International News

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	International News

 

“Singapore tackles skills gap in cyber security sector”, AsiaOne, 13 May 2015. As the Smart Nation initiative revolutionizes technology in Singapore, a lack of cyber security experts threatens progress.  To combat this, the region is looking to bring in outside experts to improve the situation as well as train more security professionals. (ID#: 15-60000) See: http://business.asiaone.com/news/singapore-tackles-skills-gap-cyber-security-sector

 

“Russia and China sign cyber security pact, vow not to hack each other”, Naked Security, 11 May 2015. The Russian and Chinese governments agreed to abstain from cyber-attacks on one another. Additionally they plan to share intelligence and cyber security related resources. (ID#: 15-60001) See: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/05/11/russia-and-china-sign-cyber-security-pact-vow-not-to-hack-each-other/

 

“Tea to tech: China's cybersecurity push sparks a 'gold rush'”, Reuters, 5 May 2015. China is pushing to adopt technology developed within its own borders rather than the US.  Entrepreneur Zhang Long hopes to capitalize on this with the release of his own operating system, SPGnux. (ID#: 15-60002) See: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/06/us-china-software-idUSKBN0NQ2A220150506

 

China Security Bill Calls for Protecting ‘Cyber Sovereignty’, Bloomberg, 7 May 2015. China hopes to change over the majority of its technology currently supplied by foreign countries with their own Chinese-developed replacements. (ID#: 15-60003) See: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/new-china-security-bill-calls-for-protecting-cyber-sovereignty-

 

“Turkey’s 10-Hour Blackout Shows Threat to World Power Grids”, Bloomberg, 1 April 2015. A major power outage in Turkey raises questions about the ability of the world’s infrastructure to fend off cyber-attacks. (ID#: 15-60004) See: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/turkish-blackout-shows-world-power-grids-under-threat

 

“China tightens cybersecurity controls to limit foreign spying”, ZDNet, 8 May 2015. New legislation in China aims to secure their cyber-borders by forcing out foreign competition. However, some feel that China needs the best technology to improve cyber security whether it is developed inside the country or not. (ID#: 15-60005) See: http://www.zdnet.com/article/china-tightens-cybersecurity-controls-to-limit-foreign-spying/

 

“Developing international rules of the road for cybersecurity”, ejinsight, 12 May 2015. In recent years, cyber security has worked its way up the list of international issues.  There is a growing need for more uniform cyber security conduct among the world’s governments. (ID#: 15-60006) See: http://www.ejinsight.com/20150512-developing-international-rules-road-cybersecurity/

 

“Darktrace, The Cyber Security Startup Backed By Mike Lynch, Raises Further $18M”, TechCrunch, 17 March 2015. Cyber security startup, Darktrace, received 18 Million USD in investments. The company is at the forefront of cyber security innovation employing nontraditional methods to detect and counter threats. (ID#: 15-60007) See: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/darktrace/

 

“Europay, MasterCard, Visa: A Primer”, TechCrunch, 12 May 2015. One area of cyber security that often gets overlooked is the integrity of credit cards and the subsequent fraud as a result of breaches.  The US is transitioning to new EMV technology to combat the several billions of dollars lost to fraud annually. (ID#: 15-60008) See: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/12/europay-mastercard-visa-a-primer/

 

“Gulf leaders want cyber-security cooperation with US”, SC Magazine UK, 13 May 2015. The Gulf Cooperation Council members hope to sign a cyber security pact with the US to help protect their countries from attacks as well as share information. (ID#: 15-60009) See: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/gulf-leaders-want-cyber-security-cooperation-with-us/article/414422/

 

“Police upskill officers on cyber-crime”, SC Magazine UK, 13 May 2015. UK police officers received updated training on cyber crime however the extent of the training is questionable at best. Additionally, police departments face other challenges with regards to cyber security. (ID#: 15-60010) See: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/police-upskill-officers-on-cyber-crime/article/414414/

 

“Glasgow choir and Winchester music festival hit by 'unique' cyber-attack”, SC Magazine UK, 12 May 2015. Members of several small Wordpress sites were hit with an unconventional cyber attack.  Login information for many users was stolen, however, no further damage was done and the motive for this attack remains unclear. (ID#: 15-60011 ) See: http://www.scmagazineuk.com/glasgow-choir-and-winchester-music-festival-hit-by-unique-cyber-attack/article/414152/

(ID#:15-5521)

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email tonews@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence

US News

 

	US News

 

“Android Factory reset fails to wipe sensitive user data, million devices at risk”, Cyber Defense Magazine, 26 May 2015. [Online]. Researchers have determined that in over 500 million Android devices from numerous manufacturers running Android versions from 2.3 to 4.3, the default factory reset fails to completely wipe user data. Sensitive data including but not limited to encryption keys for social media networks, photos and videos, and text messages can all be recovered after a factory reset. (ID#: 15-50235) See http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/android-factory-reset-fails-to-wipe-sensitive-user-data-million-devices-at-risk/

 

“Researchers in Bluetooth IoT Privacy Warning”, Infosecurity Magazine, 26 May 2015. [Online]. Security experts are expressing concerns over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol after an experiment in which researchers were able to intercept BLE data from 149 devices within half an hour in a public location. BLE, which is used for communicating with smart devices like the FitBit, transmits potentially personal data. In addition, the MAC address used by the smart device could be used to track a person for nefarious purposes. (ID#: 15-50236) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/researchers-in-bluetooth-iot/

 

“A growing threat: Car hacking”, Homeland Security News Wire, 26 May 2015. [Online]. With an increase in the use of computer technology in traditionally non-computerized systems (cars, for example), hacking and the threats that it brings are moving into mediums that most people are not used to associating with cybersecurity. In response to increasing concern over the safety of automatic vehicle systems, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has announced measures the combat the threat of automotive hacking. (ID#: 15-50237) See http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150526-a-growing-threat-car-hacking

 

“Tech experts Comment on LogJam Browser Bug”, Information Security Buzz, 26 May 2015. [Online]. Experts comment on the recently discovered LogJam bug, which allows MitM attackers to bypass the TLS protocol and intercept communications, and even alter them. The bug brings to light the issue of internet servers re-using seeds for generating cryptographic keys, namely the Diffie-Hellman key. (ID#: 15-50238) See http://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/tech-experts-comment-on-logjam-browser-bug/

 

“USA Freedom Act Fails in the Senate”, Infosecurity Magazine, 25 May 2015. [Online]. Despite resounding success in the House of Representatives, the USA Freedom Act failed in the Senate with a vote of 57-42 against it. The act would have ended bulk data collection under the controversial Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but national security concerns led to its abandonment. The legislation even received criticism from civil rights groups, who saw the bill as “fake reform”. (ID#: 15-50239) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/usa-freedom-act-fails-in-the-senate/

 

“Investigation ongoing in reported multimillion member Adult FriendFinder breach”, SC Magazine, 22 May 2015. [Online]. Following reports that personal information of nearly 4 million of its users were for sale on the “dark web”, owners of the dating site Adult FriendFinder announced that they are working with law enforcement and Mandiant to investigate a potential security issue. The stolen data — which includes dates of birth, email addresses, IP addresses, and sexual preferences, among other details —  could easily be used to target victims with blackmail. (ID#: 15-50240) See http://www.scmagazine.com/personal-info-on-39m-adult-friendfinder-members-found-on-dark-web/article/416392/

 

“Innovation Wave Prompts Many Companies to Increase IT Spending and Hiring”, Information Security Buzz, 22 May 2015. [Online]. A study released by CompTIA suggests a bright future for job-seekers in IT fields. The study, which was conducted in several countries, indicates that 23 percent of businesses plan to increase IT spending by 10 percent or more, with U.S. companies in particular planning to increase spending by 5.4 percent, on average. The trend indicates a positive attitude towards the importance of technology and cyber solutions. (ID#: 15-50241) See http://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/innovation-wave-prompts-many-companies-to-increase-it-spending-and-hiring/

 

“FTC gives thumbs up to companies that cooperate during breach probes”, SC Magazine, 21 May 2015. [Online]. A blog post on the Federal Trade Commission website explained how cooperating during an FTC data breach investigation can help a company gain a favorable view in the eyes of the FTC. According to the post, the FTC views cooperative actions, such as reporting breaches to law encforcement, as a sign of meaningful effort to “reduce the harm from the breach”. (ID#: 15-50242) See http://www.scmagazine.com/ftc-gives-thumbs-up-to-companies-that-cooperate-during-breach-probes/article/416165/

 

“Researchers observe SVG files being used to distribute ransomware”, SC Magazine, 21 May 2015. [Online]. A series of phishing emails have been discovered that are unique in that they use SVG files to carry the payload. When downloaded and executed, these files download what researchers believe to be CryptoWall ransomware. According to security firm AppRiver, small stores, law offices, and schools are among the targets. (ID#: 15-50243) See http://www.scmagazine.com/svg-files-attached-to-phishing-emails-distribute-what-is-apparently-cryptowall-ransomware/article/416143/

 

“Unknown Hackers hit systems at Bundestag”, Cyber Defense Magazine, 21 May 2015. [Online]. After IT staff at Bundestag (the German parliament) noticed that hackers were trying to penetrate their internal network, parts of Bundestag’s computer system were shut down as a safety measure. The attacker is suspected to have been seeking data pertaining to the relationship between the NSA and the German Government, though it is not clear as to whether any data was actually compromised. (ID#: 15-50244) See http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/unknown-hackers-hit-systems-at-bundestag/

 

“Brazil: Ground Zero for a Fresh Malware Approach”, Infosecurity Magazine, 21 May 2015. [Online]. Due to the popularity of online banking in Brazil, banking trojans are become correspondingly common in a unique “homegrown malware phenomenon” in the region. Many of these trojans use CPL files, a type of file that is used to cause automatic execution of code. CPL files, while still relatively uncommon elsewhere, are being used in South America at a rapidly increasing rate. (ID#: 15-50245) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/brazil-ground-zero-for-a-fresh/

 

“Netgear and ZyXEL confirm NetUSB flaw”, Computerworld, 21 May 2015. [Online]. ZyXEL Communications and Netgear have both confirmed that some of their routers have a buffer overflow vulnerability that could allow hackers to execute code at the highest possible privilege level. The vulnerability is located in NetUSB, a Linux kernel module that allows routers to facilitate USB sharing between different computers over the internet. (ID#: 15-502) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2925046/network-hardware-solutions/netgear-and-zyxel-confirm-netusb-flaw.html

 

“One false tweet sent financial markets into a tailspin”, Homeland Security Newswire, 21 May 2015. [Online]. In 2013, a single tweet from a hacked Twitter account sent financial markets into a serious crisis. Though short-lived, the incident (known as Hack Crash) brought awareness to the drastic effect that hacking and social engineering can have on algorithmic trading, and in turn, worldwide trade. (ID#: 15-50246) See http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150521-one-false-tweet-sent-financial-markets-into-a-tailspin

 

“Coast Guard Health Data Privacy Is Suspect”, GovInfoSecurity, 21 May 2015. [Online]. A report written by assistant inspector general for IT audits Sonda McCauley claims that the United States Coast Guard doesn’t take adequate measures to protect the health information of its personnel and their families. Lack of coordination and meaningful structure are some of the criticisms made against the USCG in the report. (ID#: 15-50247) See http://www.govinfosecurity.com/coast-guard-health-data-privacy-suspect-a-8236

 

“Federal prosecutors charge Chinese nationals with trade secret theft”, SC Magazine, 20 May 2015. [Online]. The Department of Justice published a 32-count indictment on Tuesday, charging six Chinese nationals with stealing U.S. trade secrets on behalf of the Chinese government. One of the defendants, Tianjin University professor Hao Zhang, was arrested the previous weekend. Wei Pang, another of the six defendants, worked with Zhang on Film Bulk Acoustic Resonator (FBAR) technology while studying at the University of Southern California. Both men would later work on FBAR for American companies, where they allegedly stole trade secrets. (ID#: 15-50248) See http://www.scmagazine.com/professor-other-chinese-nationals-indicted-on-32-counts/article/415887/

 

“CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield Hacked”, Data Breach Today, 20 May 2015. [Online]. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield joined Anthem Inc. and Premera Blue Cross as yet another recent victim of large-scale data breaches, claiming that an intrusion dating to June of last year may have affected the data of 1.1 million customers. The attack is highly reminiscent of (and possibly related to) other recent healthcare sector attacks, but despite being executed by a “sophisticated threat actor”, database access was “limited”. (ID#: 15-50249) See http://www.databreachtoday.com/carefirst-bluecross-blueshield-hacked-a-8248

 

“Federal Reserve Hijacked By Hackers”, Infosecurity Magazine, 20 May 2015. [Online]. The Federal Reserve in St. Louis was the victim of a DNS attack in April when hackers were able to redirect users from legitimate pages to imposter websites in an attempt to steal user credentials. It is likely that in stealing credentials, the attackers were betting that password reuse would allow them to use those credentials to gain access to “more sensitive websites”. (ID#: 15-50250) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/federal-reserve-hijacked-by-hackers/

 

“Android's default browser is vulnerable to URL spoofing”, Computerworld, 20 May 2015. [Online]. A security flaw in Android’s default web browser that allows URL spoofing was discovered in April; however, the slow nature of Android patch distribution means that many phones are still affected. By displaying a spoofed URL, cyber-criminals can make phishing attacks appear much more legitimate. (ID#: 15-50251) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924845/malware-vulnerabilities/androids-default-browser-is-vulnerable-to-url-spoofing.html

 

“First software update for Apple Watch includes security fixes”, Computerworld, 20 May 2015. [Online]. The first software update for Apple’s smart watch operating system, Watch OS, includes fixes for over a dozen security flaws, among other upgrades. Many of the patched vulnerabilities were located in the OS kernel, and would have allowed for anything from arbitrary code execution to MitM-style attacks. (ID#: 15-50252) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2923846/security0/first-software-update-for-apple-watch-includes-security-fixes.html

 

“Researchers create app to stop RIG attacks on Android and Android-based IoT devices”, Computerworld, 20 May 2015. [Online]. Security professionals have become increasingly aware of the issue of runtime-information-gathering (RIG) attacks on Android mobile and IoT devices. RIG attacks, which attempt to intercept sensitive data going to or from legitimate apps, pose a very serious threat to consumer data protection. Researchers have created an Android app that monitors suspicious background processes and pauses them when legitimate processes are running. (ID#: 15-50253) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924842/cybercrime-hacking/researchers-create-app-to-stop-rig-attacks-on-android-and-android-based-iot-devices.html

 

“Comey: Industry letter on encryption is 'depressing' ”, FCW, 20 May 2015. [Online]. Though default encryption could significantly help protect consumer’s data, some skeptics argue that doing so hampers the ability of law enforcement to collect data for criminal investigations. FBI director James Comey criticized the letter written by tech giants to president Obama asking to withhold further regulation of commercial encryption, calling it “depressing”. Comey argues that, despite having some value, excessive encryption can provide a “safe-haven” for criminals. (ID#: 15-50254) See http://fcw.com/articles/2015/05/20/comey-at-georgetown.aspx

 

“Venom Less Toxic Than Heartbleed”, TechNewsWorld, 20 May 2015. [Online]. Virtual Machines are an integral part of isolating and protecting sensitive data and computer systems. A new open-source bug known as “Venom”, however, allows attackers to “jump out” of the VM and execute code on the physical machine. Despite the severity of such an attack, Venom is of less concern than the infamous open-source vulnerability Heartbleed, as Venom is easier to fix and harder to exploit. (ID#: 15-50255) See http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82078.html

 

“DDoS Attacks More than Double in 12 Months”, Infosecurity Magazine, 19 May 2015. [Online]. A report by Akamai Technologies indicated that DDoS attacks have doubled in number of the past 12 months, with much of the growth being in application-layer and infrastructure-layer attacks. Though there has been a trend towards longer, lower-traffic attacks in the recent past, the increasing capabilities of booster/stresser sites indicated that “mega-attacks” with 100Gbps or more will become more common. (ID#: 15-50256) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ddos-attacks-more-than-double-in/

 

“Tech firms, privacy advocates push White House on encryption”, FCW, 19 May 2015. [Online]. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and a variety of civil rights groups and associations have signed a letter sent to President Obama, urging the president to scrap plans to pass legislation that would allow law enforcement to use “backdoors” to encrypted communications. Though some (notably, FBI director James Comey) argue that encryption can hamper criminal justice, many in the industry believe that there is no way to give law enforcement special means to bypass encryption without creating cybersecurity weak points. (ID#: 15-50257) See http://fcw.com/articles/2015/05/19/encryption-letter.aspx

 

“Hack of airplane systems described in FBI docs raises security questions”, SC Magazine, 18 May 2015. [Online]. Security researcher and founder of One World Labs Chris Roberts was detained in mid April after bragging on social media about hacking into the plane’s flight control systems via the in-flight entertainment system. Roberts claims to have issued a command that cause to plane to gain altitude, though there is doubt as to whether or not he was actually able to do this. (ID#: 15-50258) See http://www.scmagazine.com/fbi-warrant-indicates-security-researcher-commandeered-plane-briefly/article/415361/

 

“Pentagon to invest in Silicon Valley tech startups to help develop advanced cyber solutions”, Homeland Security News Wire, 18 May 2015. [Online]. The Pentagon will be using IN-Q-Tel, a CIA strategic investing firm, to help distribute funds to Silicon Valley tech start-ups. The value of start-ups and the innovation that they bring to the table has been a point of interest in recent years, and the Pentagon hopes that the innovations and inventions that come out of the region can help government meet its cyber goals. (ID#: 15-50259) See http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150518-pentagon-to-invest-in-silicon-valley-tech-startups-to-help-develop-advanced-cyber-solutions

 

“Website observed serving 83 executable files, more than 50 percent malware”, SC Magazine, 15 May 2015. [Online]. Cyphort Labs researchers announced that they observed a somewhat popular video-sharing site distributing 83 Windows executable files, with over half being one of several different flavors of malware. Visitors to the site were redirected to another site that used the remote code execution exploit CVE-2014-6332 to distribute the executables, without any user interaction required. (ID#: 15-50260) See http://www.scmagazine.com/high-def-video-sharing-site-served-up-scores-of-executable-files/article/415043/

 

“Spyware Firm Hacked: 400,000 Victims’ Data Stuck on Dark Web”, Infosecurity Magazine, 15 May 2015. [Online]. Hundreds of Gigabytes of sensitive personal data was stolen from Mspy, a shadowy group that makes mobile spyware. Apple IDs and passwords, along with transaction and payment information data, was found for sale on the Dark Web, putting as many as 400,000 victims at risk. (ID#: 15-50261) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/spyware-firm-hacked-400000-victims/

 

“Some GTA V Modders Hit With Keylogger”, PCMag, 15 May 2015. [Online]. Following the release of the PC edition of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto Five (GTA V), players discovered malware that originated from two different third-party mods. When downloaded from the internet and run, the mods would work as intended, but would also use advanced evasion techniques to install a keylogger on the victim’s machine. The website that hosted the malicious mods says that intends to make the approval process for submitted mods stricter. (ID#: 15-50262) See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484284,00.asp

 

“FireEye, Microsoft Outsmart Clever Chinese Malware”, TechNewsWorld, 15 May 2015. [Online]. FireEye and Microsoft were able to thwart an attempt by a Chinese cybercriminal group known as APT17 to use Microsoft’s professional IT web service, TechNet, as a C&C for their Black Coffee malware. The C&C traffic from the malware would be sent to TechNet, in order to make it appear as if the host machine was not sending anything illegitimate. APT17 members would then use their profiles and forum pages on TechNet to collect the information. (ID#: 15-50263) See http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82060.html

 

“Penn State College Of Engineering Network Disabled Following Two 'Incredibly Serious' Cyber Attacks”, Forbes, 15 May 2015. [Online]. Following a tip from the FBI in the November of 2014 that the school had been the victim of a cyber breach, Penn State University launched an investigation and found that it had in fact suffered two very serious cyber attacks, at least one of which originated in China. In response, Penn State took its College of Engineering Network offline and notified students and faculty who had Social Security Numbers and other sensitive information stored on CoE computers. (ID#: 15-50264) See http://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2015/05/15/penn-state-college-of-engineering-network-disabled-following-two-incredibly-serious-cyber-attacks/?s...

 

“United Airlines Will Reward Hackers Who Find Security Vulnerabilities”, Security Magazine, 14 May 2015. [Online]. United Airlines is offering free air miles as a reward for finding security flaws in its public-accessible websites and programs. The bug bounty program rewards white hats with 50 thousand air miles  for reporting low-severity threats, and as many as 1 million free miles for severe vulnerabilities. (ID#: 15-50265) See http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/86362-united-airlines-will-reward-hackers-who-find-security-vulnerabilities

 

“Lawmakers, experts wrestle with data protection bill”, FCW, 14 May 2015. [Online]. Lawmakers are struggling to come to find common ground in a debate over a data protection bill and the role that states should play in combating data breaches. Awareness of the severity of data breaches and American’s vulnerability to them has prompted lawmakers to create legislation dictating the way in which businesses must handle breaches, though opponents argue that these measures could hamper pre-existing protective measures. (ID#: 15-50266) See http://fcw.com/articles/2015/05/14/lawmakers-data-bill.aspx

 

“Sally Beauty Hit By Data Breach For The Second Time In Just Over A Year”, Forbes, 14 May 2015. [Online]. Retail store Sally Beauty announced that it has reason to believe it has suffered a second data breach, following its first breach early last year. The company launched an investigation, which is still ongoing, after a pattern of fraudulent credit card incidents pointed towards Sally Beauty as a possible source of stolen credit card information. (ID#: 15-50267) See http://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2015/05/14/sally-beauty-hit-by-data-breach-for-the-second-time-in-just-over-a-year/?ss=Security

 

“Google Faces More Scrutiny Over Right To Be Forgotten”, Information Week, 14 May 2015. [Online]. A group of eighty internet experts and academics have sent a letter to Google, asking for more transparency in the way that the tech giant handles what information it decides to “delist” from search results. With increased privacy concerns (from Europe, in particular), Google has had to grapple with “the right to be forgotten” and the issue of, as the letter puts it, “striking the balance between individual privacy and freedom of expression interests.” (ID#: 15-50268) See http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/google-faces-more-scrutiny-over-right-to-be-forgotten/d/d-id/1320426?

 

“Law enforcement warns of Nepal Earthquake Scams”, Cyber Defense Magazine, 13 May 2015. [Online]. Amongst the recovery from the disastrous earthquakes in Nepal, the FBI issued a warning to potential philanthropists about scams that masquerade as legitimate relief funds for the earthquake victims. These schemes, which can be in the form of emails, door-to-door collections, and other methods, are typical after large disasters. (ID#: 15-50269) See http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/law-enforcement-warns-of-nepal-earthquake-scams/

 

“Report: Chinese Breach of USIS Started with SAP”, Infosecurity Magazine, 13 May 2015. [Online]. Onapsis Research Labs has concluded that the breach of commercial background investigation provider USIS by Chinese hackers last fall was likely facilitated by a SAP vulnerability. An unpatched SAP vulnerability could have been used to gain access to high security networks from the outside, allowing the hackers to, in this case, steal vast quantities of data from security clearance applicants. (ID#: 15-50270) See http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/report-chinese-breach-of-usis/

 

“FBI seeks cyber threat info-sharing platform”, GCN, 13 May 2015. [Online]. The FBI is currently seeking a new Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) to allow better management, analysis, and sharing of data. The FBI is particularly interested in fostering information sharing with “trusted partners”, a practice which has come to be recognized in recent years as an important part of effective intelligence gathering. The platform is expected to be highly flexible and powerful, automating many processes to increase effectiveness and efficiency. (ID#: 15-50271) See http://gcn.com/articles/2015/05/13/fbi-threat-platform-rfi.aspx?admgarea=TC_SecCybersSec

 

“Hiring cybersecurity staff is hard for states”, GCN, 13 May 2015. [Online]. The battle for cybersecurity often manifests itself as a game of cat-and-mouse between hackers and defenders, but in the case of state governments, finding cybersecurity staff to keep up the defense role of the analogous mouse can be difficult. Lack of funding and resources has left many state cybersecurity measures inadequate, and it shows in numerous recent state government-related breaches. (ID#: 15-50272) See http://gcn.com/articles/2015/05/13/state-cyber-hiring-retention.aspx?admgarea=TC_SecCybersSec

 

“Starbucks denies reports its mobile app was hacked”, Fortune, 13 May 2015. [Online]. Popular coffee chain Starbucks has denied allegations that its mobile app was hacked, calling such reports “false”. According to some, hackers were able to use stolen credentials that customers had re-used from other accounts in order to obtain Starbucks cards and accounts. (ID#: 15-50273) See http://fortune.com/2015/05/13/starbucks-cybersecurity/

 

“Cyber Attacks on News Organizations: ISIS Changes Tactics to Win Mindshare”, Security Magazine, 12 May 2015. [Online]. Numerous attempts by the Islamic State (ISIS) to disrupt and manipulate news media in various western nations demonstrate ISIS’s desire to use social engineering to help their cause. Newsrooms — many of which lack adequate, modern security measures — are a valuable target for criminals, who may seek to hinder distribution of information and ideas, or use a hacked network as a medium by which to spread their own ideas. (ID#: 15-50274) See http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/86355-cyber-attacks-on-news-organizations-isis-changes-tactics-to-win-mindshare

 

“Cybercrime will Cost Businesses $2 Trillion by 2019”, SC Magazine, 12 May 2015. [Online]. A report by Juniper Research estimates that the cybercrime will cost businesses $2.1 trillion by 2019. Several interesting trends are expected to play out over the next few years: a majority of breaches will likely be from already extant infrastructure, despite growth in newer technologies such as the IoT. Additionally, the trend of increasing cybercrime professionalism is expected to continue; as casual hackers dwindle, attacks will become fewer in number, yet more successful on an attack-by-attack basis. (ID#: 15-50275) See http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/86352-cybercrime-will-cost-businesses-2-trillion-by-2019

 

“Russian cybergroup eyes bank attacks”, Computerworld, 12 May 2015. [Online]. Researchers at security firm Root9B have reason to believe that a group of Russian hackers known as “APT28” and “Pawn Storm” are preparing to launch an attack against U.S. banks. APT28, which dates back to the mid 2000’s an is suspected to have ties to the Russian government, has allegedly been writing new malware and registering domain names that are similar to suspected targets. The group usually uses phishing and “drive-by download” tactics to distribute malware. (ID#: 15-50276) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2921185/cybercrime-hacking/russian-cybergroup-eyes-bank-attacks.html

 

“Smart cities: Haven for tech geeks or hacker paradise?”, Extreme Tech, 12 May 2015. [Online]. The movement towards IoT and smart devices, along with the global trend of urbanization, could culminate in the creation of “smart cities”, which would use technology to improve overall quality of life. Utilizing technology like sensor networks and automated infrastructure, while efficient and potentially beneficial to citizens, also brings about concerns over security and privacy. In entrusting technology with keeping citizens safe and happy, the negative impact of security incidents are magnified. (ID#: 15-50277) See http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/205499-smart-cities-haven-for-tech-geeks-or-hacker-paradise

 

“CoroNet Launches To Put A Stop To ‘Commjacking’ ”, Forbes, 12 May 2015. [Online]. Hijacking wifi or cellular signals, also known as “commjacking”, is easier than ever thanks to the availability of cheap hardware, along with the fact that attackers don’t need a physical connection to the victim machine or network. By using advanced algorithms and a technique known as “echoing”, security company CoroNet hopes to be able to detect and put a stop to commjacking. (ID#: 15-50278) See http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/05/12/coronet-launches-to-put-a-stop-to-commjacking/?ss=Security

 

“Flawed Open Smart Grid Protocol is a risk for Smart Grid”, Cyber Defense Magazine, 11 May 2015. [Online]. Millions of smart grid devices, such as smart meters, rely on the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) as a standard for secure communications throughout smart grids. Researchers believe, however, that the OSGP has serious security weaknesses; namely, the possible encryption weaknesses that arise from the use of a “homegrown digest function”. (ID#: 15-50279) See http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/flawed-open-smart-grid-protocol-is-a-risk-for-smart-grid/

 

“GPU malware could also affect Windows PCs, and maybe Macs”, Computerworld, 11 May 2015. [Online]. After recently releasing a proof-of-concept GPU malware for Linux, the same anonymous developers have released a version for Windows and are working on a Mac OS version. The intent is to bring awareness to the issue of GPU malware; many modern security tools aren’t designed to scan the memory built on to graphics processors, but key loggers and trojans on GPUs can be just as dangerous as their normal counterparts. (ID#: 15-50280) See http://www.computerworld.com/article/2920979/malware-vulnerabilities/gpu-malware-could-also-affect-windows-pcs-and-maybe-macs.html

 

“2 Men Arrested for Photobucket Hack”, PCMag, 11 May 2015. [Online]. The U.S. Department of Justice has accused two men of various cyber crimes after they were caught selling personal data that had been stolen from users of image hosting site Photobucket. Between 2012 and 2014, the two allegedly used an application that is designed to allow access to Photobucket users’ personal information and image/video content. (ID#: 15-50281) See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484018,00.asp

 

“States, cities vying to become U.S. ‘cyber hub’ ”, Homeland Security News Wire, 08 May 2015. [Online]. With the increasing reliance on technology comes greater need for cybersecurity, which has in turn caused a dramatic increase in the size of the cybersecurity industry. States and cities across the country, eager to bring jobs and revenue into the state, are competing to attract cybersecurity jobs and businesses. (ID#: 15-50282) See http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150508-states-cities-vying-to-become-u-s-cyber-hub

 

“Raimondo orders creation of cybersecurity commission”, WPRI Eyewitness News, 07 May 2015. [Online]. Rhode Island Governor Raimondo ordered the creation of a cybersecurity commission in order to strengthen both the State Government’s cyber infrastructure as well as cybersecurity industry in the state. The commission is expected to assess the current cyber infrastructure and recommend improvements in a report due October 1st; a second report due two months later will focus on how to go about the job of cultivating a stronger cybersecurity workforce. (ID#: 15-50283) See http://wpri.com/2015/05/07/raimondo-orders-creation-of-cybersecurity-commission/

 

“5M Google Users Infected With Adware”, PCMag, 07 May 2015. [Online]. Researchers with Google and U.C. Santa Barbara found that between June and October 2014, “…5.5 percent of unique IPs—millions of users—accessing Google sites...included some form of injected ads.” Of the 5.5 percent, 3.9 percent were associated with Superfish, the pre-loaded adware that Lenovo received criticism for earlier this year, with Jollywallet being responsible for the other 2.4 percent. (ID#: 15-50284) See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2483854,00.asp

 

“Windows 10: No More Monthly Patches”, GovInfoSecurity, 06 May 2015. [Online]. With the release of the new Windows 10 operating system, Microsoft will be transitioning from periodic software patches and the tradition of “Patch Tuesday”, to a continuous cloud-based patching system. By having devices automatically receive patches the moment that they are made available, Microsoft hopes to mitigate the issue of vulnerability due to user negligence. (ID#: 15-50285) See http://www.govinfosecurity.com/windows-10-no-more-monthly-patches-a-8202

 

“New 'Rombertik' malware destroys master boot record if analysis function detected”, SC Magazine, 05 May 2015. [Online]. Researchers at Cisco have discovered a new breed of malware, dubbed “Rombertik”, which goes to unusual extremes to avoid detection. The virus constantly looks over its shoulder to detect if it is being analyzed, and if it finds that it has been discovered, tries to destroy the device’s master boot record (MBR) instead of simply self-destructing. (ID#: 15-50286) See http://www.scmagazine.com/cisco-writes-up-new-malware-campaign/article/413068/

 

“Law Enforcement Finding Few Allies On Encryption”, Dark Reading, 05 May 2015. [Online]. With the increasing popularity of cloud storage, providers of cloud storage services have begun to implement "Bring Your Own Key" (BYOK) schemes, which puts encryption in the hands of the owner of the data. This is a roadblock for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, however, as they must now subpoena the data owner directly. In the past, they have been able to get the data directly without needing to inform the cloud customer of the data request. (ID#: 15-50287) See http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/law-enforcement-finding-few-allies-on-encryption/d/d-id/1320115

 

“Thousands Linux and FreeBSD servers infected with Mumblehard spamming malware”, Cyber Defense Magazine, 04 May 2015. [Online]. Over the past few months, thousands of Linux and FreeBSD computers have become infected with Mumblehard, an advanced spamming malware that is at least five years old. Russian nesting doll structures, assembly code, and other sophisticated characteristics indicate that Mumblehard was written by highly skilled programmers. (ID#: 15-50288) See http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/thousands-linux-and-freebsd-servers-infected-with-mumblehard-spamming-malware/

 

“Mozilla to Limit New Firefox Features to Secure Sites”, PCMag, 01 May 2015. [Online]. Mozilla announced that the web browser Firefox will now show preference to sites that allow HTTPS, arguing that “HTTPS is the way forward”. Non-HTTPS websites will, in the future, be given less access to newer browser features. The change will have to happen gradually over time to a certain extent, as the changes are expected to cause some sites to break. (ID#: 15-50289) See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2483549,00.asp

 

“Survey finds few agencies are properly protecting their data”, GCN, 29 April 2015. [Online]. The Federal Network Security Survey Report found that many factors, such as limited resources and trading security for performance, have left many agencies with inadequate data protection measures. Though attitudes towards subjects like encryption were generally positive, there is an incongruity between respondent’s security views and the measures that their agencies actually implement. (ID#: 15-50290) See http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2015/04/unprotected-data.aspx?admgarea=TC_SecCybersSec

 

“Naval Academy wins NSA cyber challenge”, GCN, 23 April 2015. [Online]. Teams from several American and Canadian military academies met to compete in the 15th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, an NSA-sponsored contest in which contestants must design and build a computer network and then defend it against intrusions by the NSA and Canadian Central Security Services. After five days, the Naval Academy came out on top, having been judged on their ability to “effectively maintain network services while detecting, responding to and recovering from network security intrusions or compromises.” (ID#: 15-50291) See http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2015/04/cyber-defense-exercise.aspx?admgarea=TC_SecCybersSec

 

“Quantum cryptography one step closer as researchers design first all-photonic repeaters”, Homeland Security Newswire, 20 April 2015. [Online]. In anticipation of the rise of quantum computing and cryptography, researchers with the University of Toronto have developed all-photonic quantum repeaters, a technology that allows quantum-encrypted data to be securely and reliably sent over long distances. (ID#: 15-50292) See http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150420-quantum-cryptography-one-step-closer-as-researchers-design-first-allphotonic-repeaters

 

“DoJ Calls On Private Sector to Strengthen Cybersecurity”, TechNewsWorld, 20 March 2015. [Online]. The U.S. Department of Justice has taken notice of the importance of working with the private sector to find solutions to cybercrime issues. At a recent Cybersecurity Industry Roundtable, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell stated, “We in government know that we cannot go it alone in fighting cybercrime. We need a strong partnership with you in the private sector.” (ID#: 15-50293) See http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82079.html

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

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Cybersecurity Conference Publications, Early 2015

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	Cybersecurity Conference Publications, Early 2015

The works cited here were presented during the first six weeks of 2015. Also included is the IEEE Standard for substations system cybersecurity.

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“IEEE Standard Cybersecurity Requirements for Substation Automation, Protection, and Control Systems," IEEE Std C37.240-2014, pp. 1, 38, Jan. 30 2015. doi: 10.1109/IEEESTD.2015.7024885
Cybersecurity measures require that a balance be achieved between technical feasibility and economic feasibility and that this balance addresses the risks expected to be present at a substation. Further, cybersecurity measures must be designed and implemented in such a manner that access and operation to legitimate activities is not impeded, particularly during times of emergency or restoration activity. This standard presents a balance of the above factors.
Keywords: Access controls; Authentication; Computer crime; Computer security; Encryption; IEEE standards; Passwords; Remote access; IEEE C37.240;critical infrastructure protection; cybersecurity; electronic access; encryption; password management; remote access; substations (ID#: 15-4088)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7024885&isnumber=7024884

 

Dark, Melissa, "Thinking about Cybersecurity," Security & Privacy, IEEE, vol. 13, no.1, pp.61, 65, Jan.-Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/MSP.2015.17 What is a "security mindset" beyond a healthy dose of paranoia? This article explores advances in neuroscience and the science of learning as a foundation for thinking about whether cybersecurity educators can teach the security mindset, and if so, what that might entail.
Keywords: Computer security; Educational institutions; Neuroscience; Privacy; Uncertainty; cybersecurity; neurocognitive research; science of learning; security; security mindset (ID#: 15-4089)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7031840&isnumber=7031815

 

Geer, Daniel E., "Less Is More: Saving the Internet from Itself," Security & Privacy, IEEE, vol.13, no.1, pp. 80, 80, Jan.-Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/MSP.2015.6 Explores the need to protect the content and information gleamed from the Internet while, at the same time, ensure that freedom of access and quality of content remains intact. Claims that there is a choice - do we want to make protection of individual Internet elements the owner's problem for all values of "owner," subject to unpredictable differentiation and a picking of winners and losers by emergent processes that we can perhaps still influence but never again control? Or do we want near monocultures of a few winning platforms whose vastness represents empire and thus requires a level of defense that only a nationstate can provide, if at all? On the former lies the path of so much science fiction, especially if the Singularity is imminent. On the latter lies the path to a state-level control far more invasive than fiat currency and secret standing armies. If neither of these options appeals, now is the time to apply the brakes. Now is the time, individually and collectively, to tamp down risk by tamping down dependence on the Internet. Now is the time to say that target richness is a disease for which the cure is intolerable.
Keywords: Government; Information filters; Information retrieval; Information security; Internet; Philosophical considerations; Social implications of technology; Internet; Internet extension; attacker economics; cybersecurity; security (ID#: 15-4090)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7031818&isnumber=7031815

 

Fonash, Peter; Schneck, Phyllis, "Cybersecurity: From Months to Milliseconds," Computer, vol.48, no.1, pp. 42, 50, Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/MC.2015.11 Computer technology is the nexus of our critical infrastructures, yet it remains extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks. A proposed Integrated Adaptive Cyber Defense architecture promises to create a healthy cyber ecosystem by automating many risk decisions and optimizing human oversight of security processes too complex or important for machines alone to solve.
Keywords: Computer crime; Computer hacking; Computer security; Ecosystems; Internet of things; IACD; Integrated Adaptive Cyber Defense; Internet of Things; IoT; cyberattacks; cybersecurity; security (ID#: 15-4091)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7030229&isnumber=7030133

 

Arief, Budi; Adzmi, Mohd Azeem Bin; Gross, Thomas, "Understanding Cybercrime from Its Stakeholders' Perspectives: Part 1--Attackers," Security & Privacy, IEEE, vol.13, no.1, pp.71, 76, Jan.-Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/MSP.2015.19 Although cybercrime is rampant, there is no authoritative definition of the term and all that it implies. A comprehensive model and taxonomy of cybercrime, including all of its stakeholders, would contribute to better cybersecurity. Part one of this two-part series explores attackers and their motives in detail.
Keywords: Computer crime; Computers; Cyberspace; National security; Psychology; Training; attackers; cybercrime; cybercrime stakeholders; cybersecurity; security (ID#: 15-4092)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7031833&isnumber=7031815

 

Mazurczyk, Wojciech; Rzeszutko, Elzybieta, "Security--A Perpetual War: Lessons from Nature," IT Professional, vol.17, no. 1, pp.16,22, Jan.-Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/MITP.2015.14 For ages, people have sought inspiration in nature. Biomimicry has propelled inventions from Velcro tape to "cat's eyes" retroreflective road markers. At the same time, scientists have been developing biologically inspired techniques, including genetic algorithms and neural and sensor networks. Although a first glance shows no direct connection between the Internet's offensive and defensive techniques and patterns present in nature, closer inspection reveals many analogies between these two worlds. Botnets, distributed denial-of-service attacks, intrusion detection/prevention systems, and others techniques use strategies that closely resemble actions undertaken by certain species in the natural kingdom. The authors analyze these analogies and conclude by suggesting that the security community should turn to nature in search of new offensive and defensive techniques for virtual world security. This article is part of a special issue on IT security.
Keywords: Bioinformatics; Biological system modeling; Computer crime; Computer security; Computer worms; Firewalls (computing);Internet; Intrusion detection; Malware; DDoS attacks; bio-inspired security; bioinformatics; botnets; cybersecurity; honeypots; information technology; intrusion detection; intrusion prevention; security; worms (ID#: 15-4093)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7030143&isnumber=7030137

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

International Conferences: Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014, Hobart, Tasmania

 

	International Conferences: Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014, Hobart, Tasmania

 

The 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) was held 2-5 Nov. 2014 in Hobart, Tasmania.  ITW2014 describes itself as a forum for technical exchange among scientists and engineers working on the fundamentals of information theory. The agenda covered diverse topics including source coding, distributed source and channel coding, joint source and channel coding, coding for wireless systems, coding for sensor and ad-hoc networks, mimo and space-time coding, graph-based codes and iterative decoding, cooperation in wireless systems, sequences and coding, compressed sensing, coding applications: optical communications, smart grid, underwater, etc., and information theoretic security.  The works cited here are from the security area.  The conference site is at: http://itw2014.jaist.ac.jp/  The contributors came from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, as well as Australia—truly an international event.

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Shuiyin Liu; Yi Hong; Viterbo, E., "On Measures Of Information Theoretic Security," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE , vol., no., pp.309,310, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970843
Abstract: While information-theoretic security is stronger than computational security, it has long been considered impractical. In this work, we provide new insights into the design of practical information-theoretic cryptosystems. Firstly, from a theoretical point of view, we give a brief introduction into the existing information theoretic security criteria, such as the notions of Shannon's perfect/ideal secrecy in cryptography, and the concept of strong secrecy in coding theory. Secondly, from a practical point of view, we propose the concept of ideal secrecy outage and define a outage probability. Finally, we show how such probability can be made arbitrarily small in a practical cryptosystem.
Keywords: cryptography; information theory; Shannon perfect secrecy; computational security; ideal secrecy; information theoretic cryptosystem; information theoretic security; Australia; Cryptography; Entropy; Information theory; Probability; Vectors (ID#: 15-5155)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970843&isnumber=6970773

 

Rao, K.S.; Prabhakaran, V.M., "A New Upperbound For The Oblivious Transfer Capacity Of Discrete Memoryless Channels," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 35, 39, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970787
Abstract: We derive a new upper bound on the string oblivious transfer capacity of discrete memoryless channels (DMCs). The main tool we use is the tension region of a pair of random variables introduced in Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran (2014) where it was used to derive upper bounds on rates of secure sampling in the source model. In this paper, we consider secure computation of string oblivious transfer in the channel model. Our bound is based on a monotonicity property of the tension region in the channel model. We show that our bound strictly improves upon the upper bound of Ahlswede and Csiszár (2013).
Keywords: channel capacity; telecommunication security; DMCs; channel model; discrete memoryless channels; monotonicity property; oblivious transfer capacity; random variables; secure sampling rates; source model; string oblivious transfer; tension region; upper bound; Markov processes; Monte Carlo methods; Noise measurement; Privacy; Protocols; Random variables; Upper bound (ID#: 15-5156)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970787&isnumber=6970773

 

Pengwei Wang; Safavi-Naini, R., "An Efficient Code For Adversarial Wiretap Channel," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 40, 44, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970788
Abstract: In the (ρr, ρw)-adversarial wiretap (AWTP) channel model of [13], a codeword sent over the communication channel is corrupted by an adversary who observes a fraction ρr of the codeword, and adds noise to a fraction ρw of the codeword. The adversary is adaptive and chooses the subsets of observed and corrupted components, arbitrarily. In this paper we give the first efficient construction of a code family that provides perfect secrecy in this model, and achieves the secrecy capacity.
Keywords: channel coding; telecommunication security; wireless channels; AWTP channel model; adversarial wiretap channel model; code family; codeword; communication channel; secrecy capacity; Computational modeling; Decoding; Encoding; Reed-Solomon codes; Reliability; Security; Vectors (ID#: 15-5157)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970788&isnumber=6970773

 

Zhiqing Xiao; Yunzhou Li; Ming Zhao; Jing Wang, "Interactive Code To Correct And Detect Omniscient Byzantine Adversaries," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 45, 49, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970789
Abstract: This paper considers interactive transmissions in the presence of omniscient Byzantine attacks. Unlike prior papers, it is assumed that the number of transmissions, the number of erroneous transmissions therein, and the direction of each transmission are predetermined. Besides, the size of the alphabet in each transmission is unequal and predefined. Using these transmissions, two nodes communicate interactively to send a message. In this model, both attack strategies and coding bounds are considered. Although the codebook cannot fully describe the interactive code, we still assert the existence of successful attack strategies according to the relations between codewords in the codebook. Furthermore, to ensure that the code is able to detect or correct a given number of transmission errors, upper bounds on the size of code are derived. Finally, the tightness of the bounds is discussed.
Keywords: error correction codes; error detection codes; security of data; attack strategies; codebook; codewords; coding bounds; erroneous transmissions; interactive code; interactive transmissions; omniscient Byzantine attacks; transmission errors; Decoding; Educational institutions; Encoding; Error correction; Error correction codes; Indexes; Upper bound (ID#: 15-5158)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970789&isnumber=6970773

 

Mirghasemi, H.; Belfiore, J.-C., "The Semantic Secrecy Rate Of The Lattice Gaussian Coding For The Gaussian Wiretap Channel," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 112, 116, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970803
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the achievable semantic secrecy rate of existing lattice coding schemes, proposed in [6], for both the mod-Λ Gaussian wiretap and the Gaussian wiretap channels. For both channels, we propose new upper bounds on the amount of leaked information which provide milder sufficient conditions to achieve semantic secrecy. These upper bounds show that the lattice coding schemes in [6] can achieve the secrecy capacity to within ½ln e/2 nat for the mod-Λ Gaussian and to within ½(1 - ln (1 + SNRe / SNRe+1)) nat for the Gaussian wiretap channels where SNRe is the signal-to-noise ratio of Eve.
Keywords: Gaussian channels; channel capacity; data privacy; wireless channels; Gaussian wiretap channels; SNRe; lattice coding schemes; mod-Λ Gaussian wiretap; secrecy capacity; semantic secrecy rate; signal-to-noise ratio of Eve; Encoding; Gaussian distribution; Lattices; Security; Semantics; Upper bound; Zinc (ID#: 15-5159)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970803&isnumber=6970773

 

Geil, O.; Martin, S.; Matsumoto, R.; Ruano, D.; Yuan Luo, "Relative Generalized Hamming Weights Of One-Point Algebraic Geometric Codes," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp.137,141, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970808
Abstract: Security of linear ramp secret sharing schemes can be characterized by the relative generalized Hamming weights of the involved codes [23], [22]. In this paper we elaborate on the implication of these parameters and we devise a method to estimate their value for general one-point algebraic geometric codes. As it is demonstrated, for Hermitian codes our bound is often tight. Furthermore, for these codes the relative generalized Hamming weights are often much larger than the corresponding generalized Hamming weights.
Keywords: Hamming codes; algebraic geometric codes; security of data; Hermitian codes; general one-point algebraic geometric codes; linear ramp secret sharing schemes security; relative generalized Hamming weights; Cryptography; Galois fields; Geometry; Hamming weight; Linear codes; Vectors (ID#: 15-5160)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970808&isnumber=6970773

 

Pak Hou Che; Kadhe, S.; Bakshi, M.; Chung Chan; Jaggi, S.; Sprintson, A., "Reliable, Deniable And Hidable Communication: A Quick Survey," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE , vol., no., pp.227,231, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970826
Abstract: We survey here recent work pertaining to “deniable” communication - i.e., talking without being detected. We first highlight connections to other related notions (anonymity and secrecy). We then contrast the notions of deniability and secrecy. We highlight similarities and distinctions of deniability with a variety of related notions (LPD communications, stealth, channel resolvability) extant in the literature.
Keywords: cryptography; steganography; telecommunication channels; telecommunication network reliability; telecommunication security; LPD communications; channel resolvability; deniable communication; hidable communication; Cryptography; Noise; Reliability theory; Throughput (ID#: 15-5161)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970826&isnumber=6970773

 

Thangaraj, A., "Coding For Wiretap Channels: Channel Resolvability And Semantic Security," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 232, 236, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970827
Abstract: Wiretap channels form the most basic building block of physical-layer and information-theoretic security. Considerable research work has gone into the information-theoretic, cryptographic and coding aspects of wiretap channels in the last few years. The main goal of this tutorial article is to provide a self-contained presentation of two recent results - one is a new and simplified proof for secrecy capacity using channel resolvability, and the other is the connection between semantic security and information-theoretic strong secrecy.
Keywords: channel coding; cryptography; information theory; telecommunication security; channel resolvability; coding aspects; cryptography; information-theoretic security; physical-layer; secrecy capacity; semantic security; wiretap channels coding; Cryptography; Encoding; Semantics; Standards; Zinc (ID#: 15-5162)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970827&isnumber=6970773

 

Pradhan, P.; Venkitasubramaniam, P., "Under The Radar Attacks In Dynamical Systems: Adversarial Privacy Utility Tradeoffs," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 242, 246, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970829
Abstract: Cyber physical systems which integrate physical system dynamics with digital cyber infrastructure are envisioned to transform our core infrastructural frameworks such as the smart electricity grid, transportation networks and advanced manufacturing. This integration however exposes the physical system functioning to the security vulnerabilities of cyber communication. Both scientific studies and real world examples have demonstrated the impact of data injection attacks on state estimation mechanisms on the smart electricity grid. In this work, an abstract theoretical framework is proposed to study data injection/modification attacks on Markov modeled dynamical systems from the perspective of an adversary. Typical data injection attacks focus on one shot attacks by adversary and the non-detectability of such attacks under static assumptions. In this work we study dynamic data injection attacks where the adversary is capable of modifying a temporal sequence of data and the physical controller is equipped with prior statistical knowledge about the data arrival process to detect the presence of an adversary. The goal of the adversary is to modify the arrivals to minimize a utility function of the controller while minimizing the detectability of his presence as measured by the KL divergence between the prior and posterior distribution of the arriving data. Adversarial policies and tradeoffs between utility and detectability are characterized analytically using linearly solvable control optimization.
Keywords: Markov processes; radar; telecommunication security; Markov modeled dynamical systems; advanced manufacturing; adversarial privacy utility tradeoffs; core infrastructural frameworks; cyber communication; cyber physical systems; data arrival process; data injection attacks; digital cyber infrastructure; dynamic data injection attacks; dynamical systems; physical system dynamics; radar attacks; security vulnerabilities; smart electricity grid; state estimation mechanisms; temporal sequence; transportation networks; Markov processes; Mathematical model; Power system dynamics; Privacy; Process control; Smart grids; State estimation (ID#: 15-5163)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970829&isnumber=6970773

 

Kosut, O.; Li-Wei Kao, "On Generalized Active Attacks By Causal Adversaries In Networks," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 247, 251, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970830
Abstract: Active attacks are studied on noise-free graphical multicast networks. A malicious adversary may enter the network and arbitrarily corrupt transmissions. A very general model is adopted for the scope of attack: a collection of sets of edges is specified, and the adversary may control any one set of edges in this collection. The adversary is assumed to be omniscient but causal, such that the adversary is forced to decide on transmissions before knowing random choices by the honest nodes. Four main results are presented. First, a precise characterization of whether any positive rate can be achieved. Second, a simple erasure upper bound. Third, an achievable bound wherein random hashes are generated and distributed, so that nodes in the network can filter out adversarial corruption. Finally, an example network is presented that has capacity strictly between the general upper and lower bounds.
Keywords: graph theory; multicast communication; network coding; telecommunication security; adversarial corruption; erasure upper bound; generalized active attacks; graphical multicast networks; malicious adversary; Artificial neural networks; Decoding; Encoding; Error correction; Network coding; Upper bound; Vectors (ID#: 15-5164)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970830&isnumber=6970773

 

