and storing encrypted relational database in the cloud. Our proposed scheme BASDB is a simple and practical solution for effective search on encrypted relations and is well resistant to information leakage against attacks like search and access pattern leakage.

Nowadays, in this COVID era, work from home is quietly more preferred than work from the office. Due to this, the need for a firewall has been increased day by day. Every organization uses the firewall to secure their network and create VPN servers to allow their employees to work from home. Due to this, the security of the firewall plays a crucial role. In this paper, we have compared the two most popular open-source firewalls named pfSense and OPNSense. We have examined the security they provide by default without any other attachment. To do this, we performed four different attacks on the firewalls and compared the results. As a result, we have observed that both provide the same security still pfSense has a slight edge when an attacker tries to perform a Brute force attack over OPNSense.

Can quantum entanglement increase the capacity of (classical) covert channels? To one familiar with Holevo's Theorem it is tempting to think that the answer is obviously no. However, in this work we show: quantum entanglement can in fact increase the capacity of a classical covert channel, in the presence of an active adversary; on the other hand, a zero-capacity channel is not improved by entanglement, so entanglement cannot create ‘purely quantum’ covert channels; the problem of determining the capacity of a given channel in the presence of entanglement is undecidable; but there is an algorithm to bound the entangled capacity of a channel from above, adapted from the semi-definite hierarchy from the theory of non-local games, whose close connection to channel capacity is at the core of all of our results.

Aiming at the big data security and privacy protection issues in the smart grid, the current key technologies for big data security and privacy protection in smart grids are sorted out, and a privacy-protecting smart grid association rule is proposed according to the privacy-protecting smart grid big data analysis and mining technology route The mining plan specifically analyzes the risk factors in the operation of the new power grid, and discusses the information security of power grid users from the perspective of the user, focusing on the protection of privacy and security, using safe multi-party calculation of the support and confidence of the association rules. Privacy-protecting smart grid big data mining enables power companies to improve service quality to 7.5% without divulging customer private information.

The recent experience in the use of virtual reality (VR) technology has shown that users prefer Electromyography (EMG) sensor-based controllers over hand controllers. The results presented in this paper show the potential of EMG-based controllers, in particular the Myo armband, to identify a computer system user. In the first scenario, we train various classifiers with 25 keyboard typing movements for training and test with 75. The results with a 1-dimensional convolutional neural network indicate that we are able to identify the user with an accuracy of 93% by analyzing only the EMG data from the Myo armband. When we use 75 moves for training, accuracy increases to 96.45% after cross-validation.

Blockchain technology has made it possible to store and send digital currencies. Bitcoin wallets and marketplaces have made it easy for nontechnical users to use the protocol. Since its inception, the price of Bitcoin is going up and the number of nodes in the network has increased drastically. The increasing popularity of Bitcoin has made exchanges and individual nodes a target for an attack. Understanding the Bitcoin protocol better helps security engineers to harden the network and helps regular users secure their hot wallets. In this paper, Bitcoin protocol is presented with description of the mining process which secures transactions. In addition, the Bitcoin algorithms and their security are described with potential vulnerabilities in the protocol and potential exploits for attackers. Finally, we propose some security solutions to help mitigate attacks on Bitcoin exchanges and hot wallets.