Li-Chia Choo; Cong Ling, "Superposition Lattice Coding For Gaussian Broadcast Channel With Confidential Message," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 311, 315, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970844
Abstract: In this paper, we propose superposition coding based on the lattice Gaussian distribution to achieve strong secrecy over the Gaussian broadcast channel with one confidential message, with a constant gap to the secrecy capacity (only for the confidential message). The proposed superposition lattice code consists of a lattice Gaussian code for the Gaussian noise and a wiretap lattice code with strong secrecy. The flatness factor is used to analyze the error probability, information leakage and achievable rates. By removing the secrecy coding, we can modify our scheme to achieve the capacity of the Gaussian broadcast channel with one common and one private message without the secrecy constraint.
Keywords: Gaussian channels; broadcast channels; channel coding; error statistics; lattice theory; telecommunication security; Gaussian broadcast channel; Gaussian noise; achievable rates; confidential message; constant gap; error probability analysis; flatness factor ;information leakage; lattice Gaussian code; lattice Gaussian distribution; secrecy capacity; superposition lattice coding; wiretap lattice code; Decoding; Encoding; Error probability; Gaussian distribution Lattices; Noise; Vectors (ID#: 15-5165)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970844&isnumber=6970773

 

Jinlong Lu; Harshan, J.; Oggier, F., "A USRP Implementation Of Wiretap Lattice Codes," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEEpp. 316, 320, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970845
Abstract: A wiretap channel models a communication channel between a legitimate sender Alice and a legitimate receiver Bob in the presence of an eavesdropper Eve. Confidentiality between Alice and Bob is obtained using wiretap codes, which exploit the difference between the channels to Bob and to Eve. This paper discusses a first implementation of wiretap lattice codes using USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral), which focuses on the channel between Alice and Eve. Benefits of coset encoding for Eve's confusion are observed, using different lattice codes in small dimensions, and varying the position of the eavesdropper.
Keywords: channel coding; software radio; telecommunication security; USRP implementation; communication channel; coset encoding; eavesdropper; universal software radio peripheral; wiretap channel models; wiretap lattice codes; Baseband; Decoding; Encoding; Lattices; Receivers; Security; Signal to noise ratio (ID#: 15-5166)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970845&isnumber=6970773

 

Ng, D.W.K.; Schober, R., "Max-Min Fair Wireless Energy Transfer For Secure Multiuser Communication Systems," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 326, 330, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970847
Abstract: This paper considers max-min fairness for wireless energy transfer in a downlink multiuser communication system. Our resource allocation design maximizes the minimum harvested energy among multiple multiple-antenna energy harvesting receivers (potential eavesdroppers) while providing quality of service (QoS) for secure communication to multiple single-antenna information receivers. In particular, the algorithm design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem which takes into account a minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint at the information receivers and a constraint on the maximum tolerable channel capacity achieved by the energy harvesting receivers for a given transmit power budget. The proposed problem formulation exploits the dual use of artificial noise generation for facilitating efficient wireless energy transfer and secure communication. A semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation approach is exploited to obtain a global optimal solution of the considered problem. Simulation results demonstrate the significant performance gain in harvested energy that is achieved by the proposed optimal scheme compared to two simple baseline schemes.
Keywords: MIMO communication; antenna arrays; channel capacity; energy harvesting; next generation networks; optimisation; quality of service; resource allocation; telecommunication security; MIMO communication; QoS; artificial noise generation; max-min fair wireless energy transfer; maximum tolerable channel capacity; minimum harvested energy; multiple multiple-antenna energy harvesting receivers; multiple single-antenna information receivers; multiuser communication system security; next generation wireless communication system; nonconvex optimization problem; potential eavesdroppers; quality of service; resource allocation; semidefinite programming relaxation approach; Energy harvesting; Interference; Noise; Optimization; Receivers; Resource management; Wireless communication (ID#: 15-5167)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970847&isnumber=6970773

 

Jianwei Xie; Ulukus, S., "Secure Degrees Of Freedom Region Of The Gaussian Interference Channel With Secrecy Constraints," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 361, 365, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970854
Abstract: The sum secure degrees of freedom (s.d.o.f.) of the K-user interference channel (IC) with secrecy constraints has been determined recently as equation [1], [2]. In this paper, we determine the entire s.d.o.f. region of this channel model. The converse includes constraints both due to secrecy as well as due to interference. Although the portion of the region close to the optimum sum s.d.o.f. point is governed by the upper bounds due to secrecy constraints, the other portions of the region are governed by the upper bounds due to interference constraints. Different from the existing literature, in order to fully understand the characterization of the s.d.o.f. region of the IC, one has to study the 4-user case, i.e., the 2 or 3-user cases do not illustrate the generality of the problem. In order to prove the achievability, we use the polytope structure of the converse region. The extreme points of the converse region are achieved by a (K - m)-user IC with confidential messages, m helpers, and N external eavesdroppers, for m ≥ 1 and a finite N. A byproduct of our results in this paper is that the sum s.d.o.f. is achieved only at one extreme point of the s.d.o.f. region, which is the symmetric-rate extreme point.
Keywords: Gaussian channels; interference (signal);security of data; wireless channels; Gaussian interference channel; K-user interference channel; channel model; converse region; interference constraints; polytope structure; secrecy constraints; secure degrees of freedom; symmetric-rate extreme point; upper bounds; Integrated circuits; Interference channels; Noise; Receivers; Transmitters; Upper bound (ID#: 15-5168)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970854&isnumber=6970773

 

Xuan Guang; Jiyong Lu; Fang-Wei Fu, "Locality-Preserving Secure Network Coding," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 396, 400, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970861
Abstract: In the paradigm of network coding, when wiretapping attacks occur, secure network coding is introduced to prevent information leaking adversaries. In practical network communications, the source often multicasts messages at several different rates within a session. How to deal with information transmission and information security simultaneously under variable rates and fixed security-level is introduced in this paper as a variable-rate and fixed-security-level secure network coding problem. In order to solve this problem effectively, we propose the concept of locality-preserving secure linear network codes of different rates and fixed security-level, which have the same local encoding kernel at each internal node. We further present an approach to construct such a family of secure linear network codes and give an algorithm for efficient implementation. This approach saves the storage space for both source node and internal nodes, and resources and time on networks. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed, including the field size, computational and storage complexities.
Keywords: linear codes; network coding; telecommunication security; variable rate codes; fixed-security-level secure network coding problem; information security; information transmission; internal nodes; local encoding kernel; locality-preserving secure linear network codes; source node; variable-rate secure network coding problem; wiretapping attacks; Complexity theory; Decoding; Encoding; Information rates; Kernel; Network coding; Vectors (ID#: 15-5169)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970861&isnumber=6970773

 

Bin Dai; Zheng Ma, "Feedback Enhances The Security Of Degraded Broadcast Channels With Confidential Messages And Causal Channel State Information," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp.411,415, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970864
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the degraded broadcast channels with confidential messages (DBC-CM), causal channel state information (CSI), and with or without noiseless feedback. The inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation region are given for the non-feedback mode, and the capacity-equivocation region is determined for the feedback model. We find that by using this noiseless feedback, the achievable rate-equivocation region (inner bound on the capacity-equivocation region) of the DBC-CM with causal CSI is enhanced.
Keywords: broadcast channels; channel capacity; channel coding; feedback; telecommunication security; DBC-CM; capacity-equivocation region; channel state information; confidential messages; degraded broadcast channels; noiseless feedback; rate-equivocation region; Decoding; Joints; Random variables; Receivers; Silicon; Transmitters; Zinc; Broadcast channel; channel state information; confidential message; feedback (ID#: 15-5170)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970864&isnumber=6970773

 

Fei Lang; Zhixiang Deng; Bao-Yun Wang, "Secure Communication Of Correlated Sources Over Broadcast Channels," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 416, 420, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970865
Abstract: Broadcast channels with correlated sources are considered from a joint source-channel coding perspective, where each receiver is kept in ignorance of the source intended for the other receiver. This setting can be seen as a generalization of Han-Costa's broadcast channel with correlated sources under additional secrecy constraints on both receivers. General outer and inner bounds for this reliable and secure communication are determined. The joint source-channel coding is proved to be optimal for two special cases, including the sources satisfying a certain Markov property sent over semi-deterministic broadcast channels, and arbitrary correlated sources sent over less-noisy broadcast channels.
Keywords: broadcast channels; channel coding; correlation methods; radiocommunication; source coding; telecommunication network reliability; telecommunication security; Han-Costa broadcast channel; broadcast channels; correlated source; joint source-channel coding; less-noisy broadcast channel; reliable communication; secure communication; Decoding; Educational institutions; Encoding; Joints; Markov processes; Receivers; Reliability (ID#: 15-5171)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970865&isnumber=6970773

 

Benammar, M.; Piantanida, P., "On The Secrecy Capacity Region Of The Wiretap Broadcast Channel," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 421, 425, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970866
Abstract: This work investigates the secrecy capacity region of the Wiretap Broadcast Channel (WBC) where an encoder communicates two private messages over a Broadcast Channel (BC) while keeping both messages secret from the eavesdropper. Our main result is the derivation of a novel outer bound and an inner bound on the secrecy capacity region of this setting. These results allow us to characterize the capacity region for three non-degraded classes of WBCs: the deterministic and the semi-deterministic WBC with a more noisy eavesdropper, and the WBC when users exhibit less noisiness order between them.
Keywords: broadcast channels; encoding; telecommunication security; WBC nondegraded class; eavesdropper; encoder; private messaging; secrecy capacity region; secret messaging; wiretap broadcast channel; Decoding; Encoding; Noise measurement; Receivers; Standards; Zinc (ID#: 15-5172)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970866&isnumber=6970773

 

Mansour, A.S.; Schaefer, R.F.; Boche, H., "Secrecy Measures For Broadcast Channels With Receiver Side Information: Joint Vs Individual," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 426, 430, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970867
Abstract: We study the transmission of a common message and three confidential messages over a broadcast channel with two legitimate receivers and an eavesdropper. Each legitimate receiver is interested in decoding two of the three confidential messages, while having the third one as side information. In order to measure the ignorance of the eavesdropper about the confidential messages, we investigate two different secrecy criteria: joint secrecy and individual secrecy. For both criteria, we provide a general achievable rate region. We establish both the joint and individual secrecy capacity if the two legitimate receivers are less noisy than the eavesdropper. We further investigate the scenario where the eavesdropper is less noisy than the two legitimate receivers. It is known that the joint secrecy constraints can not be fulfilled under this scenario, however, we manage to establish a non vanishing capacity region for the individual secrecy case.
Keywords: broadcast channels; radio receivers; telecommunication security; broadcast channels; confidential messages; individual secrecy; joint secrecy; receiver side information; Decoding; Encoding; Joints; Markov processes; Noise measurement; Receivers; Reliability (ID#: 15-5173)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970867&isnumber=6970773

 

Bracher, A.; Hof, E.; Lapidoth, A., "Distributed Storage For Data Security," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 506, 510, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970883
Abstract: We study the secrecy of a distributed storage system for passwords. The encoder, Alice, observes a length-n password and describes it using two hints, which she then stores in different locations. The legitimate receiver, Bob, observes both hints. In one scenario we require that the number of guesses it takes Bob to guess the password approach 1 as n tends to infinity and in the other that the size of the list that Bob must form to guarantee that it contain the password approach 1. The eavesdropper, Eve, sees only one of the hints; Alice cannot control which. For each scenario we characterize the largest normalized (by n) exponent that we can guarantee for the number of guesses it takes Eve to guess the password.
Keywords: authorisation; message authentication; storage management; data security; distributed storage system; password approach; Blogs; Encoding; Entropy; Equations; Receivers; Stochastic processes; Upper bound (ID#: 15-5174)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970883&isnumber=6970773

 

Iwamoto, M.; Omino, T.; Komano, Y.; Ohta, K., "A New Model Of Client-Server Communications Under Information Theoretic Security," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 511, 515, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970884
Abstract: A new model for a Client-Server Communication (CSC) system satisfying information theoretic security is proposed, and its fundamental properties are discussed. Our CSC allows n users to upload their respective messages to a server securely by using symmetric key encryptions with their own keys, and all ciphertexts are decrypted by the server. If we require all messages to be perfectly secure in CSC against the corrupted clients and adversaries without any keys, it is proved that a one time pad or more inefficient encryption must be used for each communication link between a client and the server. This means that, in order to realize more efficient CSC, it is necessary to leak out some information of each message. Based on these observations, we introduce a new model for such a secure CSC formally, and discuss its fundamental properties. In addition, we propose the optimal construction of CSC under several constraints on security parameters called security rates.
Keywords: client-server systems; cryptography; information theory; telecommunication security; CSC; ciphertexts; client-server communication system; communication link; corrupted clients; information theoretic security; security parameters; security rates; symmetric key encryptions; Correlation; Cryptography; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Protocols; Servers (ID#: 15-5175)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970884&isnumber=6970773

 

Ye Wang; Ishwar, P.; Rane, S., "An Elementary Completeness Proof For Secure Two-Party Computation Primitives," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 521, 525, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970886
Abstract: In the secure two-party computation problem, two parties wish to compute a (possibly randomized) function of their inputs via an interactive protocol, while ensuring that neither party learns more than what can be inferred from only their own input and output. For semi-honest parties and information-theoretic security guarantees, it is well-known that, if only noise-less communication is available, only a limited set of functions can be securely computed; however, if interaction is also allowed over general communication primitives (multi-input/output channels), there are “complete” primitives that enable any function to be securely computed. The general set of complete primitives was characterized recently by Maji, Prabhakaran, and Rosulek leveraging an earlier specialized characterization by Kilian. Our contribution in this paper is a simple, self-contained, alternative derivation using elementary information-theoretic tools.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; cryptographic protocols; elementary completeness proof; general communication; information theoretic security; interactive protocol; noise less communication; secure two party computation primitives; Joints; Markov processes; Mutual information; Protocols; Random variables; Redundancy; Security (ID#: 15-5176)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970886&isnumber=6970773

 

Subramanian, R.; Land, I., "The Role Of Artificial Noise In Multi-Antenna Fading Wiretap Channels: Useful Or Harmful?," Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 641, 645, 2-5 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITW.2014.6970910
Abstract: New insights into the role of artificial noise in securing communication in a Gaussian multi-antenna fading wiretap channel are presented. An appropriate secrecy-outage-based optimization framework is developed for the Multiple-Input Single-Output Single-Eavesdropper (MISOSE) case to measure the performance of artificial noise. It is assumed that only the legitimate receiver's instantaneous channel state information and the average statistics of the eavesdropper's channel are available at the transmitter. The optimization is based on maximizing the effective secret-message rate constrained by a given maximum secrecy outage criterion. Under this framework, a fundamental investigation is conducted into whether it is worthwhile for the transmitter to allocate any of its available power for artificial noise. By numerically solving the optimization problem, it is demonstrated that there are: (i) scenarios where artificial noise does indeed give significant gains in the secret-message rate, and (ii) scenarios where any amount of power allocation to artificial noise is wasteful in view of the overall performance.
Keywords: Gaussian channels; fading channels; noise; optimisation; telecommunication security; Gaussian multi-antenna fading wiretap channel; MISOSE; artificial noise; channel state information; eavesdroppers channel; multiple-input single-output single-eavesdropper; power allocation; secrecy-outage-based optimization framework; secret-message rate; Encoding; Linear programming; Noise; Optimization; Receivers; Resource management; Transmitters (ID#: 15-5177)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6970910&isnumber=6970773

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

International Conferences: Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, New Orleans, Part 1

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	International Conferences: Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, New Orleans, Part 1

 

The 2014 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) had special focus on Cybersecurity for Cyber-Physical Systems.  Held December 8-12, 2014, ACSAC has a tradition of bringing together security professionals from academia, government and industry who are interested in applied security. It is an internationally recognized forum where practitioners, researchers, and developers in information system security meet to learn and to exchange practical ideas and experiences. 

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Aviel D. Rubin; Taking Two-Factor To The Next Level: Protecting Online Poker, Banking, Healthcare And Other Applications; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 1-5. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2684461 As an avid poker player, I enjoyed playing low stakes cash games and low buy-in tournaments on Full Tilt Poker before Black Friday.i However, as a Computer Scientist specializing in network and software security, I would never play poker online for any significant stakes, due to security concerns around malware and malicious remote access tools. Similarly, malware and remote access tools threaten online banking, online access to healthcare records and many other applications. In this article, I describe a new solution to the problem of remote access via malware that is easy to adopt, requires no new hardware or user training, and which I believe greatly reduces the threats to online applications.
Keywords: online applications security, security, two-factor (ID#: 15-4993)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2684461

 

Adrian Dabrowski, Nicola Pianta, Thomas Klepp, Martin Mulazzani, Edgar Weippl; IMSI-Catch Me If You Can: IMSI-Catcher-Catchers;  ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 246-255.  Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664272 IMSI Catchers are used in mobile networks to identify and eavesdrop on phones. When, the number of vendors increased and prices dropped, the device became available to much larger audiences. Self-made devices based on open source software are available for about US$ 1,500.  In this paper, we identify and describe multiple methods of detecting artifacts in the mobile network produced by such devices. We present two independent novel implementations of an IMSI Catcher Catcher (ICC) to detect this threat against everyone's privacy. The first one employs a network of stationary (sICC) measurement units installed in a geographical area and constantly scanning all frequency bands for cell announcements and fingerprinting the cell network parameters. These rooftop-mounted devices can cover large areas. The second implementation is an app for standard consumer grade mobile phones (mICC), without the need to root or jailbreak them. Its core principle is based upon geographical network topology correlation, facilitating the ubiquitous built-in GPS receiver in today's phones and a network cell capabilities fingerprinting technique. The latter works for the vicinity of the phone by first learning the cell landscape and than matching it against the learned data. We implemented and evaluated both solutions for digital self-defense and deployed several of the stationary units for a long term field-test. Finally, we describe how to detect recently published denial of service attacks.
Keywords: (not provided) (ID#: 15-4994)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664272

 

Yuru Shao, Xiapu Luo, Chenxiong Qian, Pengfei Zhu, Lei Zhang; Towards a Scalable Resource-Driven Approach For Detecting Repackaged Android Applications; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 56-65. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664275 Repackaged Android applications (or simply apps) are one of the major sources of mobile malware and also an important cause of severe revenue loss to app developers. Although a number of solutions have been proposed to detect repackaged apps, the majority of them heavily rely on code analysis, thus suffering from two limitations: (1) poor scalability due to the billion opcode problem; (2) unreliability to code obfuscation/app hardening techniques. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that exploits core resources, which have close relationships with codes, to detect repackaged apps. More precisely, we define new features for characterizing apps, investigate two kinds of algorithms for searching similar apps, and propose a two-stage methodology to speed up the detection. We realize our approach in a system named ResDroid and conduct large scale evaluation on it. The results show that ResDroid can identify repackaged apps efficiently and effectively even if they are protected by obfuscation or hardening systems.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4995)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664275

 

Drew Davidson, Matt Fredrikson, Benjamin Livshits;  MoRePriv: Mobile OS Support For Application Personalization And Privacy; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, pages 236-245. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664266 Privacy and personalization of mobile experiences are inherently in conflict: better personalization demands knowing more about the user, potentially violating user privacy. A promising approach to mitigate this tension is to migrate personalization to the client, an approach dubbed client-side personalization. This paper advocates for operating system support for client-side personalization and describes MoRePriv, an operating system service implemented in the Windows Phone OS. We argue that personalization support should be as ubiquitous as location support, and should be provided by a unified system within the OS, instead of by individual apps.  We aim to provide a solution that will stoke innovation around mobile personalization. To enable easy application personalization, MoRePriv approximates users' interests using personae such as technophile or business executive. Using a number of case studies and crowd-sourced user studies, we illustrate how more complex personalization tasks can be achieved using MoRePriv.  For privacy protection, MoRePriv distills sensitive user information to a coarse-grained profile, which limits the potential damage from information leaks. We see MoRePriv as a way to increase end-user privacy by enabling client-side computing, thus minimizing the need to share user data with the server. As such, MoRePriv shepherds the ecosystem towards a better privacy stance by nudging developers away from today's privacy-violating practices. Furthermore, MoRePriv can be combined with privacy-enhancing technologies and is complimentary to recent advances in data leak detection.
Keywords: personalization, privacy, security (ID#: 15-4996)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664266

 

Amir Herzberg, Haya Shulman; DNS Authentication As A Service: Preventing Amplification Attacks; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 356-365. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664281 We present the first defence against DNS-amplification DoS attacks, which is compatible with the common DNS servers configurations and with the (important standard) DNSSEC. We show that the proposed DNS-authentication system is efficient, and effectively prevents DNS-based amplification DoS attacks abusing DNS name servers. We present a game-theoretic model and analysis, predicting a wide-spread adoption of our design, sufficient to reduce the threat of DNS amplification DoS attacks. To further reduce costs and provide additional defences for DNS servers, we show how to deploy our design as a cloud based service.
Keywords: DNS amplification, DNS authentication, DNS reflection, denial of service attacks, source authentication (ID#: 15-4997)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664281

 

Yuzhe Tang, Ting Wang, Ling Liu, Xin Hu, Jiyong Jang; Lightweight Authentication of Freshness in Outsourced Key-Value Stores; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 176-185. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664244 Data outsourcing offers cost-effective computing power to manage massive data streams and reliable access to data. Data owners can forward their data to clouds, and the clouds provide data mirroring, backup, and online access services to end users. However, outsourcing data to untrusted clouds requires data authenticity and query integrity to remain in the control of the data owners and users.  In this paper, we address the authenticated data-outsourcing problem specifically for multi-version key-value data that is subject to continuous updates under the constraints of data integrity, data authenticity, and "freshness" (i.e., ensuring that the value returned for a key is the latest version). We detail this problem and propose IncBM-Tree, a novel construct delivering freshness and authenticity. Compared to existing work, we provide a solution that offers (i) lightweight signing and verification on massive data update streams for data owners and users (e.g., allowing for small memory footprint and CPU usage for a low-budget IT department), (ii) immediate authentication of data freshness, (iii) support of authentication in the presence of both real-time and historical data accesses. Extensive benchmark evaluations demonstrate that IncBM-Tree achieves higher throughput (in an order of magnitude) for data stream authentication than existing work. For data owners and end users that have limited computing power, IncBM-Tree can be a practical solution to authenticate the freshness of outsourced data while reaping the benefits of broadly available cloud services.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4998)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664244

 

Marco Balduzzi, Alessandro Pasta, Kyle Wilhoit; A Security Evaluation Of AIS Automated Identification System; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 436-445. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664257 AIS, Automatic Identification System, is an application of cyber-physical systems (CPS) to smart transportation at sea. Being primarily used for collision avoidance and traffic monitoring by ship captains and maritime authorities, AIS is a mandatory installation for over 300,000 vessels worldwide since 2002. Other promoted benefits are accident investigation, aids to navigation and search and rescue (SAR) operations. In this paper, we present a unique security evaluation of AIS, by introducing threats affecting both the implementation in online providers and the protocol specification. Using a novel software-based AIS transmitter that we designed, we show that our findings affect all transponders deployed globally on vessels and other maritime stations like lighthouses, buoys, AIS gateways, vessel traffic services and aircraft involved in SAR operations. Our concerns have been acknowledged by online providers and international standards organizations, and we are currently and actively working together to improve the overall security.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4999)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664257

 

Gabi Nakibly, Adi Sosnovich, Eitan Menahem, Ariel Waizel, Yuval Elovici; OSPF Vulnerability To Persistent Poisoning Attacks: A Systematic Analysis; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 336-345. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664278  Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is one of the most widely deployed interior gateway routing protocols on the Internet. The most common attack vector against OSPF is spoofing of routing advertisements on behalf of a remote router. OSPF employs a self-defense "fight-back" mechanism that quickly reverts the effects of such attacks. Nonetheless, some attacks that evade the fight-back mechanism have been discovered, making it possible to persistently falsify routing advertisements. This type of attacks are the most serious threat to a routing protocol since they allow an attacker to gain persistent control over how traffic is routed throughout the network. This shows that despite its maturity, the OSPF specification is not without security flaws and may have still-unknown vulnerabilities. In this work we systematically analyze -- manually and by formal verification -- the OSPF specification for additional vulnerabilities in the fight-back mechanism. Our analysis uncovered a fundamental security flaw in OSPF that allows a simple means for an attacker to evade the fight-back mechanism. Most major router vendors acknowledged the existence of this vulnerability in their products. Fortunately, our analysis strongly indicates that no other vulnerabilities in the fight-back mechanism are likely to exist.
Keywords: OSPF, formal verification, routing security (ID#: 15-5000)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664278

 

Sevtap Duman, Kaan Onarlioglu, Ali Osman Ulusoy, William Robertson, Engin Kirda; TrueClick: Automatically Distinguishing Trick Banners From Genuine Download Links; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 456-465. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664279 The ubiquity of Internet advertising has made it a popular target for attackers. One well-known instance of these attacks is the widespread use of trick banners that use social engineering techniques to lure victims into clicking on deceptive fake links, potentially leading to a malicious domain or malware. A recent and pervasive trend by attackers is to imitate the "download" or "play" buttons in popular file sharing sites (e.g., one-click hosters, video-streaming sites, bittorrent sites) in an attempt to trick users into clicking on these fake banners instead of the genuine link.  In this paper, we explore the problem of automatically assisting Internet users in detecting malicious trick banners and helping them identify the correct link. We present a set of features to characterize trick banners based on their visual properties such as image size, color, placement on the enclosing webpage, whether they contain animation effects, and whether they consistently appear with the same visual properties on consecutive loads of the same webpage. We have implemented a tool called TrueClick, which uses image processing and machine learning techniques to build a classifier based on these features to automatically detect the trick banners on a webpage. Our approach automatically classifies trick banners, and requires no manual effort to compile blacklists as current approaches do. Our experiments show that TrueClick results in a 3.55 factor improvement in correct link selection in the absence of other ad blocking software, and that it can detect trick banners missed by a popular ad detection tool, Adblock Plus.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5001)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664279

 

Yiming Jing, Ziming Zhao, Gail-Joon Ahn, Hongxin Hu; Morpheus: Automatically Generating Heuristics To Detect Android Emulators; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 216-225. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664250 Emulator-based dynamic analysis has been widely deployed in Android application stores. While it has been proven effective in vetting applications on a large scale, it can be detected and evaded by recent Android malware strains that carry detection heuristics. Using such heuristics, an application can check the presence or contents of certain artifacts and infer the presence of emulators. However, there exists little work that systematically discovers those heuristics that would be eventually helpful to prevent malicious applications from bypassing emulator-based analysis. To cope with this challenge, we propose a framework called Morpheus that automatically generates such heuristics. Morpheus leverages our insight that an effective detection heuristic must exploit discrepancies observable by an application. To this end, Morpheus analyzes the application sandbox and retrieves observable artifacts from both Android emulators and real devices. Afterwards, Morpheus further analyzes the retrieved artifacts to extract and rank detection heuristics. The evaluation of our proof-of-concept implementation of Morpheus reveals more than 10,000 novel detection heuristics that can be utilized to detect existing emulator-based malware analysis tools. We also discuss the discrepancies in Android emulators and potential countermeasures.
Keywords: Android, emulator, malware (ID#: 15-5002)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664250

 

Hubert Ritzdorf, Nikolaos Karapanos, Srdjan Čapkun; Assisted Deletion of Related Content; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 206-215. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664287 On primary storage systems content is often replicated, converted or modified, and the users quickly lose control over its dispersal on the system. Deleting content related to a particular project from the system therefore becomes a labor-intensive task for the user. In this paper we present IRCUS, a system that assists the user in securely removing project-related content, but does not require changes to the user's behavior or to any of the system components, such as the file system, kernel or applications. IRCUS transparently integrates within the user's system, operates in user-space and stores the resulting metadata alongside the files. We implemented and evaluated our system and show that its overhead and accuracy are acceptable for practical use and deployment.
Keywords:  (Not provided) (ID#: 15-5003)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664287

 

Arthur Gervais, Srdjan Capkun, Ghassan O. Karame, Damian Gruber; On the Privacy Provisions Of Bloom Filters In Lightweight Bitcoin Clients; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 326-335. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664267 Lightweight Bitcoin clients are gaining increasing adoption among Bitcoin users, owing to their reduced resource and bandwidth consumption. These clients support a simplified payment verification (SPV) mode as they are only required to download and verify a part of the block chain---thus supporting the usage of Bitcoin on constrained devices, such as smartphones. SPV clients rely on Bloom filters to receive transactions that are relevant to their local wallet. These filters embed all the Bitcoin addresses used by the SPV clients, and are outsourced to more powerful Bitcoin nodes which then only forward to those clients transactions relevant to their outsourced Bloom filters.  In this paper, we explore the privacy of existing SPV clients. We show analytically and empirically that the reliance on Bloom filters within existing SPV clients leaks considerable information about the addresses of Bitcoin users. Our results show that an SPV client who uses a modest number of Bitcoin addresses (e.g., < 20) risks revealing almost all of his addresses. We also show that this information leakage is further exacerbated when users restart their SPV clients and/or when the adversary has access to more than one Bloom filter pertaining to the same SPV client. Motivated by these findings, we propose an efficient countermeasure to enhance the privacy of users which rely on SPV clients; our proposal can be directly integrated within existing SPV client implementations.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5004)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664267

 

Qian Feng, Aravind Prakash, Heng Yin, Zhiqiang Lin; MACE: High-Coverage And Robust Memory Analysis For Commodity Operating Systems; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 196-205. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664248 Memory forensic analysis collects evidence for digital crimes and malware attacks from the memory of a live system. It is increasingly valuable, especially in cloud computing. However, memory analysis on on commodity operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows) faces the following key challenges: (1) a partial knowledge of kernel data structures; (2) difficulty in handling ambiguous pointers; and (3) lack of robustness by relying on soft constraints that can be easily violated by kernel attacks. To address these challenges, we present MACE, a memory analysis system that can extract a more complete view of the kernel data structures for closed-source operating systems and significantly improve the robustness by only leveraging pointer constraints (which are hard to manipulate) and evaluating these constraint globally (to even tolerate certain amount of pointer attacks). We have evaluated MACE on 100 memory images for Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 SP0. Overall, MACE can construct a kernel object graph from a memory image in just a few minutes, and achieves over 95% recall and over 96% precision. Our experiments on real-world rootkit samples and synthetic attacks further demonstrate that MACE outperforms other external memory analysis tools with respect to wider coverage and better robustness.
Keywords: memory analysis, random surfer, rootkit detection (ID#: 15-5005)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664248

 

Lance Alt, Robert Beverly, Alberto Dainotti; Uncovering Network Tarpits With Degreaser; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 156-165. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664285 Network tarpits, whereby a single host or appliance can masquerade as many fake hosts on a network and slow network scanners, are a form of defensive cyber-deception. In this work, we develop degreaser, an efficient fingerprinting tool to remotely detect tarpits. In addition to validating our tool in a controlled environment, we use degreaser to perform an Internet-wide scan. We discover tarpits of non-trivial size in the wild (prefixes as large as/16), and characterize their distribution and behavior. We then show how tarpits pollute existing network measurement surveys that are tarpit-naïve, e.g. Internet census data, and how degreaser can improve the accuracy of such surveys. Lastly, our findings suggest several ways in which to advance the realism of current network tarpits, thereby raising the bar on tarpits as an operational security mechanism.
Keywords: deception, internet census, sticky honeypot, tarpits (ID#: 15-5006)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664285

 

Rui Han, Alejandro Mesa, Mihai Christodorescu, Saman Zonouz; TroGuard: Context-Aware Protection Against Web-Based Socially Engineered Trojans; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. December 2014, Pages 66-75. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664270 Despite the increasing number of social engineering attacks through web browser applications, detection of socially engineered trojan downloads by enticed victim users remains a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we present TroGuard, a semi-automated web-based trojan detection solution, that notifies the user if the application she downloaded behaves differently than what she expected at download time. TroGuard builds on the hypothesis that in spite of millions of currently downloadable executables on the Internet, almost all of them provide functionalities from a limited set. Additionally, because each functionality, e.g., text editor, requires particular system resources, it exhibits a unique system-level activity pattern. During an offline process, TroGuard creates a profile dictionary of various functionalities. This profile dictionary is then used to warn the user if she downloads an executable whose observed activity does not match its advertised functionality (extracted through automated analysis of the download website). Our experimental results prove the above mentioned premise empirically and show that TroGuard can identify real-world socially engineered trojan download attacks effectively.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5007)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664270

 

Sören Bleikertz, Carsten Vogel, Thomas Groß; Cloud Radar: Near Real-Time Detection of Security Failures in Dynamic Virtualized infrastructures;  ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. December 2014, Pages 26-35. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664274  Cloud infrastructures are designed to share physical resources among many different tenants while ensuring overall security and tenant isolation. The complexity of dynamically changing and growing cloud environments, as well as insider attacks, can lead to misconfigurations that ultimately result in security failures. The detection of these misconfigurations and subsequent failures is a crucial challenge for cloud providers---an insurmountable challenge without tools. We establish an automated security analysis of dynamic virtualized infrastructures that detects misconfigurations and security failures in near real-time. The key is a systematic, differential approach that detects changes in the infrastructure and uses those changes to update its analysis, rather than performing one from scratch. Our system, called Cloud Radar, monitors virtualized infrastructures for changes, updates a graph model representation of the infrastructure, and also maintains a dynamic information flow graph to determine isolation properties. Whereas existing research in this area performs analyses on static snapshots of such infrastructures, our change-based approach yields significant performance improvements as demonstrated with our prototype for VMware environments.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5008)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664274

 

Michael Backes, Sven Bugiel, Sebastian Gerling; Scippa: System-Centric IPC Provenance on Android; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 36-45. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664264  Google's Android OS provides a lightweight IPC mechanism called Binder, which enables the development of feature-rich apps that seamlessly integrate services and data of other apps. Whenever apps can act both as service consumers and service providers, it is inevitable that the IPC mechanism provides message receivers with message provenance information to establish trust. However, the Android OS currently fails in providing sufficient provenance information, which has led to a number of attacks.  We present an extension to the Android IPC mechanism, called Scippa, that establishes IPC call-chains across application processes. Scippa provides provenance information required to effectively prevent recent attacks such as confused deputy attacks. Our solution constitutes a system-centric approach that extends the Binder kernel module and Android's message handlers. Scippa integrates seamlessly into the system architecture and our evaluation shows a performance overhead of only 2.23% on Android OS v4.2.2.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5009)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664264

 

Amir Herzberg, Haya Shulman, Bruno Crispo; Less is More: Cipher-Suite Negotiation for DNSSEC; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 346-355. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664283  We propose a transport layer cipher-suite negotiation mechanism for DNSSEC standard, allowing name-servers to send responses containing only the keys and signatures that correspond to the cipher-suite option negotiated with the resolver, rather than sending all the signatures and keys (as is done currently).  As we show, a lack of cipher-suite negotiation, is one of the factors impeding deployment of DNSSEC, and also results in adoption of weak ciphers. Indeed, the vast majority of domains rely on RSA 1024-bit cryptography, which is already considered insecure. Furthermore, domains, that want better security, have to support a number of cryptographic ciphers. As a result, the DNSSEC responses are large and often fragmented, harming the DNS functionality, and causing inefficiency and vulnerabilities.  A cipher-suite negotiation mechanism reduces responses' sizes, and hence solves the interoperability problems with DNSSEC-signed responses, and prevents reflection and cache poisoning attacks.
Keywords: DNS interoperability, DNS security, DNSSEC, cipher suite negotiation (ID#: 15-5010)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664283

 

Sebastian Biedermann, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Jakub Szefer; Hot-Hardening: Getting More Out Of Your Security Settings; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 6-15. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664246 Applying optimized security settings to applications is a difficult and laborious task. Especially in cloud computing, where virtual servers with various pre-installed software packages are leased, selecting optimized security settings is very difficult. In particular, optimized security settings are not identical in every setup. They depend on characteristics of the setup, on the ways an application is used or on other applications running on the same system. Configuring optimized settings given these interdependencies is a complex and time-consuming task. In this work, we present an autonomous agent which improves security settings of applications which run in virtual servers. The agent retrieves custom-made security settings for a target application by investigating its specific setup, it tests and transparently changes settings via introspection techniques unbeknownst from the perspective of the virtual server. During setting selection, the application's operation is not disturbed nor any user interaction is needed. Since optimal settings can change over time or they can change depending on different tasks the application handles, the agent can continuously adapt settings as well as improve them periodically. We call this approach hot-hardening and present results of an implementation that can hot-harden popular networking applications such as Apache2 and OpenSSH.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5011)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664246

 

Jannik Pewny, Felix Schuster, Lukas Bernhard, Thorsten Holz, Christian Rossow;  Leveraging Semantic Signatures For Bug Search In Binary Programs; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 406-415. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664269 Software vulnerabilities still constitute a high security risk and there is an ongoing race to patch known bugs. However, especially in closed-source software, there is no straightforward way (in contrast to source code analysis) to find buggy code parts, even if the bug was publicly disclosed.  To tackle this problem, we propose a method called Tree Edit Distance Based Equational Matching (TEDEM) to automatically identify binary code regions that are "similar" to code regions containing a reference bug. We aim to find bugs both in the same binary as the reference bug and in completely unrelated binaries (even compiled for different operating systems). Our method even works on proprietary software systems, which lack source code and symbols.  The analysis task is split into two phases. In a preprocessing phase, we condense the semantics of a given binary executable by symbolic simplification to make our approach robust against syntactic changes across different binaries. Second, we use tree edit distances as a basic block-centric metric for code similarity. This allows us to find instances of the same bug in different binaries and even spotting its variants (a concept called vulnerability extrapolation). To demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed method, we implemented a prototype of TEDEM that can find real-world security bugs across binaries and even across OS boundaries, such as in MS Word and the popular messengers Pidgin (Linux) and Adium (Mac OS).
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5012)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664269

 

Michael Backes, Sven Bugiel, Sebastian Gerling, Philipp von Styp-Rekowsky; Android Security Framework: Extensible Multi-Layered Access Control on Android; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 46-55. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664265 We introduce the Android Security Framework (ASF), a generic, extensible security framework for Android that enables the development and integration of a wide spectrum of security models in form of code-based security modules. The design of ASF reflects lessons learned from the literature on established security frameworks (such as Linux Security Modules or the BSD MAC Framework) and intertwines them with the particular requirements and challenges from the design of Android's software stack. ASF provides a novel security API that supports authors of Android security extensions in developing their modules. This overcomes the current unsatisfactory situation to provide security solutions as separate patches to the Android software stack or to embed them into Android's mainline codebase. This system security extensibility is of particular benefit for enterprise or government solutions that require deployment of advanced security models, not supported by vanilla Android. We present a prototypical implementation of ASF and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency by modularizing different security models from related work, such as dynamic permissions, inlined reference monitoring, and type enforcement.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5013)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664265

 

Carlos Barreto, Alvaro A. Cárdenas, Nicanor Quijano, Eduardo Mojica-Nava; CPS: Market Analysis Of Attacks Against Demand Response In The Smart Grid; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 136-145, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664284 Demand response systems assume an electricity retail-market with strategic electricity consuming agents. The goal in these systems is to design load shaping mechanisms to achieve efficiency of resources and customer satisfaction. Recent research efforts have studied the impact of integrity attacks in simplified versions of the demand response problem, where neither the load consuming agents nor the adversary are strategic.  In this paper, we study the impact of integrity attacks considering strategic players (a social planner or a consumer) and a strategic attacker. We identify two types of attackers: (1) a malicious attacker who wants to damage the equipment in the power grid by producing sudden overloads, and (2) a selfish attacker that wants to defraud the system by compromising and then manipulating control (load shaping) signals. We then explore the resiliency of two different demand response systems to these fraudsters and malicious attackers. Our results provide guidelines for system operators deciding which type of demand-response system they want to implement, how to secure them, and directions for detecting these attacks.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5014)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664284

 

Hongyu Gao, Yi Yang, Kai Bu, Yan Chen, Doug Downey, Kathy Lee, Alok Choudhary; Spam Ain't As Diverse As It Seems: Throttling OSN Spam With Templates Underneath; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 76-85. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664251 In online social networks (OSNs), spam originating from friends and acquaintances not only reduces the joy of Internet surfing but also causes damage to less security-savvy users. Prior countermeasures combat OSN spam from different angles. Due to the diversity of spam, there is hardly any existing method that can independently detect the majority or most of OSN spam. In this paper, we empirically analyze the textual pattern of a large collection of OSN spam. An inspiring finding is that the majority (63.0%) of the collected spam is generated with underlying templates. We therefore propose extracting templates of spam detected by existing methods and then matching messages against the templates toward accurate and fast spam detection. We implement this insight through Tangram, an OSN spam filtering system that performs online inspection on the stream of user-generated messages. Tangram automatically divides OSN spam into segments and uses the segments to construct templates to filter future spam. Experimental results show that Tangram is highly accurate and can rapidly generate templates to throttle newly emerged campaigns. Specifically, Tangram detects the most prevalent template-based spam with 95.7% true positive rate, whereas the existing template generation approach detects only 32.3%. The integration of Tangram and its auxiliary spam filter achieves an overall accuracy of 85.4% true positive rate and 0.33% false positive rate.
Keywords: online social networks, spam, spam campaigns (ID#: 15-5015)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664251

 

Robert Gawlik, Thorsten Holz; Towards Automated Integrity Protection Of C++ Virtual Function Tables In Binary Programs; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 396-405. doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664249 Web browsers are one of the most used, complex, and popular software systems nowadays. They are prone to dangling pointers that result in use-after-free vulnerabilites and this is the de-facto way to exploit them. From a technical point of view, an attacker uses a technique called vtable hijacking to exploit such bugs. More specifically, she crafts bogus virtual tables and lets a freed C++ object point to it in order to gain control over the program at virtual function call sites.  In this paper, we present a novel approach towards mitigating and detecting such attacks against C++ binary code. We propose a static binary analysis technique to extract virtual function call site information in an automated way. Leveraging this information, we instrument the given binary executable and add runtime policy enforcements to thwart the illegal usage of these call sites. We implemented the proposed techniques in a prototype called T-VIP and successfully hardened three versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. An evaluation with several zero-day exploits demonstrates that our method prevents all of them. Performance benchmarks both on micro and macro level indicate that the overhead is reasonable with about 2.2%, which is only slightly higher compared to recent compiler-based approaches that address this problem.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5016)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664249

 

Tianwei Zhang, Ruby B. Lee; New Models Of Cache Architectures Characterizing Information Leakage From Cache Side Channels; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 96-105. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664273 Side-channel attacks try to breach confidentiality and retrieve critical secrets through the side channels. Cache memories are a potential source of information leakage through side-channel attacks, many of which have been proposed. Meanwhile, different cache architectures have also been proposed to defend against these attacks. However, there are currently no means for comparing and evaluating the effectiveness of different defense solutions against these attacks.  In this paper, we propose a novel method to evaluate a system's vulnerability to side-channel attacks. We establish side-channel leakage models based on the non-interference property. Then we define how the security aspects of a cache architecture can be modeled as a finite-state machine (FSM) with state transitions that cause interference. We use mutual information to quantitatively reveal potential side-channel leakage of the architectures, and allow comparison of these architectures for their relative vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks. We use real attacks to validate our results.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5017)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.266427

 

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

International Conferences: Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, New Orleans, Part 2

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	International Conferences: Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, New Orleans, Part 2

 

The 2014 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) had special focus on Cybersecurity for Cyber-Physical Systems.  Held December 8-12, 2014, ACSAC has a tradition of bringing together security professionals from academia, government and industry who are interested in applied security. It is an internationally recognized forum where practitioners, researchers, and developers in information system security meet to learn and to exchange practical ideas and experiences.  

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Henry Carter, Charles Lever, Patrick Traynor; Whitewash: Outsourcing Garbled Circuit Generation for Mobile Devices; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 266-275. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664255 Garbled circuits offer a powerful primitive for computation on a user's personal data while keeping that data private. Despite recent improvements, constructing and evaluating circuits of any useful size remains expensive on the limited hardware resources of a smartphone, the primary computational device available to most users around the world. In this work, we develop a new technique for securely outsourcing the generation of garbled circuits to a Cloud provider. By outsourcing the circuit generation, we are able to eliminate the most costly operations from the mobile device, including oblivious transfers. Our proofs of security show that this technique provides the best security guarantees of any existing garbled circuit outsourcing protocol. We also experimentally demonstrate that our new protocol, on average, decreases execution time by 75% and reduces network costs by 60% compared to previous outsourcing protocols. In so doing, we demonstrate that the use of garbled circuits on mobile devices can be made nearly as practical as it is becoming for server-class machines.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5018)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664255

 

Mingshen Sun, Min Zheng, John C. S. Lui, Xuxian Jiang; Design and Implementation of an Android Host-Based Intrusion Prevention System; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 226-235. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664245 Android has a dominating share in the mobile market and there is a significant rise of mobile malware targeting Android devices. Android malware accounted for 97% of all mobile threats in 2013 [26]. To protect smartphones and prevent privacy leakage, companies have implemented various host-based intrusion prevention systems (HIPS) on their Android devices. In this paper, we first analyze the implementations, strengths and weaknesses of three popular HIPS architectures. We demonstrate a severe loophole and weakness of an existing popular HIPS product in which hackers can readily exploit. Then we present a design and implementation of a secure and extensible HIPS platform---"Patronus." Patronus not only provides intrusion prevention without the need to modify the Android system, it can also dynamically detect existing malware based on runtime information. We propose a two-phase dynamic detection algorithm for detecting running malware. Our experiments show that Patronus can prevent the intrusive behaviors efficiently and detect malware accurately with a very low performance overhead and power consumption.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5019)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664245

 

Xavier de Carné de Carnavalet, Mohammad Mannan; Challenges and Implications Of Verifiable Builds For Security-Critical Open-Source Software; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 16-25. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664288 The majority of computer users download compiled software and run it directly on their machine. Apparently, this is also true for open-sourced software -- most users would not compile the available source, and implicitly trust that the available binaries have been compiled from the published source code (i.e., no backdoor has been inserted in the binary). To verify that the official binaries indeed correspond to the released source, one can compile the source of a given application, and then compare the locally generated binaries with the developer-provided official ones. However, such simple verification is non-trivial to achieve in practice, as modern compilers, and more generally, toolchains used in software packaging, have not been designed with verifiability in mind. Rather, the output of compilers is often dependent on parameters that can be strongly tied to the building environment. In this paper, we analyze a widely-used encryption tool, TrueCrypt, to verify its official binary with the corresponding source. We first manually replicate a close match to the official binaries of sixteen most recent versions of TrueCrypt for Windows up to v7.1a, and then explain the remaining differences that can solely be attributed to non-determinism in the build process. Our analysis provides the missing guarantee on official binaries that they are indeed backdoor-free, and makes audits on TrueCrypt's source code more meaningful. Also, we uncover several sources of non-determinism in TrueCrypt's compilation process; these findings may help create future verifiable build processes.
Keywords: TrueCrypt, bitcoin, debian, deterministic build, reproducible build, tor (ID#: 15-5020)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664288

 

Fabienne Eigner, Aniket Kate, Matteo Maffei, Francesca Pampaloni, Ivan Pryvalov;  Differentially Private Data Aggregation With Optimal Utility; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 316-325. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664263 Computing aggregate statistics about user data is of vital importance for a variety of services and systems, but this practice has been shown to seriously undermine the privacy of users. Differential privacy has proved to be an effective tool to sanitize queries over a database, and various cryptographic protocols have been recently proposed to enforce differential privacy in a distributed setting, e.g., statical queries on sensitive data stored on the user's side. The widespread deployment of differential privacy techniques in real-life settings is, however, undermined by several limitations that existing constructions suffer from: they support only a limited class of queries, they pose a trade-off between privacy and utility of the query result, they are affected by the answer pollution problem, or they are inefficient.  This paper presents PrivaDA, a novel design architecture for distributed differential privacy that leverages recent advances in secure multiparty computations on fixed and floating point arithmetics to overcome the previously mentioned limitations. In particular, PrivaDA supports a variety of perturbation mechanisms (e.g., the Laplace, discrete Laplace, and exponential mechanisms) and it constitutes the first generic technique to generate noise in a fully distributed manner while maintaining the optimal utility. Furthermore, PrivaDA does not suffer from the answer pollution problem. We demonstrate the efficiency of PrivaDA with a performance evaluation, and its expressiveness and flexibility by illustrating several application scenarios such as privacy-preserving web analytics.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5021)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664263  

 

Daniela Oliveira, Marissa Rosenthal, Nicole Morin, Kuo-Chuan Yeh, Justin Cappos, Yanyan Zhuang; It's the Psychology Stupid: How Heuristics Explain Software Vulnerabilities And How Priming Can Illuminate Developer's Blind Spots; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 296-305. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664254  Despite the security community's emphasis on the importance of building secure software, the number of new vulnerabilities found in our systems is increasing. In addition, vulnerabilities that have been studied for years are still commonly reported in vulnerability databases. This paper investigates a new hypothesis that software vulnerabilities are blind spots in developer's heuristic-based decision-making processes. Heuristics are simple computational models to solve problems without considering all the information available. They are an adaptive response to our short working memory because they require less cognitive effort. Our hypothesis is that as software vulnerabilities represent corner cases that exercise unusual information flows, they tend to be left out from the repertoire of heuristics used by developers during their programming tasks. To validate this hypothesis we conducted a study with 47 developers using psychological manipulation. In this study each developer worked for approximately one hour on six vulnerable programming scenarios. The sessions progressed from providing no information about the possibility of vulnerabilities, to priming developers about unexpected results, and explicitly mentioning the existence of vulnerabilities in the code. The results show that (i) security is not a priority in software development environments, (ii) security is not part of developer's mindset while coding, (iii) developers assume common cases for their code, (iv) security thinking requires cognitive effort, (v) security education helps, but developers can have difficulties correlating a particular learned vulnerability or security information with their current working task, and (vi) priming or explicitly cueing about vulnerabilities on-the-spot is a powerful mechanism to make developers aware about potential vulnerabilities.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5022)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664254

 

Mathy Vanhoef, Frank Piessens;  Advanced Wi-Fi Attacks Using Commodity Hardware; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, pages 256-265. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664260 We show that low-layer attacks against Wi-Fi can be implemented using user-modifiable firmware. Hence cheap off-the-shelf Wi-Fi dongles can be used carry out advanced attacks. We demonstrate this by implementing five low-layer attacks using open source Atheros firmware. The first attack consists of unfair channel usage, giving the user a higher throughput while reducing that of others. The second attack defeats countermeasures designed to prevent unfair channel usage. The third attack performs continuous jamming, making the channel unusable for other devices. For the fourth attack we implemented a selective jammer, allowing one to jam specific frames already in the air. The fifth is a novel channel-based Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack, enabling reliable manipulation of encrypted traffic.  These low-layer attacks facilitate novel attacks against higher-layer protocols. To demonstrate this we show how our MitM attack facilitates attacks against the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) when used as a group cipher. Since a substantial number of networks still use TKIP as their group cipher, this shows that weaknesses in TKIP have a higher impact than previously thought.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5023)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664260

 

Samuel Junjie Tan, Sergey Bratus, Travis Goodspeed; Interrupt-Oriented Bugdoor Programming: A Minimalist Approach To Bugdooring Embedded Systems Firmware; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 116-125, doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664268 We demonstrate a simple set of interrupt-related vulnerability primitives that, despite being apparently innocuous, give attackers full control of a microcontroller platform. We then present a novel, minimalist approach to constructing deniable bugdoors for microcontroller firmware, and contrast this approach with the current focus of exploitation research on demonstrations of maximum computational power that malicious computation can achieve. Since the introduction of Return-oriented programming, an ever-increasing number of targets have been demonstrated to unintentionally yield Turing-complete computation environments to attackers controlling the target's various input channels, under ever more restrictive sets of limitations. Yet although modern OS defensive measures indeed require complex computations to bypass, this focus on maximum expressiveness of exploit programming models leads researchers to overlook other research directions for platforms that lack strong defensive measure but occur in mission-critical systems, namely, microcontrollers. In these systems, common exploiter goals such as sensitive code and data exfiltration or arbitrary code execution do not typically require complex computation; instead, a minimal computation is preferred and a simple set of vulnerability primitives typically suffices. We discuss examples of vulnerabilities and the new kinds of tools needed to avoid them in future firmware.
Keywords: ACSAC proceedings, hacking, microprocessor exploitation, security (ID#: 15-5024)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664268 

 

M. Zubair Rafique, Juan Caballero, Christophe Huygens, Wouter Joosen; Network Dialog Minimization And Network Dialog Diffing: Two Novel Primitives For Network Security Applications; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 166-175. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664261 In this work, we present two fundamental primitives for network security: network dialog minimization and network dialog diffing. Network dialog minimization (NDM) simplifies an original dialog with respect to a goal, so that the minimized dialog when replayed still achieves the goal, but requires minimal network communication, achieving significant time and bandwidth savings. We present network delta debugging, the first technique to solve NDM. Network dialog diffing compares two dialogs, aligns them, and identifies their common and different parts. We propose a novel dialog diffing technique that aligns two dialogs by finding a mapping that maximizes similarity.  We have applied our techniques to 5 applications. We apply our dialog minimization approach for: building drive-by download milkers for 9 exploit kits, integrating them in a infrastructure that has collected over 14,000 malware samples running from a single machine; efficiently measuring the percentage of popular sites that allow cookie replay, finding that 31% do not destroy the server-side state when a user logs out and that 17% provide cookies that live over a month; simplifying a cumbersome user interface, saving our institution 3 hours of time per year and employee; and finding a new vulnerability in a SIP server. We apply our dialog diffing approach for clustering benign (F-Measure = 100%) and malicious (F-Measure = 87.6%) dialogs.
Keywords: network delta debugging, network dialog diffing, network dialog minimization, network security (ID#: 15-5025)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664261

 

Willem De Groef, Fabio Massacci, Frank Piessens; NodeSentry: Least-Privilege Library Integration For Server-Side JavaScript; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 446-455. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664276 Node.js is a popular JavaScript server-side framework with an efficient runtime for cloud-based event-driven architectures. Its strength is the presence of thousands of third-party libraries which allow developers to quickly build and deploy applications. These very libraries are a source of security threats as a vulnerability in one library can (and in some cases did) compromise one's entire server.  In order to support the least-privilege integration of libraries, we developed NodeSentry, the first security architecture for server-side JavaScript. Our policy enforcement infrastructure supports an easy deployment of web-hardening techniques and access control policies on interactions between libraries and their environment, including any dependent library.  We discuss the implementation of NodeSentry, and present its practical evaluation. For hundreds of concurrent clients, NodeSentry has the same capacity and throughput as plain Node.js. Only on a large scale, when Node.js itself yields to a heavy load, NodeSentry shows a limited overhead.
Keywords: JavaScript, web security (ID#: 15-5026)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664276

 

Hyungsub Kim, Sangho Lee, Jong Kim; Exploring and Mitigating Privacy Threats of HTML5 Geolocation API; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 306-315. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664247 The HTML5 Geolocation API realizes location-based services via theWeb by granting web sites the geographical location information of user devices. However, the Geolocation API can violate a user's location privacy due to its coarse-grained permission and location models. The API provides either exact location or nothing to web sites even when they only require approximate location. In this paper, we first conduct case studies on numerous web browsers and web sites to explore how they implement and utilize the Geolocation API. We detect 14 vulnerable web browsers and 603 overprivileged web sites that can violate a user's location privacy. To mitigate the privacy threats of the Geolocation API, we propose a novel scheme that (1) supports fine-grained permission and location models, and (2) recommends appropriate privacy settings to each user by inspecting the location sensitivity of each web page. Our scheme can accurately estimate each web page's necessary geolocation degree (estimation accuracy: ~93.5%). We further provide suggestions to improve the Geolocation API.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5027)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664247

 

Adam J. Aviv, Dane Fichter; Understanding Visual Perceptions of Usability and Security of Android's Graphical Password Pattern; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 286-295. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664253 This paper reports the results of a user study of the Android graphical password system using an alternative survey methodology, pairwise preferences, that requests participants to select between pairs of patterns indicating either a security or usability preference. By carefully selecting password pairs to isolate a visual feature, a visual perception of usability and security of different features can be measured. We conducted a large IRB-approved survey using pairwise preferences which attracted 384 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Analyzing the results, we find that visual features that can be attributed to complexity indicated a stronger perception of security, while spatial features, such as shifts up/down or left/right are not strong indicators for security or usability. We extended and applied the survey data by building logistic models to predict perception preferences by training on features used in the survey and other features proposed in related work. The logistic model accurately predicted preferences above 70%, twice the rate of random guessing, and the strongest feature in classification is password distance, the total length of all lines in the pattern, a feature not used in the online survey. This result provides insight into the internal visual calculus of users when comparing choices and selecting visual passwords, and the ultimate goal of this work is to leverage the visual calculus to design systems where inherent perceptions for usability coincides with a known metric of security.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5028)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664253

 

Hendrik Meutzner, Viet-Hung Nguyen, Thorsten Holz, Dorothea Kolossa; Using Automatic Speech Recognition For Attacking Acoustic CAPTCHAs: The Trade-Off Between Usability And Security; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 276-285. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664262 A common method to prevent automated abuses of Internet services is utilizing challenge-response tests that distinguish human users from machines. These tests are known as CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) and should represent a task that is easy to solve for humans, but difficult for fraudulent programs. To enable access for visually impaired people, an acoustic CAPTCHA is typically provided in addition to the better-known visual CAPTCHAs. Recent security studies show that most acoustic CAPTCHAs, albeit difficult to solve for humans, can be broken via machine learning.  In this work, we suggest using speech recognition rather than generic classification methods for better analyzing the security of acoustic CAPTCHAs. We show that our attack based on an automatic speech recognition system can successfully defeat CAPTCHA with a significantly higher success rate than reported in previous studies. A major difficulty in designing CAPTCHAs arises from the trade-off between human usability and robustness against automated attacks. We present and analyze an alternative CAPTCHA design that exploits specific capabilities of the human auditory system, i.e., auditory streaming and tolerance to reverberation. Since state-of-the-art speech recognition technology still does not provide these capabilities, the resulting CAPTCHA is hard to solve automatically. A detailed analysis of the proposed CAPTCHA shows a far better trade-off between usability and security than the current quasi-standard approach of reCAPTCHA.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5029)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664262

 

Marina Krotofil, Alvaro A. Cárdenas, Bradley Manning, Jason Larsen; CPS: Driving Cyber-Physical Systems to Unsafe Operating Conditions by Timing DoS Attacks on Sensor Signals; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 146-155. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664290 DoS attacks on sensor measurements used for industrial control can cause the controller of the process to use stale data. If the DoS attack is not timed properly, the use of stale data by the controller will have limited impact on the process; however, if the attacker is able to launch the DoS attack at the correct time, the use of stale data can cause the controller to drive the system to an unsafe state. Understanding the timing parameters of the physical processes does not only allow an attacker to construct a successful attack but also to maximize its impact (damage to the system). In this paper we use Tennessee Eastman challenge process to study an attacker that has to identify (in realtime) the optimal timing to launch a DoS attack. The choice of time to begin an attack is forward-looking, requiring the attacker to consider each opportunity against the possibility of a better opportunity in the future, and this lends itself to the theory of optimal stopping problems. In particular we study the applicability of the Best Choice Problem (also known as the Secretary Problem), quickest change detection, and statistical process outliers. Our analysis can be used to identify specific sensor measurements that need to be protected, and the time that security or safety teams required to respond to attacks, before they cause major damage.
Keywords: CUSUM, DoS attacks, Tennessee eastman process, cyber-physical systems, optimal stopping problems (ID#: 15-5030)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664290

 

John Slankas, Xusheng Xiao, Laurie Williams, Tao Xie; Relation Extraction for Inferring Access Control Rules From Natural Language Artifacts; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 366-375. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664280 With over forty years of use and refinement, access control, often in the form of access control rules (ACRs), continues to be a significant control mechanism for information security. However, ACRs are typically either buried within existing natural language (NL) artifacts or elicited from subject matter experts. To address the first situation, our research goal is to aid developers who implement ACRs by inferring ACRs from NL artifacts. To aid in rule inference, we propose an approach that extracts relations (i.e., the relationship among two or more items) from NL artifacts such as requirements documents. Unlike existing approaches, our approach combines techniques from information extraction and machine learning. We develop an iterative algorithm to discover patterns that represent ACRs in sentences. We seed this algorithm with frequently occurring nouns matching a subject--action--resource pattern throughout a document. The algorithm then searches for additional combinations of those nouns to discover additional patterns. We evaluate our approach on documents from three systems in three domains: conference management, education, and healthcare. Our evaluation results show that ACRs exist in 47% of the sentences, and our approach effectively identifies those ACR sentences with a precision of 81% and recall of 65%; our approach extracts ACRs from those identified ACR sentences with an average precision of 76% and an average recall of 49%.
Keywords: access control, classification, natural language parsing, security (ID#: 15-5031)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664280

 

Marios Pomonis, Theofilos Petsios, Kangkook Jee, Michalis Polychronakis, Angelos D. Keromytis; IntFlow: Improving the Accuracy Of Arithmetic Error Detection Using Information Flow Tracking; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 416-425. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664282 Integer overflow and underflow, signedness conversion, and other types of arithmetic errors in C/C++ programs are among the most common software flaws that result in exploitable vulnerabilities. Despite significant advances in automating the detection of arithmetic errors, existing tools have not seen widespread adoption mainly due to their increased number of false positives. Developers rely on wrap-around counters, bit shifts, and other language constructs for performance optimizations and code compactness, but those same constructs, along with incorrect assumptions and conditions of undefined behavior, are often the main cause of severe vulnerabilities. Accurate differentiation between legitimate and erroneous uses of arithmetic language intricacies thus remains an open problem.  As a step towards addressing this issue, we present IntFlow, an accurate arithmetic error detection tool that combines static information flow tracking and dynamic program analysis. By associating sources of untrusted input with the identified arithmetic errors, IntFlow differentiates between non-critical, possibly developer-intended undefined arithmetic operations, and potentially exploitable arithmetic bugs. IntFlow examines a broad set of integer errors, covering almost all cases of C/C++ undefined behaviors, and achieves high error detection coverage. We evaluated IntFlow using the SPEC benchmarks and a series of real-world applications, and measured its effectiveness in detecting arithmetic error vulnerabilities and reducing false positives. IntFlow successfully detected all real-world vulnerabilities for the tested applications and achieved a reduction of 89% in false positives over standalone static code instrumentation.
Keywords: arithmetic errors, information flow tracking, static analysis (ID#: 15-5032)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664282

 

Tamara Denning, Daniel B. Kramer, Batya Friedman, Matthew R. Reynolds, Brian Gill, Tadayoshi Kohno; CPS: Beyond Usability: Applying Value Sensitive Design Based Methods To Investigate Domain Characteristics For Security For Implantable Cardiac Devices; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 426-435. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664289 Wireless implantable medical devices (IMDs) are cyber-physical systems that deliver life-saving treatments to cardiac patients with dangerous heart conditions. Current access control models for these systems are insufficient; more security is necessary. In response to this problem, the technical security community has investigated new directions for improving security on these resource-constrained devices. Defenses, however, must not only be technically secure; in order to be deployable, defenses must be designed to work within the needs and constraints of their relevant application spaces. Designing for an application space---particularly a specialized one---requires a deep understanding of the stakeholders, their values, and the contexts of technology usage. Grounding our work in value sensitive design (VSD), we collaborated as an interdisciplinary team to conduct three workshops with medical providers for the purpose of gathering their values and perspectives. The structure of our workshop builds on known workshop structures within the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, and the number of participants in our workshops (N=24) is compatible with current practices for inductive, exploratory studies. We present results on: what the participants find important with respect to providing care and performing their jobs; their reactions to potential security system concepts; and their views on what security system properties should be sought or avoided due to side effects within the context of their work practice. We synthesize these results, use the results to articulate design considerations for future technical security systems, and suggest directions for further research. Our research not only provides a contribution to security research for an important class of cyber-physical systems (IMDs); it also provides an example of leveraging techniques from other communities to better explore the landscape of security designs for technologies.
Keywords: cyber-physical systems, envisioning workshops, human factors, implantable cardiac devices, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, implantable medical devices, medical, methods, pacemaker, practical security, privacy, security, stakeholders, value sensitive design (ID#: 15-5033)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664289

 

Dina Hadžiosmanović, Robin Sommer, Emmanuele Zambon, Pieter H. Hartel; Through the Eye of the PLC: Semantic Security Monitoring for Industrial Processes; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 126-135. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664277 Off-the-shelf intrusion detection systems prove an ill fit for protecting industrial control systems, as they do not take their process semantics into account. Specifically, current systems fail to detect recent process control attacks that manifest as unauthorized changes to the configuration of a plant's programmable logic controllers (PLCs). In this work we present a detector that continuously tracks updates to corresponding process variables to then derive variable-specific prediction models as the basis for assessing future activity. Taking a specification-agnostic approach, we passively monitor plant activity by extracting variable updates from the devices' network communication. We evaluate the capabilities of our detection approach with traffic recorded at two operational water treatment plants serving a total of about one million people in two urban areas. We show that the proposed approach can detect direct attacks on process control, and we further explore its potential to identify more sophisticated indirect attacks on field device measurements as well.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5034)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664277

 

Jason Gionta, Ahmed Azab, William Enck, Peng Ning, Xiaolan Zhang; SEER: Practical Memory Virus Scanning As a Service; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 186-195. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664271 Virus Scanning-as-a-Service (VSaaS) has emerged as a popular security solution for virtual cloud environments. However, existing approaches fail to scan guest memory, which can contain an emerging class of Memory-only Malware. While several host-based memory scanners are available, they are computationally less practical for cloud environments. This paper proposes SEER as an architecture for enabling Memory VSaaS for virtualized environments. SEER leverages cloud resources and technologies to consolidate and aggregate virus scanning activities to efficiently detect malware residing in memory. Specifically, SEER combines fast memory snapshotting and computation deduplication to provide practical and efficient off-host memory virus scanning. We evaluate SEER and demonstrate up to an 87% reduction in data size that must be scanned and up to 72% savings in overall scan time, compared to naively applying file-based scanning approaches. Furthermore, SEER provides a 50% reduction in scan time when using a warm cache. In doing so, SEER provides a practical solution for cloud vendors to transparently and periodically scan virtual machine memory for malware.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5035)
URL:   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664271

 

Yinzhi Cao, Xiang Pan, Yan Chen, Jianwei Zhuge; JShield: Towards Real-Time And Vulnerability-Based Detection Of Polluted Drive-By Download Attacks; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 466-475. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664256 Drive-by download attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities of web browsers to control client computers, have become a major venue for attackers. To detect such attacks, researchers have proposed many approaches such as anomaly-based [22, 23] and vulnerability-based [44, 50] detections. However, anomaly-based approaches are vulnerable to data pollution, and existing vulnerability-based approaches cannot accurately describe the vulnerability condition of all the drive-by download attacks. In this paper, we propose a vulnerability-based approach, namely JShield, which uses novel opcode vulnerability signature, a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with a variable pool at opcode level, to match drive-by download vulnerabilities. We investigate all the JavaScript engine vulnerabilities of web browsers from 2009 to 2014, as well as those of portable document files (PDF) readers from 2007 to 2014. JShield is able to match all of those vulnerabilities; furthermore, the overall evaluation shows that JShield is so lightweight that it only adds 2.39 percent of overhead to original execution as the median among top 500 Alexa web sites.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5036)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664256

 

Chao Yang, Jialong Zhang, Guofei Gu; A Taste of Tweets: Reverse Engineering Twitter Spammers; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 86-95. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664258 In this paper, through reverse engineering Twitter spammers' tastes (their preferred targets to spam), we aim at providing guidelines for building more effective social honeypots, and generating new insights to defend against social spammers. Specifically, we first perform a measurement study by deploying "benchmark" social honeypots on Twitter with diverse and fine-grained social behavior patterns to trap spammers. After five months' data collection, we make a deep analysis on how Twitter spammers find their targets. Based on the analysis, we evaluate our new guidelines for building effective social honeypots by implementing "advanced" honeypots. Particularly, within the same time period, using those advanced honeypots can trap spammers around 26 times faster than using "traditional" honeypots.  In the second part of our study, we investigate new active collection approaches to complement the fundamentally passive procedure of using honeypots to slowly attract spammers. Our goal is that, given limited resources/time, instead of blindly crawling all possible (or randomly sampling) Twitter accounts at the first place (for later spammer analysis), we need a lightweight strategy to prioritize the active crawling/sampling of more likely spam accounts from the huge Twittersphere. Applying what we have learned about the tastes of spammers, we design two new, active and guided sampling approaches for collecting most likely spammer accounts during the crawling. According to our evaluation, our strategies could efficiently crawl/sample over 17,000 spam accounts within a short time with a considerably high "Hit Ratio", i.e., collecting 6 correct spam accounts in every 10 sampled accounts.
Keywords: Twitter, online social network websites, spam (ID#: 15-5037)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664258

 

Weixuan Mao, Zhongmin Cai, Xiaohong Guan, Don Towsley; Centrality Metrics of Importance in Access Behaviors And Malware Detections; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 376-385. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664286 System objects play different roles in a computer system and exhibit different degrees of importance with respect to system security. Identifying importance metrics can help us to develop more effective and efficient security protection methods. However, there is little previous work on evaluating the importance of objects from the perspective of security. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to evaluate the importance of various system objects based on a bipartite dependency network representation of access behaviors observed in a computer system. We introduce centrality metrics from network science to quantitatively measure the relative importance of system objects and reveal their inherent connections to security properties such as integrity and confidentiality. Furthermore, we propose importance-metric based models to characterize process behaviors and identify abnormal access patterns with respect to confidentiality and integrity. Extensive experimental results on one real-world dataset demonstrate that our model is capable of detecting 7,257 malware samples from 27,840 benign processes at 93.94% TPR under 0.1% FPR. Moreover, a selective protection scheme based on a partial behavioral model of important objects achieves comparable or even better results in malware detection when compared with complete behavior models. This demonstrates the feasibility of the devised importance metrics and presents a promising new approach to malware detection.
Keywords: access behaviors, centrality, importance metrics, malware detection (ID#: 15-5038)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664286

 

Raoul Strackx, Bart Jacobs, Frank Piessens; ICE: a Passive, High-Speed, State-Continuity Scheme; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 106-115.  Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664259  The amount of trust that can be placed in commodity computing platforms is limited by the likelihood of vulnerabilities in their huge software stacks. Protected-module architectures, such as Intel SGX, provide an interesting alternative by isolating the execution of software modules. To minimize the amount of code that provides support for the protected-module architecture, persistent storage of (confidentiality and integrity protected) states of modules can be delegated to the untrusted operating system. But precautions should be taken to ensure state continuity: an attacker should not be able to cause a module to use stale states (a so-called rollback attack), and while the system is not under attack, a module should always be able to make progress, even when the system could crash or lose power at unexpected, random points in time (i.e., the system should be crash resilient).  Providing state-continuity support is non-trivial as many algorithms are vulnerable to attack, require on-chip non-volatile memory, wear-out existing off-chip secure non-volatile memory and/or are too slow for many applications.  We present ICE, a system and algorithm providing state-continuity guarantees to protected modules. ICE's novelty lies in the facts that (1) it does not rely on secure non-volatile storage for every state update (e.g., the slow TPM chip). (2) ICE is a passive security measure. An attacker interrupting the main power supply or any other source of power, cannot break state-continuity. (3) Benchmarks show that ICE already enables state-continuous updates almost 5x faster than writing to TPM NVRAM. With dedicated hardware, performance can be increased 2 orders of magnitude.  ICE's security properties are guaranteed by means of a machine-checked proof and a prototype implementation is evaluated on commodity hardware.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-5039)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664259

 

Tamas K. Lengyel, Steve Maresca, Bryan D. Payne, George D. Webster, Sebastian Vogl, Aggelos Kiayias; Scalability, Fidelity and Stealth in the DRAKVUF Dynamic Malware Analysis System; ACSAC '14 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2014, Pages 386-395. Doi: 10.1145/2664243.2664252 Malware is one of the biggest security threats on the Internet today and deploying effective defensive solutions requires the rapid analysis of a continuously increasing number of malware samples. With the proliferation of metamorphic malware the analysis is further complicated as the efficacy of signature-based static analysis systems is greatly reduced. While dynamic malware analysis is an effective alternative, the approach faces significant challenges as the ever increasing number of samples requiring analysis places a burden on hardware resources. At the same time modern malware can both detect the monitoring environment and hide in unmonitored corners of the system.  In this paper we present DRAKVUF, a novel dynamic malware analysis system designed to address these challenges by building on the latest hardware virtualization extensions and the Xen hypervisor. We present a technique for improving stealth by initiating the execution of malware samples without leaving any trace in the analysis machine. We also present novel techniques to eliminate blind-spots created by kernel-mode rootkits by extending the scope of monitoring to include kernel internal functions, and to monitor file-system accesses through the kernel's heap allocations. With extensive tests performed on recent malware samples we show that DRAKVUF achieves significant improvements in conserving hardware resources while providing a stealthy, in-depth view into the behavior of modern malware.
Keywords: dynamic malware analysis, virtual machine introspection (ID#: 15-5040)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664243.2664252

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Note:

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International Conferences: Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015, Cambodia

 

	International Conferences: Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015, Cambodia

 

The 29th edition of the International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN) was originally started under the name of Joint Workshop on Computer Communication in 1986. ICOIN 2015 took place in Siem Reap, Cambodia, under the organization of Korea Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers (KIISE) on 12-14 Jan. 2015.  Conference topics included computer communications, wireless/mobile networks, and converged networks in both theoretical and applied aspects.  

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Lima, D.S.; Paula, M.R.P.; Roberto, F.M.; Ribeiro Cardoso, A.; Celestino Junior, J., "ProbT: A Temporal Probabilistic Protocol To Mitigate The Broadcast Storm Problem In Vanets," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 7, 12, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057848
Abstract: VANETs are self-organized networks in which their constituent nodes are vehicles. They can be classified as a subcategory of MANETs. Due to their special characteristics, they demand protocols designed specifically for their scenario of action. Different types of applications can be created for VANETs such as security protocols, traffic management, systems maintenance, comfort for drivers and passengers, and others. In general, applications developed for VANETs make use of broadcast information. However, there are many issues to be considered. One of the central problems is the broadcast storm. In this paper we propose a temporal probabilistic protocol, named ProbT, to mitigate the broadcast storm problem. The ProbT performance was measured and compared to the protocols Blind Flooding, Weighted p-Persistence, AutoCast and Irresponsible Forwarding. Based on the results, the ProbT shows a good performance when compared to the mentioned protocols.
Keywords: broadcast communication; probability; protocols; vehicular ad hoc networks; MANET; ProbT protocol; VANET; autocast forwarding; blind flooding; broadcast storm problem; irresponsible forwarding; maintenance system; security protocol; self-organized network; temporal probabilistic protocol; traffic management; weighted p-persistence; Packet loss; Probabilistic logic; Protocols; Receivers; Storms; Vehicles (ID#: 15-5108)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057848&isnumber=7057846

 

Chun-Ta Li; Chin-Wen Lee; Jau-Ji Shen, "A Secure Three-Party Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol Based On Extended Chaotic Maps In Cloud Storage Service," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 31, 36, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057852
Abstract: In order to guarantee secure communications in cloud storage service, we integrated the concept of session key establishment and extended chaotic maps into our proposed method which aims to allow data senders and data receivers to establish a secure common session key through a trusted cloud server over an insecure channel when they wish to share the sensitive data in cloud storage service. Moreover, due to the characteristics of extended chaotic maps and session key establishment, the agreed session key is only known by the communication participants. Therefore, we propose a secure three-party authenticated key exchange protocol (3PAKE) based on extended chaotic maps in cloud storage service without using smart card and timestamp, which requires neither long-term secret keys nor symmetric cryptosystems. According to our security analysis, our proposed protocol not only can achieve many general requirements that 3PAKE protocols should fulfill but also can against various known attacks. In this paper, comparing with other 3PAKE protocols, our proposed protocol is more secure and practical for real environments.
Keywords: chaos; cloud computing; cryptographic protocols; storage management; 3PAKE protocols; cloud storage service; extended chaotic maps; secure three-party authenticated key exchange protocol; security analysis; session key establishment; trusted cloud server; Chaotic communication; Cloud computing; Cryptography; Protocols; Receivers; Servers; Cloud storage service; Extended chaotic maps; Network security; Session key; Three-party authenticated key exchange (ID#: 15-5109)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057852&isnumber=7057846

 

Mesit, J.; Brust, M.R., "Secured Node-To-Node Key Agreement For Wireless Sensor Networks," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 37, 39, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057853
Abstract: Sensor networks are mostly deployed in unsecured environments, thus protecting a sensor network from any attack is critical in order to maintain the health of the network. Recently, many researchers have focused on making security for sensor networks available and reliable. In this paper, a secured node-to-node key agreement protocol is proposed to generate secured communication among principle nodes A and B, a ticket granting server, and a key server. Since a sensor network is usually a resource-constrained infrastructure, it is not suitable for computationally expensive asymmetric key protocols such as public-private key cryptography. Therefore, setting up a shared key in our proposed protocol is based on a symmetric key protocol processed by two trusted agents, which are the ticket granting server and the key server. The data confidentiality, authentication, and freshness of the network security are also considered in the design of the proposed protocol.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; private key cryptography; public key cryptography; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; asymmetric key protocols; data authentication; data confidentiality; key server; network security; principle nodes; public-private key cryptography; resource-constrained infrastructure; secured node-to-node key agreement protocol; symmetric key protocol; ticket granting server; wireless sensor networks; Authentication; Cryptography; Protocols; Servers; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks;Authentication;Confidential;Freshness;Security;Wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-5110)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057853&isnumber=7057846

 

Nagrath, P.; Aneja, S.; Purohit, G.N., "Defending Flooding Attack In Delay Tolerant Networks," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on pp. 40, 45, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057854
Abstract: In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), routing protocols work in an environment where there is no guarantee of end to end path between source and destination. Mobility of nodes is an important factor that helps to deliver packets in DTN. Intermediate nodes receive, store and forward packets to other intermediate nodes or destination. The packets are stored in entirety at intermediate nodes even if intermediate nodes may not have path to destination. Since mobile nodes have limited buffer space and are connected intermittently, therefore, finding a node that is a good forwarder is important for delivery of messages. Probabilistic routing protocols suggest predictability measure on information stored to know which node in contact is potential forwarder in terms to deliver message to destined node. However, any malicious node in network may inject other nodes with bogus messages in order to degrade network performance. This paper presents updated metric called reputation of node which captures predictability as well as enables node in network to decide whether to accept messages from node in contact or not. When node transfers genuine messages it gains reputation as well as predictability with respect to destined node. Simulation results show that algorithm prevents flow of bogus messages in the network and thereby increases message delivery and reduces overhead in presence of malicious nodes.
Keywords: delay tolerant networks; routing protocols; telecommunication security; DTN; delay tolerant networks; flooding attack; intermediate nodes; malicious nodes; routing protocols; Delays; Floods; Logic gates; Probabilistic logic; Routing; Routing protocols; Bogus Messages; Buffer Resource; Flooding Attack; Malicious Node (ID#: 15-5111)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057854&isnumber=7057846

 

Dahal, S.; Junghee Lee; Jungmin Kang; Seokjoo Shin, "Analysis On End-To-End Node Selection Probability In Tor Network," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 46, 50, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057855
Abstract: Tor is an open network that helps to defend against traffic analysis and thus achieves anonymity and resisting censorship online. Nowadays many researches have been carried out to attack Tor and to break the anonymity. To deanonymize the Tor, the attacker must be able to control both the guard node and exit node of a circuit. In this paper, we present an analysis on end-to-end node selection probability when an attacker adds different types of compromised nodes in the existing Tor network. For accurate Tor simulation, we used Shadow simulator for our experiment. By extensive performance evaluation, we conclude that when guard + exit flagged compromised nodes are added to Tor network, the selection probability of compromised nodes gets higher.
Keywords: computer network security; probability; telecommunication network routing; Shadow simulator; Tor network; Tor simulation; compromised nodes ;end-to-end node selection probability; online anonymity; online censorship resistance; open network; selection probability; traffic analysis; Bandwidth; Peer-to-peer computing; Privacy; Relays; Routing; Security; Servers; Shadow; Tor; nodes; selection probability (ID#: 15-5112)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057855&isnumber=7057846

 

Soonhwa Sung; Cheong Youn; Eunbae Kong; Jaecheol Ryou, "User Authentication Using Mobile Phones For Mobile Payment," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 51, 56, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057856
Abstract: Mobile authentication systems for mobile payment often use either the Web or mobile channel individually to confirm the identity request of a remote user. Most common activity in mobile commerce is done through mobile phones. The mobile phones are vulnerable to numerous security threats due to involvement of valuable financial and personal information.To provide secure Web transactions using mobile phones, multifactorial authentication techniques are preferred. In former study, user authentication software technology using mobile phones, one of the multifactorial authentication techniques, can potentially be copied to another device. For the solution of the problem, this paper proposes Transaction Certificate Mode (TCM), a software token, which supports mutual authentication considering stolen, borrowed, and infected mobile phones for mobile payments. It uses a novel approach based on TCM to enforce a lightweight mobile security and provides a highly secure environment that is simple to use and deploy.
Keywords: authorisation; mobile commerce; mobile computing; mobile handsets; security of data; TCM; financial information; lightweight mobile security; mobile authentication systems; mobile commerce; mobile payment; mobile payments; mobile phones; multifactorial authentication techniques; personal information; remote user identity request; secure Web transactions; security threats; software token; transaction certificate mode; user authentication software technology; Authentication; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Protocols; Servers; Software; mobile payment protocol; mobile phone; mutual authentication; software token; transaction certificate (ID#: 15-5113)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057856&isnumber=7057846

 

Nirmala, M.B.; Manjunath, A.S., "Mobile Agent Based Secure Code Update In Wireless Sensor Networks," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 75, 80, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057860
Abstract: Most of the sensor nodes are battery powered and energy utilization is one of the important criteria. At the same time Securing code update is very much essential for military, health care and environmental applications. But to send the code updates in a distributed, multihop sensor networks, most of the energy will be consumed in forwarding the packets to next hop sensor nodes. In order to avoid this and save energy consumption at sensor nodes, a small number of mobile agents are used to distribute the code. Mobile agents traverse along the desired path to disseminate the code. Sensor nodes have to authenticate the mobile agent and at the same time they have to check the integrity of the packets. Mobile agents are more vulnerable for adversaries, hence measures are taken to detect the attacks and rectify them. Secure code update using mobile agents provides confidentiality and immediate authentication. This protocol is implemented on Tiny OS platform, tested using Tossim simulator and evaluated the Performance.
Keywords: mobile agents; telecommunication computing; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; Tiny OS platform; Tossim simulator; mobile agent based secure code update; multihop sensor networks; wireless sensor networks; Authentication; Base stations; Cryptography; Energy consumption; Mobile agents; Protocols; Wireless sensor networks; Code update; Mobile Agent; Security; TinyOS; Wireless Sensor Networks (ID#: 15-5114)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057860&isnumber=7057846

 

Win-Bin Huang; Wei-Tsung Su, "Identity-Based Access Control For Digital Content Based On Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 87, 91, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057862
Abstract: Digital content is easily spread out in the era of cloud computing. However, the challenge is providing an identity-based access control mechanism to carry out the rating system for preventing specific digital content from being obtained by inappropriate users. In this paper, we proposed a novel identity-based access control approach for digital content based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (iDAC). In iDAC, the access control still works even the digital content is duplicated to another content server. Moreover, only one copy of encrypted digital content is required to share with multiple users. This could efficiently reduce the overhead of content servers. As shown in our performance analysis with respect of security, space complexity, and time complexity, iDAC outperforms the traditional access control list based and encryption-based access control approaches.
Keywords: authorisation; cloud computing; computational complexity; cryptography; ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption; cloud computing; content server; digital content encryption; iDAC; identity-based access control mechanism; performance analysis; security; space complexity; time complexity; Access control; Encryption; Servers; Time complexity; access control ;ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption; identity-based; rating system (ID#: 15-5115)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057862&isnumber=7057846

 

Mowla, N.I.; Inshil Doh; Kijoon Chae, "An Efficient Defense Mechanism For Spoofed IP Attack In SDN Based CDNi," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 92, 97, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057863
Abstract: In recent years enhancing the capability of network services automatically and dynamically through SDN and CDN/CDNi networks has become a new field of research. These future network architectures pose both a blessing and a threat in the network field. Such network architectures can optimize the overall network services by analyzing the topology, traffic paths, packet handling and so on and also can create a potential target for spoofed IP attacks. We, therefore, propose an architecture for an SDN based CDNi network to detect spoofed ip and create a defense against attacks created by them. We also propose ALTO like servers in our architecture which enable mapping a very big network to provide a summarized view. In the ALTO server we propose an additional map named the mark map as a mechanism to detect spoofed IP addresses. SDN switches are utilized to extract rules associated with the ALTO server mark map and follow a mechanism of spoofed IP detection fed to them by the SDN controller application layer.
Keywords: IP networks; telecommunication network topology; telecommunication security; ALTO server mark map; SDN based CDNi network; SDN controller application layer;SDN switches; efficient defense mechanism; network architectures; overall network services; packet handling; spoofed IP addresses; spoofed IP attacks; spoofed IP detection; topology; traffic paths; Computer architecture; Control systems; Encryption; IP networks; Servers; Topology; ALTO; Attack; CDN; CDNi; SDN; defense (ID#: 15-5116)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057863&isnumber=7057846

 

Jin-Hyeok Park; Pham Ngoc Giao; Teak-Young Seung; Ki-Ryong Kwon; Kwang-Seok Moon; Gi-Chang Kwon; Suk-Hwan Lee, "Selective-Encrypted GIS Vector Map With Low Complexity," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 98, 103, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057864
Abstract: Recently years, vector map has many advantages than raster map when it is used in many domains as research, education, military or digital map services. And in most cases vector map data contains confidential information which must be kept away from unauthorized users. Moreover, the producing process of a vector map is considerably complex, and the maintenance of a digital map requires substantial monetary, human resources. With the rapid development of vector map contents, a large volume of valuable vector map dataset has been illegal distributed by pirates, hackers or unauthorized users. Therefore the problem focuses on how to protect the vector map data for multimedia applications, storage and transmission. This paper presents the selective encryption algorithm for vector map protection for storage, transmission, distribution to authorized users. In proposed algorithm, we just select some values of polylines and polygons in DCT domain to encrypt by random algorithms and cryptography. Experimental results verified that proposed algorithm is effectively and security. Maps are changed whole after encryption process, and unauthorized users cannot access to copy or use them. Encrypted maps do not alter the size of file and it does not have loss accuracy. The error between original map and decrypted map is approximate zero.
Keywords: cryptography; geographic information systems; DCT domain; approximate zero; cryptography; decrypted map; digital map; encryption process; hackers; human resources; multimedia applications; multimedia storage; multimedia transmission; original map; pirates; polygons; polylines; raster map; selective encrypted GIS vector map; selective encryption algorithm; substantial monetary; unauthorized users; valuable vector map; vector map data; vector map protection; Algorithm design and analysis; Discrete cosine transforms; Encryption; Geographic information systems; Vectors; DCT; GIS vector map; digital vector map; random algorithm; selective encryption (ID#: 15-5117)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057864&isnumber=7057846

 

Shi Li; Inshil Doh; Kijoon Chae, "Key Management Mechanism in ALTO/SDN based CDNi Architecture," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 110, 115, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057866
Abstract: Content delivery network interconnection (CDNi) as a new interactive network which inherits all of the advantages of single CDN. Moreover, CDNs supported by different network operators can communicate with each other directly through the interfaces between them. Meanwhile, the interactivity also brings some security issues. In this paper, we propose a new CDNi communication architecture which combined with another two efficient technologies, ALTO and SDN. Based on this architecture, a key generation and distribution mechanism is also proposed to ensure the security communication of content in CDNi. From the analysis result, we can proof that it is scarcely possible for attackers to break our security system.
Keywords: computer network security; optimisation; software defined networking; telecommunication traffic; ALTO-SDN based CDNi communication architecture; application-layer traffic optimization; content communication security; content delivery network interconnection; interactive network; key distribution mechanism; key management mechanism; software defined networking; Computer architecture; Equations; Routing; Security; Servers; Symmetric matrices; Vectors; ALTO service; CDNi; Key management; SDN; Security (ID#: 15-5118)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057866&isnumber=7057846

 

Techapanupreeda, C.; Chokngamwong, R.; Thammarat, C.; Kungpisdan, S., "An Accountability Model For Internet Transactions," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 127,132, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057869
Abstract: Internet transaction is increasing significantly due to very fast grown of mobile devices, electronic commerce, and electronic records. Many researchers proposed several protocols to analyze the accountability in Internet transaction. In this paper we propose accountability model and protocol in Internet transaction that have advantages over existing protocols and satisfies essential security properties: Confidentiality, Integrity, Authorization, Authentication, Non-repudiation, Liability and Responsiveness. The protocol is designed using asymmetric cryptography and hash function to ensure that it meets all above accountability properties. The proposed protocol is also analyzed and compared with existing accountability protocols.
Keywords: Internet; cryptographic protocols; electronic commerce; mobile computing; mobile handsets; Internet transactions; accountability model; accountability properties; accountability protocols; asymmetric cryptography; electronic commerce; electronic records; hash function; mobile devices security properties; Authentication; Authorization; Electronic commerce; Internet; Protocols; Public key; Accountability; Liability; Network Security; Payment Protocol; Responsiveness; Security Protocols (ID#: 15-5119)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057869&isnumber=7057846

 

Thammarat, C.; Chokngamwong, R.; Techapanupreeda, C.; Kungpisdan, S., "A Secure Lightweight Protocol For NFC Communications With Mutual Authentication Based On Limited-Use Of Session Keys," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 133, 138, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057870
Abstract: Nowadays, mobile phones are equipped with enhanced short-range communication functionality called Near Field Communication (or NFC for short). NFC requires no pairing between devices and suitable for transferring small amount of data in very limited area. A number of researchers proposed authentication techniques for NFC communications but they still lack some necessary security properties, especially mutual authentication.. This paper introduces new authentication protocols for NFC communication that provides mutual authentication between connecting devices. Mutual authentication is a security property that prevents replay and man-in-the-middle attack. The proposed protocols deploy limited-use offline session key generation and distribution technique to enhance security and importantly make our protocol lightweight.
Keywords: computer network security; cryptographic protocols; mobile radio; near-field communication; NFC communication authentication technique; data transfer; enhanced short-range communication functionality; man-in-the-middle attack; mobile phone; mutual authentication protocol; near field communication security enhancement; offline session key distribution technique limited-use; offline session key generation limited-use; secure lightweight protocol; Authentication; Encryption; Mobile handsets; Protocols; Servers; Cryptographic protocols; Mutual Authentication; NFC; Near Field Communications; Network Security; Security Protocols (ID#: 15-5120)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057870&isnumber=7057846

 

Nhu-Ngoc Dao; Junho Park; Minho Park; Sungrae Cho, "A Feasible Method To Combat Against DDoS Attack In SDN Network," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 309, 311, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057902
Abstract: In Software Defined Network, the controller is so vulnerable to flooding attack. By injecting spoofed request packets continuously, attackers make a burdensome process to the controller, cause bandwidth occupation in the controller-switch channel, and overload the flow table in switch. The final target of attackers is to downgrade or even shutdown the stability and quality of service of the network. In this paper, we introduce a feasible method to protect the network against Distributed Denial of Service attacks more effectively.
Keywords: computer network security; quality of service; software defined networking; telecommunication switching; DDoS attack; SDN network; bandwidth occupation; controller-switch channel; distributed denial of service attacks; flooding attack; flow table; network stability; quality of service; software defined network; spoofed request packet injection; Bandwidth; Computer crime; IP networks; Radiation detectors; Switches; DDoS; DoS; Openflow; SDN (ID#: 15-5121)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057902&isnumber=7057846

 

SunWook Nam; Dohyung Kim; Ikjun Yeom, "Content Verification in Named Data Networking," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 414, 415, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057931
Abstract: It is crucial to guarantee content integrity in Named Data Networking(NDN), where copies of the contents are distributed over the network. NDN adopts digital signatures, and contents are verified whenever they are stored in caches. However, the current scheme is not practical in practice since its operations incur too much overhead. In this paper, we suggest a simple but effective solution for content verification in NDN.
Keywords: Internet; digital signatures; NDN; content verification; digital signatures; named data networking; Bandwidth; Computational modeling; Delays; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Security; Topology (ID#: 15-5122)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057931&isnumber=7057846

 

Nguyen Tri, H.T.; Kyungbaek Kim, "Assessing the Impact Of Resource Attack in Software Defined Network," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 420, 425, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057934
Abstract: Software Defined Network (SDN) empowers network operators with more flexibility to program their networks. In SDN, dummy switches on the data plane dynamically forward packets based on the rules which are managed by a centralized controller. To apply the rules, switches need to write the rules in its flow table. However, because the size of the flow table is limited, a scalability problem can be an issue. Also, this scalability problem becomes a security issue related to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, especially the resource attack which consumes all flow tables of switches. In this paper, we explore the impact of the resource attack to a SDN network. The resource attack is emulated on the SDN with mininet and OpenDaylight, and the effect of resource attack to the SDN is deeply analyzed in the aspects of delay and bandwidth. Through the evaluation, we highlight the importance of managing the flow tables with the awareness of their size limitation. Also, we discuss solutions which can address the resource attack and their challenges.
Keywords: computer network security; resource allocation; software defined networking; Distributed Denial of Service attack; SDN network; mininet; open daylight; packet forwarding; resource attack; software defined network; Bandwidth; Control systems; Delays; Ports (Computers); Process control; Security; Servers (ID#: 15-5123)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057934&isnumber=7057846

 

Yuchae Jung; Yongik Yoon, "Behavior Tracking Model In Dynamic Situation Using The Risk Ratio EM," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on,  pp.  444,  448, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057942
Abstract: Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) system has been popular in daily life such as traffic, airport, street and public place. The common goal of CCTV system is the prevention of crime and disorder by observing objects. In the future, smart CCTV camera combined with mobile phone will be used to protect human from crime and dangerous situations. Intelligent CCTV system in public place will monitor human behavior in real-time and transfer image data to control tower for the security purpose. In this paper, we propose an abnormal behavioral tracking model for prediction of abnormal situation by using Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm combined with Viterbi algorithm. The tracking model will detect objects from CCTV image in dynamic environment for the prediction of dangerous situation. This tracking system has five main steps. (1) The detection of object and their environment, (2) Feature extraction from objects and situations such as human body posture, weather, and time (3) Location information such as object trajectory and area safety level (4) knowledge update and decision making (5) prediction of abnormal situation and maximized risk rates.
Keywords: behavioural sciences computing; closed circuit television; expectation-maximisation algorithm; feature extraction; object detection; object recognition; object tracking; CCTV system; Viterbi algorithm; abnormal behavioral tracking model; abnormal situation prediction; closed circuit television; decision making; expectation maximization algorithm; feature extraction; knowledge update; location information; object detection; risk rate maximisation; risk ratio EM algorithm; Computational modeling; Decision making; Event detection; Meteorology; Safety; Trajectory; Videos; CCTV; Expectation Maximization (EM); Tracking Abnormal behavior (ID#: 15-5124)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057942&isnumber=7057846

 

JongWon Kim, "Designing Multi-Level Connectivity for IoT-enabled SmartX Boxes," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 462, 463, 12-14 Jan. 2015.  doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057946
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss about a futuristic design for multi-level connectivity that plays the pivotal role in enabling IoT services employing the hyper-convergent SmartX Boxes.
Keywords: Internet of Things; ubiquitous computing; IoT services; IoT-enabled SmartX boxes; futuristic design; hyper-convergent SmartX boxes; multilevel connectivity design; Cloud computing; Computer architecture; Mobile communication; Real-time systems; Safety; Security; Internet of Things; Software-Defined Infrastructue; inter-connected box; multi-level connectivity (ID#: 15-5125)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057946&isnumber=7057846

 

Louk, M.; Hyotaek Lim, "Homomorphic Encryption In Mobile Multi Cloud Computing," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 493,  497, 12-14 Jan. 2015.   doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057954
Abstract: Multi cloud computing has become a new trend for complementing existing cloud computing today. Multi cloud computing is considered safer and more efficient in maintaining data regulation of user(s). The paper discusses the security of mobile multi cloud computing (MMC) and the advantages for mobile user(s), beside that for the data security itself cover with homomorphic encryption which predictable by many researchers as the optimum method for cloud computing environment. The implementation and evaluation of homomorphic encryption in mobile cloud computing are discussed in this paper.
Keywords: cloud computing; cryptography; mobile computing; MMC; cloud computing environment; data regulation; data security; homomorphic encryption; mobile multicloud computing; optimum method; Cloud computing; Clouds; Encryption; Mobile communication; Homomorphic Encryption; Mobile; Multi Cloud Computing; Security (ID#: 15-5126)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057954&isnumber=7057846

 

Chun-Ta Li; Cheng-Chi Lee; Hua-Hsuan Chen; Min-Jie Syu; Chun-Cheng Wang, "Cryptanalysis Of An Anonymous Multi-Server Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme Using Smart Cards And Biometrics," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 498, 502, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057955
Abstract: With the growing popularity of network applications, multi-server architectures are becoming an essential part of heterogeneous networks and numerous security mechanisms have been widely studied in recent years. To protect sensitive information and restrict the access of precious services for legal privileged users only, smart card and biometrics based password authentication schemes have been widely utilized for various transaction-oriented environments. In 2014, Chuang and Chen proposed an anonymous multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme based on trust computing using smart cards, password, and biometrics. They claimed that their three-factor scheme achieves better efficiency and security as compared to those for other existing biometrics-based and multi-server schemes. Unfortunately, in this paper, we found that the user anonymity of Chuang-Chen's authentication scheme cannot be protected from an eavesdropping attack during authentication phase. Moreover, their scheme is vulnerable to smart card lost problems, many logged-in users' attacks and denial-of-service attacks and is not easily reparable.
Keywords: biometrics (access control); cryptography; message authentication; smart cards; trusted computing; anonymous multiserver authenticated key agreement scheme; biometrics; cryptanalysis; denial-of-service attacks; eavesdropping attack; password authentication; smart card loss problems; trusted computing; user anonymity; Authentication; Biometrics (access control);Computer crime; Cryptography; Servers; Smart cards; Anonymity; Authentication; Biometrics; Cryptanalysis; Multi-server; Password; Smart cards (ID#: 15-5127)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057955&isnumber=7057846

 

Wooguil Pak; Youngrok Cha; Sunki Yeo, "Detecting And Tracing Leaked Private Phone Number Data In Android Smartphones," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2015 International Conference on, pp. 503, 508, 12-14 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2015.7057956
Abstract: Easy and open development environments of Android make itself not only as the most famous platform in the world but also as the most preferred platform for malicious users. In this paper, we propose a new approach to protect the private phone number data in smartphones from leaking and stealing through malicious applications. Our approach differently deals with trusted and suspicious applications and avoids the malfunctions of applications caused by security policy. Most of outstanding feature of our approach is that it can detect the leakage of the private phone number data, trace the leaked data and finally identify which application leaked them. Furthermore, it can minimize the damage owing to the data even though it is abused for cyber-crimes.
Keywords: Android (operating system);data privacy; invasive software; smart phones; trusted computing; Android smartphones; cyber-crimes; leaked private phone number data detection; leaked private phone number data tracing; malicious applications; malicious users; security policy; suspicious applications; trusted applications; Computer crime; Computers; Databases; Educational institutions; Relays; Servers; Smart phones; Android; Detection; Private data leaks; Tracing (ID#: 15-5128)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7057956&isnumber=7057846

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International Conferences: Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, Israel, 2015

 

	International Conferences: Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, Israel, 2015

 

The 6th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), was held at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, January 11-13, 2015.  ITCS (previously known as ICS) seeks to promote research that carries a strong conceptual message (e.g., introducing a new concept or model, opening a new line of inquiry within traditional or cross-interdisciplinary areas, or introducing new techniques or new applications of known techniques). ITCS welcomes all submissions, whether aligned with current theory of computation research directions or deviating from them.

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Pranjal Awasthi, Afonso S. Bandeira, Moses Charikar, Ravishankar Krishnaswamy, Soledad Villar, Rachel Ward; Relax, No Need to Round: Integrality of Clustering Formulations;  ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 191-200. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688116 We study exact recovery conditions for convex relaxations of point cloud clustering problems, focusing on two of the most common optimization problems for unsupervised clustering: k-means and k-median clustering. Motivations for focusing on convex relaxations are: (a) they come with a certificate of optimality, and (b) they are generic tools which are relatively parameter-free, not tailored to specific assumptions over the input. More precisely, we consider the distributional setting where there are k clusters in Rm and data from each cluster consists of n points sampled from a symmetric distribution within a ball of unit radius. We ask: what is the minimal separation distance between cluster centers needed for convex relaxations to exactly recover these k clusters as the optimal integral solution? For the k-median linear programming relaxation we show a tight bound: exact recovery is obtained given arbitrarily small pairwise separation ε > O between the balls. In other words, the pairwise center separation is δ > 2+ε. Under the same distributional model, the k-means LP relaxation fails to recover such clusters at separation as large as δ = 4. Yet, if we enforce PSD constraints on the k-means LP, we get exact cluster recovery at separation as low as δ > min{2 + √2k/m}, 2+√2 + 2/m} + ε. In contrast, common heuristics such as Lloyd's algorithm (a.k.a. the k means algorithm) can fail to recover clusters in this setting; even with arbitrarily large cluster separation, k-means++ with overseeding by any constant factor fails with high probability at exact cluster recovery. To complement the theoretical analysis, we provide an experimental study of the recovery guarantees for these various methods, and discuss several open problems which these experiments suggest.
Keywords: clustering, convex optimization, exact recovery, kmeans, kmedians (ID#: 15-5041)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688116

 

Mika Göös, Toniann Pitassi, Thomas Watson; Zero-Information Protocols and Unambiguity in Arthur-Merlin Communication; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 113-122. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688074 We study whether information complexity can be used to attack the long-standing open problem of proving lower bounds against Arthur{Merlin (AM) communication protocols. Our starting point is to show that|in contrast to plain randomized communication complexity|every boolean function admits an AM communication protocol where on each yes- input, the distribution of Merlin's proof leaks no information about the input and moreover, this proof is unique for each outcome of Arthur's randomness. We posit that these two properties of zero information leakage and unambiguity on yes-inputs are interesting in their own right and worthy of investigation as new avenues toward AM. 

Zero-information protocols (ZAM). Our basic ZAM protocol uses exponential communication for some functions, and this raises the question of whether more efficient protocols exist. We prove that all functions in the classical space-bounded complexity classes NL and L have polynomial-communication ZAM protocols. We also prove that ZAM complexity is lower bounded by conondeterministic communication complexity. •Unambiguous protocols (UAM). Our most technically substantial result is a (n) lower bound on the UAM complexity of the NP-complete set-intersection function; the proof uses information complexity arguments in a new, indirect way and overcomes the \zero-information barrier" described above. We also prove that in general, UAM complexity is lower bounded by the classic discrepancy bound, and we give evidence that it is not generally lower bounded by the classic corruption bound.
Keywords: arthur-merlin protocols, communication complexity, information complexity (ID#: 15-5042)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688074

 

Oded Goldreich, Dana Ron; On Sample-Based Testers; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 337-345. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688080 The standard definition of property testing endows the tester with the ability to make arbitrary queries to "elements" of the tested object. In contrast, sample-based testers only obtain independently distributed elements (a.k.a. labeled samples) of the tested object. While sample-based testers were defined by Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Ron  JACM 1998), with few exceptions, most research in property testing is focused on query-based testers. In this work, we advance the study of sample-based property testers by providing several general positive results as well as by revealing relations between variants of this testing model. In particular:
•We show that certain types of query-based testers yield sample-based testers of sublinear sample complexity. For example, this holds for a natural class of proximity oblivious testers.
•We study the relation between distribution-free sample-based testers and one-sided error sample-based testers w.r.t. the uniform distribution. While most of this work ignores the time complexity of testing, one part of it does focus on this aspect. The main result in this part is a sublinear-time sample-based tester in the dense graphs model for k-Colorability, for any k > 2.
Keywords: property testing, sampling, sublinear algorithms (ID#: 15-5043)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688080

 

Tom Gur, Ron D. Rothblum; Non-Interactive Proofs of Proximity; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015  Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 133-142. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688079 We initiate a study of non-interactive proofs of proximity. These proof-systems consist of a verifier that wishes to ascertain the validity of a given statement, using a short (sublinear length) explicitly given proof, and a sublinear number of queries to its input. Since the verifier cannot even read the entire input, we only require it to reject inputs that are far from being valid. Thus, the verifier is only assured of the proximity of the statement to correct one. Such proof-systems can be viewed as the NP (or more accurately MA) analogue of property testing.  We explore both the power and limitations of non interactive proofs of proximity. We show that such proof-systems can be exponentially stronger than property testers, but are exponentially weaker than the interactive proofs of proximity studied by Rothblum, Vadhan and Wigderson (STOC 2013). In addition, we show a natural problem that has a full and (almost) tight multiplicative trade-off between the length of the proof and the verifier's query complexity. On the negative side, we also show that there exist properties for which even a linearly-long (non-interactive) proof of proximity cannot significantly reduce the query complexity.
Keywords: probabilistic proof systems, property testing (ID#: 15-5044)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688079

 

Moshe Babaioff, Moran Feldman, Moshe Tennenholtz; Mechanism Design with Strategic Mediators; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 307-316. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688081 We consider the problem of designing mechanisms that interact with strategic agents through strategic intermediaries (or mediators), and investigate the cost to society due to the mediators' strategic behavior. Selfish agents with private information are each associated with exactly one strategic mediator, and can interact with the mechanism exclusively through that mediator. Each mediator aims to optimize the combined utility of his agents, while the mechanism aims to optimize the combined utility of all agents. We focus on the problem of facility location on a metric induced by a publicly known tree. With non-strategic mediators, there is a dominant strategy mechanism that is optimal. We show that when both agents and mediators act strategically, there is no dominant strategy mechanism that achieves any approximation. We, thus, slightly relax the incentive constraints, and define the notion of a two-sided incentive compatible mechanism. We show that the 3-competitive deterministic mechanism suggested by Procaccia and Tennenholtz (2009) and Dekel et al. (2010) for lines extends naturally to trees, and is still 3-competitive as well as two-sided incentive compatible. This is essentially the best possible. We then show that by allowing randomization one can construct a 2-competitive randomized mechanism that is two-sided incentive compatible, and this is also essentially tight. This result also closes a gap left in the work of Procaccia and Tennenholtz (2009) and Lu et al. (2009) for the simpler problem of designing strategy-proof mechanisms for weighted agents with no mediators on a line, while extending to the more general model of trees. We also investigate a further generalization of the above setting where there are multiple levels of mediators.
Keywords: facility location, mechanism design, mediators (ID#: 15-5045)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688081

 

Mohammad Bavarian, Peter W. Shor; Information Causality, Szemerédi-Trotter and Algebraic Variants of CHSH; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 123-132. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688112 In this work, we consider the following family of two prover one-round games. In the CHSH_q game, two parties are given x,y in F_q uniformly at random, and each must produce an output a,b in F_q without communicating with the other. The players' objective is to maximize the probability that their outputs satisfy a+b=xy in F_q. This game was introduced by Buhrman and Massar (PRA 2005) as a large alphabet generalization of the celebrated CHSH game---which is one of the most well-studied two-prover games in quantum information theory, and which has a large number of applications to quantum cryptography and quantum complexity. Our main contributions in this paper are the first asymptotic and explicit bounds on the entangled and classical values of CHSH_q, and the realization of a rather surprising connection between CHSH_q and geometric incidence theory. On the way to these results, we also resolve a problem of Pawlowski and Winter about pairwise independent Information Causality, which, beside being interesting on its own, gives as an application a short proof of our upper bound for the entangled value of CHSH_q.
Keywords: bell inequalities and tsirelson bounds., point-line incidences, the chsh game, two player refereed games (ID#: 15-5046)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688112

 

Mark Braverman, Jieming Mao;  Simulating Noisy Channel Interaction; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 21-30. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688087 We show that T rounds of interaction over the binary symmetric channel BSC1/2--ε with feedback can be simulated with O(ε2 T) rounds of interaction over a noiseless channel. We also introduce a more general "energy cost" model of interaction over a noisy channel. We show energy cost to be equivalent to external information complexity, which implies that our simulation results are unlikely to carry over to energy complexity. Our main technical innovation is a self-reduction from simulating a noisy channel to simulating a slightly-less-noisy channel, which may have other applications in the area of interactive compression.
Keywords: communication complexity, information complexity, noisy channel (ID#: 15-5047)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688087

 

Avrim Blum, Jamie Morgenstern, Ankit Sharma, Adam Smith; Privacy-Preserving Public Information for Sequential Games; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 173-180. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688100 In settings with incomplete information, players can find it difficult to coordinate to find states with good social welfare. For instance, one of the main reasons behind the recent financial crisis was found to be the lack of market transparency, which made it difficult for financial firms to accurately measure the risks and returns of their investments. Although regulators may have access to firms' investment decisions, directly reporting all firms' actions raises confidentiality concerns for both individuals and institutions. The natural question, therefore, is whether it is possible for the regulatory agencies to publish some information that, on one hand, helps the financial firms understand the risks of their investments better, and, at the same time, preserves the privacy of their investment decisions. More generally, when can the publication of privacy-preserving information about the state of the game improve overall outcomes such as social welfare? In this paper, we explore this question in a sequential resource-sharing game where the value gained by a player on choosing a resource depends on the number of other players who have chosen that resource in the past. Without any knowledge of the actions of the past players, the social welfare attained in this game can be arbitrarily bad. We show, however, that it is possible for the players to achieve good social welfare with the help of privacy-preserving, publicly-announced information. We model the behavior of players in this imperfect information setting in two ways -- greedy and undominated strategic behaviours, and we prove guarantees about the social welfare that certain kinds of privacy-preserving information can help attain. To achieve the social welfare guarantees, we design a counter with improved privacy guarantees under continual observation. In addition to the resource-sharing game, we study the main question for other games including sequential versions of the cut, machine-scheduling and cost-sharing games, and games where the value attained by a player on a particular action is not only a function of the actions of the past players but also of the actions of the future players.
Keywords: game theory, privacy (ID#: 15-5048)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688100

 

Rachel Cummings, Katrina Ligett, Aaron Roth, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Juba Ziani;  Accuracy for Sale: Aggregating Data with a Variance Constraint; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 317-324. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688106 We consider the problem of a data analyst who may purchase an unbiased estimate of some statistic from multiple data providers. From each provider i, the analyst has a choice: she may purchase an estimate from that provider that has variance chosen from a finite menu of options. Each level of variance has a cost associated with it, reported (possibly strategically) by the data provider. The analyst wants to choose the minimum cost set of variance levels, one from each provider, that will let her combine her purchased estimators into an aggregate estimator that has variance at most some fixed desired level. Moreover, she wants to do so in such a way that incentivizes the data providers to truthfully report their costs to the mechanism. We give a dominant strategy truthful solution to this problem that yields an estimator that has optimal expected cost, and violates the variance constraint by at most an additive term that tends to zero as the number of data providers grows large.
Keywords: buying data, mechanism design, vcg mechanism (ID#: 15-5049)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688106

 

Clement Louis Canonne, Venkatesan Guruswami, Raghu Meka, Madhu Sudan; Communication with Imperfectly Shared Randomness; ITCS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, January 2015, Pages 257-262. Doi: 10.1145/2688073.2688099 The communication complexity of many fundamental problems reduces greatly when the communicating parties share randomness that is independent of the inputs to the communication task. Natural communication processes (say between humans) however often involve large amounts of shared correlations among the communicating players, but rarely allow for perfect sharing of randomness. Can the communication complexity benefit from shared correlations as well as it does from shared randomness? This question was considered mainly in the context of simultaneous communication by Bavarian et al. [1]. In this work we study this problem in the standard interactive setting and give some general results. In particular, we show that every problem with communication complexity of k bits with perfectly shared randomness has a protocol using imperfectly shared randomness with complexity 2^Ω(k) bits. We also show that this is best possible by exhibiting a promise problem with complexity k bits with perfectly shared randomness which requires 2^Ω(k) bits when the randomness is imperfectly shared. Along the way we also highlight some other basic problems such as compression, and agreement distillation, where shared randomness plays a central role and analyze the complexity of these problems in the imperfectly shared randomness model.  The technical highlight of this work is the lower bound that goes into the result showing the tightness of our general connection. This result builds on the intuition that communication with imperfectly shared randomness needs to be less sensitive to its random inputs than communication with perfectly shared randomness. The formal proof invokes results about the small-set expansion of the noisy hypercube and an invariance principle to convert this intuition to a proof, thus giving a new application domain for these fundamental results.
Keywords: communication complexity, invariance principle, randomness (ID#: 15-5050)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2688073.2688099

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

International Conferences: Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015

 

	International Conferences: Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015

 

The 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 was held on 19-20 February 2015 at by the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Noida, India.  The conference focused on advancements in Signal Processing and Integrated Networks. Researchers from India and abroad gathered to introduce their recent advances in the field and promote the exchange of new ideas, results and techniques and to promote research work, sharing views and getting innovative ideas in this field.  The articles and presentations cited here relate directly to security issues. 

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Sharma, Lavanya; Yadav, Dileep Kumar; Bharti, Sunil Kumar, "An Improved Method For Visual Surveillance Using Background Subtraction Technique," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 421, 426, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095253
Abstract: Moving object detection is an important research area in computer vision. It deals with detecting instances of moving objects of various classes (such as humans, animals, buildings, or vehicles) in digital images and frame sequences for increasing needs of security and surveillance in public or private areas. In this work, proposed improvement enhances the existing model by using some image processing techniques in order to improve detection quality and compared against existing model using metrics like error analysis, precision, recall, f-measure and accuracy. In the existing work, robust estimators were used in order to model an efficient background and then a fast test was used to classify foreground pixel. There were problem of noisy pixels (false detection) due to environmental changes like waving tree leaves, rippling water and lighting effects. The, proposed improvement overcomes the problem of false detection and enhances the detection quality.
Keywords: Background Modeling; Background Subtraction; Hole filling; Morphological Operator; Moving Object Detection (ID#: 15-5129)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095253&isnumber=7095159

 

Islam, Md.Faruqul; Maheshwari, Saurabh; Kumar, Yogesh, "Energy Efficient Railway Track Security Using Vibration Sensing Network," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 973, 978, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095254
Abstract: Accidents occurring in railway transportation systems cost a large number of lives. Many people die and several others get physical and mentally injured. There is certain need of advanced and robust techniques that can not only prevent these accidents but also eradicate all possibilities of their occurrence. We are proposing a sensor network which continuously monitors the railway track through the acoustic sensors and detect any discontinuity in the track. The sensor nodes are equipped with the acoustic sensors that can sense the vibration in the railway track due a coming train. They also estimate the theoretical value of vibration knowing their distance from the train. They compare sensed and estimated vibration intensities. If there is a major difference between these intensities then the track is suspected to be broken. The geographical positioning sensors are placed on the trains as well as on sensors. This complete process is real time in nature and should meet the timing deadlines. The nodes placed on the track and the forwarding poles are expected to work regularly for a long period of time without human intervention. These are generally battery operated so should be following some energy efficiency algorithm also. This paper is an attempt to optimize the energy used by the sensor nodes by using proposed intelligent sensor and lazy pole strategy. Very few approaches have been implemented concerning the track breakage detection. The sensors follow the proposed intelligent sensing technique whereas the poles follow the lazy poles strategy to make the approach energy efficient.
Keywords: WSN; multilevel routing; railway track; security; track breakage; vibration sensors (ID#: 15-5130)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095254&isnumber=7095159

 

Dora, Durga Prasada; Kumar, Sushil; Kaiwartya, Omprakash, "Efficient Dynamic Caching For Geocast Routing In Vanets," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 979, 983, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095262
Abstract: Virtual warning system which is an integral component of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) can be realized through geocasting in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). It enhances road safety and security by targeting a group of vehicles within a specified geospatial region, called Zone of Interest (ZOI) rather than an individual vehicle. Velocity of the node and dynamic topology are major concerns in vehicular traffic environment which differentiates VANETs from mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). This paper purposes neighbor selection scheme based on overlapping area threshold and efficient caching based on threshold time beaconing system to incorporate caching for geospatial packet dissemination which enhances data packet delivery ratio significantly. Due to this the messages that could not be forwarded because of local maximum problem in greedy forwarding are stored in cache which enhances geocast message delivery success ratio. Simulation results show that the purposed approach not only enhances the caching methodology but also minimizes packet loss as compared to greedy forwarding and greedy perimeter stateless routing (GPSR).
Keywords: caching; geocast routing; overlapping area threshold based caching; vehicular ad-hoc networks (ID#: 15-5131)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095262&isnumber=7095159

 

Bhattacharjee, Suchismita; Rajkumari, Roshni; Marchang, Ningrinla, "Effect Of Colluding Attack In Collaborative Spectrum Sensing," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 223, 227, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095266
Abstract: Collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) is an approach that enhances the spectrum sensing performance where multiple secondary users (SUs) cooperate to make the final sensing decision in a cognitive radio network (CRN). In CSS, the SUs are generally assumed to report correct local sensing result to the fusion center (FC). But, some SUs may be compromised and start reporting false local sensing decision to the FC to disrupt the network. CSS can also be severely affected by compromised nodes working together. Such a type of attack is termed as colluding attack and nodes that launch colluding attacks are known as colluding nodes. In this paper, we study the effect of colluding nodes in collaborative spectrum sensing. We also show that the presence of colluding attack results in higher as network performance degradation compared to independent attack especially when the presence of attackers is high. Hence, colluding attacks are of much security concern.
Keywords: Cognitive radio; Infrastructure-based CR; Spectrum sensing data falsification; colluding nodes (ID#: 15-5132)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095266&isnumber=7095159

 

Dwivedi, Rudresh; Dey, Somnath, "Cancelable Iris Template Generation Using Look-Up Table Mapping," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 785, 790, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095296
Abstract: One of the potential passiveness in a biometric system is the invasion of stored biometric template, which may lead to serious security and privacy thefts. The emerging need of biometric approaches is evolved from privacy invasion and irrevocable issues of identity thefts as passwords and tokens can be easily compromised. To address these issues, the notion of cancelable biometrics is introduced to signify biometric templates that can be canceled and replaced with the inclusion of another independent authentication factor. Cancelable biometric generation technique based on randomized look-up table mapping has been proposed in this paper. The technique uses a decimal vector, which is evaluated from a row vector. Row vector is generated by applying 1-D Log Gabor filter on the raw iris template. The decimal vector is then mapped to look-up table based on the position of bits. The proposed approach enables an operation of cancelable iris biometric systems at a high security level. Experiments which are carried out on the CASIA V3 Interval iris database confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Although, the accuracy of the proposed approach is confirmed as 94.26% but the approach is efficient if we consider the security and non-revocable perspectives.
Keywords: Look-up table; biometric; cancelable; iris biometric (ID#: 15-5133)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095296&isnumber=7095159

 

Kashyap, Katyayani; Sarma, Manash P.; Sarma, Kandarpa K.; Mastorakis, Nikos, "Generation Of Orthogonal Logistic Map Sequences For Faded Channels In Spread Spectrum Modulation," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 253, 258, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095304
Abstract: Spread spectrum system are techniques by which signals are spreaded in the frequency domain and plays a very important role in wireless communication system. For secure communication, chaotic spreading sequence is advantageous but most of them are non-orthogonal. This paper presents the design of an orthogonal chaotic spreading sequence for application in Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS SS) system for faded wireless channels. Enhancing the quality of service (QOS) and security of data transmission are prime issues which can better be addressed with chaotic sequences. In this paper, generation and application of orthogonal chaotic sequence is done and a comparison with non orthogonal chaotic sequence is presented. Also the generated orthogonal spreading sequence is applied for DS SS system using different channels and the results are compared. The comparison factors are bit error rate (BER), mutual information, signal power and computational time, which finally states the efficiency of generated code. Again a multiplier-less chaotic sequence generator is proposed for lower power requirement than the existing one.
Keywords: Chaotic code; DS SS; Logistic map; Orthogonal chaotic code; Rayleigh fading; Rician fading (ID#: 15-5134)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095304&isnumber=7095159

 

Mishra, Manoj K.; Sengar, Sandeep Singh; Mukhopadhyay, Susanta, "Algorithm For Secure Visual Communication," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 831, 836, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095310
Abstract: The enormous size of video data of natural scene and objects is a practical threat to storage, transmission. The efficient handling of video data essentially requires compression for economic utilization of storage space, access time and the available network bandwidth of the public channel. In addition, the protection of important video is of utmost importance so as to save it from malicious intervention, attack or alteration by unauthorized users. Therefore, security and privacy has become an important issue. Since from past few years, number of researchers concentrate on how to develop efficient video encryption for secure video transmission, a large number of multimedia encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature like selective encryption, complete encryption and entropy coding based encryption. Among above three kinds of algorithms, they all remain some kind of shortcomings. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight selective encryption algorithm for video conference which is based on efficient XOR operation and symmetric hierarchical encryption, successfully overcoming the weakness of complete encryption while offering a better security. The proposed algorithm guarantees security, fastness and error tolerance without increasing the video size.
Keywords: GDH.3; H.264/AVC; RC4; video encryption (ID#: 15-5135)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095310&isnumber=7095159

 

Kamila, Sabyasachi; Roy, Ratnakirti; Changder, Suvamoy, "A DWT Based Steganography Scheme With Image Block Partitioning," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 471, 476, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095311
Abstract: Steganography is a branch of information hiding. It hides the existence of a secret message by embedding it in a cover media. In this paper, a new method for color image steganography is proposed in frequency domain where Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) of the cover image is used to differentiate high frequency and low frequency information of each pixel of the image. Proposed method hides secret bits in three higher frequency components making sure that the embedding impact on the cover image is minimum and not centralized in sensitivity domain. Experimental results reveal a good visual quality of the stego image with desirable steganalysis resisting characteristics.
Keywords: 2D-DWT; Dynamic Blocking; PairingFunction; Security; Steganography (ID#: 15-5136)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095311&isnumber=7095159

 

Kashyap, Katyayani; Sarma, Manash P.; Sarma, Kandarpa K.; Mastorakis, Nikos, "Logistic Map Based Spread Spectrum Modulation In Faded Wireless Channel," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 270, 274, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095325
Abstract: Spread spectrum modulation finds a very important place in wireless communication due to many striking features like robustness to noise and interference, application of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and so on. But generation of an efficient spreading code is always challenging and crucial too. This paper presents a design of chaotic spreading sequence for application in a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS SS) based system with the considerations of a faded wireless channel. Enhancing the security of data transmission is a main issue and can better be addressed with a chaotic sequence. Generation and application of chaotic sequence is done and a comparison with Gold sequence is presented which clearly indicates achieving better performance with simplicity of design. Performance evaluation is done in terms of BER, computational time and mutual information for faded channel taking into considerations of different modulation schemes, which finally dictates the efficiency of the generated code in high data rate modulation schemes.
Keywords: BPSK; DPSK; DS SS; Gold code; Logistic map code; QPSK (ID#: 15-5137)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095325&isnumber=7095159

 

Ankur; Divyanjali; Bhardwaj, Trishansh, "A Dissection of Pseudorandom Number Generators," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 318, 323, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095369
Abstract: Security over the network has become the most challenging issue with the day by day increase in use of internet and other such services provided by network. The secure transmission, storage and access of data or information are the key issues for security. To understand and implement security one needs to first know in deep the concept of pseudorandom numbers because they play a major role in internet security. Pseudo-random number generators are used to generate these numbers which can be then used as keys or in any other form. In this paper we have presented various pseudorandom number generators that are used for security purpose to generate the encryption keys, SSL connection, database security etc. There is a need to understand how and for what purpose these pseudorandom number generators can be used. We also elaborate some of the limitations of the same.
Keywords: Inversive Congruential Generator; Lagged Fibonacci Generator; Linear Congruential Generator; Pseudorandom generators; Random numbers (ID#: 15-5138)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095369&isnumber=7095159

 

Roy, Aniket; Maiti, Arpan Kumar; Ghosh, Kuntal, "A Perception Based Color Image Adaptive Watermarking Scheme in YCbCr Space," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 537, 543, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095399
Abstract: Copyright protection has now become a challenging domain in real life scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is an important tool for copyright protection technique. A good quality watermarking scheme should have high perceptual transparency, and should also be robust enough against possible attacks. A well-known (Lewis-Barni) Human Visual System (HVS) based watermarking model is fairly successful with respect to the first mentioned criterion, though its effectiveness in color images has not been claimed. Furthermore, it is true that although several watermarking schemes are available in literature for grayscale images, relatively few works have been done in color image watermarking, and the little that have been done, have mostly been tested in RGB, YUV, YIQ color spaces. Thus the question remains that, which is the optimal color space for color image watermarking and whether this HVS model is applicable for that color space. There are two main contributions of the present work with respect to the above. First, it claims that for color image watermarking, the YCbCr space can be used as the perceptually optimum color space, the Cb component being the optimal color channel here. Second, it also tests the effectiveness of the above-mentioned HVS model in that color space. These have been achieved by using the HVS model to propose a new non-blind (original image and the watermark logo image both are needed for extraction) image adaptive Discrete Wavelet transform and Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD) based color image watermarking scheme in YCbCr color space. The multi-resolution property of DWT and stability of SVD additionally makes the scheme robust against attacks, while the Arnold scrambling, of the watermark, enhances the security in our method. The experimental results support the superiority of our scheme over the existing methods.
Keywords: DWT; SVD; YCbCr color space; color image watermarking; perceptual transparency; robustness (ID#: 15-5139)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095399&isnumber=7095159

 

Cabrera, Josue; Alonso, Jesus B.; Travieso, Carlos M.; Ferrer, Miguel A.; Hernriquez, Patricia; Dutta, Malay Kishore; Singh, Anushikha, "Emotional States Discrimination In Voice In Secure Environments," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 843, 847, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095414
Abstract: In this paper we present the use of emotions in security. The access control security systems by speech recognition can be complemented by means of an emotions discrimination system from the speech. An emotions recognition system has the advantage of increasing the security allowing identifying if an authorized user in the system is being coerced while he executes speech identification, reflecting his speech some nervousness. In this study we use four emotional states. We use three emotional states that would produce alarm in a security system: anxiety, hot anger and panic. and a fourth emotional state that corresponds to emotions set without interest for the security, like happiness, shame, sadness, boredom or the absence of emotion (neutral), and that we have called rest. In our simulations, the proposed emotions discrimination system has obtained an average accuracy about 79%.
Keywords: Emotion recognition; feature extraction; speech (ID#: 15-5140)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095414&isnumber=7095159

 

Goswami, Sudhir; Goswami, Jyoti; Kumar, Nagresh, "Unusual Event Detection In Low Resolution Video For Enhancing ATM Security," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 848, 853, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095435
Abstract: In real world applications, tracking target in low resolution video is a challenging task because there is loss of discriminative detail in the visual appearance of moving object. The existing methods are mostly based on the enhancement of LR (low resolution) video by super resolution techniques. But these methods require high computational cost. This cost further increases if we are dealing with events detection. In this paper we present an algorithm which is able to detect unusual events without such type of conversion and well suited for enhancement of security of ATMs where conventional low resolution cameras are generally used due to their low cost. Proposed algorithm only uses close morphological operation with disk like structuring element in the preprocessing steps to cope up with low resolution video. It further uses rolling average background subtraction technique to detect foreground object from dynamic background in a scene. Our proposed algorithm is able to recognize the occurrence of uncommon events such as overcrowding or fight in the low resolution video simply by using statistical property, standard deviation of moving objects. It is fast enough because it process low resolution frames and could be helpful in surveillance system for enhancing the security of ATMs where conventional camera of low resolution are still used. It does not use any classifier and avoids the requirement of training the system initially.
Keywords: ATM security; Object Tracking; Unusual event detection; background subtraction; video surveillance (ID#: 15-5141)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095435&isnumber=7095159

 

Mehta, Rajesh; Vishwakarma, Virendra P.; Rajpal, Navin, "Lagrangian Support Vector Regression Based Image Watermarking In Wavelet Domain," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 854, 859, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095436
Abstract: To enhance the imperceptibility and robustness against image processing operations, the advantage of artificial neural network (ANN) and machine learning algorithms such as support vector regression (SVR), extreme learning machine (ELM) etc. are employed into watermarking applications. In this paper, Lagrangian support vector regression (LSVR) based blind image watermarking scheme in wavelet domain is proposed. The good learning capability, high generalization property against noisy datasets and less computational cost of LSVR compared to traditional SVR and ANN based algorithms makes the proposed scheme more imperceptible and robustness. Firstly, four sub images of host image are obtained using sub sampling. Each sub image is decomposed using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to obtain the low frequency subband. Low frequency coefficients of each sub image are used to form the dataset act as input to LSVR. The output obtained by trained LSVR is used to embed the binary watermark. The security of the watermark is enhanced by applying Arnold transformation. Experimental results show the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed scheme against several image processing attacks. The visual quality of watermarked image is quantified by the peak-signal-to noise ratio (PSNR) and the similarity between the original and extracted watermark is evaluated using bit error rate (BER). Performance of the proposed scheme is verified by comparing with the state-of-art techniques.
Keywords: Bit error rate; Lagrangian support vector regression; Peak signal to noise ratio; Wavelet transform (ID#: 15-5142)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095436&isnumber=7095159

 

Ali, Sadaf Syed; Prakash, Surya, "Enhanced Fingerprint Shell," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on, pp. 801, 805, 19-20 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095438
Abstract: Most of the fingerprint based biometric systems directly store fingerprint information in the form of minutiae template. A fingerprint is permanently associated with a user and cannot be changed unlike passwords in case of token-based systems. If the fingerprint of a user is compromised, it is lost forever. Hence ensuring security of fingerprint data is essential. In this paper, a key based technique, called Enhanced fingerprint Shell, has been presented for securing fingerprint template. This technique is an enhanced version of the key based technique named as Fingerprint Shell proposed by Moujahdi et al. The proposed technique transforms a fingerprint template by using a pair of keys defined uniquely for every individual. If the transformed template is compromised, user has an option to generate a new template using a new pair of keys. The proposed technique has been evaluated on IIT Kanpur fingerprint database. Experimental results have been found encouraging and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
Keywords: Biometric security; Diversity; Fingerprint; Minutiae; Revocability (ID#: 15-5143)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7095438&isnumber=7095159

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

International Conferences: Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication & Energy Systems (SPICES), India, 2015

 

	International Conferences: Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), India, 2015

 

The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES) was held on 19-21 Feb. 2015 at in Kozhikode, Kerala, India. It was a forum for technical exchange amongst researchers from academia, research laboratories, and industries in various emerging fields of Signal Processing, Communication, Computer Science, Power Systems, and Control spanning across six tracks. The technical program includes keynote lectures, plenary lectures, regular technical sessions, and special sessions.  Conference web page is at: http://www.ieeespices.org/   

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Sadio, Ousmane; Ngom, Ibrahima; Lishou, Claude; Saliah-Hassane, Hamadou, "Improving Security And Mobility For Remote Access: A Wireless Sensor Network Case," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091369
Abstract: Ubiquitous Computing is a new Internet revolution that will allow, among other uninterrupted access to the network actors machines and some mobile devices. In this paper, the example of mobile laboratory is composed a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) whose the data collection is done through a special node called master. HIP (Host Identity Protocol) is used as communication protocol. The HIP architecture uses the identity/locator split. In the proposed architecture, mobility is managed by three entities including mobile node (master), locator manager or fLRVS (firewall and Local Rendezvous Server), access link manager or S-RVS (Subnet Rendezvous Server). The new introduced network entity is fLRVS, it is responsible for the node accessibility in the domain and filtering based on the HI (Host Identifier). The node identifier named HI, is the public key of an asymmetric key-pair. The HIP Registration and HIP Rendezvous Extension have been modified to achieve this authentication system. A proposed mobility scheme, named HIPdisass, is based on a proactive handover mechanism which reduce latency and packet loss. At outside, remote hosts can connect to the mobile laboratory safely regardless of the type of access network.
Keywords: Authentication; Decision support systems; Hip; Protocols; Servers; Wireless sensor networks; host identity protocol; macro-mobility; micro-mobility; remote access; security; wireless sensor network (ID#: 15-5090)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091369&isnumber=7091354

 

Lata, B T; Sumukha, T V; Suhas, H; Tejaswi, V; Shaila, K; Venugopal, K R; Anvekar, Dinesh; Patnaik, L M, "SALR: Secure Adaptive Load-Balancing Routing In Service Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091379
Abstract: Congestion control and secure data transfer are the major factors that enhance the efficiency of Service Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks. It is desirable to modify the routing and security schemes adaptively in order to respond effectively to the rapidly changing Network State. Adding more complexities to the routing and security schemes increases the end-to-end delay which is not acceptable in Service Oriented WSNs which are mostly in real time. We propose an algorithm Secure Adaptive Load-Balancing Routing (SALR) protocol, in which the routing decision is taken at every hop considering the unforeseen changes in the network. Multipath selection based on Node Strength is done at every hop to decide the most secure and least congested route. The system predicts the best route rather than running the congestion detection and security schemes repeatedly. Simulation results show that security and latency performance is better than reported protocols.
Keywords: Delays; Mathematical model; Routing; Routing protocols; Security; Wireless sensor networks; Wireless Sensor Networks; hop-by-hop routing; load-balancing; machine learning; multipath; network security; secure adaptive routing (ID#: 15-5091)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091379&isnumber=7091354

 

Sarvabhatla, Mrudula; Narayana, Kodavali Lakshmi; Vorugunti, Chandra Sekhar, "An Improved Secure Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards With Check Digits," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091415
Abstract: The advancement of communication technology resulted in increasing number of security threats over public Internet on remote servers. In 2014, Shipra et al. proposed an improved remote user authentication scheme using smart cards with check digits. Shipra et al. claimed that their scheme is secure and efficient against all major cryptographic attacks. Unfortunately, their scheme is vulnerable to some of the cryptographic attacks, particularly “online password guess attack” as discussed in this manuscript. As a part of our contribution, we propose a robust and extra secure authentication scheme for remote users based on smart cards with check digits, with slight increase in the cost. Security is the fundamental compared to complexity, since complexity can be easily manage with improved technology.
Keywords: Authentication; Law; Resists; Servers; Smart cards; Authentication; Check digits; Security; Smart Card; Cryptography (ID#: 15-5092)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091415&isnumber=7091354

 

Yassin, Mohamad; Rachid, Elias, "A Survey Of Positioning Techniques And Location Based Services In Wireless Networks," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091420
Abstract: Positioning techniques are known in a wide variety of wireless radio access technologies. Traditionally, Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most popular outdoor positioning system. Localization also exists in mobile networks such as Global System for Mobile communications (GSM). Recently, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) become widely deployed, and they are also used for localizing wireless-enabled clients. Many techniques are used to estimate client position in a wireless network. They are based on the characteristics of the received wireless signals: power, time or angle of arrival. In addition, hybrid positioning techniques make use of the collaboration between different wireless radio access technologies existing in the same geographical area. Client positioning allows the introduction of numerous services like real-time tracking, security alerts, informational services and entertainment applications. Such services are known as Location Based Services (LBS), and they are useful in both commerce and security sectors. In this paper, we explain the principles behind positioning techniques used in satellite networks, mobile networks and Wireless Local Area Networks. We also describe hybrid localization methods that exploit the coexistence of several radio access technologies in the same region, and we classify the location based services into several categories. When localization accuracy is improved, position-dependant services become more robust and efficient, and user satisfaction increases.
Keywords: Accuracy; Global Positioning System; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Position measurement; Satellites; GPS; GSM; Location Based Services; Positioning techniques; Wi-Fi; hybrid positioning systems (ID#: 15-5093)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091420&isnumber=7091354

 

Meera, G; Geethakumari, G, "A Provenance Auditing Framework For Cloud Computing Systems," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp.1,5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091427
Abstract: Cloud computing is a service oriented paradigm that aims at sharing resources among a massive number of tenants and users. This sharing facility that it provides coupled with the sheer number of users make cloud environments susceptible to major security risks. Hence, security and auditing of cloud systems is of great relevance. Provenance is a meta-data history of objects which aid in verifiability, accountability and lineage tracking. Incorporating provenance to cloud systems can help in fault detection. This paper proposes a framework which aims at performing secure provenance audit of clouds across applications and multiple guest operating systems. For integrity preservation and verification, we use established cryptographic techniques. We look at it from the cloud service providers' perspective as improving cloud security can result in better trust relations with customers.
Keywords: Cloud computing; Cryptography; Digital forensics; Monitoring; Virtual machining; Auditing; Cloud computing; Provenance (ID#: 15-5094)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091427&isnumber=7091354

 

Mohan, Arun K; Saranya, M R; Anusudha, K, "Improved Reversible Data Hiding Using Histogram Shifting Method," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091459
Abstract: A reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithm with improved security, which can reacquire the cover in separable manner from the marked stego-image is presented in this paper. In the content owner side cover image is encrypted by deploying user-defined security key derived-chaotic based transposition algorithm. Then the data hider conceals secret data into the encrypted image by perturbing its histogram, by utilizing another user defined data hiding key. At the receiver side, the recuperation of the cover can be implemented directly or indirectly which depends on shared key. Lower bound of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) for direct recuperation method is set to 48.13dB. This technique has improved security & achieved higher data hiding capacity than the existing methods.
Keywords: Data mining; Encryption; Histograms; PSNR; Receivers; Chaotic sequence; Histogram shifting; Image encryption; Key generation; Logistic Map Function; PSNR; Reversible data hiding (ID#: 15-5095)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091459&isnumber=7091354

 

Kakarla, Jagadeesh; Majhi, Banshidhar; Babu, B Ramesh, "A Trust Based Secured Coordination Mechanism For WSAN," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091460
Abstract: Wireless sensor-actor networks (WSAN) consist of a vast number of sensors and few actors. Generally, these networks are deployed in an unprotected environment to sense the physical world, and perform reliable actions on it. Hence, these networks are always susceptible to various kinds of passive and active attacks by malicious nodes. The back hole and gray hole attacks are part of active attacks. These attacks degrade the network efficiency and performance. In this paper, an efficient trust based secured coordination mechanism is proposed to counter the black hole and gray hole attacks on the delay and energy efficient routing protocol in sensor-actor networks. In the proposed mechanism, each sensor analyzes the trust level of its 1 — hop sensors based on the experience, recommendation, and knowledge. The analyzed trust value is transferred to the actor. The actor analyzes these values to identify the malicious nodes in its cluster region. The proposed trust based secured coordination mechanism (TBSC) is simulated using NS2. The performance is analyzed with respect to packet delivery ratio, average energy dissipation in the network, and average end-to-end delay. The simulation results reveal that TBSC mechanism performs well for the delay and energy efficient routing protocol compared to the existing security mechanisms.
Keywords: Ad hoc networks; Delays; Energy dissipation; Monitoring; Sensors; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; Black hole; Energy; Gray hole; Sensor; Trust (ID#: 15-5096)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091460&isnumber=7091354

 

Saranya, M R; Mohan, Arun K; Anusudha, K, "Algorithm For Enhanced Image Security Using DNA And Genetic Algorithm," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091462
Abstract: An efficient image encryption algorithm with improved image security has been developed by using chaotic function, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing and genetic algorithm (GA). A chaotic sequence of desired length is generated by using the logistic map function whose initial value is calculated using the secret key. A number of DNA masks are generated and these masks along with the chaotic sequences are used to encrypt the digital image. Finally genetic algorithm is employed to get the best mask for encryption. The proposed method can resist various types of attacks and produce high entropy and very low correlation between pixels.
Keywords: DNA; Decision support systems; Encoding; Encryption; Entropy; Genetic algorithms; Logistics; Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA); Entropy; Genetic algorithm (GA);Image encryption; Logistic map (ID#: 15-5097)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091462&isnumber=7091354

 

Sarojkumar, K; Krishna, S, "Comparison Of Numerical Methods For Online Dynamic Security Assessment Using Energy Function," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091485
Abstract: Online dynamic security assessment involves analyzing the effect of a large number of contingencies in a short time. This is a computationally demanding task, and use of energy function method reduces the computational burden. Energy function method involves determination of a quantity called critical energy which requires system simulation for a short duration. In spite of the use of energy function method, there is a significant computational requirement since a large number of contingencies have to be analyzed. In this paper, a comparison of the performance, in terms of accuracy and speed, of different numerical methods in the determination of critical energy, is presented.
Keywords: Accuracy; Computational modeling; Generators; Numerical models; Potential energy; Power transmission lines; Rotors; Online dynamic security assessment; energy function; numerical solution (ID#: 15-5098)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091485&isnumber=7091354

 

Ramaiah, N.Pattabhi; Ijjina, Earnest Paul; Mohan, C.Krishna, "Illumination Invariant Face Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 4, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091490
Abstract: Face is one of the most widely used biometric in security systems. Despite its wide usage, face recognition is not a fully solved problem due to the challenges associated with varying illumination conditions and pose. In this paper, we address the problem of face recognition under non-uniform illumination using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). The ability of a CNN to learn local patterns from data is used for facial recognition. The symmetry of facial information is exploited to improve the performance of the system by considering the horizontal reflections of the facial images. Experiments conducted on Yale facial image dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Keywords: Face; Face recognition; Lighting; Neural networks; Pattern analysis;Training; biometrics; convolutional neural networks; facial recognition; non-uniform illumination (ID#: 15-5099)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091490&isnumber=7091354

 

Chandrasekaran, Jeyamala; Jayaraman, Thiruvengadam S, "A Fast And Secure Image Encryption Algorithm Using Number Theoretic Transforms And Discrete Logarithms," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091491
Abstract: Many of the Internet applications such as video conferencing, military image databases, personal online photograph albums and cable television require a fast and efficient way of encrypting images for storage and transmission. In this paper, discrete logarithms are used for generation of random keys and Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is used as a transformation technique prior to encryption. The implementation of NTT is simple as it uses arithmetic for real sequences. Encryption and decryption involves the simple and reversible XOR operation of image pixels with the random keys based on discrete logarithms generated independently at the transmitter and receiver. Experimental results with the standard bench mark test images proposed in the USC-SIPI data base confirm the enhanced key sensitivity and strong resistivity of the algorithm against brute force attack and statistical crypt analysis. The computational complexity of the algorithm in terms of number of operations and number of rounds is very small in comparison with the other image encryption algorithms. The randomness of the keys generated has been tested and is found in accordance with the statistical test suite for security requirements of cryptographic modules as recommended by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Keywords: Chaotic communication; Ciphers; Correlation; Encryption; Transforms; Discrete Logarithms; Image Encryption; Number Theoretic Transforms (ID#: 15-5100)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091491&isnumber=7091354

 

Janani, V.S.; Manikandan, M.S.K., "CRT-KM: Chinese Remainder Theorem Based Key Management Scheme For Securing Ad-Hoc Networks," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091501
Abstract: Providing security for Dynamic Cluster based Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANET) is a vital task to improve network security with less compromising mobility and with reduced dedicated Data occupancy. Key generation, distribution and authentication are major tasks of a key management system. A flexible and strong model is required to handle key management since dynamic ad-hoc networks are more prone to many kinds of hacking activity. In this paper a new procedure is implemented using Chinese remainder Theorem based Key-management (CRT-KM) and it is compared with one existing ID-Based Multiple Key Management system (IMKM). The performances are compared in terms of parameters like mobility, Overhead message; security and power consumption.
Keywords: Mobile ad hoc networks; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Public key; Chinese Remainder Theorem; ID based multiple key management system; key management; mobile ad hoc network (ID#: 15-5101)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091501&isnumber=7091354

 

Jilna, P.; Deepthi, P.P.; Sameer, S.M.; Sathidevi, P.S.; Vijitha, A.P., "FPGA Implementation Of An Elliptic Curve Based Integrated System For Encryption And Authentication," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp.1,6, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091513
Abstract: The resource constrained applications in the present day communication networks demand the use of new cryptographic protocols and hardware with reduced computational and structural complexity. The use of standard, standalone cryptographic primitives are not suitable for such applications. This paper proposes the implementation of a new integrated system for both encryption and authentication based on elliptic curves. An algorithm for pseudo random sequence generation based on cryptographic one way function of elliptic curve point multiplication is developed. This is combined with an elliptic curve based message authentication code to form the integrated system. EC point multiplication operation is preferred as cryptographic one way function for use in this system due to its high security per bit of the key. The hardware is implemented on a Virtex 5 FPGA using Xilinx ISE. In the proposed hardware implementation a single point multiplication unit is time shared between the operations of pseudo random sequence generation and authentication to reduce the overall hardware complexity. A comparison of the resource requirement of the proposed implementation with existing standalone methods is also done.
Keywords: Authentication; Complexity theory; Elliptic curves; Encryption; Hardware; Random sequences; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; MAC; Pseudo random sequence (ID#: 15-5102)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091513&isnumber=7091354

 

Kodali, Ravi Kishore; Gundabathula, Satya Kesav; Boppana, Lakshmi, "Implementation of Toeplitz Hash based RC-4 in WSN," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091535
Abstract: Certain Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications such as military and e- health care require the inter-node communication to be secure. The tiny WSN nodes have limited computational power, memory and finite energy source. These constraints restrict the implementation of highly secure models on the devices as they demand more memory and involve compute intensive operations. Several protocols have been designed for providing different security levels with varying strengths at the expense of the amount of hardware and computational power of the processor in the WSN node. In wireless equivalent privacy (WEP) model static keys are generated for the XOR operation with the plain text in the encryption process. This work proposes a new security model that provides dynamic keys to the encryption/decryption stages. A model for the proposed scheme has been developed using nesC and the same has been implemented on a IRIS WSN node. The WSN implementation of the proposed security model has been compared with those of WEP, WiFi Protected access (WPA) based on memory usage and execution time.
Keywords: Ciphers; Computational modeling; Encryption; Heuristic algorithms; Random access memory; Wireless sensor networks; IRIS mote; Security; Toeplitz Hash; WEP; WPA; WSN (ID#: 15-5103)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091535&isnumber=7091354

 

Dickson, Anne; Thomas, Ciza, "Optimizing False Alerts Using Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Method," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091547
Abstract: Security attacks through Internet have proliferated in recent years. An Intrusion Detection System in the general framework of a network catches the perpetrators before they do real damage to the resources. The performance of Intrusion Detection Systems usually depends on the false alarm rate and the detection rate, since true positive and false positive trade-off is always a major challenge in the choice of systems. In this paper, a multi-objective optimization approach using Particle Swarm Optimization method is used in the context of tradeoffs inherent in the performance evaluators of Intrusion Detection Systems.
Keywords: Classification algorithms; Conferences; Intrusion detection; Optimization; Particle swarm optimization; Search problems; Gbest; Intrusion Detection Systems; Particle Swarm Optimization; Pbest; Swarm Intelligence (ID#: 15-5104)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091547&isnumber=7091354

 

Tanuja, R; Arudi, Souparnika P; Manjula, S H; Venugopal, K R; Patnaik, L M, "TKP: Three Level Key Pre-Distribution With Mobile Sinks For Wireless Sensor Networks," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091557
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks are by its nature prone to various forms of security attacks. Authentication and secure communication have become the need of the day. Due to single point failure of a sink node or base station, mobile sinks are better in many wireless sensor networks applications for efficient data collection or aggregation, localized sensor reprogramming and for revoking compromised sensors. The existing sytems that make use of key predistribution schemes for pairwise key establishment between sensor nodes and mobile sinks, deploying mobile sinks for data collection has drawbacks. Here, an attacker can easily obtain many keys by capturing a few nodes and can gain control of the network by deploying a node preloaded with some compromised keys that will be the replica of compromised mobile sink. We propose an efficient three level key predistribution framework that uses any pairwise key predistribution in different levels. The new framework has two set of key pools one set of keys for the mobile sink nodes to access the sensor network and other set of keys for secure communication among the sensor nodes. It reduces the damage caused by mobile sink replication attack and stationary access node replication attack. To further reduce the communication time it uses a shortest distance to make pair between the nodes for comunication. Through results, we show that our security framework has a higher network resilience to a mobile sink replication attack as compared to the polynomial pool-based scheme with less communication time.
Keywords: Authentication; Base stations; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Polynomials; Wireless sensor networks; Key predistribution; Security; Wireless Sensor Networks (ID#: 15-5105)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091557&isnumber=7091354

 

Stuart, Celine Mary; Deepthi, P.P., "Hardware Efficient Scheme For Generating Error Vector To Enhance The Performance Of Secure Channel Code," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091564
Abstract: Security, reliability and hardware complexity are the main issues to be addressed in resource constrained devices such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Secure channel coding schemes have been developed in literature to reduce the overall processing cost while providing security and reliability. The security of a channel coding scheme against various attacks is mainly decided by the nature of intentional error vectors added to the encoded data. The methods available in literature to generate random error vectors increase the encoding complexity for each message block. Also the error vectors generated are not able to provide much security. A novel method is proposed in this paper to generate intentional error vector with sufficient weight, so that the security of the secure channel code is increased by a large margin without causing any additional encoding complexity. Results show that the proposed model is effective in incorporating security in resource constrained sensor networks.
Keywords: Complexity theory; Cryptography; Hamming weight; Hardware; Polynomials; Quantum cascade lasers; Cryptosystem; MV attack; QCLDPC; RN attack; ST attack (ID#: 15-5106)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091564&isnumber=7091354

 

Jose, Binesh; Kumar, S D Madhu, "Telecom Grade Cloud Computing: Challenges And Opportunities," Signal Processing, Informatics, Communication and Energy Systems (SPICES), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1 ,5, 19-21 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1109/SPICES.2015.7091565
Abstract: Cloud computing and virtualization are two key technology priorities for telecom service providers. Besides total cost reduction, there are many strategic objectives while adopting cloud technology into the telecom sector. Telecom service providers core assets and strength lies in their communication networks, but these alone are not enough to maintain the industry in the higher level that it once enjoyed. Combining cloud computing technology and networks, telecom service providers can become a significant force in the cloud providers domain and more importantly to return to the growth path. This work evaluates the new challenges and opportunities that are offered by the adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies in telecom sector and its impact on industry value chain and the operational model. Results indicate that even though there are many technical and non-technical challenges still existing, security is still considered as the primary concern that forces cloud into back foot. This study also brings out the fact that, like all other technologies involving in business, cloud technology also brings in many new advantages as well as few disadvantages. Whilst several studies and research works have been done on cloud computing for IT sector, limited research work has been found on cloud computing for telecommunication. Also, majority of the research done in this area is based on industrial research perspective. The significance of our work comes in this context.
Keywords: Cloud computing; Computational modeling; Resource management; Security; Telecommunication services; cloud computing; network function virtualisation; software defined networking; telecom grade cloud (ID#: 15-5107)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7091565&isnumber=7091354

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Security Conference Publications, Early 2015

 

	Security Conference Publications, Early 2015

 

The publications cited here are an olio of conference publications from early in 2015.

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Ismail, Ziad; Leneutre, Jean; Bateman, David; Chen, Lin, "A Game-Theoretical Model for Security Risk Management of Interdependent ICT and Electrical Infrastructures," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.101,109, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.24 The communication infrastructure is a key element for management and control of the power system in the smart grid. The communication infrastructure, which can include equipment using off-the-shelf vulnerable operating systems, has the potential to increase the attack surface of the power system. The interdependency between the communication and the power system renders the management of the overall security risk a challenging task. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting a mathematical model for identifying and hardening the most critical communication equipment used in the power system. Using non-cooperative game theory, we model interactions between an attacker and a defender. We derive the minimum defense resources required and the optimal strategy of the defender that minimizes the risk on the power system. Finally, we evaluate the correctness and the efficiency of our model via a case study.
Keywords: Communication equipment; Games; Nash equilibrium; Power grids; Security; Substations; Cyber-physical System; Non-cooperative Game Theory; SCADA Security (ID#: 15-4787)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027420&isnumber=7027398

 

Lee, Chen-Yu; Kavi, Krishna M.; Paul, Raymond A.; Gomathisankaran, Mahadevan, "Ontology of Secure Service Level Agreement," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.166, 172, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.33 Maintaining security and privacy in the Cloud is a complex task. The task is made even more challenging as the number of vulnerabilities associated with the cloud infrastructure and applications are increasing very rapidly. Understanding the security service level agreements (SSLAs) and privacy policies offered by service and infrastructure providers is critical for consumers to assess the risks of the Cloud before they consider migrating their IT operations to the Cloud. To address these concerns relative to the assessment of security and privacy risks of the Cloud, we have developed ontologies for representing security SLAs (SSLA) in this paper. Our ontologies for SSLAs can be used to understand the security agreements of a provider, to negotiate desired security levels, and to audit the compliance of a provider with respect to federal regulations (such as HIPAA).
Keywords: Business; Cloud computing; Facebook; Monitoring; Ontologies; Privacy; Security; SLA; SSLA; cloud computing; security; service level agreement (ID#: 15-4788)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027428&isnumber=7027398

 

Aghaei-Foroushani, Vahid; Zincir-Heywood, A.Nur, "A Proxy Identifier Based on Patterns in Traffic Flows," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.118, 125, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.26 Proxies are used commonly on today's Internet. On one hand, end users can choose to use proxies for hiding their identities for privacy reasons. On the other hand, ubiquitous systems can use it for intercepting the traffic for purposes such as caching. In addition, attackers can use such technologies to anonymize their malicious behaviours and hide their identities. Identification of such behaviours is important for defense applications since it can facilitate the assessment of security threats. The objective of this paper is to identify proxy traffic as seen in a traffic log file without any access to the proxy server or the clients behind it. To achieve this: (i) we employ a mixture of log files to represent real-life proxy behavior, and (ii) we design and develop a data driven machine learning based approach to provide recommendations for the automatic identification of such behaviours. Our results show that we are able to achieve our objective with a promising performance even though the problem is very challenging.
Keywords: Cryptography; Delays; IP networks; Probes; Web servers; Behavior Analysis; Network Security; Proxy; Traffic Flow (ID#: 15-4789)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027422&isnumber=7027398

 

Emami-Taba, Mahsa; Amoui, Mehdi; Tahvildari, Ladan, "Strategy-Aware Mitigation Using Markov Games for Dynamic Application-Layer Attacks," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.134,141, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.28 Targeted and destructive nature of strategies used by attackers to break down the system require mitigation approaches with dynamic awareness. In the domain of adaptive software security, the adaptation manager of a self-protecting software is responsible for selecting countermeasures to prevent or mitigate attacks immediately. Making a right decision in each and every situation is one of the most challenging aspects of engineering self-protecting software systems. Inspired by the game theory, in this research work, we model the interactions between the attacker and the adaptation manager as a two-player zero-sum Markov game. Using this game-theoretic approach, the adaptation manager can refine its strategies in dynamic attack scenarios by utilizing what has learned from the system's and adversary's actions. We also present how this approach can be fitted to the well-known MAPE-K architecture model. As a proof of concept, this research conducts a study on a case of dynamic application-layer denial of service attacks. The simulation results demonstrate how our approach performs while encountering different attack strategies.
Keywords: Adaptation models; Computer crime; Game theory; Games; Markov processes; Adaptive Security; Dynamic Application-Layer Attacks; Game Theory; Markov Games (ID#: 15-4790)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027424&isnumber=7027398

 

Ceccarelli, Andrea; Mori, Marco; Lollini, Paolo; Bondavalli, Andrea, "Introducing Meta-Requirements for Describing System of Systems," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.150, 157, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.31 Complex, evolutionary systems operating in an open world can be seen as a composition of components which interact each other in order to fulfill their requirements. Following this vision, Systems of Systems (SoSs) literature aims at supporting the life of such complex systems taking into account key viewpoints such as emergence, time, mobility, evolution, dynamicity. Although different attempts can be found in the literature to address mostly specific viewpoints separately, it is still missing a unifying approach to analyze the whole set of viewpoints and their relationships, based on the identification of meta-requirements that can be exploited to describe any System of Systems (SoS). To this end, we developed a unifying meta-requirements model to describe SoSs viewpoints and relate them. The model is meant to be used to support the derivation of the requirements for any SoS. This paper introduces the problem, and presents the main notions of the meta-requirements model with the support of a domain-specific scenario.
Keywords: Cascading style sheets; Measurement; Rail transportation; Security; Semantics; Standards; Systems engineering and theory; AMADEOS; RUMI; System of Systems; dynamicity; emergence; evolution; requirement model (ID#: 15-4791)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027426&isnumber=7027398

 

Xie, Mengjun; Li, Yanyan; Yoshigoe, Kenji; Seker, Remzi; Bian, Jiang, "CamAuth: Securing Web Authentication with Camera," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.232,239, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.41 Frequent outbreak of password database leaks and server breaches in recent years manifests the aggravated security problems of web authentication using only password. Two-factor authentication, despite being more secure and strongly promoted, has not been widely applied to web authentication. Leveraging the unprecedented popularity of both personal mobile devices (e.g., Smartphones) and barcode scans through camera, we explore a new horizon in the design space of two-factor authentication. In this paper, we present Cam Auth, a web authentication scheme that exploits pervasive mobile devices and digital cameras to counter various password attacks including man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks. In Cam Auth, a mobile device is used as the second authentication factor to vouch for the identity of a use who is performing a web login from a PC. The device communicates directly with the PC through the secure visible light communication channels, which incurs no cellular cost and is immune to radio frequency attacks. Cam Auth employs public-key cryptography to ensure the security of authentication process. We implemented a prototype system of Cam Auth that consists of an Android application, a Chrome browser extension, and a Java-based web server. Our evaluation results indicate that Cam Auth is a viable scheme for enhancing the security of web authentication.
Keywords: Authentication; Browsers; DH-HEMTs; Servers; Smart phones (ID#: 15-4792)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027436&isnumber=7027398

 

Relan, Neha G.; Patil, Dharmaraj R., "Implementation of Network Intrusion Detection System Using Variant Of Decision Tree Algorithm," Nascent Technologies in the Engineering Field (ICNTE), 2015 International Conference on, pp.1, 5, 9-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICNTE.2015.7029925 As the need of internet is increasing day by day, the significance of security is also increasing. The enormous usage of internet has greatly affected the security of the system. Hackers do monitor the system minutely or keenly, therefore the security of the network is under observation. A conventional intrusion detection technology indicates more limitation like low detection rate, high false alarm rate and so on. Performance of the classifier is an essential concern in terms of its effectiveness; also number of feature to be examined by the IDS should be improved. In our work, we have proposed two techniques, C4.5 Decision tree algorithm and C4.5 Decision tree with Pruning, using feature selection. In C4.5 Decision tree with pruning we have considered only discrete value attributes for classification. We have used KDDCup'99 and NSL_KDD dataset to train and test the classifier. The Experimental Result shows that, C4.5 decision tree with pruning approach is giving better results with all most 98% of accuracy.
Keywords: Accuracy; Classification algorithms; Data mining; Decision trees; Intrusion detection; Testing; Training; Accuracy etc.; Classification Algorithms; False Negative (FN); False Positive (FP); IDS; KDD; NSL_KDD; Pruning; True Negative(TN);True positive (TP) (ID#: 15-4793)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7029925&isnumber=7029899

 

Pandurang, Rathod Mahesh; Karia, Deepak C., "Performance Measurement of WEP and WPA2 on WLAN Using OpenVPN," Nascent Technologies in the Engineering Field (ICNTE), 2015 International Conference on, pp.1,4, 9-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/ICNTE.2015.7029939 With the advancement of wireless networking many serious security issues have been raised. Because of broadcast nature in wireless networks, various attacks such as eavesdropping, Denial of Service, Session hijacking is very much possible. To encounter these attacks various encryption standards such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and 802.11i (WPA2) have been deployed along with it Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have also provided an important solution to security threats that surrounds the use of public networks for private communications. In this paper performance measurement of WEP and WPA2 on wireless local area networks (WLANs) using OpenVPN based on various performance metrics such as throughput, latency and frame loss rate will be done.
Keywords: Encryption; Loss measurement; Standards; Throughput; Wireless LAN; IEEE 802.11i standard (WPA2); OpenVPN; Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP); frame loss rate; throughput (ID#: 15-4794)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7029939&isnumber=7029899

 

Hawkins, Richard; Habli, Ibrahim; Kolovos, Dimitris; Paige, Richard; Kelly, Tim, "Weaving an Assurance Case from Design: A Model-Based Approach," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.110, 117, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.25 Assurance cases are used to demonstrate confidence in properties of interest for a system, e.g. For safety or security. A model-based assurance case seeks to bring the benefits of model-driven engineering, such as automation, transformation and validation, to what is currently a lengthy and informal process. In this paper we develop a model-based assurance approach, based on a weaving model, which allows integration between assurance case, design and process models and meta-models. In our approach, the assurance case itself is treated as a structured model, with the aim that all entities in the assurance case become linked explicitly to the models that represent them. We show how it is possible to exploit the weaving model for automated generation of assurance cases. Building upon these results, we discuss how a seamless model-driven approach to assurance cases can be achieved and examine the utility of increased formality and automation.
Keywords: Analytical models; Automation; Control systems; Cryptography; Weaving; arguments; assurance cases; model-driven engineering; safety cases; weaving (ID#: 15-4795)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027421&isnumber=7027398

 

Li, Xiaohua; Yang, Thomas, "Signal Processing Oriented Approach for Big Data Privacy," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.275, 276, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.23 This paper addresses the challenge of big data security by exploiting signal processing theories. We propose a new big data privacy protocol that scrambles data via artificial noise and secret transform matrices. The utility of the scrambled data is maintained, as demonstrated by a cyber-physical system application. We further outline the proof of the proposed protocol's privacy by considering the limitations of blind source separation and compressive sensing.
Keywords: Big data; Data privacy; Noise; Power demand; Protocols; Vectors; big data; cyber-physical systems; privacy; signal processing
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027443&isnumber=7027398

 

Yan, Haixing; Fang, Huixing; Kuka, Christian; Zhu, Huibiao, "Verification for OAuth Using ASLan++," High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE), 2015 IEEE 16th International Symposium on, pp.76, 84, 8-10 Jan. 2015. doi: 10.1109/HASE.2015.20 Over the past few years, OAuth has become an open authorization standard that is being adopted by a growing number of sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google. It allows users to grant a third-party application access to restricted resources without providing their credentials. However, ensuring the correctness of implementations of OAuth in applications brings multiple concerns. Therefore, it is crucial to verify OAuth with an exhaustive examination by utilizing formal methods. In this paper, we first formalize OAuth with ASLan++ on the AVANTSSAR platform and propose several fundamental security properties on it which are specified using extended Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. In a second step, we use a SAT-based Model-Checker (SATMC) to verify whether OAuth violates these properties. As a result, we reveal three attacks which steal and falsify users' critical information.
Keywords: Authentication; Authorization; Browsers; Facebook; Protocols; Servers; ASLan++; Modeling; Oauth; SATMC; Verification (ID#: 15-4796)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7027417&isnumber=7027398

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Citations for Hard Problems (2014 Year in Review)

 

	Citations for Hard Problems (2014 Year in Review)

 

The works cited here address topics among the Hard Problems of Science of Security research, specifically Composability & Scalability, and Predictive Security Metrics. This set of references includes the reference citation; links, Digital Object Identifiers (doi's) and key words are included so that interested researchers can locate the source document. This research was presented and published in 2014.

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Prodromos E. Tsinaslanidis, Dimitris Kugiumtzis; A Prediction Scheme Using Perceptually Important Points And Dynamic Time Warping; Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal, Volume 41 Issue 15, November, 2014, Pages 6848-6860. Doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2014.04.028
Keywords: Dynamic time warping, Efficient market hypothesis, Nonlinear prediction, Perceptually important points (ID#: 15-4457)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2014.04.028

 

Abul Bashar, Gerard Parr, Sally McClean, Bryan Scotney, Detlef Nauck;  Application of Bayesian Networks for Autonomic Network Management; Journal of Network and Systems Management, Volume 22 Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 174-207. Doi:   10.1007/s10922-013-9289-x
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Bayesian Networks, Call Admission Control, Data Mining, Intelligent Traffic Engineering, Machine Learning, Network Management, Next Generation Networks (ID#: 15-4458)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10922-013-9289-x

 

Mohammad Reza Jabbarpour, Hossein Malakooti, Rafidah Md Noor, Nor Badrul Anuar, Norazlina Khamis; Ant Colony Optimisation For Vehicle Traffic Systems: Applications And Challenges; International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation; Volume 6 Issue 1, March 2014;  Pages 32-56.  Doi: 10.1504/IJBIC.2014.059970
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4459)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJBIC.2014.059970

 

Jae-wook Jang, Jiyoung Woo, Jaesung Yun, Huy Kang Kim; Mal-Netminer: Malware Classification Based On Social Network Analysis Of Call Graph; WWW Companion '14 Proceedings of the Companion Publication Of The 23rd International Conference On World Wide Web, April 2014, Pages 731-734. Doi: 10.1145/2567948.2579364 
Keywords: Degree Distribution, Dynamic analysis, malware, social network analysis (SNA), system call graph (ID#: 15-4460)
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2579364&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=532216741&CFTOKEN=86668354

 

Isredza Rahmi A. Hamid, Jemal H. Abawajy; An Approach For Profiling Phishing Activities; Computers and Security, Volume 45, September, 2014, Pages 27-41. Doi:   10.1016/j.cose.2014.04.002
Keywords: Clustering, Cybersecurity, Information security, Network security, Phishing email, Profiling(ID#: 15-4461)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2014.04.002

 

Mamatha Balachandra, K. V. Prema, Krishnamoorthy Makkithaya; Multiconstrained and Multipath QoS Aware Routing Protocol for MANETs; Wireless Networks, Volume 20 Issue 8, November 2014, Pages 2395-2408. Doi:   10.1007/s11276-014-0754-6
Keywords: AOMDV, Disjoint, Link life time, MANET, MMQARP, QoS (ID#: 15-4462)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0754-6

 

Barry Mclarnon, Philip Robinson, Peter Milligan, Paul Sage; An Iterative Approach to Trustable Systems Management Automation and Fault Handling; Journal of Network and Systems Management, Volume 22 Issue 3, July 2014, Pages 366-395. Doi:  10.1007/s10922-013-9295-z  Keywords: Automation, Cloud computing, Data center, Enterprise systems, Fault handling, Systems management, Trustability (ID#: 15-4463)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10922-013-9295-z

 

Pontus Johnson, Johan Ullberg, Markus Buschle, Ulrik Franke, Khurram Shahzad; An Architecture Modeling Framework For Probabilistic Prediction; Information Systems and e-Business Management, Volume 12 Issue 4, November 2014, Pages 595-622.  Doi: 10.1007/s10257-014-0241-8
Keywords: Assessment, Business properties, Object Constraint Language, Prediction, Probabilistic inference, System properties, UML (ID#: 15-4464)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10257-014-0241-8

 

Jinkeun Hong; Sec-Service Level Agreement Analysis of OFB Mode in Block Cipher; International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, Volume 8 Issue 2, July 2014, Pages 116-126. Doi: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2014.063258
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4465)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJIIDS.2014.063258

 

Maria Leitner, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma; A Systematic Review On Security In Process-Aware Information Systems - Constitution, Challenges, And Future Directions; Information and Software Technology, Volume 56 Issue 3, March, 2014, Pages 273-293. Doi:  10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.004
Keywords: Business Process Management, Business process security, Process-Aware Information Systems, Security, Systematic literature review, Workflow security (ID#: 15-4466)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.004

 

Neminath Hubballi, Vinoth Suryanarayanan; Review: False Alarm Minimization Techniques In Signature-Based Intrusion Detection Systems: A Survey; Computer Communications, Volume 49, August, 2014, Pages 1-17. Doi:  10.1016/j.comcom.2014.04.012
Keywords: Correlation, False alarms, Intrusion detection (ID#: 15-4467)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2014.04.012

 

Michael Felderer, Ina Schieferdecker; A Taxonomy of Risk-Based Testing; International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), Volume 16 Issue 5, October 2014, Pages 559-568. Doi: 10.1007/s10009-014-0332-3
Keywords: Classification, Risk analysis, Risk management, Risk-based testing, Software testing, Taxonomy (ID#: 15-4468)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10009-014-0332-3

 

Rami M. Mohammad, Fadi Thabtah, Lee Mccluskey; Predicting Phishing Websites Based On Self-Structuring Neural Network;  Neural Computing and Applications, Volume 25 Issue 2, August 2014, Pages 443-458. Doi: 10.1007/s00521-013-1490-z
Keywords: Data mining, Information security, Neural network, Phishing, Web threat (ID#: 15-4469)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00521-013-1490-z

 

Gaya K. Jayasinghe, J. Shane Culpepper, Peter Bertok; Efficient and Effective Realtime Prediction Of Drive-By Download Attacks; Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Volume 38, February, 2014, Pages 135-149. Doi:  10.1016/j.jnca.2013.03.009
Keywords: Anomaly detection, Drive-by downloads, Dynamic analysis, Machine learning, Web client exploits (ID#: 15-4470)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2013.03.009

 

Stefan Walraven, Dimitri Van Landuyt, Eddy Truyen, Koen Handekyn, Wouter Joosen; Efficient Customization Of Multi-Tenant Software-As-A-Service Applications With Service Lines; Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 91, May, 2014, Pages 48-62. Doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2014.01.021
Keywords: Multi-tenancy, SaaS, Variability (ID#: 15-4471)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2014.01.021

 

Alexandre Skyrme, Noemi Rodriguez, Roberto Ierusalimschy, A Survey Of Support For Structured Communication In Concurrency Control Models; Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Volume 74 Issue 4, April, 2014,  Pages 2266-2285. Doi: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2013.11.005
Keywords: Communication, Concurrency, Model, Structured, Survey (ID#: 15-4472)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2013.11.005

 

Micah Sherr, Harjot Gill, Taher Aquil Saeed, Andrew Mao, William R. Marczak, Saravana Soundararajan, Wenchao Zhou, Boon Thau Loo, Matt Blaze; The Design And Implementation Of The A³ Application-Aware Anonymity Platform; Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, Volume 58, January, 2014,  Pages 206-227. Doi: 10.1016/j.comnet.2013.09.021
Keywords: Anonymity, Declarative networking, Extensibility, Testbeds (ID#: 15-4473)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2013.09.021

 

Weishan Zhang, Klaus Marius Hansen, Mads Ingstrup; A Hybrid Approach to Self-Management In A Pervasive Service Middleware; Knowledge-Based Systems, Volume 67, September, 2014, Pages 143-161.  Doi: 10.1016/j.knosys.2014.06.002
Keywords: Architectural styles, Change Management, Component control, Goal Management, Self-management (ID#: 15-4474)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2014.06.002

 

R. Mahindru, R. Sarkar, M. Viswanathan; Software Defined Unified Monitoring and Management of Clouds; IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 58 Issue 2-3, March/May 2014, Pages 12-12.  Doi: 10.1147/JRD.2014.2305313
Keywords:  IEEE keywords: Best practices;Cloud computing;Information technology;Middleware;Servers;Software defined networks;Storage area networks (ID#: 15-4475)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1147/JRD.2014.2305313

 

Li Yu, Dong Li, Sparsh Mittal, Jeffrey S. Vetter; Quantitatively Modeling Application Resilience with the Data Vulnerability Factor; SC '14 Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 2014, Pages 695-706. Doi: 10.1109/SC.2014.62
Keywords:  IEEE keywords: data protection;pattern classification;safety-critical software;software fault tolerance;DVF;application resilience modelling;data vulnerability factor;protection mechanism;representative computational kernel;vulnerability classification;Algorithm design and analysis;Analytical models;Computational modeling;Data models;Data structures;Hardware;Resilience (ID#: 15-4476)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SC.2014.62

 

Navonil Mustafee, Korina Katsaliaki, Paul Fishwick; Exploring the Modelling and Simulation Knowledge Base Through Journal Co-Citation Analysis; Scientometrics, Volume 98 Issue 3, March 2014, Pages 2145-2159. Doi:  10.1007/s11192-013-1136-z
Keywords: Co-citation analysis, Modelling and Simulation (M&S), SIMULATION: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, Simulation research, Society for Modeling and Simulation International (ID#: 15-4477)
URL: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-013-1136-z

 

Qiang Lu, Justin Wilson, Yixin Chen, Christopher Gill, Louis Thomas, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Guoliang Chen; Situation-aware Composition And Execution In Dynamic Environments By Automated Planning; Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 35, October, 2014, Pages 215-236. Doi: 10.1016/j.engappai.2014.06.024
Keywords: Automated planning, Coordination, Mobile environments, Workflow (ID#: 15-4478)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2014.06.024

 

Amin Jula, Elankovan Sundararajan, Zalinda Othman; Review: Cloud Computing Service Composition: A Systematic Literature Review; Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal, Volume 41 Issue 8, June, 2014, Pages 809-3824. Doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2013.12.
Keywords: Cloud computing service composition, Importance percentage of quality of service parameters, QoS, Quality of service parameter, Research objectives, Systematic literature review (ID#: 15-4479)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.12.017

 

Hassina Nacer, Djamil Aissani; Review: Semantic Web Services: Standards, Applications, Challenges And Solutions; Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Volume 44, September, 2014, Pages 134-151. Doi:  10.1016/j.jnca.2014.04.015
Keywords: Distributed middleware, Interoperability, Performance analysis, Semantic web, Web services, Web services composition (ID#: 15-4480)
URL:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2014.04.015

 

Raffaela Mirandola, Pasqualina Potena, Patrizia Scandurra; Adaptation Space Exploration For Service-Oriented Applications; Science of Computer Programming, Volume 80, February, 2014, pages 356-384.  Doi: 10.1016/j.scico.2013.09.017
Keywords: Functional/extra-functional requirements, Optimization techniques, Service-oriented applications, Software adaptation and evolution (ID#: 15-4481)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2013.09.017

 

Eduardo Gurgel Pinho, Francisco Heron De Carvalho, Junior; An Object-Oriented Parallel Programming Language For Distributed-Memory Parallel Computing Platforms; Science of Computer Programming, Volume 80, February, 2014, Pages 65-90. Doi: 10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.014
Keywords: High performance computing, Object-oriented programming languages, Parallel programming languages, Parallel programming techniques (ID#: 15-4482)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.014

 

Eugene Goldberg, Panagiotis Manolios; Quantifier Elimination by Dependency Sequents; Formal Methods in System Design, Volume 45 Issue 2, October 2014, Pages 111-143. Doi: 10.1007/s10703-014-0214-z
Keywords: Dependency sequents, Model checking, Quantifier elimination, Resolution, SAT (ID#: 15-4483)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10703-014-0214-z

 

Rui Zhou, Chanjuan Li, Rong Min, Qi Yu, Fei Gu, Qingguo Zhou, Jason C. Hung, Kuan-Ching Li, Xuan Wang; On Design And Formal Verification of SNSP: A Novel Real-Time Communication Protocol For Safety-Critical Applications; The Journal of Supercomputing, Volume 69 Issue 3, September 2014,  Pages 1254-1283. Doi: 10.1007/s11227-014-1157-2
Keywords: Event-triggered protocol, Fault-tolerance, Formal verification, Safe node sequence protocol, Safety (ID#: 15-4484)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1157-2

 

Andra Hugo, Abdou Guermouche, Pierre-André Wacrenier, Raymond Namyst; Composing Multiple Starpu Applications Over Heterogeneous Machines: A Supervised Approach; International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Volume 28 Issue 3, August 2014, Pages 285-300. Doi:  10.1177/1094342014527575
Keywords: Parallel composition, runtime optimisation, resource allocation, heterogeneous architectures, scheduling (ID#: 15-4485)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1094342014527575

 

Hind Benfenatki, Catarina Ferreira Da Silva, Aïcha Nabila Benharkat, Parisa Ghodous; Cloud Application Development Methodology; WI-IAT '14 Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT) - Volume 01, August 2014, Pages 13-20. Doi:  10.1109/WI-IAT.2014.11
Keywords: Cloud computing, Business applications development, Requirement expression, Linked services, Services reuse, Orchestration tools (ID#: 15-4486)
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WI-IAT.2014.11

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review), Part 1

 

	Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review)  Part 1

 

Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally.  In 2014, more than one hundred articles of interest to the Science of Security community have been published.  We cite them here in five parts. 

 

Kai Liao; Xiaoxin Cui; Nan Liao; Tian Wang; Xiao Zhang; Ying Huang; Dunshan Yu, "High-speed Constant-Time Division Module for Elliptic Curve Cryptography based on GF(2^m)," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp.818,821, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865261 To achieve high performance scalar multiplication arithmetic in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based on GF(2m), a high-speed constant-time division module with optimized architecture is proposed in this paper. Modified from the traditional extended Euclidean Great Common Divisor (GCD) division algorithm, the presented algorithm computes a single multiplicative inverse or division in constant m iterations, i.e. m clock cycles, in GF(2m), which obtains a tremendous reduction (specifically more than 50%) on computing time compared with previous works. Combined with the meticulously optimized architecture, this novel division module achieves lower area-time complexity, which makes it an excellent option for high performance ECC design.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; iterative methods; polynomials; public key cryptography; Euclidean great common divisor division algorithm; elliptic curve cryptography; high performance scalar multiplication arithmetic; high-speed constant-time division module; Algorithm design and analysis; Clocks; Computer architecture; Elliptic curve cryptography; Galois fields; Registers ;constant-time; division module; elliptic curve cryptography; finite field arithmetic; high-speed (ID#: 15-4179)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6865261&isnumber=6865048

 

Gautschi, M.; Muehlberghuber, M.; Traber, A.; Stucki, S.; Baer, M.; Andri, R.; Benini, L.; Muheim, B.; Kaeslin, H., "SIR10US: A Tightly Coupled Elliptic-Curve Cryptography Co-processor for the OpenRISC," Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), 2014 IEEE 25th International Conference on, pp.25,29, 18-20 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ASAP.2014.6868626 Today's embedded systems require resource-aware acceleration engines, which support advanced cryptographic algorithms such as elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC). The authors present an application-specific co-processor for digital signature verification according to the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) based on the NIST B-233 standard. A novel OpenRISC-ISA (instruction-set architecture) core featuring a high IPC rate and balanced pipeline stages has been developed to act as the main controlling unit of the accelerator. The redesigned OpenRISC core processes 67% more instructions per second than the reference architecture and ties with a micro-controllable ECC datapath through a highly optimized interface. An ECDSA signature is verified in 11 ms, which is equal to a speedup of 15× and 3.3× with respect to a portable C implementation on the OpenRISC and an assembler-optimized implementation on an ARM7, respectively. Moreover, thanks to a tightly coupled data memory, the proposed co-processor does not block the OpenRISC during its ECC-specific operations, thereby enabling it to also support concurrent execution of other workloads and/or software-based cryptographic extension functions.
Keywords: coprocessors; embedded systems; public key cryptography; reduced instruction set computing; ECDSA; OpenRISC core;OpenRISC-ISA;SIR10US;advanced cryptographic algorithms; cryptographic extension functions; digital signature verification; elliptic curve digital signature algorithm; embedded systems; instruction set architecture; microcontrollable ECC datapath; pipeline stages; reference architecture; resource aware acceleration engines; tightly coupled elliptic curve cryptography coprocessor; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Elliptic curves; Pipelines; Program processors; Random access memory; Registers; ECC;  OpenRISC; co-processor; elliptic-curve cryptography; finitefield arithmetic; instruction-set extension (ID#: 15-4180)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868626&isnumber=6868606

 

Kurt, M.; Duru, N., "Steganography over Video Files Using Menezes Vanstone Elliptic Curve Cryptography Algorithm," Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU), 2014 22nd, pp.1195,1198, 23-25 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/SIU.2014.6830449 In recent years information security and information privacy have been more important with an increment of technology. Different techniques of stenography and cryptography are used for sending information to recipient due to safety communication channel. Lots of algorithms have been developed as a result of these techniques. In this work the message to be sent is divided into consecutive two main parts are called coordinate data and stego data. Data represent coordinate points are encrypted with Modified Menezes Vanstone Elliptic Curve Cryptography (MMV - ECC) Algorithm and coordinate points are achieved. These coordinate points are found on related frame of video file in AVI format, and then these coordinate points' pixel value replace with decimal value of stego data.
Keywords: data privacy; public key cryptography; security of data; steganography; telecommunication channels; video coding; AVI format; MMV-ECC algorithm; coordinate data; coordinate point pixel value; decimal value; information privacy; information security; modified Menezes-Vanstone elliptic curve cryptography; safety communication channel; steganography; stego data; video files; Conferences; Elliptic curve cryptography; PSNR; Reactive power; Signal processing algorithms; İmage Processing; Cryptology; Steganography; Video Processing (ID#: 15-4181)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6830449&isnumber=6830164

 

Sakharkar, S.M.; Mangrulkar, R.S.; Atique, M., "A Survey: A Secure Routing Method For Detecting False Reports And Gray-Hole Attacks Along With Elliptic Curve Cryptography In Wireless Sensor Networks," Electrical, Electronics and Computer Science (SCEECS), 2014 IEEE Students' Conference on, pp.1,5, 1-2 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/SCEECS.2014.6804514 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in many applications in military, environmental, and health-related areas. These applications often include the monitoring of sensitive information such as enemy movement on the battlefield or the location of personnel in a building. Security is important in WSNs. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and the use of insecure wireless communication channels. These constraints make security in WSNs a challenge. In this paper, we try to explore security issue in WSN. First, the constraints, security requirements and attacks with their corresponding countermeasures in WSNs are explained. Individual sensor nodes are subject to compromised security. An adversary can inject false reports into the networks via compromised nodes. Furthermore, an adversary can create a Gray hole by compromised nodes. If these two kinds of attacks occur simultaneously in a network, some of the existing methods fail to defend against those attacks. The Ad-hoc On Demand Distance (AODV) Vector scheme for detecting Gray-Hole attack and Statistical En-Route Filtering is used for detecting false report. For increasing security level, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithm is used. Simulations results obtain so far reduces energy consumption and also provide greater network security to some extent.
Keywords: public key cryptography; routing protocols; wireless sensor networks; AODV protocol; Gray hole attack; ad hoc on demand distance vector protocol; elliptic curve cryptography; false report detection; individual sensor nodes; secure routing method; statistical en-route filtering; wireless sensor networks; Base stations; Elliptic curve cryptography; Protocols; Routing; Wireless sensor networks; AODV; ECC; Secure Routing; Security; Statistical En-Route; Wireless Sensor Network (ID#: 15-4182)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6804514&isnumber=6804412

 

Leca, C.-L.; Rincu, C.-I., "Combining Point Operations for Efficient Elliptic Curve Cryptography Scalar Multiplication," Communications (COMM), 2014 10th International Conference on, pp. 1, 4, 29-31 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICComm.2014.6866676 Elliptic curve cryptosystems have gained increase attention and have become an intense area of research, mainly because of their shorter key length when compared to other public key cryptosystems such as RSA. Shorter key length brings advantages such as reduced computation effort, power consumption and storage requirements, making it possible to increase the available security for portable devices, smartcards and other power strained devices. ECC manages to cover all the significant cryptographic operations such as key exchange and agreement or digital signature with greater efficiency than previous systems. These operations rely heavily on point multiplication which is also the most time-consuming operation. This paper evaluates point operations (doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and addition) and proposes an algorithm for combining the operations in order to achieve faster scalar multiplication when compared to the standard algorithm for scalar multiplication of double and add.
Keywords: {public key cryptography; smart cards; cryptographic operation; efficient ECC scalar multiplication; elliptic curve cryptography; point multiplication; point operation; portable device; power strained device; public key cryptosystem; security; smartcards; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Equations; Galois fields; cryptography; elliptic curve cryptography; point operations; scalar multiplication (ID#: 15-4183)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866676&isnumber=6866648

 

Subashri, T.; Arjun, A.; Ashok, S., "Real time implementation Of Elliptic Curve Cryptography over a open aource VoIP server," Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,6, 11-13 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCNT.2014.6963029 This paper presents the design and the implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in an Asterisk VoIP server which serves as an exchange for placing voice calls over the internet. Voice over internet protocol refers to the transmission of speech encoded into data packets transmitted across networks. VoIP networks are prone to confidentiality threats due to the weak keys used by the AES algorithm for encryption of the VoIP packets. So, in order to strengthen the key for encryption/decryption, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) Algorithm key agreement scheme is employed with smaller key sizes resulting in faster computations. The elliptic curve used in this paper is a modified NIST P-256 curve and key generation algorithm using split exponents for fast exponentiation has been implemented to speed up and increase the randomness of key generation. The implementation of split exponents also help in increasing the security of the keys generated. The key generated by ECDH is highly secure because the discrete logarithmic problem is very difficult in this scheme. This Method is successfully carrying out voice calls on VoIP clients connected to the internet. This ECDH key exchanging mechanism for voice calls in real time is implemented on an Asterisk PBX (Private Branch eXchange), using AGI(Asterisk Gateway Interface) server.
Keywords: Asterisk PBX; Dynamic ECDH; IAX; Key exchange; SIP; Softphone; Split Exponents; VoIP (ID#: 15-4184)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6963029&isnumber=6962988

 

Holler, A.; Druml, N.; Kreiner, C.; Steger, C.; Felicijan, T., "Hardware/Software Co-Design Of Elliptic-Curve Cryptography For Resource-Constrained Applications," Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE, pp.1, 6, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1145/2593069.2593148 ECC is an asymmetric encryption providing a comparably high cryptographic strength in relation to the key sizes employed. This makes ECC attractive for resource-constrained systems. While pure hardware solutions usually offer a good performance and a low power consumption, they are inflexible and typically lead to a high area. Here, we show a flexible design approach using a 163-bit GF(2m) elliptic curve and an 8-bit processor. We propose improvements to state-of-the-art software algorithms and present innovative hardware/software codesign variants. The proposed implementation offers highly competitive performance in terms of performance and area.
Keywords: hardware-software codesign; public key cryptography;163-bit GF2m elliptic curve;8-bit processor; ECC; asymmetric encryption; cryptographic strength; elliptic-curve cryptography; flexible design approach; hardware-software code sign variants; key sizes; pure hardware solutions; resource-constrained applications; state-of-the-art software algorithms; Coprocessors; Error correction codes; Hardware; Radiofrequency identification; Random access memory; Software; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Embedded Devices; RFID (ID#: 15-4185)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6881534&isnumber=6881325

 

He, D.; Zeadally, S., "An Analysis of RFID Authentication Schemes for Internet of Things in Healthcare Environment Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography," Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, vol. PP, no. 99, pp.1, 1, 23 September 2014. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2014.2360121 Advances in information and communication technologies have led to the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT). In the healthcare environment, the use of IoT technologies brings convenience to physicians and patients since they can be applied to various medical areas (such as constant real-time monitoring, patient information management, medical emergency management, blood information management, and health management). The Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology is one of the core technologies of IoT deployments in the healthcare environment. To satisfy the various security requirements of RFID technology in IoT, many RFID authentication schemes have been proposed in the past decade. Recently, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based RFID authentication schemes have attracted a lot of attention and have been used in the healthcare environment. In this paper, we discuss the security requirements of RFID authentication schemes and in particular we present a review of ECC-based RFID authentication schemes in terms of performance and security. Although most of them cannot satisfy all security requirements and have satisfactory performance, we found that there are three recently proposed ECC-based authentication schemes suitable for the healthcare environment in terms of their performance and security.
Keywords: Authentication; Databases; Internet of Things; Medical services; Radiofrequency identification; Servers; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Internet of Things; Performance; Radio Frequency identification; Security (ID#: 15-4186)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6907930&isnumber=6702522

 

Javeed, K.; Xiaojun Wang, "Efficient Montgomery Multiplier For Pairing And Elliptic Curve Based Cryptography," Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP), 2014 9th International Symposium on, pp.255,260, 23-25 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSNDSP.2014.6923835 In this paper, we propose an efficient 256×256 bit modular multiplier based on Montgomery reduction algorithm. The 256 × 256 bit modular multiplier is required in elliptic curve and pairing based cryptographic protocols to achieve 128 bit security level. The in-built features of modern FPGA are efficiently utilized. Two time consuming components (1) 512-bit addition (2) 256 × 256 bit multiplier are efficiently optimized. The 512-bit addition is optimized using 64-bit carry chains while the 64 × 64 bit multiplier soft cores provided by Xilinx FPGAs are utilized to design the 256 × 256 bit multiplier. Subsequently, both the adder and multiplier are used to design 256-bit modular multiplier using Montgomery reduction algorithm. The design is synthesized using Xilinx ISE 14.1 design suite targeting virtex 6 FPGA devices. The proposed design runs at 188 MHz and can be used to construct elliptic curve and pairing based cryptographic processors.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; field programmable gate arrays; public key cryptography; FPGA devices; Montgomery reduction algorithm; Xilinx FPGA; Xilinx ISE 14.1 design; cryptographic processors; cryptographic protocols; efficient montgomery multiplier; elliptic curve based cryptography; modular multiplier; pairing curve based cryptography; Adders; Algorithm design and analysis; Clocks; Educational institutions; Field programmable gate arrays; Multiplexing; Pipelines; Elliptic curve cryptography; FPGA design; Montgomery Multiplier; Pairing (ID#: 15-4187)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6923835&isnumber=6923783

 

Azarderakhsh, R.; Reyhani-Masoleh, A., "Parallel and High-Speed Computations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography Using Hybrid-Double Multipliers," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on , vol.26, no.6, pp.1668,1677, June 1 2015  doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2014.2323062 High-performance and fast implementation of point multiplication is crucial for elliptic curve cryptographic systems. Recently, considerable research has investigated the implementation of point multiplication on different curves over binary extension fields. In this paper, we propose efficient and high speed architectures to implement point multiplication on binary Edwards and generalized Hessian curves. We perform a data-flow analysis and investigate maximum number of parallel multipliers to be employed to reduce the latency of point multiplication on these curves. Then, we modify the addition and doubling formulations and employ a newly proposed digit-level hybrid-double Gaussian normal basis multiplier to remove the data dependencies and hence reduce the latency of point multiplication. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that one employs hybrid-double multiplication technique to reduce the computation time of point multiplication. Moreover, we have implemented our proposed architectures for point multiplication on FPGA and obtained the results of timing and area. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme is one step forward to improve the performance of point multiplication on binary Edward and generalized Hessian curves.
Keywords: Gaussian processes;  Hessian matrices; field programmable gate arrays; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; FPGA; addition formulations; binary Edwards curves; binary extension fields; data dependencies; data-flow analysis; digit-level hybrid-double Gaussian normal basis multiplier; doubling formulations; elliptic curve cryptographic systems; generalized Hessian curves; hybrid-double multiplication technique; parallel multipliers; point multiplication; Clocks; Computer architecture; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Gaussian processes; Logic gates; Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC); Gaussian normal basis; binary Edwards curves; double-hybrid multiplier; generalized Hessian curves (ID#: 15-4188)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6814322&isnumber=4359390

 

Ying Zhang; Ji Pengfei, "An Efficient and Hybrid Key Management for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks," Control and Decision Conference (2014 CCDC), The 26th Chinese, pp. 1881, 1885, May 31 2014-June 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCDC.2014.6852476 Key management is the core to ensure the communication security of wireless sensor network. How to establish efficient key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a challenging problem for the constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of the sensor nodes. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks with symmetric key cryptography. Recent researches have shown that using asymmetric key cryptography in heterogeneous sensor networks (HSN) can improve network performance, such as connectivity, resilience, etc. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of symmetric key cryptography and asymmetric key cryptography, the paper propose an efficient and hybrid key management method for heterogeneous wireless sensor network, cluster heads and base stations use public key encryption method based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), while using symmetric encryption method between adjacent nodes in the cluster. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed key management method can provide better security, prefect scalability and connectivity with saving on storage space.
Keywords: cryptography; telecommunication network management; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; asymmetric key cryptography; base stations; cluster heads; communication security; elliptic curve cryptography; heterogeneous sensor networks; hybrid key management; public key encryption method; sensor network security; sensor nodes; symmetric encryption; wireless sensor networks; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Energy consumption; Wireless sensor networks; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks; Key Management; Symmetric Encryption (ID#: 15-4189)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6852476&isnumber=6852105

 

Xuanxia Yao; Xiaoguang Han; Xiaojiang Du, "A Light-Weight Certificate-Less Public Key Cryptography Scheme Based on ECC," Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2014 23rd International Conference on, pp.1,8, 4-7 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2014.6911773 With the rapid development of mobile computing, more and more mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets are able to access Internet. As these mobile devices are usually battery powered, energy efficiency is a very important issue. For most mobile applications, energy saving should be considered at the design stage. Of course, security application is no different. Public key cryptography plays an important role in network security, and it is still essential in mobile computing despite it needs high energy consumption. Considering Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is easy to perform in hardware and needs lower energy than other public key algorithms. We propose an ECC-based certificate-less public key cryptography scheme. The scheme is lightweight and can save energy for mobile devices. Firstly, it does not need certificate to prove the authenticity of a public key, which can save energy for certificate transmission. Secondly, it is constructed on the traditional ECC instead of bilinear pairing, which makes it lightweight and can save energy for computation. In addition, it avoids the key escrow issue, which makes it has higher security strength than traditional public key cryptography. These advantages make it very suitable for resources-constrained mobile devices.
Keywords: Internet; energy conservation; mobile computing; power consumption; public key cryptography; telecommunication power management; telecommunication security; ECC; Internet; battery power; bilinear pairing; certificate transmission; elliptic curve cryptography; energy consumption; energy efficiency; energy saving; light-weight certificate-less public key cryptography scheme; mobile computing; mobile devices; network security; public key algorithms; resources-constrained mobile devices; security application; security strength; smart phones; tablets; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Encryption; certificate-less public key cryptosystem; certificate-less public key encryption; certificate-less public key signature; elliptic curve cryptography (ID#: 15-4190)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911773&isnumber=6911704

 

Rao, M.R.; Rao, B.P., "Adaptive Hybrid Multi-User Detector in CDMA Using ECC," Wireless and Optical Communications Networks (WOCN), 2014 Eleventh International Conference on, pp.1,9, 11-13 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/WOCN.2014.6923051 Code division multiple access (CDMA) is one of the promising techniques in cellular mobile communications system used for radio accessing and personal communication systems. Besides several practical advantages, CDMA suffers with multiuser interference, limiting the spectral efficiency drastically. There are various optimal and suboptimal multi user detection techniques in CDMA to overcome this problem. These MUDs identify the desired users signal but the interference signal is high and there is a chance of loosing the signal. By considering these drawbacks, we propose a MUD technique using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The main objective of this technique is to detect the desired user signal with less interference ratio. An elliptic curve based key is generated and encoded the user signals before transmission. A BPSK technique is used for modulating the signals. The decoder decodes the desired user information and neglects the undesired user information. The performance comparison shows that this technique has better performance than the existing methods.
Keywords: cellular radio; code division multiple access; decoding; personal communication networks; phase shift keying; public key cryptography; radio access networks; radiofrequency interference; signal processing; BPSK technique; CDMA; ECC; MUD technique; adaptive hybrid multiuser detector; cellular mobile communications system; code division multiple access; decoding; elliptic curve cryptography; multiuser interference signal; personal communication system; radio access network; signal modulation; suboptimal multiuser detection technique; user signal encoding; Binary phase shift keying; Detectors; Elliptic curve cryptography; Interference; Multiaccess communication; Multiuser detection; Noise; B PSK; CDMA; Decoding; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Encoding; Key generation; Multi User Detection (ID#: 15-4191)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6923051&isnumber=6923038

 

Fournaris, A.P.; Zafeirakis, J.; Koufopavlou, O., "Designing and Evaluating High Speed Elliptic Curve Point Multipliers," Digital System Design (DSD), 2014 17th Euromicro Conference on, pp.169,174, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DSD.2014.104 Point Multiplication (PM) is considered the most computationally complex and resource hungry Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) related mathematic operation. The design of PM hardware accelerators follows approaches that have a trade off between utilized hardware resources and computation speed. In this paper, the above trade-off and its relation with the operations of the GF(2k) defining the Elliptic Curve (EC) is highlighted and investigated. Following this direction, a point operation design methodology based on the parallelization and scheduling of GF(2k) operations is proposed. This design approach is adapted to the PM employed GF(2k) multiplication algorithm and associated implementation in an effort to increase PM accelerator speed with an acceptable cost on chip covered area (hardware resources). Using the proposed methodology, two PM accelerator hardware architectures were proposed based on bit serial and bit parallel GF(2k) multipliers that, when implemented in FPGA technology, proved to be very fast in comparison to other similar works.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; public key cryptography; ECC; GF(2k) multiplication algorithm; PM; elliptic curve cryptography; point multiplication; Delay effects; Elliptic curve cryptography; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Multiplexing; Polynomials; Table lookup; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Finite Field computation; VLSI design (ID#: 15-4192)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927241&isnumber=6927207

 

Lin-Shung Huang; Adhikarla, S.; Boneh, D.; Jackson, C., "An Experimental Study of TLS Forward Secrecy Deployments," Internet Computing, IEEE, vol. 18, no.6, pp.43, 51, Nov.-Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MIC.2014.86 Many Transport Layer Security (TLS) servers use the ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (DHE) key exchange to support forward secrecy. However, in a survey of 473,802 TLS servers, the authors found that 82.9 percent of the DHE-enabled servers use weak DH parameters, resulting in a false sense of security. They compared the server throughput of various TLS setups, and measured real-world client-side latencies using an advertisement network. Their results indicate that using forward secrecy is no harder, and can even be faster using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), than no forward secrecy.
Keywords: public key cryptography; DHE key exchange; DHE-enabled servers; ECC; TLS forward secrecy deployments; TLS servers; advertisement network; client-side latencies; elliptic curve cryptography; ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange; server throughput; transport layer security servers; Browsers; Ciphers; Cryptography; DH-HEMTs; Elliptic curve cryptography; Internet; Network security; Servers; Throughput; Transport protocols; TLS; elliptic curve cryptography; forward secrecy (ID#: 15-4193)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6870379&isnumber=6938659

 

Pontie, S.; Maistri, P., "Design of a Secure Architecture For Scalar Multiplication On Elliptic Curves," Microelectronics and Electronics (PRIME), 2014 10th Conference on Ph.D. Research in, pp.1,4, June 30 2014-July 3 2014. doi: 10.1109/PRIME.2014.6872655 Embedded systems support more and more features. Authentication and confidentiality are part of them. These systems have limitations that put the public-key RSA algorithm at a disadvantage: Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) becomes more attractive because it requires less energy and less area. A lot of attacks exploit physical access on cryptographic hardware device: power analysis attacks (SPA, DPA), or timing analysis attacks. The coprocessor presented here supports all critical operations of an ECC cryptosystem and has been secured against side channel attacks.
Keywords: coprocessors; embedded systems; public key cryptography; DPA; ECC cryptosystem; SPA; coprocessor; cryptographic hardware device; elliptic curve cryptography; embedded systems; power analysis attacks; public-key RSA algorithm; scalar multiplication; secure architecture design; side channel attacks; timing analysis attacks; Algorithm design and analysis; Coprocessors; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Registers; Timing; Elliptic curve cryptography; scalar multiplication; side channel analysis (ID#: 15-4194)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6872655&isnumber=6872647

 

Doe, N.P.; Suganya, V., "Secure Service To Prevent Data Breaches In Cloud," Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1, 6, 3-5 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCI.2014.6921755 Cloud Computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a cloud of computers. Its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and dynamically re-allocation of resources as per demand make it desirable. At an unprecedented pace, cloud computing has simultaneously transformed business and government, and created new security challenges such as data breaches, data loss, account hijacking and denial of service. Paramount among these security threats is data breaches. The proposed work is to prevent data breaching threat by way of providing user authentication through one-time password system and challenge response, risk assessment to identify and prevent possible risks, encryption using enhanced elliptic curve cryptography where a cryptographically secure random number generation is used to make the number unpredictable, data integrity using MD5 technique, and key management. The platform for deployment of the application is Google App Engine.
Keywords: authorisation; cloud computing; public key cryptography; random number generation; risk management; Google App Engine;MD5 technique; account hijacking; cloud computing; cryptographically secure random number generation; data breach prevention; data loss; denial of service; dynamic resource reallocation; elliptic curve cryptography; one-time password system; personal computers; risk assessment; secure service; user authentication; Cloud computing; Computational modeling; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Encryption; MD5;authentication;cloud computing; elliptic curve cryptography; risk assessment; security issues (ID#: 15-4195)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6921755&isnumber=6921705

 

Daehee Kim; Sunshin An, "Efficient and Scalable Public Key Infrastructure For Wireless Sensor networks," Networks, Computers and Communications, The 2014 International Symposium on, pp.1,5, 17-19 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/SNCC.2014.6866514 Ensuring security is essential in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since a variety of applications of WSNs, including military, medical and industrial sectors, require several kinds of security services such as confidentiality, authentication, and integrity. However, ensuring security is not trivial in WSNs because of the limited resources of the sensor nodes. This has led a lot of researchers to focus on a symmetric key cryptography which is computationally lightweight, but requires a shared key between the sensor nodes. Public key cryptography (PKC) not only solves this problem gracefully, but also provides enhanced security services such as non-repudiation and digital signatures. To take advantage of PKC, each node must have a public key of the corresponding node via an authenticated method. The most widely used way is to use digital signatures signed by a certificate authority which is a part of a public key infrastructure (PKI). Since traditional PKI requires a huge amount of computations and communications, it can be heavy burden to WSNs. In this paper, we propose our own energy efficient and scalable PKI for WSNs. This is accomplished by taking advantage of heterogeneous sensor networks and elliptic curve cryptography. Our proposed PKI is analyzed in terms of security, energy efficiency, and scalability. As you will see later, our PKI is secure, energy efficient, and scalable.
Keywords: digital signatures; energy conservation; public key cryptography; telecommunication power management; wireless sensor networks; PKC; PKI; WSN; authenticated method; certificate authority; digital signatures; elliptic curve cryptography; energy efficiency; heterogeneous sensor networks; industrial sectors; medical sectors; military sectors; public key cryptography; public key infrastructure; security services; sensor nodes; symmetric key cryptography; wireless sensor networks; Cryptography; IP networks; Servers; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks;(k, n) Threshold Scheme; Certificate Authority; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Heterogeneous Sensor Networks; Public Key Infrastructure; Wireless Sensor Networks(ID#: 15-4196)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866514&isnumber=6866503

 

Druml, N.; Menghin, M.; Kuleta, A.; Steger, C.; Weiss, R.; Bock, H.; Haid, J., "A Flexible and Lightweight ECC-Based Authentication Solution for Resource Constrained Systems," Digital System Design (DSD), 2014 17th Euromicro Conference on , vol., no., pp.372,378, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DSD.2014.77 RFID-based and NFC-based applications can be found, apart from others, in security critical application fields, such as payment or access control. For this purpose, Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ECC) is commonly used hardware integrated in resource constrained applications in order to provide authenticity and data integrity. On the one hand, specialized crypto hardware approaches provide good performance and consume low power. On the other hand, they often lack flexibility, caused, for example, by hardware integrated protocols and cryptographic parameters. Here we present a flexible and lightweight ECC-based authentication solution that takes into account resource constrained systems. This technique permits to shift parts of the computational intense ECC calculations from the resource constrained device to the authentication terminal. By employing a security controller with a small multi-purpose hardware acceleration core, high computation speed is achieved and a maximum level of flexibility is maintained at the same time. We demonstrate the feasible implementation of the proposed technique by means of an Android-based reader / smart card system, which represent a prime example of contemporary power-constrained and performance-constrained embedded systems. An ECC-based authentication can be carried out on average within 25 ms and checked against a back-end server within 66 ms in a secured manner. Thus, a secured and flexible one-way authentication system is given that shows high performance. This solution can be utilized in a wide variety of application fields, such as anti-counterfeiting, where flexibility and low chip prices are essential.
Keywords: Android (operating system); data integrity; message authentication; public key cryptography; radiofrequency identification; resource allocation; smart cards; Android-based reader/smart card system; ECC-based authentication solution; NFC-based application; RFID-based application; access control; anticounterfeiting; authentication terminal; authenticity;back-end server; chip prices; computation speed; computational intense ECC calculation; crypto hardware approach; cryptographic parameter; data integrity; elliptic-curve cryptography; flexible one-way authentication system; hardware integrated protocol; multipurpose hardware core; payment; performance-constrained embedded system; power-constrained embedded system; resource constrained application; resource constrained device; resource constrained systems; security controller; security critical application field; Authentication; Cryptography; Embedded systems; Protocols; Smart cards;Timing;Authentication; Elliptic-Curve Cryptography; Resource Constrained System; Smart Card (ID#: 15-4197)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927267&isnumber=6927207

 

Alrimeih, H.; Rakhmatov, D., "Fast and Flexible Hardware Support for ECC Over Multiple Standard Prime Fields," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.22, no.12, pp.2661, 2674, Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2013.2294649 Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used as an efficient mechanism to secure private data using public-key protocols. We focus on ECC over five standard prime fields recommended by the National Institute of Standard and Technology (with the corresponding prime sizes of 192, 224, 256, 384, and 521 bits) and propose a novel hardware processor that enables flexible security–performance tradeoffs. To enhance performance, our processor exploits parallelism by pipelining modular arithmetic computations and associated input/output data transfers. To enhance security, modular arithmetic computations and associated data transfers are grouped into atomically executed computational blocks. The flexibility of our processor is achieved through the software-controlled hardware programmability, which allows for different scenarios of computing atomic block sequences. A Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA implementation of the proposed hardware architecture takes between 0.30 ms (192-bit ECC) and 3.91 ms (521-bit ECC) to perform a typical scalar multiplication, which demonstrates both flexibility and efficiency of our processor.
Keywords: Algorithm design and analysis; Data transfer; Elliptic curve cryptography; Hardware; NIST; Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC); parallel atomic computation; prime fields; programmable hardware; security--performance tradeoffs.; security performance tradeoffs (ID#: 15-4198)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6704828&isnumber=6963544

 

Jen-Wei Lee; Szu-Chi Chung; Hsie-Chia Chang; Chen-Yi Lee, "Efficient Power-Analysis-Resistant Dual-Field Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Processor Using Heterogeneous Dual-Processing-Element Architecture," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.22, no.1, pp.49,61, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2013.2237930 Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for portable applications is in high demand to ensure secure information exchange over wireless channels. Because of the high computational complexity of ECC functions, dedicated hardware architecture is essential to provide sufficient ECC performance. Besides, crypto-ICs are vulnerable to side-channel information leakage because the private key can be revealed via power-analysis attacks. In this paper, a new heterogeneous dual-processing-element (dual-PE) architecture and a priority-oriented scheduling of right-to-left double-and-add-always EC scalar multiplication (ECSM) with randomized processing technique are proposed to achieve a power-analysis-resistant dual-field ECC (DF-ECC) processor. For this dual-PE design, a memory hierarchy with local memory synchronization scheme is also exploited to improve data bandwidth. Fabricated in a 90-nm CMOS technology, a 0.4- mm2 160-b DF-ECC chip can achieve 0.34/0.29 ms 11.7/9.3 μJ for one GF(p)/GF(2m) ECSM. Compared to other related works, our approach is advantageous not only in hardware efficiency but also in protection against power-analysis attacks.
Keywords: CMOS digital integrated circuits; computational complexity; microprocessor chips; private key cryptography; public key cryptography; synchronisation; wireless channels; CMOS technology; DF-ECC chip; ECC functions; computational complexity; crypto-IC; data bandwidth; dedicated hardware architecture; dual-PE design; efficient power-analysis-resistant dual-field elliptic curve cryptographic processor; hardware efficiency; heterogeneous dual-PE architecture; heterogeneous dual-processing-element architecture; information exchange security ;local memory synchronization scheme; memory hierarchy; portable application; power-analysis attacks; power-analysis-resistant DF-ECC processor; priority-oriented scheduling; private key; randomized processing technique; right-to-left double-and-add-always EC scalar multiplication; side-channel information leakage; size 90 nm; wireless channels; Algorithm design and analysis; Computer architecture; Elliptic curve cryptography; Hardware; Instruction sets; Processor scheduling; Scheduling; Dual fields; elliptic curve cryptography (ECC);heterogeneous processing-element architecture; parallel computations ;power-analysis attacks (ID#: 15-4199)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6459050&isnumber=6690268

 

Kun Ma; Kaijie Wu, "Error Detection and Recovery for ECC: A New Approach Against Side-Channel Attacks," Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.33, no.4, pp.627,637, April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCAD.2013.2293058 Side channel attacks allow an attacker to retrieve secret keys with far less effort than other attacks. Countermeasures against these attacks should be considered during cryptosystem design. This paper presents a novel low-cost error detection and recovery scheme (LOEDAR) to counter fault attacks. The proposed architecture retains the efficiency of the Montgomery ladder algorithm and shows strong resistance to both environmental-induced faults as well as attacker-introduced faults. Moreover, the proposed LOEDAR scheme is compatible with most existing countermeasures against various power analysis attacks including differential power analysis and its variants, which makes it extendable to a comprehensive countermeasure against both fault attacks and power analysis attacks.
Keywords: error detection; public key cryptography; ECC; LOEDAR scheme; Montgomery ladder algorithm; differential power analysis; elliptic curve cryptography; fault attacks; novel low-cost error detection and recovery scheme; power analysis attacks; secret keys; side-channel attacks; Algorithm design and analysis; Circuit faults; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Error correction codes; Registers; Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC);Montgomery ladder; error detection and recovery; fault attack; power analysis; side-channel attack (ID#: 15-4200)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6774527&isnumber=6774487

 

Shyam, V.; Sujatha, D., "FPGA Implementation Of An Efficient And Highly Secure Cryptoprocessor Over Barreto-Naehrig Curves," Green Computing Communication and Electrical Engineering (ICGCCEE), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,5, 6-8 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICGCCEE.2014.6922282 Pairings such as Tate, Ate and Optimal-ate are used to perform operations over special form of elliptic curves known as Barreto-Naehrig (BN) curves. Computation of the pairings involve the floating point operations which is difficult to perform and for this purpose special hardware blocks are used. Existing techniques uses Montgomery multiplication algorithm which uses one hardware block corresponding to each operations. This results in increase in the area. Also these hardware blocks take more time to perform these computations. So this paper aims at 1) reducing the computation time of the cryptographic operations and 2) minimizing the hardware blocks required for performing the computations thereby reducing the area. A new dedicated Cryptoprocessor is proposed which consists of a single hardware unit to perform all the operations. The implementation results on a Virtex-4 FPGA device shows that it consumes 23k Slices and computes the tate pairing in 16.475ns.
Keywords: computational complexity; field programmable gate arrays; floating point arithmetic; group theory; microprocessor chips; public key cryptography; Barreto-Naehrig curves; Montgomery multiplication algorithm;Virtex-4 FPGA device; area reduction; ate pairing; computation time reduction; cryptographic operations; elliptic curve cryptography; field programmable gate array; floating point operations; hardware block minimization; optimal-ate pairing; secure cryptoprocessor; tate pairing; Adders ;Elliptic curve cryptography; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Multiplexing; Registers; Cryptoprocessor; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Field Programmable Gate Array; Pairing Computations (ID#: 15-4201)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6922282&isnumber=6920919

 

Realpe-Muñoz, P.; Trujillo-Olaya, V.; Velasco-Medina, J., "Design of Elliptic Curve Cryptoprocessors Over GF(2¹⁶³) On Koblitz Curves," Circuits and Systems (LASCAS), 2014 IEEE 5th Latin American Symposium on, pp.1,4, 25-28 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/LASCAS.2014.6820253 This paper presents the design of cryptoprocessors using two multipliers over finite field GF(2¹⁶³) with digit-level processing. The arithmetic operations were implemented in hardware using Gaussian Normal Bases (GNB) representation and the scalar multiplication kP was performed on Koblitz curves using window-τNAF algorithm with w = 2, 4, 8 and 16. The cryptoprocessors were designed using VHDL description, synthesized on the Stratix-IV FPGA using Quartus II 12.0, and verified using SignalTAP II and Matlab. The simulation results show that the cryptoprocessors present a very good performance using low area. In this case, the computation times for calculating the scalar multiplication for w = 2, 4, 8 and 16 were 9.88, 7.37, 6.17 and 5.05 μs.
Keywords: Gaussian processes; digital arithmetic; field programmable gate arrays; hardware description languages; mathematics computing; public key cryptography ;GNB representation; Gaussian normal bases representation; Koblitz curves; Matlab; Quartus II 12.0;SignalTAP II; Stratix-IV FPGA; VHDL description ;arithmetic operations; digit-level processing; elliptic curve cryptoprocessors; finite field GF(2163);scalar multiplication; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Galois fields; Gaussian processes; Hardware; Elliptic curve cryptography; Gaussian normal basis; Koblitz curves; digit-level multiplier (ID#: 15-4202)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6820253&isnumber=6820243

 

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

 

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review), Part 2

 

	Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review)  Part 2

 

Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally.  In 2014, more than one hundred articles of interest to the Science of Security community have been published.  We cite them here in five parts.

 

Vincy, J.; Krithika, S.; Gowtham, K., "Design of Cryptosystem Based On ECC Algorithm Using Hexadecimal Values Of Character," Green Computing Communication and Electrical Engineering (ICGCCEE), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,6, 6-8 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICGCCEE.2014.6922205 This paper proposes a new approach to encrypt data with new modified cryptosystem based on elliptic curve. This new version utilizes the original Menezes Vanstone cryptosystem. But it has some additional features to cryptosystem's encryption method. According to the encryption method, first the message is divided into blocks that contain only one character, and then each character is converted to hexadecimal value. A hexadecimal value of each character has two digits. These two digits allow us to express the message as a point in curve. The knowledge of each character's point need not be sent to the recipient. The paper explains the implementation of encrypting data with new modified cryptosystem based on elliptic curve using VHDL.
Keywords: public key cryptography; ECC algorithm; VHDL; cryptosystem; elliptic curve; hexadecimal values of character; Algorithm design and analysis; Ciphers; Elliptic curve cryptography ;Elliptic curves; Encryption; Cryptography; Elliptic curve cryptography; Menezes Vanstone cryptosystem; Symmetric key (ID#: 15-4203)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6922205&isnumber=6920919

 

Young Sil Lee; Alasaarela, E.; HoonJae Lee, "Secure Key Management Scheme Based On ECC Algorithm For Patient's Medical Information In Healthcare System," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2014 International Conference on, pp.453,457, 10-12 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2014.6799723 Recent advances in Wireless Sensor Networks have given rise to many application areas in healthcare such as the new field of Wireless Body Area Networks. The health status of humans can be tracked and monitored using wearable and non-wearable sensor devices. Security in WBAN is very important to guarantee and protect the patient's personal sensitive data and establishing secure communications between BAN sensors and external users is key to addressing prevalent security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose secure and efficient key management scheme based on ECC algorithm to protect patient's medical information in healthcare system. Our scheme divided into three phases as setup, registration, verification and key exchange. And we use the identification code which is the SIM card number on a patient's smart phone with the private key generated by the legal use instead of the third party. Also to prevent the replay attack, we use counter number at every process of authenticated message exchange to resist.
Keywords: body area networks; health care; medical information systems; message authentication; public key cryptography; ECC algorithm; WBAN; authenticated message exchange; healthcare system; patient medical information protection; secure key management scheme; wireless body area networks; wireless sensor networks; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Medical services; Sensors; Wireless sensor networks; Elliptic curve Cryptography; body area sensor network security; healthcare security; key management; secure communication (ID#: 15-4204)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6799723&isnumber=6799467

 

Chiou-Yng Lee; Chun-Sheng Yang; Meher, B.K.; Meher, P.K.; Jeng-Shyang Pan, "Low-Complexity Digit-Serial and Scalable SPB/GPB Multipliers Over Large Binary Extension Fields Using (b,2)-Way Karatsuba Decomposition," Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 61, no.11, pp.3115, 3124, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCSI.2014.2335031 Shifted polynomial basis (SPB) and generalized polynomial basis (GPB) are two variations of polynomial basis representation. SPB/GPB have potential for efficient bit-level and digit-level implementations of multiplication over binary extension fields. This paper presents a (b,2)-way KA decomposition for digit-serial multiplication with low-space complexity. Based on the proposed parallel (b,2)-way KA scheme, we derive a novel scalable SPB/GPB multiplier. Analytical results show that the proposed multiplier could achieve the desired trade-off between space and time complexities. Our proposed multiplier is modular, regular, and suitable for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementations. It involves significantly less area complexity, less computation time and less energy consumption compared to the existing digit-serial and scalable multipliers.
Keywords: VLSI; multiplying circuits; polynomials; public key cryptography;(b,2)-way Karatsuba decomposition; SPB-GPB multipliers; VLSI; binary extension fields; elliptic curve cryptography; generalized polynomial basis; low-complexity digit-serial multiplication; shifted polynomial basis; very large scale integration; Complexity theory; Computer architecture; Delays; Hardware; Logic gates; Polynomials; Pulse width modulation; Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC);Karatsuba algorithm; pairing computation; shifted polynomial basis (ID#: 15-4205)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6924813&isnumber=6936397

 

Javeed, K.; Xiaojun Wang, "Radix-4 and radix-8 Booth Encoded Interleaved Modular Multipliers over General F_p," Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014 24th International Conference on, pp. 1, 6, 2-4 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/FPL.2014.6927452 This paper presents radix-4 and radix-8 Booth encoded modular multipliers over general Fp based on inter-leaved multiplication algorithm. An existing bit serial interleaved multiplication algorithm is modified using radix-4, radix-8 and Booth recoding techniques. The modified radix-4 and radix-8 versions of interleaved multiplication result in 50% and 75% reduction in required number of clock cycles for one modular multiplication over the corresponding bit serial interleaved multipliers, while maintaining a competitive critical path delay. The proposed architectures are implemented in Verilog HDL and synthesized by targeting virtex-6 FPGA platform. Due to an efficient utilization of optimized addition chains available in FPGAs and exploiting the parallelism among operations, the proposed radix-4 and radix-8 multipliers compute one 256 × 256 bit modular multiplication in 1.49μs and 0.93μs respectively, which are 35% and 94% improvement over the corresponding bit serial version. Further, this work also presents a thorough comparison on basis of area, throughput, and area × time per bit value. Which shows that these designs are efficiently optimized for area × time per bit value with a high throughput rate. Thus, these designs are suitable to construct most of the elliptic curve and pairing based cryptographic processors.
Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; hardware description languages; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; Verilog HDL;Virtex-6 FPGA platform; bit serial interleaved multiplication algorithm; booth recoding; critical path delay; elliptic curve cryptographic processors; pairing based cryptographic processors;radix-4 booth encoded interleaved modular multipliers;radix-8 booth encoded interleaved modular multipliers; Algorithm design and analysis; Clocks; Computer architecture; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Registers; Throughput; Finite field; elliptic curve cryptography (ECC);interleaved multiplication; public key cryptography (PKC) (ID#: 15-4206)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927452&isnumber=6927322

 

Jeng-Shyang Pan; Azarderakhsh, R.; Kermani, M.M.; Chiou-Yng Lee; Wen-Yo Lee; Che Wun Chiou; Jim-Min Lin, "Low-Latency Digit-Serial Systolic Double Basis Multiplier over GF(2^m)  Using Subquadratic Toeplitz Matrix-Vector Product Approach," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no.5, pp.1169,1181, May 2014. doi: 10.1109/TC.2012.239 Recently in cryptography and security, the multipliers with subquadratic space complexity for trinomials and some specific pentanomials have been proposed. For such kind of multipliers, alternatively, we use double basis multiplication which combines the polynomial basis and the modified polynomial basis to develop a new efficient digit-serial systolic multiplier. The proposed multiplier depends on trinomials and almost equally space pentanomials (AESPs), and utilizes the subquadratic Toeplitz matrix-vector product scheme to derive a low-latency digit-serial systolic architecture. If the selected digit-size is d bits, the proposed digit-serial multiplier for both polynomials, i.e., trinomials and AESPs, requires the latency of 2⌈√{m/d⌉, while traditional ones take at least O(⌈m/d⌉) clock cycles. Analytical and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) synthesis results indicate that both the area and the time × area complexities of our proposed architecture are significantly lower than the existing digit-serial systolic multipliers.
Keywords: logic design; matrix multiplication; multiplying circuits; systolic arrays; AESP; ASIC synthesis; almost equally space pentanomial; application-specific integrated circuit; digit-serial systolic double basis multiplier over GF(2^m);low-latency digit-serial systolic architecture; polynomial basis; subquadratic Toeplitz matrix-vector product approach; subquadratic space complexity; trinomials; Clocks; Complexity theory; Computer architecture; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Polynomials; Vectors; Subquadratic Toeplitz matrix-vector product; digit-serial systolic multiplier; double basis; elliptic curve cryptography (ID#: 15-4207)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6319292&isnumber=6810193

 

Ali Jatoi, P.; Chowdhry, B.S.; Memon, A.A.; Ullah, M.G., "Exchanging Information In Wireless Sensor Networks At Very Low Time Consumption Rate In An Efficient Hybrid Cryptographic Algorithm," Wireless Communications, Vehicular Technology, Information Theory and Aerospace & Electronic Systems (VITAE), 2014 4th International Conference on, pp.1,5, 11-14 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/VITAE.2014.6934429 Sensors are the tiny nodes which are used for getting information from any particular area for some particular situations. These are usually deployed in such places where existence of human may not be possible. These are very small electronic devices having very short amount of resources like memory, power as well as bandwidth. A number of nodes are deployed which are connected with each other and also connected with a base station. While deploying on particular place, there might occur two types of problems; nodes may be in excess or very far from each other. If the nodes are in majority, then the network may be inefficient due to interference and malicious access control collisions. Efficiency of network is the main issue to be resolved at priority bases. While transferring of information from node to node or from node to base station, the least time must be consumed. As much as the network will be efficient, the data will be received and sent easily from node to node or at sink. For making network reliable and secure, cryptographic techniques have been used. A hybrid algorithm has been suggested here using both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic techniques. A message is divided into two parts containing Meta data and original data. Symmetric cryptography has been implemented on Meta data part while asymmetric cryptography has been applied for the original part of message. This approach will make our network more efficient as well as secure and reliable.
Keywords: cryptography; sensor placement; telecommunication network reliability; wireless sensor networks; base station; cryptographic technique; efficient hybrid cryptographic algorithm; information exchange; malicious access control collision; nodes deployment; radiofrequency interference; symmetric cryptography; very low time consumption rate; wireless sensor networks; Algorithm design and analysis; Encryption; Public key cryptography; Routing protocols; Wireless sensor networks; Asymmetric; Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Node; Public Key Cryptography; SPIN; Symmetric; Symmetric Key Cryptography; Wireless Sensor Network (ID#: 15-4208)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6934429&isnumber=6934393

 

Venkatasubramani, V.R.; Ram Kumar, G.; Vignesh, K.; ManiRajan, G.; Rajaram, S., "Fast Computation Of Scalar Multiplication Over Binary Edwards Curve Processor Against Side Channel Attack," Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 1, 7, 13-14 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECS.2014.6892615 Effective implementation of scalar multiplication is vital for Elliptic Curve Crypto-Processor over GF(2^m). They have problems in terms of unifiedness and completeness that is overcome by the Edwards Curve. In this paper, the scalar multiplication is done using Non Adjacent Form Algorithm (NAF). We illustrate parallelization in group operation level by utilizing unified addition formulas computation for Binary Edwards Curve (BEC). This decreases the number of field arithmetic operations, specifically multiplications, in the critical path by using many multipliers simultaneously. Also there is significant reduction in number of clock cycles and register resource at the expense of area usage. We estimate the LUT complexity and tradeoffs between time-area of the proposed BEC processor on FPGA. The results prove that the proposed BEC processor has better time performance compared to existing techniques.
Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; public key cryptography; table lookup; BEC; FPGA; LUT complexity; NAF; binary Edwards curve processor; clock cycle; elliptic curve cryptoprocessor; field arithmetic operation; nonadjacent form algorithm; register resource; scalar multiplication computation; side channel attack; Application specific integrated circuits; Artificial intelligence; Cryptography; Field programmable gate arrays; Time-frequency analysis; Binary Edwards Curve (BEC);Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC); Non Adjacent Form Algorithm (NAF); Power Profile Analysis (ID#: 15-4209)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6892615&isnumber=6892507

 

Doche, C.; Sutantyo, D., "New and Improved Methods to Analyze and Compute Double-Scalar Multiplications," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 230, 242, Jan.  2014. doi: 10.1109/TC.2012.184 We address several algorithms to perform a double-scalar multiplication on an elliptic curve. All the methods investigated are related to the double-base number system (DBNS) and extend previous work of Doche et al. [25]. We refine and rigorously prove the complexity analysis of the joint binary-ternary (JBT) algorithm. Experiments are in line with the theory and show that the JBT requires approximately 6 percent less field multiplications than the standard joint sparse form (JSF) method to compute [n]P + [m]Q. We also introduce a randomized version of the JBT, called JBT-Rand, that gives total control of the number of triplings in the expansion that is produced. So it becomes possible with the JBT-Rand to adapt and tune the number of triplings to the coordinate system and bit length that are used, to further decrease the cost of a double-scalar multiplication. Then, we focus on Koblitz curves. For extension degrees enjoying an optimal normal basis of type II, we discuss a Joint τ-DBNS approach that reduces the number of field multiplications by at least 35 percent over the traditional τ-JSF. For other extension degrees represented in polynomial basis, the Joint τ-DBNS is still relevant provided that appropriate bases conversion methods are used. In this situation, tests show that the speedup over the τ-JSF is then larger than 20 percent. Finally, when the use of the τ-DBNS becomes unrealistic, for instance because of the lack of an efficient normal basis or the lack of memory to allow an efficient conversion, we adapt the joint binary-ternary algorithm to Koblitz curves giving rise to the Joint τ-τ method whose complexity is analyzed and proved. The Joint τ-τ induces a speedup of about 10 percent over the τ-JSF.
Keywords: linear algebra; public key cryptography; JBT-rand algorithm; Koblitz curves; complexity analysis; double-base number system; double-scalar multiplication; elliptic curve; joint τ-τ method; joint τ-DBNS approach; joint binary-ternary algorithm; polynomial basis; Algorithm design and analysis; Approximation algorithms; Cryptography; Elliptic curves; Equations; Interference; Joints; Elliptic curve cryptography; Koblitz curves; double-base number system; double-scalar multiplication; joint sparse form (ID#: 15-4210)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6256663&isnumber=6678157

 

Abdallah, W.; Boudriga, N.; Daehee Kim; Sunshin An, "An Efficient And Scalable Key Management Mechanism For Wireless Sensor Networks," Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), 2014 16th International Conference on, pp.687, 692, 16-19 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICACT.2014.6779051 A major issue to secure wireless sensor networks is key distribution. Current key distribution schemes are not fully adapted to the tiny, low-cost, and fragile sensors with limited computation capability, reduced memory size, and battery-based power supply. This paper investigates the design of an efficient key distribution and management scheme for wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme can ensure the generation and distribution of different encryption keys intended to secure individual and group communications. This is performed based on elliptic curve public key encryption using Diffie-Hellman like key exchange and secret sharing techniques that are applied at different levels of the network topology. This scheme is more efficient and less complex than existing approaches, due to the reduced communication and processing overheads required to accomplish key exchange. Furthermore, few keys with reduced sizes are managed in sensor nodes which optimize memory usage, and enhances scalability to large size networks.
Keywords: public key cryptography; telecommunication network management; telecommunication network topology; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; Diffie-Hellman like key exchange; battery-based power supply; elliptic curve public key encryption; encryption keys; group communications; key distribution schemes; large size networks; limited computation capability; network topology; processing overheads; reduced memory size; scalable key management mechanism; secret sharing techniques; secure wireless sensor networks; sensor nodes; Base stations; Elliptic curves; Public key; Sensors; Wireless sensor networks; Elliptic curve cryptography; Key management; Security; Wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-4211)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6779051&isnumber=6778899

 

Pontie, S.; Maistri, P.; Leveugle, R., "An Elliptic Curve Crypto-Processor Secured by Randomized Windows," Digital System Design (DSD), 2014 17th Euromicro Conference on, pp. 535, 542, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DSD.2014.18  Embedded systems are increasingly providing secure functionalities, which often rely on some dedicated hardware for symmetric and public-key cryptography. When resources are limited, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) may be chosen instead of the more widely known RSA, which needs much longer keys for the same security level. However, ECC may be vulnerable, as any other cryptographic implementation, to side channel analysis, which may reveal secret information by analyzing collateral sources of information, such as power consumption. Countermeasures must be thus adopted at the design level, in order to ensure robust and secure operation of the device. We propose here a new scalar multiplication algorithm on an elliptic curve, based on a novel randomized window method. This design is protected against side channel attacks (Timing, Simple and Differential Power Analysis) and it is implemented over prime fields, but it can be applied to binary fields as well. In order to evaluate this countermeasure, we provide its costs, and an estimation of the additional entropy added to the computation against side channels attacks.
Keywords: embedded systems; public key cryptography; ECC; differential power analysis attack; elliptic curve cryptography; elliptic curve cryptoprocessor; embedded systems; information sources; public-key cryptography; randomized window method; scalar multiplication algorithm; side channel analysis; side channel attacks; simple power analysis attack; symmetric cryptography; timing attack; Algorithm design and analysis; Coprocessors; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Heuristic algorithms; Radiation detectors; elliptic curves; power analysis;scalar multiplication; side channel analysis (ID#: 15-4212)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927288&isnumber=6927207

 

Ravikumar, K.; Udhayakumar, A., "Secure Multiparty Electronic Payments Using ECC Algorithm: A Comparative Study," Computing and Communication Technologies (WCCCT), 2014 World Congress on, pp.132, 136, Feb. 27 2014-March 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/WCCCT.2014.31 This paper is an attempt at the detailed study of Cryptography algorithm. In resource constrained system, Elliptic Curve Cryptography is a promising alternative for public algorithms, because it provides similar level of security with proposed shorter keys than conventional integer based public key algorithm. ECC over binary field is taken up with special interest because the operation in binary filed operation, are thought to be more in space and efficient in time. However, ECC's software implementation, on binary field are slow, Specially on low end processors, which are used in small computing devices such as sensors node, mobile phone, etc. This proposed paper, studied the Cryptography algorithms and software implementation of ECC. Firstly, while implementing ECC with software, for example byte size may affect the choice of algorithm some architectural parameters has been examined. Also, identification of software for low-end processors has been done. In addition, the proposed paper has implemented ECC algorithm in Multiparty Electronic transaction.
Keywords: electronic commerce; public key cryptography; software architecture; transaction processing; ECC algorithm; ECC software implementation; architectural parameters; binary field; binary filed operation; byte size; cryptography algorithm; elliptic curve cryptography; low-end processors; multiparty electronic transaction; public algorithms; resource constrained system; secure multiparty electronic payments; software identification; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Program processors; Software algorithms; Cryptography; DES; DSA; ECC; Elliptic Curve; RSA (ID#: 15-4213)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6755121&isnumber=6755083

 

Nagaraju, M.; Srinu, M.; Satish Kumar, B., "Efficient Design And FPGA Implementation Of ECPBSG Algorithm For A Secure Communication Applications," Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 1 , 6, 13-14 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECS.2014.6892766 The main aim of this paper is to design hardware efficient secure communication system. To design a secure communication system of low hardware complexity, one method is to avoid redundancy in cryptography primitives. The method used for encryption can be either a stream cipher or block cipher. But the hardware complexity of a stream cipher is much less than that of a block ciphers. Hence in a secure communication system of low hardware complexity, stream cipher is a suitable method in order to reduce redundant hardware for the implementation of some other cryptographic service in time sharing way in the system. The key exchange and encryption are two sequential operations and a popular standard used for key exchange is Elliptic Curve (EC) based method. Most critical step in the design of stream cipher is the design of a Cryptographically Strong Pseudorandom Bit Sequence Generator (CSPBSG). This PBSG is implemented based on Elliptic Curve (EC). The main complex hardware block in Elliptic Curve Pseudorandom Bit Sequence Generator (ECPBSG) is EC point multiplication block. The computational complexity of the EC point multiplication is reduced by using normal basis representation for elements of GF (2^m). The GF multiplier structure used in implementation of EC point multiplication is chosen such that the overall hardware complexity is low. It is possible to design secure stream ciphers based on EC point multiplication. Hence this paper completely concentrates on hardware efficiency, in the implementation of secure communication system.
Keywords: Galois fields; digital arithmetic; field programmable gate arrays; logic design; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; ECPBSG algorithm; FPGA implementation; Galois field multiplier structure; block cipher; cryptographically strong pseudorandom bit sequence generator; cryptography primitive; elliptic curve based method; elliptic curve pseudorandom bit sequence generator; key exchange; low hardware complexity; point multiplication block; secure communication applications; sequential operation; stream cipher; Ciphers; Communication systems; Complexity theory; Elliptic curve cryptography; Generators; Hardware; CSPBSG; EC; ECC; ECPBSG; GF; Gibberish; RSA; WEP (ID#: 15-4214)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6892766&isnumber=6892507

 

Kodali, R.K., "Implementation of ECC with hidden Generator Point in Wireless Sensor Networks," Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), 2014 Sixth International Conference on, pp. 1, 4, 6-10 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/COMSNETS.2014.6734924 With ever growing demand for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in military and commercial application areas, the urge for secure data exchange over the network is also on the increase. The standard cryptographic algorithms, such as the RSA can not address the security issue due to its computational complexity and the resource constrained nature of the constituent nodes. Another public key cryptographic (PKC) algorithm, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been emerging as a promising alternative to be used in WSN nodes, as it is capable of providing a similar security level using smaller key length compared to that of the RSA. As WSN nodes are deployed randomly over the field, these nodes are more vulnerable to the man-in-middle (MIM) attack. In traditional ECC algorithm, the Generator point is published along with other domain parameters. An intruder, launching MIM attack, could crack the public key, leading to a security breach in the network. This work proposes a technique for ECC with a hidden generator point in order to overcome the MIM attack. Three different algorithms based on distribution of points on the elliptic cure (EC), using a different generator point for each encrypted message and selecting different generator points for each session are discussed. A comparison based on the computational cost and security for three different techniques is also presented.
Keywords: computational complexity; electronic data interchange; message authentication; public key cryptography; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; ECC algorithm; MIM attack; PKC algorithm; RSA; WSN; commercial application; computational complexity; constituent node; elliptic curve cryptography; hidden generator point; man-in-middle attack; message encryption; military application; public key cryptography; resource constraint; secure data exchange ; security level; standard cryptographic algorithm; wireless sensor network; Communication system security; Elliptic curve cryptography; Generators; Protocols; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; ECC ;MIM attack; generator point (ID#: 15-4215)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6734924&isnumber=6734849

 

Vedhavathy, T.R.; Manikandan, M.S.K.; Indrajith, N., "Secure Incentive Mechanism For Multihop Wireless Networks," Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,5, 13-14 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECS.2014.6892649 In multi hop wireless networks, the mobile nodes perform routing to relay the packets of other nodes. But selfish nodes do not relay other nodes' packets to save their limited resources. It greatly affect the network throughput and performance. Credits are used to stimulate the selfish nodes' cooperation in incentive protocols. But the existing protocols use heavyweight public-key cryptographic operations for securing the payment. In this paper, we propose secure incentive mechanism that uses the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and the hashing operations, so as to improve the network performance and throughput. The proposed technique reduces the overhead of the system which is less than that of the public-key based protocols.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; mobile radio; packet radio networks; public key cryptography; relay networks (telecommunication);telecommunication network routing; telecommunication security; ECC; elliptic curve cryptography; hashing operations; incentive protocols; mobile nodes; multihop wireless networks; network performance improvement; network throughput improvement; packet relaying; packet routing; payment security; public-key based protocols; public-key cryptographic operations; secure incentive mechanism; selfish node cooperation; Elliptic curve cryptography; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Routing; Cooperation stimulation; Incentive mechanisms; security; selfish nodes (ID#: 15-4216)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6892649&isnumber=6892507

 

Jheng-Hao Ye; Szu-Han Huang; Ming-Der Shieh, "An Efficient Countermeasure Against Power Attacks for ECC over GF(p)," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp. 814, 817, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865260 Power attacks are serious threats to cryptographic devices, and most countermeasures against power attacks result in a large time overhead for hardware implementation. This work presents an efficient countermeasure against power attacks for elliptic curve cryptography over GF(p). The proposed algorithm adopts the Montgomery ladder scalar multiplication algorithm as a basic framework to protect SPA. Then, a new scheme is presented to effectively manipulate the key so as to reduce the resulting time overhead for preventing differential power attack (DPA) and zero power attack (ZPA). Particularly, the base point blinding technique and half key splitting scheme are used to protect the upper and the lower halves of the key, respectively. Experimental results show the proposed countermeasure exhibit a time advantage over related works. Compared to other countermeasures against SPA, DPA, and ZPA, the proposed one can achieve up to 15% time improvement for accomplishing one 160-bit GF(p) scalar multiplication.
Keywords: matrix multiplication; public key cryptography; DPA; ECC;GF(p);Montgomery ladder scalar multiplication algorithm; ZPA; base point blinding technique; cryptographic devices; differential power attack prevention; elliptic curve cryptography; half key splitting scheme; resulting time overhead reduction; zero power attack prevention; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Hardware; Power demand; Resistance (ID#: 15-4217)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6865260&isnumber=6865048

 

Iwasaki, A.; Dohi, K.; Shibata, Y.; Oguri, K.; Harasawa, R., "A Soft-Core Processor For Finite Field Arithmetic With A Variable Word Size Accelerator," Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014 24th International Conference on, pp. 1, 4, 2-4 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/FPL.2014.6927388 This paper presents implementation and evaluation of an accelerator architecture for soft-cores to speed up reduction process for the arithmetic on GF(2^m) used in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) systems. In this architecture, the word size of the accelerator can be customized when the architecture is configured on an FPGA. Focusing on the fact that the number of the reduction processing operations on GF(2^m) is affected by the irreducible polynomial and the word size, we propose to employ an unconventional word size for the accelerator depending on a given irreducible polynomial and implement a MIPS-based soft-core processor coupled with a variable-word size accelerator. As a result of evaluation with several polynomials, it was shown that the performance improvement of up to 10.2 times was obtained compared to the 32-bit word size, even taking into account the maximum frequency degradation of 20.4% caused by changing the word size. The advantage of using unconventional word sizes was also shown, suggesting the promise of this approach for low-power ECC systems.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; field programmable gate arrays; low-power electronics; public key cryptography; FPGA; MIPS-based soft-core processor; accelerator architecture; elliptic curve cryptography systems; finite field arithmetic; irreducible polynomial; low-power ECC systems; reduction processing operations; variable word size accelerator; word length 32 bit; Clocks; Elliptic curve cryptography; Error correction codes; Field programmable gate arrays; Polynomials; Registers (ID#: 15-4218)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927388&isnumber=6927322

 

Mansour, I.; Chalhoub, G.; Lafourcade, P.; Delobel, F., "Secure Key Renewal And Revocation for Wireless Sensor Networks," Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2014 IEEE 39th Conference on, pp. 382, 385, 8-11 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/LCN.2014.6925797 Once a secure mechanism for authenticated communication is deployed in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), several situations may arise: a node can leave the network, a new node can join the network, an intruder could try to join the network or capture a node. Therefore it is important to revoke and renew certain keys that are learned by a malicious node. We propose several secure WSN protocols for revocations and renewal of cryptographic keys in the network based on symmetric encryption and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). For all our solutions, we provide a formal analysis of the security of our protocols using Scyther, an automatic verification tool for cryptographic protocols. All the proposed protocols are proven secure but have different security levels by using different types of keys. Finally we implemented all our protocols on real testbeds using TelosB motes and compared their efficiency.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; public key cryptography; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; ECC; Scyther; TelosB motes; WSN protocols; authenticated communication; automatic verification tool; cryptographic keys; cryptographic protocols; elliptic curve cryptography; key renewal; key revocation; malicious node; symmetric encryption; wireless sensor networks; DH-HEMTs; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Protocols; Wireless sensor networks; Key Renewing; Key Revocation; Security; WSN (ID#: 15-4219)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6925797&isnumber=6925725

 

Kodali, R.K.; Amanchi, C.N.; Kumar, S.; Boppana, L., "FPGA Implementation Of Itoh-Tsujii Inversion Algorithm," Recent Advances and Innovations in Engineering (ICRAIE), 2014, pp. 1 ,5, 9-11 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICRAIE.2014.6909308 Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been gaining popularity due to its shorter key size requirements. It uses arithmetic operations including addition, subtraction, multiplication and inversion in finite fields. For an efficient implementation of ECC, it is very important to carry out these operations faster using lesser resources. The in version operation consumes most of the time and more resources. The Itoh-Tsujii algorithm can be used to carry out the computation of multiplicative inverse by making use of Brauer addition chains in less time. This work presents an FPGA implementation of the multiplicative inversion for the key lengths of 194-, 233-, and 384- bits. A resource comparison for these key lengths is also made. This work uses Sunar-Koc multiplier for the finite field, GF(2^m) multiplication.
Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; matrix multiplication; public key cryptography; Brauer addition chains; ECC; FPGA;GF(2^m) multiplication; Itoh-Tsujii inversion algorithm; Sunar-Koc multiplier; arithmetic operation; elliptic curve cryptography; multiplicative inverse; Elliptic curve cryptography; Equations;Field programmable gate arrays;E CC; inversion; multiplication (ID#: 15-4220)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6909308&isnumber=6909103

 

Bigou, K.; Tisserand, A., "RNS Modular Multiplication Through Reduced Base Extensions," Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), 2014 IEEE 25th International Conference on, pp.57,62, 18-20 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ASAP.2014.6868631 The paper describes a new RNS (residue number system) modular multiplication algorithm, for finite field arithmetic over FP, based on a reduced number of moduli in base extensions with only 3n=2 moduli instead of 2n for standard ones. Our algorithm reduces both the number of elementary modular multiplications (EMMs) and the number of stored precomputations for large asymmetric cryptographic applications such as elliptic curve cryptography or Diffie-Hellman (DH) cryptosystem. It leads to faster operations and smaller circuits.
Keywords: cryptography; residue number systems; DH cryptosystem; Diffie-Hellman cryptosystem; EMM;RNS modular multiplication algorithm; asymmetric cryptographic applications; base extensions; elementary modular multiplications; elliptic curve cryptography; finite field arithmetic; reduced base extensions; residue number system; Application specific integrated circuits; Barium; Elliptic curve cryptography; Graphics processing units; Memory; Standard (ID#: 15-4221)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868631&isnumber=6868606

 

Duc-Phong Le; Chik How Tan, "Improved Miller’s Algorithm for Computing Pairings on Edwards Curves," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no.10, pp. 2626, 2632, Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TC.2013.125 Since Edwards curves were introduced to elliptic curve cryptography by Bernstein and Lange in 2007, they have received a lot of attention due to their very fast group law operation. Pairing computation on such curves is slightly slower than on Weierstrass curves. However, in some pairing-based cryptosystems, they might require a number of scalar multiplications which is time-consuming operation and this can be advantageous to use Edwards in this scenario. In this paper, we present a variant of Miller's algorithm for pairing computation on Edwards curves. Our approach is generic, it is able to compute both Weil and Tate pairings on pairing-friendly Edwards curves of any embedding degree. Our analysis shows that the new algorithm is faster than the previous algorithms for odd embedding degree and as fast as for even embedding degree. Hence, the new algorithm is suitable for computing optimal pairings and in situations where the denominators elimination technique is not possible.
Keywords: public key cryptography; Edwards curves; Miller algorithm; Tate pairings; Weierstrass curve; Weil pairings; curve pairing computation; elliptic curve cryptography; embedding degree; group law operation; pairing-based cryptosystems; scalar multiplications; Algorithm design and analysis; Cryptographic protocols; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Equations; Edwards curves; Miller’s algorithm; Weil/Tate pairings; pairing computation; pairing-based cryptography; pairing-friendly elliptic curves (ID#: 15-4222)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6532295&isnumber=6891494

 

Cinnati Loi, K.C.; Sen An; Seok-Bum Ko, "FPGA Implementation Of Low Latency Scalable Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem Processor in GF(2^m)," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp.822,825, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865262 This paper presents the architecture of a scalable elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) processor (ECP). Two versions of scalable ECPs are presented, one for binary field pseudo-random curves and one for binary field Koblitz curves. The implementations of these designs are able to support all 5 key sizes of pseudo-random or Koblitz curves recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) without reconfiguring the hardware. The paper proposes an architecture of a finite field multiplier that uses the Karatsuba-Ofman algorithm in order to reduce the latency of the finite field multiplication for larger key sizes. As a result, the latency of the overall elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) is reduced compared to previous designs of the scalable ECPs. To the authors' best knowledge, the proposed scalable ECPs are the fastest ECPs that can support all 5 pseudo-random or Koblitz curves recommended by NIST.
Keywords: Galois fields; digital arithmetic; field programmable gate arrays; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; ECC ECP; ECPM;FPGA;GF(2^m); Karatsuba-Ofman algorithm; binary field Koblitz curves; binary field pseudorandom curves; elliptic curve point multiplication ;finite field multiplier architecture; low latency scalable elliptic curve cryptosystem processor; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Hardware; NIST; Registers (ID#: 15-4223)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6865262&isnumber=6865048

 

Fan, Xin; Peter, Steffen; Krstic, Milos, "GALS Design of ECC against Side-Channel Attacks — A Comparative Study," Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation (PATMOS), 2014 24th International Workshop on, pp.1, 6, Sept. 29 2014-Oct. 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/PATMOS.2014.6951905 Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) represents the state-of-the-art of public-key cryptography. It is very computation intensive and hardware consuming for ASIC implementation. In this work, an ECC processor based on the Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design is presented. Attention has been paid on the resistances of GALS design against side-channel attacks (SCAs). The pausible clocking scheme, with random hopping of clock frequencies, is applied as a countermeasure of SCAs with low overhead on hardware. A comparative study between the synchronous and the GALS designs of ECC, in terms of the SCA resistance, processing efficiency, and hardware costs, is further elaborated.
Keywords: Clocks; Delays; Elliptic curve cryptography; Hardware; Synchronization; ECC; GALS; SCA (ID#: 15-4224)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6951905&isnumber=6951857

 

Lu, Yung-Feng; Shu, I-Chih; Tseng, Hsueh-Wen; Chou, Shih-Chun, "An NFC-Phone Mutual Authentication Scheme For Smart-Living Applications," Information Science, Electronics and Electrical Engineering (ISEEE), 2014 International Conference on, vol.2, no., pp.1053,1057, 26-28 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/InfoSEEE.2014.6947830 This paper presents a two-factor authentication with key agreement scheme for smart living applications. The proposed mechanism integrates IMSI identifier and identity-based remote mutual authentication scheme on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). It supports flawless two-factor and mutual authentication of participants and agreement of session key. The proposed mechanism does not require modifying the software of clients; thus, it is highly flexibly. We believe the proposed mechanism is usable for smart living applications.
Keywords: Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Mobile handsets; Servers; ECC; key agreement; smart living; two-factor authentication (ID#: 15-4225)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6947830&isnumber=6947749

 

He, D.; Wang, D., "Robust Biometrics-Based Authentication Scheme for Multiserver Environment," Systems Journal, IEEE, vol.  PP, no. 99, pp. 1, 8, 06 February 2014. doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2014.2301517 The authentication scheme is an important cryptographic mechanism, through which two communication parties could authenticate each other in the open network environment. To satisfy the requirement of practical applications, many authentication schemes using passwords and smart cards have been proposed. However, passwords might be divulged or forgotten, and smart cards might be shared, lost, or stolen. In contrast, biometric methods, such as fingerprints or iris scans, have no such drawbacks. Therefore, biometrics-based authentication schemes gain wide attention. In this paper, we propose a biometrics-based authentication scheme for multiserver environment using elliptic curve cryptography. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first truly three-factor authenticated scheme for multiserver environment. We also demonstrate the completeness of the proposed scheme using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic.
Keywords: Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Feature extraction; Servers; Smart cards; Authentication scheme; biometrics; elliptical curve cryptosystem; smart card (ID#: 15-4226)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6733264&isnumber=4357939

 

Oder, T.; Poppelmann, T.; Güneysu, T., "Beyond ECDSA and RSA: Lattice-Based Digital Signatures On Constrained Devices," Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE, pp.1,6, 1-5 June 2014.  All currently deployed asymmetric cryptography is broken with the advent of powerful quantum computers. We thus have to consider alternative solutions for systems with long-term security requirements (e.g., for long-lasting vehicular and avionic communication infrastructures). In this work we present an efficient implementation of BLISS, a recently proposed, post-quantum secure, and formally analyzed novel lattice-based signature scheme. We show that we can achieve a significant performance of 35.3 and 6 ms for signing and verification, respectively, at a 128-bit security level on an ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller. This shows that lattice-based cryptography can be efficiently deployed on today's hardware and provides security solutions for many use cases that can even withstand future threats.
Keywords: digital signatures; microcontrollers; public key cryptography; quantum computing; ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller; BLISS; ECDSA; RSA; asymmetric cryptography; constrained devices; elliptic curve cryptography; lattice based cryptography; lattice based digital signatures; quantum computers; word length 128 bit; Elliptic curve cryptography; Memory management; Microcontrollers; Polynomials; Random access memory (ID#: 15-4227)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6881437&isnumber=6881325

 

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review), Part 3

 

	Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review)  Part 3

 

Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally.  In 2014, more than one hundred articles of interest to the Science of Security community have been published.  We cite them here in five parts. 

 

Azarderakhsh, R.; Karabina, K., "A New Double Point Multiplication Algorithm and Its Application to Binary Elliptic Curves with Endomorphisms," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no. 10, pp.2614,2619, Oct. 201. doi: 10.1109/TC.2013.112 We present a new double point multiplication algorithm based on differential addition chains. Our proposed scheme has a uniform structure and has some degree of built-in resistance against side channel analysis attacks. We discuss deploying our scheme in a hardware implementation of single point multiplication on binary elliptic curves with efficiently computable endomorphisms. Based on operation counts, we expect to gain accelerations of 30% and 18% for computing single point multiplication with and without availability of parallel multipliers, respectively, and these results are verified in our implementations.
Keywords: public key cryptography; binary elliptic curves; computable endomorphisms; differential addition chains; double point multiplication algorithm; hardware implementation; parallel multipliers; side channel analysis attacks; single point multiplication; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Resistance; Elliptic curve cryptosystems; differential addition chains; double point multiplication; endomorphism (ID#: 15-4228)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6514031&isnumber=6891494

 

Yang, Yatao; Zhang, Shuang; Yang, Junming; Li, Jia; Li, Zichen, "Targeted Fully Homomorphic Encryption Based On A Double Decryption Algorithm For Polynomials," Tsinghua Science and Technology, vol.19, no. 5, pp.478,485, Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TST.2014.6919824 Several public-key encryption schemes used to solve the problem of ciphertext data processing on the fly are discussed. A new targeted fully homomorphic encryption scheme based on the discrete logarithm problem is presented. Public-key encryption cryptosystems are classified to examine homomorphic encryption. Without employing techniques proposed by Gentry such as somewhat homomorphic and bootstrapping techniques, or relinearization technique proposed by Brakerski, et al., a new method called “Double Decryption Algorithm” is employed in our cryptography to satisfy a fully or targeted fully homomorphic property. Inspired by ElGamal and BGN cryptography, we obtain the desired fully homomorphic property by selecting a new group and adding an extra component to the ciphertext. Proof of semantic security is also demonstrated.
Keywords: Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Polynomials; discrete logarithm problem; exponential function method; power function method; targeted fully homomorphic encryption (ID#: 15-4229)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6919824&isnumber=6919815

 

Hsin-Yu Ting; Chih-Tsun Huang, "Design of Low-Cost Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Engines for Ubiquitous Security," VLSI Design, Automation and Test (VLSI-DAT), 2014 International Symposium on, pp. 1, 4, 28-30 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/VLSI-DAT.2014.6834883 This paper presents Elliptic Curve Cryptographic (ECC) engines for very constrained devices in ubiquitous security such as passive RFID tags. The proposed scheduling of atomic operations optimizes the EC scalar multiplication at a higher level of finite field arithmetic with improved resource arrangement. Our architecture of arithmetic unit (AU) and circular-shift-based register file (RF) realizes the scheduling effectively. Using 65nm process technology, the ECC engine can produce one scalar multiplication in 250ms with 10.5K gates. The area overhead is 1.23× to 1.54× smaller than other designs; the power of 4.68μW and energy of 1.17μJ is also the lowest. The comparison shows that our ECC engines outperform others in terms of cycles, area, power and energy.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; flip-flops; public key cryptography; radiofrequency identification; shift registers; telecommunication security; ubiquitous computing;65nm process technology; EC scalar multiplication; ECC engine; arithmetic unit architecture; atomic operation scheduling; circular-shift-based register file; finite field arithmetic; low-cost elliptic curve cryptographic engine design; passive RFID tags; resource arrangement improvement; ubiquitous security; Elliptic curve cryptography; Engines; Gold; Radio frequency; Radiofrequency identification; Registers (ID#: 15-4230)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6834883&isnumber=6834858

 

Xiao Chun Yin; Zeng Guang Liu; Hoon Jae Lee, "An Efficient And Secured Data Storage Scheme In Cloud Computing using ECC-based PKI," Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), 2014 16th International Conference on, pp.523, 527, 16-19 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICACT.2014.6779015 Cloud computing is set of resources and services offered through the Internet. Cloud services are delivered from data centres located throughout the world. Cloud computing facilitates its consumers by providing virtual resources via internet. The rapid growth in field of "cloud computing" also increases severe security concerns. Security has remained a constant issue for Open Systems and internet, when we are talking about security, cloud really suffers. Lack of security is the only hurdle in wide adoption of cloud computing. Cloud computing is surrounded by many security issues like securing data and examining the utilization of cloud by the cloud computing vendors. This paper proposes a scheme to securely store and access of data via internet. We have used ECC based PKI for certificate procedure because the use of ECC significantly reduces the computation cost, message size and transmission overhead over RSA based PKI as 160-bit key size in ECC provides comparable security with 1024-bit key in RSA. We have designed Secured Cloud Storage Framework (SCSF). In this framework, users not only can securely store and access data in cloud but also can share data with multiple users through the unsecure internet in a secured way. This scheme can ensure the security and privacy of the data in the cloud.
Keywords: cloud computing; computer centres; data privacy; open systems; public key cryptography; security of data; storage management; ECC-based PKI; RSA based PKI; SCSF; certificate procedure; cloud computing; cloud services; computation cost; data centres; data privacy;data security; message size; open systems; secured cloud storage framework; secured data storage scheme; security concern; transmission overhead; unsecure Internet; virtual resources; Cloud computing; Educational institutions; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Certificate; Cloud computing; Cloud storage; ECC; PKI (ID#: 15-4231)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6779015&isnumber=6778899

 

Kannavara, R.; Schaumont, P.; Maniatakos, M.; Smith, M.A.; Buck, S., "Innovative Engineering Outreach Using Intel® Security And Embedded Tools," Microelectronics Education (EWME), 10th European Workshop on, pp.127,132, 14-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/EWME.2014.6877411 During Spring 2013, the Evaluation Platforms Program from Intel and the Intel Software and Services Group donated Intel® Atom™ processor based development kits to the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Departments at Virginia Tech University and Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU Poly). The goal was to enable engineering faculty to develop projects based on Intel® security and embedded tools. The projects thus developed, key learnings and project outcomes are elucidated in this paper. Further, we evaluate the outreach projects to highlight the two different, yet important approaches to security curriculum development emphasizing security engineering versus security attacks.
Keywords: computer science education; embedded systems; innovation management; microprocessor chips; security of data; ECE departments; Intel Atom processor based development kits; Intel Software and Services Group; Intel embedded tools; Intel security tools; NYU Poly; Polytechnic Institute of New York University; Virginia Tech University; electrical and computer engineering departments; engineering faculty; evaluation platform program; innovative engineering outreach; security curriculum development; Elliptic curve cryptography; Law; Libraries; NIST; Computer Security; Embedded Platforms; Engineering Outreach; Intel® Atom^TM Processors (ID#: 15-4232)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6877411&isnumber=6877377

 

Poppelmann, T.; Guneysu, T., "Area Optimization Of Lightweight Lattice-Based Encryption On Reconfigurable Hardware," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp.2796, 2799, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865754 Ideal lattice-based cryptography gained significant attraction in the last years due to its versatility, simplicity and performance in implementations. Nevertheless, existing implementations of encryption schemes reported only results trimmed for high-performance what is certainly not sufficient for all applications in practice. To the contrary, in this work we investigate lightweight aspects and suitable parameter sets for Ring-LWE encryption and show optimizations that enable implementations even with very few resources on a reconfigurable hardware device. Despite of this restriction, we still achieve reasonable throughput that is sufficient for many today's and future applications.
Keywords: cryptography; area optimization; ideal lattice-based cryptography; lightweight lattice-based encryption scheme; reconfigurable hardware device; ring-LWE encryption; Digital signal processing; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Hardware; Lattices; Polynomials (ID#: 15-4233)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6865754&isnumber=6865048

 

Suresh, J.S.; Manjushree, A.; Eswaran, P., "Differential Power Analysis (DPA) Attack On Dual Field ECC Processor For Cryptographic Applications," Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1, 5, 3-5 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCI.2014.6921775 Exchange of private information over a public medium must incorporate a method for data protection against unauthorized access. To enhance the data security against the DPA attack in network communication, a dual field ECC processor supporting all finite field operations is proposed. The ECC processor performs hardware designs in terms of functionality, scalability, performance and power consumption. A unified scheme is introduced to accelerate EC arithmetic functions. The hardware is optimized by a very compact Galois field arithmetic unit with fully pipelined technique. A key-blinded technique is designed against power analysis attacks.
Keywords: Galois fields; pipeline arithmetic; public key cryptography; DPA attack; EC arithmetic functions; Galois field arithmetic unit; cryptographic applications; data security; differential power analysis; dual field ECC processor; elliptical curve cryptography; fully pipelined technique; hardware optimization; key-blinded technique; network communication; Algorithm design and analysis; Computers; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Hardware; DPA; Dual fields; ECC; Galois field; Public key cryptography (ID#: 15-4234)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6921775&isnumber=6921705

 

Huaqun Wang, "Authentic and Confidential Policy Distribution In Software Defined Wireless Network," Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2014 International, pp. 1167, 1171, 4-8 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWCMC.2014.6906520 Software-defined networking (SDN) empowers network operators with more flexibility to program their networks. By separating the complexity of state distribution from network specification, SDN provides new ways to deal with age-old problems in networking, for example, routing. At the same time, SDN also brings about some new security problems, such as forged traffic flow, vulnerability, etc. In wireless SDN, the controller will send some policies to the switches. It is very important to remain these policies authentic and confidential due to the wireless and insecure channel. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient policy distribution scheme in wireless SDN which can realize authentication and secrecy simultaneously. The proposed scheme takes use of the symmetric encryption/decryption algorithms, bilinear pairings and multi-linear map. Through security analysis and efficiency analysis, our scheme is provably secure and efficient in the random oracle model (ROM).
Keywords: cryptography; radio networks; software radio; wireless channels; bilinear pairings; multilinear map; network specification; policy distribution; random oracle model; software defined wireless network; state distribution; symmetric encryption decryption algorithms; wireless channel; Communication system security; Control systems; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Wireless communication; Authentication; Multi-linear map; Policy distribution; SDN; Secrecy (ID#: 15-4235)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906520&isnumber=6906315

 

Sarvabhatla, M.; Giri, M.; Vorugunti, C.S., "Cryptanalysis of “a Biometric-Based User Authentication Scheme For Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks”," Contemporary Computing (IC3), 2014 Seventh International Conference on, pp. 312, 317, 7-9 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IC3.2014.6897192 With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and rapid growth of WSN applications, provides an opportunity to connect WSN to IoT, which results in the secure sensor data can be accessible via in secure Internet. The integration of WSN and IoT effects lots of security challenges and requires strict user authentication mechanism. Quite a few isolated user verification or authentication schemes using the password, the biometrics and the smart card have been proposed in the literature. In 2013, A.K Das et al. designed a biometric-based remote user verification scheme using smart card for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. A.K Das et al insisted that their scheme is secure against several known cryptographic attacks. Unfortunately, in this manuscript we will show that their scheme fails to resist replay attack, user impersonation attack, failure to accomplish mutual authentication and failure to provide data privacy.
Keywords: Internet; Internet of Things; authorisation; biometrics (access control); cryptography; message authentication; smart cards; wireless sensor networks; Internet of Things technology; IoT technology; WSN applications; biometric-based remote user verification scheme; cryptanalysis; cryptographic attack; data privacy; heterogeneous wireless sensor network; mutual authentication; password; replay attack; secure Internet; secure sensor data; smart card; user authentication mechanism; user impersonation attack; Authentication; Biometrics (access control);Elliptic curve cryptography; Smart cards; Wireless sensor networks; Biometric; Cryptanalysis; Smart Card; User Authentication; Wireless Sensor Networks (ID#: 15-4236)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6897192&isnumber=6897132

 

Khan, A.K.; Mahanta, H.J., "Side Channel Attacks And Their Mitigation Techniques," Automation, Control, Energy and Systems (ACES), 2014 First International Conference on, pp.1, 4, 1-2 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ACES.2014.6807983 Side channel cryptanalysis is one of the most volatile fields of research in security prospects. It has proved that cryptanalysis is no more confined to its dependence on plain text or cipher text. Indeed side channel attack uses the physical characteristics of the cryptographic device to find the cryptographic algorithm used and also the secret key. It is one of the most efficient techniques and has successfully broken almost all the cryptographic algorithms today. In this paper we aim to present a review on the various side channel attacks possible. Also, the techniques proposed to mitigate such an attack have been stated.
Keywords: cryptography; cryptographic device; Ivolatile field; mitigation technique; security prospect; side channel attack; side channel cryptanalysis; Ciphers; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Hardware; Timing; AES; DES; DPA; Power Analysis; SPA; cryptographic device (ID#: 15-4237)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6807983&isnumber=6807973

 

Yezhen Liang; Guoqiang Bai, "A Randomized Window-Scanning RSA Scheme Resistant To Power Analysis," Computer and Information Science (ICIS), 2014 IEEE/ACIS 13th International Conference on, pp.217,221, 4-6 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICIS.2014.6912137 An effective randomized window-scanning RSA scheme resistant to power analysis is presented in this paper. Unlike the traditional countermeasures such as message blinding or the multiply-always exponentiation scheme, our proposal focuses on randomizing the position information of the exponentiation bits which is a brand new direction for anti-power analysis research. Experimental results show that it works effectively against power analysis with a minimum overhead compared with other countermeasures.
Keywords: public key cryptography; randomised algorithms; antipower analysis; exponentiation bits; position information; randomized window-scanning RSA scheme; Correlation; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Hardware; Proposals; RSA; power analysis; randomized window-scanning (ID#: 15-4238)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6912137&isnumber=6912089

 

Xueyuan Su; Gang Peng; Chan, S., "Multi-Path Routing and Forwarding in Non-Cooperative Wireless Networks," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.25, no.10, pp.2638, 2647, Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.200 Multi-path routing and forwarding in non-cooperative networks is extremely challenging due to the co-existence of both rational and Byzantine nodes. They both might deviate from the protocol; however, their intentions and behaviors are totally different. Rational nodes aim to maximize their utilities, while Byzantine nodes purposefully deviate from the protocol to disrupt the normal operation of a network. Most work in the literature treat both kinds of misbehavior without distinction and thus lead to ineffective solutions. This paper presents a hybrid design that seamlessly integrates mechanisms for different misbehavior in a unified framework. The GSP auction provides incentives for rational nodes to cooperate and results in truth-telling Nash equilibria. With the possible inclusion of Byzantine nodes in the least cost paths selected by GSP, the FORBID mechanism builds a decentralized reputation system such that malicious behavior is effectively detected. This in turn triggers the GSP auction to update the least cost paths so as to exclude the malicious nodes from being selected for communication. It is proved that the unified protocol is cooperation-optimal. Experiments have been conducted to further investigate the performance of the proposed protocol and the impact of various parameters.
Keywords: game theory; radio networks; routing protocols; Byzantine node; FORBID mechanism; GSP auction; cooperation-optimal unified protocol; decentralized reputation system; hybrid design; least cost paths; malicious behavior; malicious nodes; multipath routing-forwarding; noncooperative wireless networks; rational node; truth-telling Nash equilibria; Elliptic curve cryptography; Packet loss; Resource management; Routing; Routing protocols; Distributed networks; mechanism design and analysis; non-cooperative networks; routing and forwarding (ID#: 15-4239)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6577364&isnumber=6895194

 

von Maurich, I.; Guneysu, T., "Lightweight Code-Based Cryptography: QC-MDPC Mceliece Encryption On Reconfigurable Devices," Design, Automation And Test In Europe Conference And Exhibition (DATE), 2014, Pp. 1, 6, 24-28 March 2014. doi: 10.7873/DATE.2014.051 With the break of RSA and ECC cryptosystems in an era of quantum computing, asymmetric code-based cryptography is an established alternative that can be a potential replacement. A major drawback are large keys in the range between 50kByte to several MByte that prevented real-world applications of code-based cryptosystems so far. A recent proposal by Misoczki et al. showed that quasi-cyclic moderate density parity-check (QC-MDPC) codes can be used in McEliece encryption - reducing the public key to just 0.6 kByte to achieve a 80-bit security level. Despite of reasonably small key sizes that could also enable small designs, previous work only report highperformance implementations with high resource consumptions of more than 13,000 slices on a large Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA for a combined en-/decryption unit. In this work we focus on lightweight implementations of code-based cryptography and demonstrate that McEliece encryption using QC-MDPC codes can be implemented with a significantly smaller resource footprint - still achieving reasonable performance sufficient for many applications, e.g., challenge-response protocols or hybrid firmware encryption. More precisely, our design requires just 68 slices for the encryption and around 150 slices for the decryption unit and is able to en-/decrypt an input block in 2.2ms and 13.4 ms, respectively.
Keywords: {cyclic codes; field programmable gate arrays; parity check codes; public key cryptography; quantum computing; reconfigurable architectures; ECC cryptosystems ;QC-MDPC McEliece encryption; QC-MDPC codes; RSA cryptosystems; Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA; combined encryption-decryption unit; lightweight code-based cryptography; quantum computing; quasicyclic moderate density parity-check codes; reconfigurable devices; resource consumption; resource footprint; security level; word length 80 bit; Decoding; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Field programmable gate arrays; Generators; Vectors (ID#: 15-4240)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6800252&isnumber=6800201

 

Ullah, R.; Nizamuddin; Umar, A.I.; ul Amin, N., "Blind Signcryption Scheme Based On Elliptic Curves," Information Assurance and Cyber Security (CIACS), 2014 Conference on, pp. 51, 54, 12-13 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/CIACS.2014.6861332 In this paper blind signcryption using elliptic curves cryptosystem is presented. It satisfies the functionalities of Confidentiality, Message Integrity, Unforgeability, Signer Non-repudiation, Message Unlink-ability, Sender anonymity and Forward Secrecy. The proposed scheme has low computation and communication overhead as compared to existing blind Signcryption schemes and best suited for mobile phone voting and m-commerce.
Keywords: public key cryptography; blind signcryption scheme; communication overhead; confidentiality; elliptic curves cryptosystem; forward secrecy; m-commerce; message integrity; message unlink-ability; mobile phone voting; sender anonymity; signer nonrepudiation; unforgeability; Digital signatures; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Equations; Mobile handsets; Anonymity; Blind Signature; Blind Signcryption; Elliptic curves; Signcryption (ID#: 15-4241)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6861332&isnumber=6861314

 

Debiao He; Kumar, N.; Jong-Hyouk Lee; Sherratt, R.S., "Enhanced Three-Factor Security Protocol For Consumer USB Mass Storage Devices," Consumer Electronics, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 60, no.1, pp. 30, 37, February 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCE.2014.6780922 The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an extremely popular interface standard for computer peripheral connections and is widely used in consumer Mass Storage Devices (MSDs). While current consumer USB MSDs provide relatively high transmission speed and are convenient to carry, the use of USB MSDs has been prohibited in many commercial and everyday environments primarily due to security concerns. Security protocols have been previously proposed and a recent approach for the USB MSDs is to utilize multi-factor authentication. This paper proposes significant enhancements to the three-factor control protocol that now makes it secure under many types of attacks including the password guessing attack, the denial-of-service attack, and the replay attack. The proposed solution is presented with a rigorous security analysis and practical computational cost analysis to demonstrate the usefulness of this new security protocol for consumer USB MSDs.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; digital storage; message authentication; MSD; consumer USB mass storage devices; denial-of-service attack; enhanced three-factor security protocol; mass storage devices; multifactor authentication; password guessing attack; replay attack; universal serial bus; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Protocols; Universal Serial Bus; Authentication; Consumer Storage; Mass Storage Device; USB (ID#: 15-4242)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6780922&isnumber=6780912

 

Gallo, P.; Levicky, D.; Bugar, G.; Banoci, V., "Edwards Curve Addition And Doubling Formula Analysis For Effective Parallel Decomposition," ELMAR (ELMAR), 2014 56th International Symposium, pp. 1, 4, 10-12, Sept.  2014. doi: 10.1109/ELMAR.2014.6923365 The Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem is an emerging alternative for traditional Public-Key Cryptosystem like RSA, DSA and DH. It provides the highest strength-per-bit of any cryptosystem known today with smaller key sizes resulting in faster computations, lower power consumption and memory. It also provides a methodology for obtaining high-speed, efficient and scalable implementation of protocols for authentication. The objective is to give the reader an overview on efficient addition and doubling formulas of Edwards curves together with analysis and effective parallel decomposition of these formulas. Practical analysis is provided with implementation consideration.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; parallel processing; public key cryptography; Edwards curve; addition formulas; authentication protocols; doubling formulas; elliptic curve cryptosystem; high-speed implementation; parallel decomposition; power consumption; scalable implementation; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Galois fields; Jacobian matrices; Standards; ECDLP; Edwards curve; Elliptic curve arithmetic; Parallel computation (ID#: 15-4243)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6923365&isnumber=6923293

 

Pontie, S.; Maistri, P., "Randomized Windows For Secure Scalar Multiplication On Elliptic Curves," Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), 2014 IEEE 25th International Conference on, pp.78, 79, 18-20 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ASAP.2014.6868638 Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECCs) may be chosen instead of RSA in secure embedded systems, thanks to shorter keys. However, ECC may be vulnerable, as any other cryptographic implementation, to side channel analysis, which may reveal secret information by analyzing collateral sources of information, such as power consumption. To protect the device against Timing, Simple and Differential Power Analysis, we propose the implementation of a new scalar multiplication algorithm based on randomized windows method.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; embedded systems; power consumption; public key cryptography; ECC; RSA; collateral information sources; cryptographic implementation; differential power analysis; elliptic curve cryptosystems; power consumption; randomized windows; randomized windows method; scalar multiplication algorithm; secret information; secure embedded systems; secure scalar multiplication; side channel analysis; Acceleration; Algorithm design and analysis; Computational efficiency; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Partitioning algorithms; Elliptic curves; power analysis; scalar multiplication; side channel analysis (ID#: 15-4244)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868638&isnumber=6868606

 

Flood, P.; Schukat, M., "Peer to Peer Authentication For Small Embedded Systems: A Zero-Knowledge-Based Approach To Security for the Internet of Things," Digital Technologies (DT), 2014 10th International Conference on, pp.68, 72, 9-11 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/DT.2014.6868693 With an estimated 50 billion internet-enabled devices deployed by 2020, the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) or Internet of Everything (IoE) raises many questions regarding the suitability and adaptability of current computer security standards to provide privacy, data integrity and end entity authentication between communicating peers. In this paper we present a new protocol which combines zero-knowledge proofs and key exchange mechanisms to provide secure and authenticated communication in static machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. This approach addresses all of the aforementioned issues while also being suitable for devices with limited computational resources and can be deployed in wireless sensor networks. While the protocol requires an a-priori knowledge about the network setup and structure, it guarantees perfect forward secrecy.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptographic protocols; data integrity; data privacy; embedded systems; peer-to-peer computing; wireless sensor networks; Internet of Everything; Internet of Things security; Internet-enabled devices;IoE;IoT;M2M network; computer security standards; data integrity; embedded systems; end entity authentication ;key exchange mechanisms; peer to peer authentication; perfect forward secrecy; privacy; static machine-to-machine network; wireless sensor networks; zero-knowledge proofs; zero-knowledge-based approach; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Embedded systems; Protocols; Diffie-Hellman key exchange; GMW protocol; Zero knowledge proof (ID#: 15-4245)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868693&isnumber=6868673

 

Papanikolaou, A.; Rantos, K.; Androulidakis, I., "Proxied IBE-Based Key Establishment for LLNs," Digital Technologies (DT), 2014 10th International Conference on, pp.275, 280, 9-11 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/DT.2014.6868727 Embedded systems devices have a wide application range, an instance of which is their use in Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), which are anticipated to become one of the fundamental building blocks for the realisation of the Internet of Things (IoT). The security issues emerging from the requirement for Web accessibility can be fulfilled by appropriate cryptographic techniques, so as to secure the communicated information, supported by appropriate key exchange protocols, able to cope with the particular nature of such networks. The properties of Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) seem to match well the nature of such networks, thus an IBE-based key establishment protocol would be a good choice to be used in an LLN. However, severe limitations on those devices resources render deployment of expensive key establishment protocols inappropriate. Alternatives are therefore proposed such as offloading some of the computationally-intensive tasks to other, more powerful devices. Our IBE-based key establishment protocol enables a constrained node to exchange a shared secret with a remote party, that typically operates outside the node's network through an also non-constrained proxy node that undertakes the task of performing some of the expensive computations. The proposed key establishment scheme facilitates secure communications among embedded systems devices providing information and services to remote parties, towards the realisation of the Internet of Things.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptographic protocols; embedded systems; IBE-based key establishment protocol; Internet of Things; IoT; LLN; embedded systems devices; identity-based encryption; key exchange protocols; low-power and lossy networks; nonconstrained proxy node; proxied IBE-based key establishment; secure communications; Elliptic curve cryptography; Identity-based encryption; Peer-to-peer computing; Protocols; embedded systems; identity-based encryption; key establishment; low-power and lossy networks; wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-4246)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868727&isnumber=6868673

 

Farouk, A.; Miri, A.; Fouad, M.M.; Abdelhafez, A.A., "Efficient Pairing-Free, Certificateless Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol For Grid Computing," Digital Information and Communication Technology and it's Applications (DICTAP), 2014 Fourth International Conference on, pp.279,284, 6-8 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/DICTAP.2014.6821696 The most prevalent grid security standard, grid security infrastructure uses an authentication protocol based on public key infrastructure (PKI). Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) overcomes PKI certificate management problems and is well aligned with grid computing demands. Security and efficiency are the main grid authentication protocol objectives. Practical, efficient CL-PKC-based authentication protocols for real grid environments is widely acknowledged as a challenging issue. Unfortunately, certificateless authenticated key agreement protocols rely on bilinear pairings, which are extremely computational expensive. In this paper, we present a novel pairing-free certificateless two-party authenticated grid key agreement (GPC-AKA) protocol, providing a lighter weight key management approach for grid users. We then propose the first practical GPC-AKA implementation as a proof of concept. We also compare the efficiency of GPC-AKA to other proposed work in the literature.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; grid computing; public key cryptography; CL-PKC; authentication protocol; bilinear pairings; certificateless public key cryptography; certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement protocol; grid computing; grid security infrastructure; grid security standard; public key infrastructure; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Protocols; Grid computing; certificateless authenticated key agreement; pairing-free (ID#: 15-4247)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6821696&isnumber=6821645

 

Zhiguo Wan; Guilin Wang; Yanjiang Yang; Shenxing Shi, "SKM: Scalable Key Management for Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grids," Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 61, no. 12, pp. 7055, 7066, Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIE.2014.2331014 Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a critical role in the smart grid. It enables intelligent applications such as load control switching, demand side management, and meter data management by creating a bidirectional communication network for smart meters and utility systems. Consequently, AMI should be strictly protected to ensure reliable and secure operations of smart grid. In this paper, we first show that a recently proposed key management scheme for AMI by Liu et al. suffers from the desynchronization attack, and, at the same time, it lacks scalability due to inefficient key management. Then, we propose a new scalable key management (SKM) scheme characterized by combining identity-based cryptosystem and efficient key tree technique. The scheme SKM possesses advantages of efficiency and flexibility in key management. In particular, the cost of SKM is O(log n) in either aspect of computation and communication (n is the number of smart meters), which is significantly reduced from the cost of O(n) in the scheme of Liu et al. We analyze security and performance of SKM in detail to show that SKM is efficient in computation and communication cost.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; power system security; smart meters; smart power grids; AMI; SKM scheme; advanced metering infrastructure; bidirectional communication network; demand side management; desynchronization attack; identity-based cryptosystem; key tree technique; load control switching; scalable key management; smart grid reliability; smart grid security; smart meter data management; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Protocols; Smart grids; Security; smart grids (ID#: 15-4248)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6834788&isnumber=6898054

 

Kilinc, H.H.; Yanik, T., "A Survey of SIP Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol. 16, no. 2, pp.1005, 1023, Second Quarter 2014. doi: 10.1109/SURV.2013.091513.00050 We present a survey of authentication and key agreement schemes that are proposed for the SIP protocol. SIP has become the center piece for most VoIP architectures. Performance and security of the authentication and key agreement schemes are two critical factors that affect the VoIP applications with large number of users. Therefore, we have identified, categorized and evaluated various SIP authentication and key agreement protocols according to their performance and security features. Although the performance is inversely proportional to the security features provided in general, we observed that there are successful schemes from both the performance and security viewpoint.
Keywords: Internet telephony; cryptographic protocols; telecommunication security; SIP authentication; SIP protocol; VoIP architectures; Voice over Internet Protocol; key agreement protocols; key agreement schemes; security features; security viewpoint; survey; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Protocols; Servers; Authentication Protocols; SIP; SIP Security (ID#: 15-4249)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6644333&isnumber=6811383

 

Kapse, A.D.; Ingole, P.K., "Secure and Efficient Search Technique in Cloud Computing," Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on, pp.743,747, 7-9 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSNT.2014.156 Cloud computing is nowadays widely used technology. Various advanced technologies in the world are taking cloud computing very seriously as the new era for mobile as well as a steady computing environment. In cloud computing the data privacy and its security is highly recommended, that's why the data which have to be stored on the cloud server database requires encryption. This results into complex utilization of cloud data access. So, it is highly recommended to improve the trust on cloud server as well as not to make its utilization a complex task for computation. This process should not increase the burden on overall system. This paper represents brief review of various methodologies which helps user for secured storage and efficient access to the data. Later a very secure and efficient system has been proposed to reduce the burden of the system thus to decrease complexity and to improve performance of overall system.
Keywords: cloud computing; cryptography; data privacy; file servers; information retrieval; mobile computing; search problems; cloud computing; cloud data access; cloud server; cloud server database; data privacy; encryption; secure search technique; steady computing environment; Cloud computing; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Indexes; Servers; cloud computing; data encryption; keyword search; ranked search (ID#: 15-4250)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6821498&isnumber=6821334

 

Hui Li; Zhonghua Liu; Junkai Yi, "Fast Elliptic Scalar Multiplication Using Lagged Fibonacci Generator," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp. 488, 491, 27-29 June 2014.  doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933612 Scalar multiplication is the dominant and time consuming operation in Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem. A number of works bearing on improving the efficiency of scalar multiplication have been done during the past several years. In this paper, we attempt to present a new strategy by combining scalar multiplication with the pseudorandom number generator: lagged Fibonacci generator to accelerate the process of scalar multiplication. Experimental results identify the efficiency of the strategy.
Keywords: cryptography; random number generation; elliptic curve cryptosystem; elliptic scalar multiplication; lagged Fibonacci generator; pseudorandom number generator; Computational efficiency; Educational institutions; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Generators; Information science; Elliptic curve cryptosystem; Lagged Fibonacci generator; Pseudorandom number generator; Scalar multiplication (ID#: 15-4251)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933612&isnumber=6933501

 

Adj, G.; Rodriguez-Henriquez, F., "Square Root Computation over Even Extension Fields," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no. 11, pp. 2829, 2841, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TC.2013.145 This paper presents a comprehensive study of the computation of square roots over finite extension fields. We propose two novel algorithms for computing square roots over even field extensions of the form BBFq2, with q = pn, p an odd prime and n ≥ 1. Both algorithms have an associate computational cost roughly equivalent to one exponentiation in BBFq2. The first algorithm is devoted to the case when q ≡ 1 mod 4, whereas the second one handles the case when q ≡ 3 mod 4. Numerical comparisons show that the two algorithms presented in this paper are competitive and in some cases more efficient than the square root methods previously known.
Keywords: number theory; even extension fields; finite extension fields; number theoretical problem; square root computation; Algorithm design and analysis; Complexity theory ;Computational efficiency; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Modular square root; finite field arithmetic (ID#: 15-4252)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6564285&isnumber=6919806

 

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review), Part 4

 

	Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review) Part 4

 

Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally.  In 2014, more than one hundred articles of interest to the Science of Security community have been published.  We cite them here in five parts.

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Tajeddine, A.; Kayssi, A.; Chehab, A.; Elhajj, I., "Authentication Schemes For Wireless Sensor Networks," Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), 2014 17th IEEE, pp.367,372, 13-16 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/MELCON.2014.6820562 In this paper, we discuss the different authentication techniques suitable for severely constrained nodes in wireless sensor networks. We divide such techniques into three main categories based on symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, and hybrid techniques using both cryptographic methods. We discuss each category and deduce the best cipher for each, namely, RC5 and IBE-ECC to be applied in a WSN. We also specify the factors affecting the decision of which category is best to use and the different parameters affecting the network in each category. Finally, we give a real network example and discuss the appropriate choice of the authentication scheme based on the particular WSN needs.
Keywords: public key cryptography; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; IBE-ECC; RC5; WSN; asymmetric cryptography; authentication scheme; cipher; hybrid techniques; wireless sensor network; Authentication; Ciphers; Elliptic curve cryptography; Encryption; Wireless sensor networks; Asymmetric Key; Authentication; Symmetric Key; Wireless Sensor Networks (ID#: 15-4253)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6820562&isnumber=6820492

 

Thareja, Preeti; Arora, Neeru, "Securing DNS using ECC," Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence), 2014 5th International Conference , pp. 887, 889, 25-26 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CONFLUENCE.2014.6949246 The paper presents the concept of securing Domain Name System, DNS. Digital Signatures being very secure helps in providing good security to DNS. Software like BIND, OpenDNSSEC, Secure64 etc. involve signing of DNS using cryptographic algorithms (e.g., RSA, DSA etc.). Also, ECDSA is one way that provides same level of security, as provided by RSA for low power and portable devices. So, proposing a new ECDSA implementation that can be used in securing DNS.
Keywords: Digital signatures; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Software algorithms; Cryptography; DNS; ECC; ECDLP; ECDSA (ID#: 15-4254)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6949246&isnumber=6949036

 

El-Hamawi, E.; Bakhache, B.; Rostom, R., "An Improved Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol For Low Power Networks," Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), 2014 17th IEEE, pp.426,431, 13-16 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/MELCON.2014.6820572 Providing fast and robust mutual authentication and key establishment for wireless networks was a priority for the security researchers in the last years. In this paper, an improved Elliptic Curve based Fast and Secure Authenticated Key Agreement (FS-AKA) protocol is presented. All the essential security services are provided by the proposed protocol. In addition, it is quick and light since it reduces the computational load (number of exponentiations and hash functions), therefore, it is suitable to low power networks and real time applications. The proposed protocol ensures also an excellent robustness against the famous attacks. In other words, the FS-AKA achieves a compromise between the robustness and the rapidity. The power of this new protocol is the high performance enhancement in terms of computational and communication load, compared with the known key agreement protocols.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; public key cryptography; radio networks; FS-AKA protocol;  authenticated key agreement protocol; communication load; computational load; elliptic curve based fast and secure authenticated key agreement; exponentiations; hash functions; low power networks; mutual authentication; wireless networks; Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Protocols; Robustness; Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol; Elliptic curves; Security (ID#: 15-4255)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6820572&isnumber=6820492

 

Kuzhalvaimozhi, S.; Rao, G.R., "Privacy Protection In Cloud Using Identity Based Group Signature," Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies (ICADIWT), 2014 Fifth International Conference on the, pp.75,80, 17-19 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICADIWT.2014.6814670 Cloud computing is one of the emerging computing technology where costs are directly proportional to usage and demand. The advantages of this technology are the reasons of security and privacy problems. The data belongs to the users are stored in some cloud servers which is not under their own control. So the cloud services are required to authenticate the user. In general, most of the cloud authentication algorithms do not provide anonymity of the users. The cloud provider can track the users easily. The privacy and authenticity are two critical issues of cloud security. In this paper, we propose a secure anonymous authentication method for cloud services using identity based group signature which allows the cloud users to prove that they have privilege to access the data without revealing their identities.
Keywords: authorisation; cloud computing; cryptography; data privacy; digital signatures; cloud computing; cloud security; cloud services; identity based cryptosystem; identity based group signature; privacy problems; privacy protection; secure anonymous authentication method; security problems; user authentication; Authentication; Cloud computing; Elliptic curve cryptography; Privacy; Cloud; Group Signature; Identity based cryptosystem; Privacy Protection (ID#: 15-4256)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6814670&isnumber=6814661

 

Roy, D.B.; Mukhopadhyay, D.; Izumi, M.; Takahashi, J., "Tile Before Multiplication: An Efficient Strategy To Optimize DSP Multiplier For Accelerating Prime Field ECC For NIST Curves," Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE, pp. 1, 6, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1145/2593069.2593234 High speed DSP blocks present in the modern FPGAs can be used to implement prime field multiplication to accelerate Elliptic Curve scalar multiplication in prime fields. However, compared to logic slices, DSP blocks are scarce resources, hence its usage needs to be optimized. The asymmetric 25 × 18 signed multipliers in FPGAs open a new paradigm for multiplier design, where operand decomposition becomes equivalent to a tiling problem. Previous literature has reported that for asymmetric multiplier, it is possible to generate a tiling (known as non-standard tiling) which requires less number of DSP blocks compared to standard tiling, generated by school book algorithm. In this paper, we propose a generic technique for such tiling generation and generate this tiling for field multiplication in NIST specified curves. We compare our technique with standard school book algorithm to highlight the improvement. The acceleration in ECC scalar multiplication due to the optimized field multiplier is experimentally validated for P-256. The impact of this accelerated scalar multiplication is shown for the key encapsulation algorithm PSEC-KEM (Provably Secure Key Encapsulation Mechanism).
Keywords: digital signal processing chips; encapsulation; field programmable gate arrays; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; DSP multiplier; ECC scalar multiplication; FPGA; NIST curves;P-256;asymmetric multiplier; elliptic curve scalar multiplication; key encapsulation algorithm PSEC-KEM; multiplier design; operand decomposition; prime field multiplication; provably secure key encapsulation mechanism; school book algorithm; tiling generation; tiling problem; Clocks; Digital signal processing; Educational institutions; Elliptic curve cryptography; Elliptic curves; Field programmable gate arrays; Standards; DSP Blocks; ECC; FPGA; NIST Curves (ID#: 15-4257)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6881504&isnumber=6881325

 

de Oliveira, P.R.; Andreia Fondazzi Martimiano, L.; Delisandra Feltrim, V.; Brasilino Marcal Zanoni, G., "Energy Consumption Analysis of the Cryptographic Key Generation Process of RSA and ECC Algorithms in Embedded Systems," Latin America Transactions, IEEE (Revista IEEE America Latina), vol.12, no.6, pp.1141,1148, Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TLA.2014.6894012 A subject that is gaining more strength in technological scenario is the embedded system. They are present in various products, from a simple MP3 player to an aircraft with the latest technology. Embedded systems have limited memory resources, processing and storage. Thus, the amount of computational resources used is a factor that should be taken into account in time to develop a software. Along with the reat expansion of embedded systems, also increased the number of attacks and threats to systems. Thus, security is a key aspect of the design of these systems. Taking into account the characteristic of safety related authentication, this paper presents the energy consumption analysis between the key generators for the RSA and ECC algorithms. Cryptographic keys can be used in the authentication process between entities that are communicating, improving the security of communication. Tests to check for a possible correlation between the runtime and energy consumption were also conducted. The algorithms were implemented in C language and the executions were carried out in the BeagleBoard platform. The conclusion is that the ECC algorithm presented a lower energy consumption than the RSA algorithm and a strong correlation between runtime and power consumption.
Keywords: C language; authorisation; embedded systems; public key cryptography; BeagleBoard platform; C language; ECC algorithms;MP3 player; RSA algorithms; aircraft; computational resources; cryptographic key generation process; embedded systems; energy consumption analysis; safety-related authentication; security; Algorithm design and analysis; Elliptic curve cryptography; Embedded systems; Energy consumption; Embedded systems; cryptography; security (ID#: 15-4258)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6894012&isnumber=6893985

 

de Clercq, R.; Uhsadel, L.; Van Herrewege, A.; Verbauwhede, I., "Ultra Low-Power Implementation of ECC on the ARM Cortex-M0+," Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE, pp. 1, 6, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1145/2593069.2593238 In this work, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is used to make a fast, and very low-power software implementation of a public-key cryptography algorithm on the ARM Cortex-M0+. An optimization of the López-Dahab field multiplication method is proposed, which aims to reduce the number of memory accesses, as this is a slow operation on the target platform. A mixed C and assembly implementation was made; a random point multiplication requires 34.16 μJ, whereas our fixed point multiplication requires 20.63 μJ. Our implementation's energy consumption beats all other software implementations, on any platform, by a factor of at least 3.3.
Keywords:  digital arithmetic; microprocessor chips; public key cryptography; ARM Cortex-MO+;ECC; Lopez-Oahab field multiplication method; assembly implementation; elliptic curve cryptography; low-power software implementation; mixed C implementation; public-key cryptography algorithm; random point multiplication; software implementations;ultra low-power implementation; Abstracts; Control systems; Error correction codes; Random access memory; Software; Vectors; Wireless sensor networks; ECC; Embedded; Low-Power; Public-key cryptography (ID#: 15-4259)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6881439&isnumber=6881325

 

Pettenghi, H.; Ambrose, J.A.; Chaves, R.; Sousa, L., "Method for Designing Multi-Channel RNS Architectures to Prevent Power Analysis SCA," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp. 2233, 2236, 1-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865614 Power analysis attacks are one of the most common Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs), proven to be extremely successful even on protected embedded devices. This paper proposes the use of a Residue Number System (RNS) architecture with randomly permuted moduli sets to implement the Double-and-Add computation, which is proven as the most susceptible operation in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The proposed solution randomly permutes the moduli sets, allowing randomized power traces, significantly removing the correlation between the power dissipation and the secret key and eliminating the need for the intermediate conversion to binary required in the state-of-the-art. Architectures obtained for a 90nm standard cell technology suggest that a significant power analysis resistance is achieved for the Double-and-Add circuitry, incurring an extra performance cost of 3 times compared to the related state-of-the-art.
Keywords: correlation theory; cryptography ;private key cryptography; public key cryptography; residue number systems; ECC; correlation removal; double-and-add circuitry computation; elliptic curve cryptography; intermediate conversion; multichannel RNS architecture design method; power analysis SCA prevention; power analysis resistance; power dissipation; protected embedded device; randomized power traces; randomly permuted moduli set; residue number system; secret key; side-channel attack; size 90 nm; standard cell technology; Adders; Computer architecture; Control systems; Correlation; Power dissipation; Resistance; Standards (ID#: 15-4260)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6865614&isnumber=6865048

 

Vaidya, B.; Makrakis, D.; Mouftah, H.T., "Authentication Mechanism For Mobile RFID Based Smart Grid Network," Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), 2014 IEEE 27th Canadian Conference on, pp.1,6, 4-7 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCECE.2014.6901143 Smart grid networks include various communication technologies, among which, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is considered as an enabling technology for realizing the ubiquitous environment by providing identity to an essential object. We have proposed a comprehensive mutual authentication protocol for a mobile RFID based Smart grid network, which is lightweight and efficient. In the proposed mechanism, only simple cryptographic operations (i.e. one-way hash function, XOR operation) are used in RFID tag, while other techniques including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and zero knowledge protocol are used in mobile reader and backend server. We have deployed a conjoined verification technique to minimize authentication cost in such a network. We illustrate that the proposed mechanism can better performance than the existing representative schemes.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; mobile radio; public key cryptography; radiofrequency identification; smart power grids; ECC; authentication cost minimization; authentication mechanism; comprehensive mutual authentication protocol; conjoined verification technique; cryptographic operations; elliptic curve cryptography; mobile RFID based smart grid network; radio frequency identification; zero knowledge protocol; Authentication; Mobile communication; Protocols; Radiofrequency identification; Servers; Smart grids (ID#: 15-4261)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901143&isnumber=6900900

 

Jian Li; Yun Li; Jian Ren; Jie Wu, "Hop-by-Hop Message Authentication and Source Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 25, no. 5, pp.1223,1232, May 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.119 Message authentication is one of the most effective ways to thwart unauthorized and corrupted messages from being forwarded in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For this reason, many message authentication schemes have been developed, based on either symmetric-key cryptosystems or public-key cryptosystems. Most of them, however, have the limitations of high computational and communication overhead in addition to lack of scalability and resilience to node compromise attacks. To address these issues, a polynomial-based scheme was recently introduced. However, this scheme and its extensions all have the weakness of a built-in threshold determined by the degree of the polynomial: when the number of messages transmitted is larger than this threshold, the adversary can fully recover the polynomial. In this paper, we propose a scalable authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). While enabling intermediate nodes authentication, our proposed scheme allows any node to transmit an unlimited number of messages without suffering the threshold problem. In addition, our scheme can also provide message source privacy. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more efficient than the polynomial-based approach in terms of computational and communication overhead under comparable security levels while providing message source privacy.
Keywords: message authentication; public key cryptography; wireless sensor networks; ECC; WSN; elliptic curve cryptography; hop-by-hop message authentication; intermediate nodes authentication; message source privacy; polynomial-based scheme; public-key cryptosystems; symmetric-key cryptosystems; wireless sensor networks; Authentication; Message authentication; Polynomials; Privacy; Public key; Wireless sensor networks; Hop-by-hop authentication; decentralized control; distributed algorithm; public-key cryptosystem; simulation; source privacy; symmetric-key cryptosystem; wireless sensor networks (WSNs) (ID#: 15-4262)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6504456&isnumber=6786006

 

Mahmoud, W.M.; Bingxin Liu; Asif, R.A.; Huapeng Wu, "LFSR Based Low Complexity Montgomery Multiplier In GF(2^m) For A Class Of Fields," Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), 2014 IEEE 27th Canadian Conference on, pp.1,4, 4-7 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCECE.2014.6901023 Montgomery multiplication (MM) in GF(2^m) is a popular technique to speedup network security protocols such like digital signature provided by elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and key distribution supported by ECC or Diffie-Hellman. MM in GF(2^m) is defined as ABr-1 mod f(x), where f(x) is the irreducible polynomial of degree m and r is a fixed element in the field. In this paper, a low complexity Montgomery multiplier in GF(2^m) using Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR) is proposed for the class of fields generated with an irreducible all-one polynomial. The latency of the proposed architecture is shown to be lower than the best among existing works found in the literature. Furthermore, highly regular architecture in LFSR and available LFSR based low power techniques make our proposal more attractive than non-LFSR architectures. On the other hand, the constraint of the new multiplier is that it will not have speed advantage when the system clock rate is higher than 2GHz.
Keywords: computational complexity; protocols; public key cryptography; Diffie-Hellman; ECC; LFSR based low complexity Montgomery multiplier; Montgomery multiplication; digital signature; elliptic curve cryptography; irreducible all-one polynomial; linear feedback shift registers; network security protocols; system clock rate; Clocks; Complexity theory; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Delays; Logic gates; Polynomials (ID#: 15-4263)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901023&isnumber=6900900

 

Mozaffari-Kermani, M.; Azarderakhsh, R.; Chiou-Yng Lee; Bayat-Sarmadi, S., "Reliable Concurrent Error Detection Architectures for Extended Euclidean-Based Division Over GF(2^m) ," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 22, no.5, pp.995,1003, May 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2013.2260570 The extended Euclidean algorithm (EEA) is an important scheme for performing the division operation in finite fields. Many sensitive and security-constrained applications such as those using the elliptic curve cryptography for establishing key agreement schemes, augmented encryption approaches, and digital signature algorithms utilize this operation in their structures. Although much study is performed to realize the EEA in hardware efficiently, research on its reliable implementations needs to be done to achieve fault-immune reliable structures. In this regard, this paper presents a new concurrent error detection (CED) scheme to provide reliability for the aforementioned sensitive and constrained applications. Our proposed CED architecture is a step forward toward more reliable architectures for the EEA algorithm architectures. Through simulations and based on the number of parity bits used, the error detection capability of our CED architecture is derived to be 100% for single-bit errors and close to 99% for the experimented multiple-bit errors. In addition, we present the performance degradations of the proposed approach, leading to low-cost and reliable EEA architectures. The proposed reliable architectures are also suitable for constrained and fault-sensitive embedded applications utilizing the EEA hardware implementations.
Keywords: cryptography; embedded systems; error detection; fault diagnosis; reliability; constrained embedded applications; elliptic curve cryptography; encryption; extended Euclidean-based division; fault diagnosis; fault-sensitive embedded applications; finite field GF(2^m);multiple-bit errors; parity bits; reliable concurrent error detection architectures; single-bit errors; Efficient fault diagnosis; error coverage (EC);extended Euclidean algorithm (EEA) ;reliable and constrained embedded systems; reliable and constrained embedded systems. (ID#: 15-4264)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6532418&isnumber=6803904

 

Huapeng Wu, "Efficient Bit-Serial Finite Field Montgomery Multiplier in GF(2^m)," Information Science and Technology (ICIST), 2014 4th IEEE International Conference on, pp. 527, 530, 26-28 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICIST.2014.6920532 Montgomery multiplication in finite fields has been paid more and more attention recently since it shows advantageous over regular multiplication in speeding up elliptic curve cryptography based network security protocols. In this paper, a most-significant-bit first bit-serial Montgomery multiplication algorithm in GF(2^m) using weakly dual bases is proposed for the first time. Then a new bit-serial Montgomery multiplier architecture is proposed using a linear feedback shift register (LFSR). Complexity comparison has shown that the proposed multiplier is comparable to or has certain advantage over the best among the existing similar works found in the literature.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; multiplying circuits; public key cryptography; shift registers; LFSR; bit-serial Montgomery multiplier architecture; complexity comparison; elliptic curve cryptography based network security protocols; finite fields; linear feedback shift register; most-significant-bit first bit-serial Montgomery multiplication algorithm; weakly dual bases; Complexity theory; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Linear feedback shift registers; Logic gates; Polynomials; Finite field; Linear feedback shift register (LFSR);Montgomery multiplication; Weakly dual basis (ID#: 15-4265)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6920532&isnumber=6920317

 

Alrimeih, H.; Rakhmatov, D., "Pipelined Modular Multiplier Supporting Multiple Standard Prime fields," Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), 2014 IEEE 25th International Conference on, pp. 48, 56, 18-20 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ASAP.2014.6868630 Computationally-intensive cryptographic applications are critically dependent on the efficiency of modular multiplications. It is desirable for a modular multiplier to offer not only high performance, but also a certain degree of flexibility, supporting multiplications over finite fields of varying size. We propose a fast and flexible modular multiplier over five prime fields GF(p), standardized by NIST for use in elliptic curve cryptography, where the five special primes p are of size 192, 224, 256, 384, and 521 bits. A prime-specific datapath configuration of our multiplier is established automatically, based on an external control word that identifies a NIST prime in use. The pipeline latency of our multiplier (implemented on a Virtex-6 FPGA and running at 100 MHz) is 80 ns for 192-bit, 224-bit, and 256-bit NIST primes, and 200 ns for 384-bit and 521-bit NIST primes. The main limitation of this work is that our multiplier currently supports only the NIST prime fields. We believe that such a limitation is justifiable, as the NIST prime fields are widely used in practice and enable performance improvements through specialized hardware optimizations.
Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; matrix multiplication; public key cryptography; NIST primes;Virtex-6 FPGA; computationally-intensive cryptographic applications; elliptic curve cryptography; external control word; field programmable gate array; flexibility degree; hardware optimizations; modular multiplications; multiple standard prime fields; pipelined modular multiplier; prime-specific datapath configuration; Clocks; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; NIST; Pipelines; Throughput; Zirconium (ID#: 15-4266)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868630&isnumber=6868606

 

Renfeng Dou; Jun Han; Yifan Bo; Zhiyi Yu; Xiaoyang Zeng, "An Efficient Implementation of Montgomery Multiplication on Multicore Platform With Optimized Algorithm, Task Partitioning, and Network Architecture," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.22, no.11, pp.2245,2255, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2013.2294339 The modular multiplication (MM) is a key operation in cryptographic algorithms, such as RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography. Multicore processor is a suitable platform to implement MM because of its flexibility, high performance, and energy-efficiency. In this paper, we propose a block-level parallel algorithm for MM with quotient pipelining and optimally map it on a network-on-chip-based multicore platform equipped with broadcasting mechanism. Aiming at highest performance, a theoretical speedup model for parallel MM is also developed for parameter exploration that optimizes task partitioning. Experimental results based on a multicore prototype show that compared with the sequential MM on single core, the parallel implementation proposed in this paper maximizes the speedup ratio with regard to given intercore communication latency.
Keywords: multiplying circuits; multiprocessing systems; network-on-chip; public key cryptography; Montgomery multiplication; RSA; block level parallel algorithm; elliptic curve cryptography; intercore communication latency; modular multiplication; multicore processor; network architecture; network-on-chip; quotient pipelining; task partitioning; Algorithm design and analysis; Broadcasting; Multicore processing; Parallel processing; Partitioning algorithms; Topology; Broadcast; Montgomery multiplication; cryptography; multicast; multicore systems; network-on-chip (NoC); parallel computing; parallel computing. (ID#: 15-4267)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6689343&isnumber=6932540

 

Basiri, M.M.A.; Nayak, S.C.; Sk, N.M., "Multiplication Acceleration Through Quarter Precision Wallace Tree Multiplier," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2014 International Conference on, pp.502, 505, 20-21 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2014.6777005 This paper proposes a novel fixed point multiplier architecture with data level parallelism. That is, the same multiplier hardware is used to perform multiple multiplications on different data paths. Here, we proposed a Wallace tree multiplier to perform more number of multiplications in parallel with fewer extra carry save stages than conventional multiplier. The proposed n-bit Wallace structure is used to perform four (n/2)×(n/2)-bit multiplications, two n×(n/2)-bit multiplications and one n × n-bit multiplication in parallel. The experimental results are showing the comparison between the conventional 32-bit Wallace tree multiplier with proposed 32-bit Wallace tree multiplier. The proposed system is having slightly higher depth than conventional multiplier due to 2 extra carry save stages to incorporate multiple multiplications in parallel, which is not possible in conventional Wallace tree multiplier.
Keywords: fixed point arithmetic; public key cryptography ;trees (mathematics); cryptography systems; data level parallelism; elliptic curve cryptography; multiplication acceleration; n-bit Wallace structure; novel fixed point multiplier architecture; quarter precision Wallace tree multiplier; Adders; Arrays; Hardware; Parallel processing; Signal processing; Vector processors; Carry look ahead adder; DSP processor; Data level parallelism; High performance arithmetic; Vector processor and Wallace tree multiplier (ID#: 15-4268)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6777005&isnumber=6776904

 

Xie, J.; Meher, P.K.; Mao, Z.-H., "High-Throughput Finite Field Multipliers Using Redundant Basis for FPGA and ASIC Implementations," Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1, 10, 01 October 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCSI.2014.2349577 Redundant basis (RB) multipliers over Galois Field GF(2^m) have gained huge popularity in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) mainly because of their negligible hardware cost for squaring and modular reduction. In this paper, we have proposed a novel recursive decomposition algorithm for RB multiplication to obtain high-throughput digit-serial implementation. Through efficient projection of signal-flow graph (SFG) of the proposed algorithm, a highly regular processor-space flow-graph (PSFG) is derived. By identifying suitable cut-sets, we have modified the PSFG suitably and performed efficient feed-forward cut-set retiming to derive three novel multipliers which not only involve significantly less time-complexity than the existing ones but also require less area and less power consumption compared with the others. Both theoretical analysis and synthesis results confirm the efficiency of proposed multipliers over the existing ones. The synthesis results for field programmable gate array (FPGA) and application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) realization of the proposed designs and competing existing designs are compared. It is shown that the proposed high-throughput structures are the best among the corresponding designs, for FPGA and ASIC implementation. It is shown that the proposed designs can achieve up to 94% and 60% savings of area-delay-power product (ADPP) on FPGA and ASIC implementation over the best of the existing designs, respectively.
Keywords: Algorithm design and analysis; Arrays; Field programmable gate arrays; Galois fields; Microprocessors; Registers; ASIC; FPGA; digit-serial; finite field multiplication; high-throughput; redundant basis (ID#: 15-4269)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6914617&isnumber=4358591

 

Kodali, Ravi Kishore, "ECC with Hidden Generator Point in WSNs," Region 10 Symposium, 2014 IEEE,  pp.131,136, 14-16 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TENCONSpring.2014.6863011 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), comprising of tiny nodes with limited energy, computational and communication resources, are being widely used in various application areas ranging from pollution and weather monitoring to military. Even though every application may not require data to be exchanged in a secure manner, few WSN applications may have certain security requirements. The data is encrypted by a sender and sent over the wireless links and the same is decrypted at the receiver. To meet this purpose, symmetric key cryptographic (SKC) algorithms may be used. Such SKC primitives require keys to be made available before carrying out the data transfer between the nodes. Alternately, Public Key Cryptographic techniques, such as RSA algorithm can be considered. Even though, RSA is a popular algorithm providing good security level, it is computationally intensive involving large key sizes. The RSA can not be used in WSNs, as the nodes have limited resources. Presently, it is infeasible to implement the RSA algorithm using any of the WSN nodes commercially available. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), another public key cryptographic (PKC) algorithm providing same level of security with smaller key size requirements, can be used as an alternative in order to provide security in WSN applications. ECC encryption and decryption use domain parameters, which includes the Generator point to be published. In most of the outdoor WSN applications, the deployment of the nodes is random and the nodes could be captured and an attacker could launch man-in-middle (MIM) attack, and break the public key thereby leading to security breach in the network. A technique to overcome such an attack is proposed in this work and the same is compared with two other similar approaches.
Keywords: ECC; Security; WSN (ID#: 15-4270)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6863011&isnumber=6862973

 

Ribarski, P.; Antovski, L., "Comparison of ID-Based Blind Signatures From Pairings For E-Voting Protocols," Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO), 2014 37th International Convention on, pp.1394,1399, 26-30 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/MIPRO.2014.6859785 Elliptic curves are gaining momentum as scientists are continuously proving their security and performance. Pairings over elliptic curves are relatively new in the world of cryptography. Researchers are coming with new cryptographic usage of pairings for over ten years. ID-based cryptography is also gaining popularity because of the certificate-less mode of work. Blind signatures are appropriate schemes when user anonymity is wanted as property. One possible type of blind signature is ID-based blind signature based on bilinear pairings. For easy computation we look into pairing-friendly elliptic curves for implementation of pairings. This paper will review state of the art ID-based blind signature schemes from pairings over elliptic curves which are suitable for building blind signatures as part of e-voting protocols. We give comparative results about the computation cost of arithmetic operations. In our knowledge, this is first paper which gives head-to-head bandwidth comparison of the interactive protocol in the signing algorithm of blind signature schemes. The results are easy to use when choosing appropriate blind signature scheme for e-voting protocols.
Keywords: blind source separation; cryptographic protocols; identification technology; public administration; public key cryptography; ID-based blind signatures; ID-based cryptography; bilinear pairings; e-voting protocols; interactive protocol; pairing-friendly elliptic curves; user anonymity; Bandwidth; Cryptography; Electronic voting; Elliptic curves; Frequency modulation; Protocols; blind signature; cryptography; e-voting; elliptic curves; pairing (ID#: 15-4271)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6859785&isnumber=6859515

 

Wagan, Asif Ali; Jung, Low Tang, "Security Framework For Low Latency Vanet Applications," Computer and Information Sciences (ICCOINS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,6, 3-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCOINS.2014.6868395 Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a communication network for vehicles on the highway. Presently, VANET technology is surrounded with security challenges and it is essentially important for VANET to successfully implement a security measure according to the safety applications requirements. Many academia researcher have suggested a various solutions to encounter security attacks and also proposed models to strengthen security characteristics. The current most suitable security scheme for VANET is an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). However ECDSA is associated with high computational cost, therefore it is considered an inappropriate approach for low latency safety applications. In this study, a security framework is proposed to solve above issues; a proposed framework utilizes both traditional cryptographic schemes; asymmetric PKI and symmetric respectively. The asymmetric cryptography scheme is used to securely exchange the key and authentication process and symmetric cryptography scheme is used for low latency safety application (especially time critical safety applications). The suggested framework is not only reduce the latency but also enhance the security cryptography characteristics by establishing trust between ongoing vehicles.
Keywords: Asymmetric and Symmetric Cryptography; ECDSA; Latency; TPM; VANET (ID#: 15-4272)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868395&isnumber=6868339

 

Baheti, A.; Singh, L.; Khan, A.U., "Proposed Method for Multimedia Data Security Using Cyclic Elliptic Curve, Chaotic System, and Authentication Using Neural Network," Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on, pp.664,668, 7-9 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSNT.2014.139 As multimedia applications are used increasingly, security becomes an important issue of security of images. The combination of chaotic theory and cryptography forms an important field of information security. In the past decade, chaos based image encryption is given much attention in the research of information security and a lot of image encryption algorithms based on chaotic maps have been proposed. But, most of them delay the system performance, security, and suffer from the small key space problem. This paper introduces an efficient symmetric encryption scheme based on a cyclic elliptic curve and chaotic system that can overcome these disadvantages. The cipher encrypts 256-bit of plain image to 256-bit of cipher image within eight 32-bit registers. The scheme generates pseudorandom bit sequences for round keys based on a piecewise nonlinear chaotic map. Then, the generated sequences are mixed with the key sequences derived from the cyclic elliptic curve points. The proposed algorithm has good encryption effect, large key space, high sensitivity to small change in secret keys and fast compared to other competitive algorithms.
Keywords: image coding; multimedia computing; neural nets; public key cryptography; authentication; chaos based image encryption; chaotic maps; chaotic system; chaotic theory; competitive algorithms; cryptography; cyclic elliptic curve points; encryption effect; image encryption algorithms; information security; multimedia applications; multimedia data security; neural network; piecewise nonlinear chaotic map; pseudorandom bit sequences; small key space problem; system performance; Authentication; Chaotic communication; Elliptic curves; Encryption; Media; Multimedia communication; authentication; chaos; decryption; encryption; neural network (ID#: 15-4273)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6821481&isnumber=6821334

 

Abubakar, Mustapha Yusuf; Jung, Low Tang; Zakaria, Nordin Mohd; Foong, Oi Mean, "Proposed Method For Enhancing Quantum Bit Error Rate Using Quantum Key Distribution Technique," Computer and Information Sciences (ICCOINS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,6, 3-5 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCOINS.2014.6868384 The current public key infrastructure (pki) encryption/decryption methods are still vulnerable to attacks. The main issue is, the public key algorithm suffers no effective solutions which are natural within particular integer factorization, distinct logarithm and also elliptic curve interactions. It might be computationally possible for an individual to create public and private key set computationally for attacking purposes. The current single channel quantum key distribution (qkd) technique suffers high quantum bit error rates (qber) in the presence of eavesdropping attacks. Therefore this high error rate needs to be reduced for better security using two channels qkd. With the current emergence of quantum computers many security algorithm that could take classical computer years to break could now be broken in matter of seconds. Therefore stronger quantum cryptography is needed for high security networking. This paper is proposed to provide a way for solving the key transmission issues using qkd, as a new method, by providing two quantum channels to improve qber. In addition also to develop an algorithm for integrating pki and qkd in solving the secrete key sharing issues in grid environment. The research methodology will require the use of qkd devices to be placed at the end of the sender and the receiver nodes for quantum channel secrete key sharing. The outcome of the research shall provide highly enhanced network cryptography mechanism for cyber security.
Keywords: grid computing; public key infrastructure; quantum bit error rate; quantum cryptography; quantum key distribution (ID#: 15-4274)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6868384&isnumber=6868339

 

 

Skarmeta, A.F.; Hernández-Ramos, J.L.; Moreno, M.V., "A Decentralized Approach For Security And Privacy Challenges in the Internet of Things," Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum on, pp.67,72, 6-8 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/WF-IoT.2014.6803122 The strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT) is dramatically changing traditional perceptions of the current Internet towards an integrated vision of smart objects interacting with each other. While in recent years many technological challenges have already been solved through the extension and adaptation of wireless technologies, security and privacy still remain as the main barriers for the IoT deployment on a broad scale. In this emerging paradigm, typical scenarios manage particularly sensitive data, and any leakage of information could severely damage the privacy of users. This paper provides a concise description of some of the major challenges related to these areas that still need to be overcome in the coming years for a full acceptance of all IoT stakeholders involved. In addition, we propose a distributed capability-based access control mechanism which is built on public key cryptography in order to cope with some of these challenges. Specifically, our solution is based on the design of a lightweight token used for access to CoAP Resources, and an optimized implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) inside the smart object. The results obtained from our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal and show promising in order to cover more complex scenarios in the future, as well as its application in specific IoT use cases.
Keywords: Internet of Things; authorisation; computer network security; data privacy; digital signatures; personal area networks; public key cryptography;6LoWPAN;CoAP resources; ECDSA; Internet of Things ;IoT deployment; IoT stakeholders; distributed capability-based access control mechanism; elliptic curve digital signature algorithm; information leakage; lightweight token; public key cryptography; security challenges; sensitive data management; user privacy; wireless technologies; Authentication; Authorization; Cryptography ;Internet; Privacy; 6LoWPAN; Internet of Things; Privacy; Security; cryptographic primitives; distributed access control (ID#: 15-4275)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6803122&isnumber=6803102

 

Song Guo; Deze Zeng; Yang Xiang, "Chameleon Hashing for Secure and Privacy-Preserving Vehicular Communications," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 25, no.11, pp.2794, 2803, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.277 Many services and applications in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) require preserving and secure data communications. To improve driving safety and comfort, the traffic-related status information will be broadcasted regularly and shared among drivers. Without the security and privacy guarantees, attackers could track their interested vehicles by collecting and analyzing their traffic messages. Hence, anonymous message authentication is an essential requirement of VANETs. On the other hand, when a vehicle is involved in a dispute event of warning message, the certificate authority should be able to recover the real identity of this vehicle. To deal with this issue, we propose a new privacy-preserving authentication protocol with authority traceability using elliptic curve based chameleon hashing. Compared with existing schemes, our approach possesses the following features: 1) mutual and anonymous authentication for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications, 2) vehicle unlinkability, 3) authority tracking capability, and 4) high computational efficiency. We also demonstrate the merits of our proposed scheme through security analysis and extensive performance evaluation.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; message authentication; public key cryptography; road traffic; telecommunication security; vehicular ad hoc networks; VANET; authority tracking capability; data communication security; driving comfort; driving safety; elliptic curve based chameleon hashing; message authentication; privacy-preserving authentication protocol; traffic messages; traffic-related status information; vehicle unlinkability; vehicle-to-roadside communication; vehicle-to-vehicle communication; vehicular ad-hoc networks ;vehicular communication security; Authentication; Privacy; Protocols; Public key; Vehicles; Security and privacy; authentication protocol design; ecliptic curve based chameleon hashing (ID#: 15-4276)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6654169&isnumber=6919360

 

Roy, S.S.; Fan, J.; Verbauwhede, I., "Accelerating Scalar Conversion for Koblitz Curve Cryptoprocessors on Hardware Platforms," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,1, 09 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2014.2321282 Koblitz curves are a class of computationally efficient elliptic curves where scalar multiplications can be accelerated using τNAF representations of scalars. However, conversion from an integer scalar to a short τNAF is a costly operation. In this paper, we improve the recently proposed scalar conversion scheme based on division by τ². We apply two levels of optimizations in the scalar conversion architecture. First, we reduce the number of long integer subtractions during the scalar conversion. This optimization reduces the computation cost and also simplifies the critical paths present in the conversion architecture. Then we implement pipelines in the architecture. The pipeline splitting increases the operating frequency without increasing the number of cycles. We have provided detailed experimental results to support our claims made in this paper.
Keywords: Acceleration; Adders; Computer architecture ;Equations; Hardware; Optimization ;Pipeline processing; Architecture; Koblitz curve; cryptography; field-programmable gate array (FPGA); lazy reduction; pipelining; scalar multiplication (ID#: 15-4277)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6827945&isnumber=4359553

 

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review), Part 5

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	Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2014 Year in Review)  Part 5

 

Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally.  In 2014, more than one hundred articles of interest to the Science of Security community have been published.  We cite them here in five parts.

 

Chiou-Yng Lee; Meher, P.K.; Chien-Ping Chang, "Efficient M-ary Exponentiation over GF(2^m)  Using Subquadratic KA-Based Three-Operand Montgomery Multiplier," Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on, vol.61, no.11, pp.3125,3134, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCSI.2014.2334992 Karatsuba algorithm (KA) is popularly used for high-precision multiplication of long binary polynomials. The only well-known subquadratic multipliers using KA scheme are, however, based on conventional two-operand polynomial multiplication. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on 2-way and 3-way KA decompositions for computing three-operand polynomial multiplications. Using these novel KA decompositions, we present here a new subquadratic Montgomery multiplier. Our proposed multiplier involves less area and less delay compared to the schoolbook three-operand multiplier as well as the two-operand multipliers based on conventional KA decomposition. We have used the proposed three-operand Montgomery multiplication to derive a novel efficient scheme for m-ary exponentiation, and proposed a novel architecture for exponentiation. We have analyzed the complexities of proposed design, and shown that the proposed exponentiator can have a small lower bound on time complexity amounting to √m-1 multiplication delays, while traditional exponentiators require nearly m multiplication delays. From synthesis results, it is shown that the proposed exponentiator using subquadratic three-operand multiplier approach has significantly less time complexity, less area-delay product, and less power consumption than the existing exponentiators. Moreover, exponentiation-based cryptosystems, such as pairing based cryptography, could achieve high-speed operation using by our proposed multiplier and m-ary exponentiator.
Keywords: digital arithmetic; matrix decomposition; polynomials; 2-way KA decomposition; 3-way KA decomposition; Karatsuba algorithm; efficient m-ary exponentiation; exponentiation-based cryptosystems; pairing based cryptography; subquadratic KA-based three-operand Montgomery multiplier; subquadratic Montgomery multiplier; three-operand polynomial multiplications; Complexity theory; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Delays; Elliptic curves;Logic gates; Polynomials; Exponentiation; Karatsuba algorithm; Montgomery multiplication; three-operand multiplication (ID#: 15-4278)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6924811&isnumber=6936397

 

Kumar, A.; Lafourcade, P.; Lauradoux, C., "Performances of Cryptographic Accumulators," Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2014 IEEE 39th Conference on, pp.366, 369, 8-11 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/LCN.2014.6925793 Cryptographic accumulators are space/time efficient data structures used to verify if a value belongs to a set. They have found many applications in networking and distributed systems since their introduction by Benaloh and de Mare in 1993. Despite this popularity, there is currently no thorough performance evaluation of the different existing designs. Symmetric and asymmetric accumulators are used likewise without any particular argument to support either of the design. We aim to establish the speed of each design and their application's domains in terms of their size and the size of the values.
Keywords: cryptography; data structures; distributed processing; performance evaluation; asymmetric accumulators; cryptographic accumulator performance evaluation; distributed systems; networking systems; space efficient data structures; time efficient data structures; Cryptography; Data structures; Electronic mail; Elliptic curves; Indexes; Vectors; Bloom filter; Cryptographic accumulators; Performance (ID#: 15-4279)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6925793&isnumber=6925725

 

Durech, J.; Hrubos, M.; Franekova, M.; Janota, A., "Implementation of Data from the Mobile Measurement Platform to VANET Application," ELEKTRO, 2014, pp.430, 434, 19-20 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ELEKTRO.2014.6848932 The paper deals with an idea of informing the car drivers on problem of road degradation via sending of warning messages from road side units. The initial part of the paper summarized the up-to-now realized concept of the mobile measurement platform (MMS) and its mathematical principles showing how detailed data on road surface may be obtained. The main part of the paper is aimed at design of integration of data from MMS into the VANET application. Practical realisation is based on the warning message generation with GPS coordinates which is assuring by digital signature ECDSA cryptography algorithm via OpenSSL tool.
Keywords: Global Positioning System; data integration; digital signatures; electronic messaging; public key cryptography; vehicular ad hoc networks; GPS coordinate; MMP; OpenSSL tool; VANET application; car driver; data implementation; data integration; digital signature ECDSA cryptography algorithm; elliptic curve digital signature algorithm; mobile measurement platform; road degradation; road side unit; vehicular ad hoc network; warning message generation; warning messages sending; Algorithm design and analysis; Digital signatures; Public key; Roads; Silicon compounds;Vehicles;3D model;C2C;C2I;OpenSSL;VANET;cryptography;data fusion; point cloud; vehicular communications (ID#: 15-4280)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6848932&isnumber=6847850

 

Ravi, Kalkundri; Praveen, Kalkundri, "AODV Routing in VANET for Message Authentication using ECDSA," Communications and Signal Processing (ICCSP), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1389,1393, 3-5 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCSP.2014.6950077 A Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a part of MANETs that is formed by wireless connections between cars. In VANETs, routing protocols and other routing related techniques must be adaptable to vehicular-specific capabilities and requirements. Along with the routing in VANET, message security is also one of the major concern. Messages are critical and important like a warning message, so that the message must be authenticated which guarantee's the message integrity. The authentication of these messages is done with the help of an algorithm called Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which provides an efficient message authentication scheme. A combination of AODV, ECDSA and VANET can make the scenario more efficient and perform better in terms of routing and time delay in message delivery.
Keywords: Ad hoc networks; Algorithm design and analysis; Authentication; Cryptography; Message authentication; Mobile computing; Routing; AODV; ECDSA; Message Authentication; VANET (ID#: 15-4281)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6950077&isnumber=6949766

 

Mikhail, M.; Abouelseoud, Y.; Elkobrosy, G., "Extension and Application Of El-Gamal Encryption Scheme," Computer Applications and Information Systems (WCCAIS), 2014 World Congress on, pp.1,6, 17-19 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/WCCAIS.2014.6916627 Security is an essential requirement in the industrial world. Information leakage to competitors can cause financial problems for a company. Moreover, the wide use of the Internet as an environment for doing business and shopping calls for secure electronic transactions. Confidentiality of the information is preserved through the use of encryption schemes. This paper proposes a new three-party extension of ElGamal encryption scheme and a multi-receiver extension of ElGamal encryption scheme. For both of the two proposed schemes, security and performance are analyzed. Finally, the application of El-Gamal encryption scheme in internet voting is studied for its importance nowadays.
Keywords: cryptography; data privacy; El-Gamal encryption scheme; information confidentiality; information leakage; multireceiver extension; secure electronic transaction; security; Elliptic curves; Encryption; Finite element analysis; Galois fields; Public key; ElGamal encryption; Information security; Public key encryption; internet voting; multi-recipient encryption; tripartite encryption (ID#: 15-4282)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916627&isnumber=6916540

 

Mezroui, S.; Azizi, A.; Ziane, M., "A Key Exchange System Based On Some Bicyclic Biquadratic Number Fields," Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1260,1264, 14-16 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICMCS.2014.6911343 Buchmann and Williams presented in 1988 a key exchange system based on the quadratic imaginary fields. In this paper, we introduce a key exchange protocol based on some imaginary biquadratic fields which is inspired by the Buchmann-Williams' method. We also give the theoretical method in order to generalize the Buchmann-Williams protocol to other fields extensions.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; Buchmann-William method; Buchmann-Williams protocol; bicyclic biquadratic number fields; imaginary biquadratic field; key exchange protocol; key exchange system; Cryptography; Educational institutions; Elliptic curves; Generators; Protocols; Buchmann-Williams protocol; Euclidean rings; Hilbert fundamental domains (ID#: 15-4283)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911343&isnumber=6911126

 

Patil, M.; Sahu, V.; Jain, A., "SMS text Compression and Encryption on Android O.S," Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 1, 6, 3-5 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCI.2014.6921767 Today in the world of globalization mobile communication is one of the fastest growing medium though which one sender can interact with other in short time. During the transmission of data from sender to receiver, size of data is important, since more data takes more time. But one of the limitations of sending data through mobile devices is limited use of bandwidth and number of packets transmitted. Also the security of these data is important. Hence various protocols are implemented which not only provides security to the data but also utilizes bandwidth. Here we proposed an efficient technique of sending SMS text using combination of compression and encryption. The data to be send is first encrypted using Elliptic curve Cryptographic technique, but encryption increases the size of the text data, hence compression is applied to this encrypted data so the data gets compressed and is send in short time. The Compression technique implemented here is an efficient one since it includes an algorithm which compresses the text by 99.9%, hence a great amount of bandwidth gets saved.The hybrid technique of Compression-Encryption of SMS text message is implemented for Android Operating Systems.
Keywords: Android (operating system); cryptographic protocols; data communication; data compression; electronic messaging; public key cryptography; smart phones; Android OS;SMS text encryption-compression technique; data security; data transmission; elliptic curve cryptographic technique; mobile communication; mobile devices; security protocols; Algorithm design and analysis; Bandwidth; Computers; Encryption; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; ECDSA; Look ahead buffer; PDA; SMS; lossless compression (ID#: 15-4284)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6921767&isnumber=6921705

 

Bubenikova, E.; Durech, J.; Franekova, M., "Security Solutions Of Intelligent Transportation System's Applications With Using VANET Networks," Control Conference (ICCC), 2014 15th International Carpathian, pp.63,68, 28-30 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/CarpathianCC.2014.6843570 The paper deals with the problem of security increasing of applications oriented to safety used within intelligent transportation systems (ITS). The mainly part is orientated to the Lane Departure Warning System (LDWS) with connection to vehicular communications (VC). Simultaneously the safety parameters of the effective digital signature schemes for VC communications are mentioned which are used for an authorised message transmission. In the paper the possible solutions of detection of horizontal road marking on the base of segmentation method are described and the solution of connection of assistance service to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications with using Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES). Practical part realized via SW Matlab detects the departure of the vehicle from its driving lane, triggers the resulting alarm which is on the security manner transferred as alarm message with digital signature between vehicles via V2V communications. The effectiveness of three digital signature schemes according to length of the key is simulated via SW OpenSSL.
Keywords: alarm systems; digital signatures; intelligent transportation systems; public key cryptography; telecommunication security; vehicular ad hoc networks; ECIES; ITS; LDWS; SW Matlab; SW OpenSSL;V2V communications; VANET networks; alarm message; assistance service; authorised message transmission; digital signature; driving lane; elliptic curve integrated encryption scheme; horizontal road marking; intelligent transportation system; lane departure warning system; security solutions; segmentation method; vehicle-to-vehicle communications; vehicular communications; Digital signatures; Image color analysis; Roads; Safety; Vehicles; Vehicular ad hoc networks; ECIES scheme; LDWS; Matlab; OpenSSL; security; vehicular network (ID#: 15-4285)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6843570&isnumber=6843557

 

Mamun, M.S.I.; Miyaji, A., "RFID Path Authentication, Revisited," Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on, pp.245,252, 13-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/AINA.2014.150 In an RFID-enabled supply chain, where items are outfitted with RFID tags, path authentication based on tag enables the destination checkpoints to validate the route that a tag has already accessed. In this work, we propose a novel, efficient, privacy-preserving path authentication system for RFID-enabled supply chains. Compared to existing Elliptic curve Elgamal Re-encryption (ECElgamal) based solution, our Homomorphic Message authentication Code on arithmetic circuit (HomMAC) based solution offers less memory storage (with limited scalability) and no computational requirement on the reader. However, unlike previous schemes, we allow computational ability inside the tag that consents a new privacy direction to path privacy proposed by Cai et al. in ACNS012. In addition, we customize a polynomial-based authentication scheme (to thwart potential tag impersonation and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks), so that it fits our new path authentication protocol.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; polynomials; public key cryptography; radiofrequency identification; supply chain management; ECElgamal based solution; RFID path authentication; RFID-enabled supply chain; arithmetic circuit; denial of service attacks; elliptic curve Elgamal reencryption based solution; homomorphic message authentication code; path authentication protocol; path privacy; polynomial-based authentication scheme; privacy-preserving path authentication system; supply chain management; Authentication; Logic gates; Polynomials; Privacy; Protocols; Supply chains; Arithmetic circuit; Homomorphic MAC; Mutual Authentication; Path Authentication (ID#: 15-4286)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6838672&isnumber=6838626

 

Durech, J.; Franekova, M.; Holecko, P.; Bubenikova, E., "Security Analysis Of Cryptographic Constructions Used Within Communications In Modern Transportation Systems On The Base Of Modelling," ELEKTRO, 2014, pp.424, 429, 19-20 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ELEKTRO.2014.6848931 The goal of this paper is the analysis of cryptographic mechanisms utilised in VANET communication for Intelligent Transportation Systems with focus on security. The practical part of the contribution is dedicated to modelling of security properties of VANET networks in OPNET Modeler modelling tool extended by the implementation of the OpenSSL library. The designed models simulate a transmission of authorised alert messages in Car-to-Car communication with Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES). The OpenSSL library has also been utilised for the comparison of time demandingness of ECDSA schemes for different key-lengths.
Keywords: intelligent transportation systems; public key cryptography; road traffic; telecommunication security; vehicular ad hoc networks; ECIES; MANET communication; OPNET Modeler modelling tool; OpenSSL library; authorised alert messages transmission; car-to-car communication; cryptographic constructions; elliptic curve integrated encryption scheme; intelligent transportation systems; modern transportation systems; road transport; security analysis; Availability; Cryptography; Libraries; Relays; Vectors; Vehicles; Vehicular ad hoc networks; ECIES scheme; OPNET Modeler; OpenSSL; VANET networks; cryptography; intelligent transportation systems; modelling; vehicular communications (ID#: 15-4287)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6848931&isnumber=6847850

 

Li Xi; Dengguo Feng; Yu Qin; Feng Wei; Jianxiong Shao; Bo Yang, "Direct Anonymous Attestation in Practice: Implementation And Efficient Revocation," Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2014 Twelfth Annual International Conference on, pp.67,74, 23-24 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PST.2014.6890925 Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) is a signature scheme that provides a balance between user privacy and authentication in a reasonable way. The first RSA-based DAA is proposed in 2004, since then several ECC-based DAA schemes are proposed to achieve better performance. To analyze DAA schemes from a practical point of view, it is necessary to consider implementation-related issues, such as elliptic curve selection and runtime performance. We present a framework for implementing and evaluating various DAA schemes for multiple computing platforms. We implement four DAA schemes using different elliptic curves and show detailed performance evaluation for both PC and mobile device. We analyze the impact of elliptic selections on the performance of DAA schemes and propose practical techniques such as pre-computation to improve the performance of DAA schemes. We also discuss revocation of DAA and present a novel technique which significantly reduces the time of privacy-enhanced signature revocation, thus making privacy-enhanced revocation practical even for embedded mobile devices.
Keywords: authorisation; data privacy; digital signatures; mobile computing; public key cryptography; ECC-based DAA schemes; RSA-based DAA; authentication; direct anonymous attestation; elliptic curve selection; elliptic selections; embedded mobile devices; multiple computing platforms; privacy-enhanced revocation; privacy-enhanced signature revocation; signature scheme; user privacy; Elliptic curves; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Performance evaluation; Protocols; Runtime; Security (ID#: 15-4288)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6890925&isnumber=6890911

 

Rengaraju, P.; Chung-Horng Lung; Srinivasan, A., "QoS-Aware Distributed Security Architecture for 4G Multihop Wireless Networks," Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 63, no.6, pp.2886, 2900, July 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVT.2013.2292882 Vehicular communications have received a great deal of attention in recent years due to the demand for multimedia applications during travel and for improvements in safety. Safety applications often require fast message exchanges but do not use much bandwidth. On the other hand, multimedia services require high bandwidth for vehicular users. Hence, to provide mobile broadband services at a vehicular speed of up to 350 km/h, Worldwide interoperable for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) are considered the best technologies for vehicular networks. WiMAX and LTE are Fourth-Generation (4G) wireless technologies that have well-defined quality of service (QoS) and security architectures. However, some security threats, such as denial of service (DoS), an introduction of rogue node, etc., still exist in WiMAX and LTE networks, particularly in multihop networks. Therefore, strong security architecture and hasty authentication methods are needed to mitigate the existing security threats in 4G multihop wireless networks. Conversely, the network QoS should not be degraded while enhancing security. Thus, we propose QoS-aware distributed security architecture using the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) protocol that has proven security strength and low overhead for 4G wireless networks. In this paper, we first describe the current security standards and security threats in WiMAX and LTE networks. Then, the proposed distributed security architecture for 4G multihop wireless networks is presented. Finally, we compare and analyze the proposed solution using testbed implementation and simulation approaches for WiMAX. From the simulation and testbed results for WiMAX networks, it is evident that the proposed scheme provides strong security and hasty authentication for handover users without affecting the QoS performance. For LTE networks, we present the theoretical analysis of the proposed scheme to show that similar performance can also be achieved.
Keywords: Long Term Evolution; WiMax; broadband networks; cryptographic protocols; electronic messaging; message authentication; mobility management (mobile radio); multimedia communication; public key cryptography; quality of service; telecommunication security; vehicular ad hoc networks;4G multihop wireless network; ECDH protocol; LTE networks; QoS; WiMax network; distributed security architecture; elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman protocol; handover user; hasty authentication; long term evolution; message exchange; mobile broadband services; multimedia application; multimedia service; quality of service; safety application; security standard; security threat mitigation; vehicular communication ;vehicular network; vehicular user; worldwide interoperable for microwave access; Authentication; Long Term Evolution; Quality of service; Spread spectrum communication; WiMAX; Distributed security; ECDH; LTE; Long-Term Evolution (LTE); Multihop; WiMAX; Worldwide interoperable for Microwave Access (WiMAX);elliptic curve Diffie??Hellman (ECDH); multihop (ID#: 15-4289)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6675873&isnumber=6851966

 

Saavedra Benitez, Y.I.; Ben-Othman, J.; Claude, J.-P., "Performance Evaluation of Security Mechanisms in RAOLSR Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1808, 1812, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883585 In this paper, we have proposed the IBE-RAOLSR and ECDSA-RAOLSR protocols for WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks), which contributes to security routing protocols. We have implemented the IBE (Identity Based Encryption) and ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) methods to secure messages in RAOLSR (Radio Aware Optimized Link State Routing), namely TC (Topology Control) and Hello messages. We then compare the ECDSA-based RAOLSR with IBE-based RAOLSR protocols. This study shows the great benefits of the IBE technique in securing RAOLSR protocol for WMNs. Through extensive ns-3 (Network Simulator-3) simulations, results have shown that the IBE-RAOLSR outperforms the ECDSA-RAOLSR in terms of overhead and delay. Simulation results show that the utilization of the IBE-based RAOLSR provides a greater level of security with light overhead.
Keywords: cryptography; routing protocols; telecommunication control; telecommunication network topology; wireless mesh networks; ECDSA-RAOLSR protocols; IBE-RAOLSR protocols; WMN; elliptic curve digital signature algorithm; hello messages; identity based encryption; network simulator-3 simulations ;radio aware optimized link state routing; routing protocols; security mechanisms; topology control; wireless mesh networks; Delays; Digital signatures; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Routing; Routing protocols; IBE; Identity Based Encryption; Radio Aware Optimized Link State Routing; Routing Protocol; Security; Wireless Mesh Networks (ID#: 15-4290)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883585&isnumber=6883277

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

Hard Problems: Scalability and Composability (2014 Year in Review)

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	Hard Problems: Scalability and Composability (2014 Year in Review)

 

Scalability and Composability is a hard problem in the Science of Security. A survey of the IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries found a long list of scholarly articles about research into scalability and composability published in 2014. This series of bibliographical citations includes those actually published by IEEE or ACM. A separate listing of works researching these areas but not published by IEEE or ACM is cited under the heading "Citations for Hard Problems."

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Yves Lhuillier, Maroun Ojail, Alexandre Guerre, Jean-Marc Philippe, Karim Ben Chehida, Farhat Thabet, Caaliph Andriamisaina, Chafic Jaber, Raphaël David; “HARS: A Hardware-Assisted Runtime Software For Embedded Many-Core Architectures,” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special Issue on Design Challenges for Many-Core Processors, Special Section on ESTIMedia'13 and Regular Papers TECS Homepage, Volume 13 Issue 3s, March 2014, Article No. 102. Doi: 10.1145/2517311 The current trend in embedded computing consists in increasing the number of processing resources on a chip. Following this paradigm, cluster-based many-core accelerators with a shared hierarchical memory have emerged. Handling synchronizations on these architectures is critical since parallel implementations speed-ups of embedded applications strongly depend on the ability to exploit the largest possible number of cores while limiting task management overhead. This article presents the combination of a low-overhead complete runtime software and a flexible hardware accelerator for synchronizations called HARS (Hardware-Assisted Runtime Software). Experiments on a multicore test chip showed that the hardware accelerator for synchronizations has less than 1% area overhead compared to a cluster of the chip while reducing synchronization latencies (up to 2.8 times compared to a test-and-set implementation) and contentions. The runtime software part offers basic features like memory management but also optimized execution engines to allow the easy and efficient extraction of the parallelism in applications with multiple programming models. By using the hardware acceleration as well as a very low overhead task scheduling software technique, we show that HARS outperforms an optimized state-of-the-art task scheduler by 13% for the execution of a parallel application.
Keywords: Embedded runtime software, hardware acceleration, many-core architectures, multicore architectures (ID#: 15-4378)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2517311

 

Rupak Majumdar, Sai Deep Tetali, Zilong Wang; “Kuai: A Model Checker for Software-defined Networks,” FMCAD '14 Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, October 2014, Pages 163-170. Doi: (none provided) ISBN: 978-0-9835678-4-4 In software-defined networking (SDN), a software controller manages a distributed collection of switches by installing and uninstalling packet-forwarding rules in the switches. SDNs allow flexible implementations for expressive and sophisticated network management policies.  We consider the problem of verifying that an SDN satisfies a given safety property. We describe Kuai, a distributed enumerative model checker for SDNs. Kuai takes as input a controller implementation written in Murphi, a description of the network topology (switches and connections), and a safety property, and performs a distributed enumerative reachability analysis on a cluster of machines. Kuai uses a set of partial order reduction techniques specific to the SDN domain that help reduce the state space dramatically. In addition, Kuai performs an automatic abstraction to handle unboundedly many packets traversing the network at a given time and unboundedly many control messages between the controller and the switches. We demonstrate the scalability and coverage of Kuai on standard SDN benchmarks. We show that our set of partial order reduction techniques significantly reduces the state spaces of these benchmarks by many orders of magnitude. In addition, Kuai exploits large-scale distribution to quickly search the reduced state space.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4379)
URL:  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2682923.2682953

 

Mingxin Zhang, Alexander Verbraeck; “A Composable PRS-Based Agent Meta-Model For Multi-Agent Simulation Using the DEVS Framework,” ADS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium on Agent Directed Simulation, April 2014, Article No. 1.  Doi: (none provided) This paper presents a composable cognitive agent meta-model for multi-agent simulation based on the DEVS (Discrete Event System Specification) framework. We describe an attempt to compose a PRS-based cognitive agent by merely combining "plug and play" DEVS components, show how this DEVS-based cognitive agent meta-model is extensible to serve as a higher-level component for M&S of multi-agent systems, and how the agent meta-model components are reusable to ease cognitive agent modelling development. In addition to an overview of our agent meta-model, we also describe the components of the model specification and services in detail. To test the feasibility of our design, we constructed a simulation based on a Rock-Paper-Scissors game scenario. We also give out comparisons between this agent meta-model and other cognitive agent models. Our agent meta-model is novel in terms of both agent and agent components as these are all abstracted using the DEVS formalism. As different implementations of agent model components are based on the same meta-model components, all the developed agent model components can be reused in the development of other agent models which increases the composability of the agent model, and the whole cognitive agent model can be considered as a coupled model in the DEVS model hierarchy which supports multi-hierarchy modelling.
Keywords: DEVS, PRS, agent model, cognitive architecture, composability (ID#: 15-4380)
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2665049.2665050

 

Miloš Panić, Eduardo Quiñones, Pavel G. Zaykov, Carles Hernandez, Jaume Abella, Francisco J. Cazorla; “Parallel Many-Core Avionics Systems,” EMSOFT '14 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Embedded Software, October 2014, Article No. 26.  Doi: 10.1145/2656045.2656063 Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) enables incremental qualification by encapsulating avionics applications into software partitions (SWPs), as defined by the ARINC 653 standard. SWPs, when running on top of single-core processors, provide robust time partitioning as a means to isolate SWPs timing behavior from each other. However, when moving towards parallel execution in many-core processors, the simultaneous accesses to shared hardware and software resources influence the timing behavior of SWPs, defying the purpose of time partitioning to provide isolation among applications. In this paper, we extend the concept of SWP by introducing parallel software partitions (pSWP) specification that describes the behavior of SWPs required when running in a many-core to enable incremental qualification. pSWP are supported by a new hardware feature called guaranteed resource partition (GRP) that defines an execution environment in which SWPs run and that controls interferences in the accesses to shared hardware resources among SWPs such that time composability can be guaranteed.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4381)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2656045.2656063

 

Andreas Weichslgartner, Deepak Gangadharan, Stefan Wildermann, Michael Glaß, Jürgen Teich; “DAARM: Design-Time Application Analysis And Run-Time Mapping For Predictable Execution In Many-Core Systems,” CODES '14 Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis, October 2014, Article No. 34. Doi: 10.1145/2656075.2656083  Future many-core systems are envisaged to support the concurrent execution of varying mixes of different applications. Because of the vast number of binding options for such mixes on heterogeneous resources, enabling predictable application execution is far from trivial. Hybrid application mapping is an efficient way of achieving run-time predictability by combining design-time analysis of application mappings with run-time management. Existing hybrid mapping strategies focus on computation resources and either ignore communication details or make significantly simplifying assumptions like unlimited bandwidth or exclusive usage. But, actual many-core systems consist of constrained and shared computation and communication resources where the run-time decision of whether a feasible application binding on a set of preoccupied resources exists or not is an NP-complete problem. As a remedy, we present a novel hybrid application mapping approach that considers constrained shared communication and computation resources. Here, (a) a design space exploration coupled with a formal performance analysis delivers several resource reservation configurations with verified real-time guarantees for each individual application. The configurations are then transformed to (b) a novel efficient intermediate representation that is passed to the run-time management where we (c) formulate run-time resource reservation and application binding as a constraint satisfaction problem and present an adequate solving mechanism. Our experimental evaluation shows that existing approaches may produce infeasible outcomes and are thus not applicable for predictable application execution, while the proposed approach enables predictable and efficient run-time management of dynamic application mixes.
Keywords: dse, hybrid mapping, many-core, networks-on-chip, predictability (ID#: 15-4382)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2656075.2656083

 

Hanane Becha, Daniel Amyot; “Consumer-Centric Non-Functional Properties Of SOA-Based Services,” PESOS 2014 Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented and Cloud Systems, May 2014, Pages 18-27. Doi:  10.1145/2593793.2593796 An effective SOA service development approach requires the identification, specification, implementation, aggregation, management and monitoring of service-related Non-Functional Properties (NFPs). However, commonly nowadays, NFPs are often not handled or are handled partially in ad hoc, proprietary ways. In this paper, we focus on providing formal NFP descriptions of SOA-based services to be published along with their functional description. Such descriptions empower service consumers to determine whether a given service is the most appropriate one for their needs and enables them to predict the NFPs of composed services based on the NFPs of their composed underlying services. Our contributions are an externally validated collection of NFPs with a concrete syntax and composition algorithms ready to be used for defining, selecting and composing NFP-driven services. 
Keywords: Non-Functional Properties (NFPs), QoS, SOA, Service composition, Service description (ID#: 15-4383)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2593793.2593796

 

Jan Nowotsch, Michael Paulitsch, Arne Henrichsen, Werner Pongratz, Andreas Schacht; “Monitoring and WCET Analysis In COTS Multi-Core-SoC-Based Mixed-Criticality Systems,” DATE '14 Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation & Test in Europe,  March 2014, Article No. 67.  Doi:  (none provided) The performance and power efficiency of multi-core processors are attractive features for safety-critical applications, for example in avionics. But the inherent use of shared resources complicates timing analysability. In this paper we discuss a novel approach to compute the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of multiple hard real-time applications scheduled on a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multi-core processor. The analysis is closely coupled with mechanisms for temporal partitioning as, for instance, required in ARINC 653-based systems. Based on a discussion of the challenges for temporal partitioning and timing analysis in multi-core systems, we deduce a generic architecture model. Considering the requirements for re-usability and incremental development and certification, we use this model to describe our integrated analysis approach.
Keywords: WCET, multi-core, safety-critical real-time systems, temporal partitioning (ID#: 15-4384)
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2616606.2616689

 

Gervin Thomas, Ahmed Elhossini, Ben Juurlink; “A Generic Implementation of a Quantified Predictor on FPGAs,” GLSVLSI '14 Proceedings of the 24th Edition Of The Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, May 2014, Pages 255-260.  Doi: 10.1145/2591513.2591517 Predictors are used in many fields of computer architectures to enhance performance. With good estimations of future system behaviour, policies can be developed to improve system performance or reduce power consumption. These policies become more effective if the predictors are implemented in hardware and can provide quantified forecasts and not only binary ones. In this paper, we present and evaluate a generic predictor implemented in VHDL running on an FPGA which produces quantified forecasts. Moreover, a complete scalability analysis is presented which shows that our implementation has a maximum device utilization of less than 5%. Furthermore, we analyse the power consumption of the predictor running on an FPGA. Additionally, we show that this implementation can be clocked by over 210 MHz. Finally, we evaluate a power-saving policy based on our hardware predictor. Based on predicted idle periods, this power-saving policy uses power-saving modes and is able to reduce memory power consumption by 14.3%.
Keywords: RTL, VHDL, power consumption, predictor (ID#: 15-4385)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2591513.2591517

 

Michael Eichberg, Ben Hermann; “A Software Product Line For Static Analyses: The OPAL Framework,” SOAP '14 Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on the State of the Art in Java Program Analysis, June 2014, Pages 1-6. Doi: 10.1145/2614628.2614630  Implementations of static analyses are usually tailored toward a single goal to be efficient, hampering reusability and adaptability of the components of an analysis. To solve these issues, we propose to implement static analyses as highly-configurable software product lines (SPLs). Furthermore, we also discuss an implementation of an SPL for static analyses -- called OPAL -- that uses advanced language features offered by the Scala programming language to get an easily adaptable and (type-)safe software product line.  OPAL is a general purpose library for static analysis of Java Bytecode that is already successfully used. We present OPAL and show how a design based on software product line engineering benefits the implementation of static analyses with the framework.
Keywords: abstract interpretation, design, program analysis, software product line engineering, static analysis (ID#: 15-4386)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2614628.2614630

 

Christoph Bösch, Pieter Hartel, Willem Jonker, Andreas Peter; “A Survey of Provably Secure Searchable Encryption,” ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) Surveys Homepage, Volume 47 Issue 2, November 2014 Issue-in-Progress,  Article No. 18. Doi:  10.1145/2636328  We survey the notion of provably secure searchable encryption (SE) by giving a complete and comprehensive overview of the two main SE techniques: searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). Since the pioneering work of Song, Wagner, and Perrig (IEEE S&P '00), the field of provably secure SE has expanded to the point where we felt that taking stock would provide benefit to the community.  The survey has been written primarily for the nonspecialist who has a basic information security background. Thus, we sacrifice full details and proofs of individual constructions in favor of an overview of the underlying key techniques. We categorize and compare the different SE schemes in terms of their security, efficiency, and functionality. For the experienced researcher, we point out connections between the many approaches to SE and identify open research problems. Two major conclusions can be drawn from our work. While the so-called IND-CKA2 security notion becomes prevalent in the literature and efficient (sublinear) SE schemes meeting this notion exist in the symmetric setting, achieving this strong form of security efficiently in the asymmetric setting remains an open problem. We observe that in multirecipient SE schemes, regardless of their efficiency drawbacks, there is a noticeable lack of query expressiveness that hinders deployment in practice.
Keywords: Secure data management, keyword search on encrypted data, privacy, provably secure, searchable encryption (ID#: 15-4387)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2636328

 

Yanqi Zhou, David Wentzlaff; “The Sharing Architecture: Sub-Core Configurability For IaaS Clouds,” ASPLOS '14 Proceedings of the 19th International Conference On Architectural Support For Programming Languages And Operating Systems, February 2014, pages 559-574. Doi: 10.1145/2644865.2541950 Businesses and Academics are increasingly turning to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to fulfill their computing needs. Unfortunately, current IaaS systems provide a severely restricted pallet of rentable computing options which do not optimally fit the workloads that they are executing. We address this challenge by proposing and evaluating a manycore architecture, called the Sharing Architecture, specifically optimized for IaaS systems by being reconfigurable on a sub-core basis. The Sharing Architecture enables better matching of workload to micro-architecture resources by replacing static cores with Virtual Cores which can be dynamically reconfigured to have different numbers of ALUs and amount of Cache. This reconfigurability enables many of the same benefits of heterogeneous multicores, but in a homogeneous fabric, and enables the reuse and resale of resources on a per ALU or per KB of cache basis. The Sharing Architecture leverages Distributed ILP techniques, but is designed in a way to be independent of recompilation. In addition, we introduce an economic model which is enabled by the Sharing Architecture and show how different users who have varying needs can be better served by such a flexible architecture. We evaluate the Sharing Architecture across a benchmark suite of Apache, SPECint, and parts of PARSEC, and find that it can achieve up to a 5x more economically efficient market when compared to static architecture multicores. We implemented the Sharing Architecture in Verilog and present area overhead results.
Keywords: cache, cache banks, infrastructure as a service (iaas), market efficiency, slice, utility, virtual core (vcore), virtual machine (vm) (ID#: 15-4388)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2644865.2541950

 

Clemens Dubslaff, Sascha Klüppelholz, Christel Baier; “Probabilistic Model Checking For Energy Analysis In Software Product Lines,” MODULARITY '14 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Modularity, April 2014, Pages 169-180. Doi:  10.1145/2577080.2577095 In a software product line (SPL), a collection of software products is defined by their commonalities in terms of features rather than explicitly specifying all products one-by-one. Several verification techniques were adapted to establish temporal properties of SPLs. Symbolic and family-based model checking have been proven to be successful for tackling the combinatorial blow-up arising when reasoning about several feature combinations. However, most formal verification approaches for SPLs presented in the literature focus on the static SPLs, where the features of a product are fixed and cannot be changed during runtime. This is in contrast to dynamic SPLs, allowing to adapt feature combinations of a product dynamically after deployment.  The main contribution of the paper is a compositional modeling framework for dynamic SPLs, which supports probabilistic and nondeterministic choices and allows for quantitative analysis. We specify the feature changes during runtime within an automata-based coordination component, enabling to reason over strategies how to trigger dynamic feature changes for optimizing various quantitative objectives, e.g., energy or monetary costs and reliability. For our framework there is a natural and conceptually simple translation into the input language of the prominent probabilistic model checker PRISM. This facilitates the application of PRISM's powerful symbolic engine to the operational behavior of dynamic SPLs and their family-based analysis against various quantitative queries. We demonstrate feasibility of our approach by a case study issuing an energy-aware bonding network device.
Keywords: dynamic features, energy analysis, probabilistic model checking, software product lines (ID#: 15-4389)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2577080.2577095 

 

Zaur Molotnikov, Markus Völter, Daniel Ratiu; “Automated Domain-specific C Verification with mbeddr,” ASE '14 Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference On Automated Software Engineering, September 2014, Pages 539-550. Doi:  10.1145/2642937.2642938 When verifying C code, two major problems must be addressed. One is the specification of the verified systems properties, the other one is the construction of the verification environment. Neither C itself, nor existing C verification tools, offer the means to efficiently specify application domain-level properties and environments for verification. These two shortcomings hamper the usability of C verification, and limit its adoption in practice. In this paper we introduce an approach that addresses both problems and results in user-friendly and practically usable C verification. The novelty of the approach is the combination of domain-specific language engineering and C verification. We apply the approach in the domain of state-based software, using mbeddr and CBMC. We validate the implementation with an example from the Pacemaker Challenge, developing a functionally verified, lightweight, and deployable cardiac pulse generator. The approach itself is domain-independent.
Keywords: cbmc, domain-specific languages, mbeddr, verification (ID#: 15-4390)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2642937.2642938 

 

Jun Zhang, Graham Cormode, Cecilia M. Procopiuc, Divesh Srivastava, Xiaokui Xiao; “PrivBayes: Private Data Release via Bayesian Networks,” SIGMOD '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, June 2014, Pages 1423-1434.  Doi: 10.1145/2588555.2588573 Privacy-preserving data publishing is an important problem that has been the focus of extensive study. The state-of-the-art goal for this problem is differential privacy, which offers a strong degree of privacy protection without making restrictive assumptions about the adversary. Existing techniques using differential privacy, however, cannot effectively handle the publication of high-dimensional data. In particular, when the input dataset contains a large number of attributes, existing methods require injecting a prohibitive amount of noise compared to the signal in the data, which renders the published data next to useless.  To address the deficiency of the existing methods, this paper presents PrivBayes, a differentially private method for releasing high-dimensional data. Given a dataset D, PrivBayes first constructs a Bayesian network N, which (i) provides a succinct model of the correlations among the attributes in D and (ii) allows us to approximate the distribution of data in D using a set P of low-dimensional marginals of D. After that, PrivBayes injects noise into each marginal in P to ensure differential privacy, and then uses the noisy marginals and the Bayesian network to construct an approximation of the data distribution in D. Finally, PrivBayes samples tuples from the approximate distribution to construct a synthetic dataset, and then releases the synthetic data. Intuitively, PrivBayes circumvents the curse of dimensionality, as it injects noise into the low-dimensional marginals in P instead of the high-dimensional dataset D. Private construction of Bayesian networks turns out to be significantly challenging, and we introduce a novel approach that uses a surrogate function for mutual information to build the model more accurately. We experimentally evaluate PrivBayes on real data, and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms existing solutions in terms of accuracy.
Keywords: bayesian network, differential privacy, synthetic data generation (ID#: 15-4391)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2588555.2588573

 

Zhen Ye, Athman Bouguettaya, Xiaofang Zhou; “Economic Model-Driven Cloud Service Composition,” ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) - Special Issue on Pricing and Incentives in Networks and Systems and Regular Papers TOIT Homepage; Volume 14 Issue 2-3, October 2014, Article No. 20.  Doi: 10.1145/2651420 This article considers cloud service composition from a decision analysis perspective. Traditional QoS-aware composition techniques usually consider the qualities available at the time of the composition because compositions are usually immediately consumed. This is fundamentally different in the cloud environment where the cloud service composition typically lasts for a relatively long period of time. The two most important drivers when composing cloud service are the long-term nature of the composition and the economic motivation for outsourcing tasks to the cloud. We propose an economic model, which we represent as a Bayesian network, to select and compose cloud services. We then leverage influence diagrams to model the cloud service composition. We further extend the traditional influence diagram problem to a hybrid one and adopt an extended Shenoy-Shafer architecture to solve such hybrid influence diagrams that include deterministic chance nodes. In addition, analytical and simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed composition approach.
Keywords: Cloud service, economic model, service composition  (ID#: 15-4392)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2651420 

 

Manohar Jonnalagedda, Thierry Coppey, Sandro Stucki, Tiark Rompf, Martin Odersky; “Staged Parser Combinators For Efficient Data Processing,” OOPSLA '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications, October 2014, Pages 637-653. Doi:  10.1145/2660193.2660241  Parsers are ubiquitous in computing, and many applications depend on their performance for decoding data efficiently. Parser combinators are an intuitive tool for writing parsers: tight integration with the host language enables grammar specifications to be interleaved with processing of parse results. Unfortunately, parser combinators are typically slow due to the high overhead of the host language abstraction mechanisms that enable composition.  We present a technique for eliminating such overhead. We use staging, a form of runtime code generation, to dissociate input parsing from parser composition, and eliminate intermediate data structures and computations associated with parser composition at staging time. A key challenge is to maintain support for input dependent grammars, which have no clear stage distinction.  Our approach applies to top-down recursive-descent parsers as well as bottom-up non-deterministic parsers with key applications in dynamic programming on sequences, where we auto-generate code for parallel hardware. We achieve performance comparable to specialized, hand-written parsers.
Keywords: algebraic dynamic programming, multi-stage programming, parser combinators (ID#: 15-4393)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660193.2660241

 

Sebastian Erdweg, Vlad Vergu, Mira Mezini, Eelco Visser; “Modular Specification And Dynamic Enforcement Of Syntactic Language Constraints When Generating Code,” MODULARITY '14 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Modularity, April 2014, Pages 241-252. Doi:  10.1145/2577080.2577089  A key problem in metaprogramming and specifically in generative programming is to guarantee that generated code is well-formed with respect to the context-free and context-sensitive constraints of the target language. We propose typesmart constructors as a dynamic approach to enforcing the well-formedness of generated code. A typesmart constructor is a function that is used in place of a regular constructor to create values, but it may reject the creation of values if the given data violates some language-specific constraint. While typesmart constructors can be implemented individually, we demonstrate how to derive them automatically from a grammar, so that the grammar remains the sole specification of a language's syntax and is not duplicated. We have integrated support for typesmart constructors into the run-time system of Stratego to enforce usage of typesmart constructors implicitly whenever a regular constructor is called. We evaluate the applicability, performance, and usefulness of typesmart constructors for syntactic constraints in a compiler for MiniJava developed with Spoofax and in various language extensions of Java and Haskell implemented with SugarJ and SugarHaskell.
Keywords: abstract syntax tree, dynamic analysis, generative programming, program transformation, spoofax, sugarj, typesmart constructors, well-formedness checks (ID#: 15-4394)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2577080.2577089

 

Mahdi Zamani, Mahnush Movahedi; “Secure Location Sharing,” FOMC '14 Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Workshop On Foundations Of Mobile Computing; August 2014, Pages 1-10. Doi:  10.1145/2634274.2634281 In the last decade, the number of location-aware mobile devices has mushroomed. Just as location-based services grow fast, they lay out many questions and challenges when it comes to privacy. For example, who owns the location data and for what purpose is the data used? To answer these questions, we need new tools for location privacy. In this paper, we focus on the problem of secure location sharing, where a group of n clients want to collaborate with each other to anonymously share their location data with a location database server and execute queries based on them. To become more realistic, we assume up to a certain fraction of the clients are controlled arbitrarily by an active and computationally unbounded adversary. A relaxed version of this problem has already been studied in the literature assuming either a trusted third party or a weaker adversarial model. We alternatively propose a scalable fully-decentralized protocol for secure location sharing that tolerates up to n/6 statically-chosen malicious clients and does not require any trusted third party. We show that, unlike most other location-based services, our protocol is secure against traffic-analysis attacks. We also show that our protocol requires each client to send a polylogarithmic number of bits and compute a polylogarithmic number of operations (with respect to n) to query a point of interest based on its location.
Keywords: distributed algorithms, fault-tolerance, location-based services (ID#: 15-4395)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2634274.2634281

 

Jamie Garside, Neil C. Audsley; “WCET Preserving Hardware Prefetch for Many-Core Real-Time Systems,” RTNS '14 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems, October, 2014, Pages 193.  Doi: 10.1145/2659787.2659824  There is an obvious bus bottleneck when multiple CPUs within a Many-Core architecture share the same physical off-chip memory (eg. DDR / DRAM). Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis of application tasks will inevitably include the effects of sharing the memory bus amongst CPUs; likewise average case execution times will include effects of individual memory accesses being slowed by interference with other memory requests from other CPUs. One approach for mitigating this is to use a hardware prefetch to move instructions and data from memory to the CPU cache before a cache miss instigates a memory request. However, in a real-time system, there is a trade-off between issuing prefetch requests to off-chip memory and hence reducing bandwidth available to serving CPU cache misses; and the gain in the fact that some CPU cache misses are avoided by the prefetch with the memory system seeing reduced memory requests.  In this paper we propose, analyse and show the implementation of a hardware prefetcher designed so that WCET of application tasks are not affected by the run-time behaviour of the prefetcher, i.e. it utilises spare time within the memory system to issue prefetch requests and forward them to the appropriate CPU. As well as not affecting WCET times, the prefetcher enables significant reduction in average case execution times of application tasks, showing the efficacy of the approach.
Keywords: (not provided) (ID#: 15-4396)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2659787.2659824

 

 

Edward Z. Yang, David Mazières; “Dynamic Space Limits for Haskell,” PLDI '14 Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 2014, Pages 588-598. Doi: 10.1145/2594291.2594341 We describe the semantics and implementation of a space limits system for Haskell, which allows programmers to create resource containers that enforce bounded resident memory usage at runtime. Our system is distinguished by a clear allocator-pays semantics drawn from previous experience with profiling in Haskell and an implementation strategy which uses a block-structured heap to organize containers, allowing us to enforce limits with high accuracy. To deal with the problem of deallocating data in a garbage collected heap, we propose a novel taint-based mechanism that unifies the existing practices of revocable pointers and killing threads in order to reclaim memory. Our system is implemented in GHC, a production-strength compiler for Haskell.

Keywords: Haskell, fault tolerance, profiling, resource limits (ID#: 15-4397)

URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2594291.2594341

 

Mikael Åsberg, Thomas Nolte, Shinpei Kato; “Towards Partitioned Hierarchical Real-Time Scheduling On Multi-Core Processors,” ACM SIGBED Review; Volume 11 Issue 2, June 2014, Pages 13-18. Doi: 10.1145/2668138.2668140 This paper extends previous work on hierarchical scheduling to multi-core systems. We have implemented partitioned multi-core scheduling of servers in the Linux kernel, using the scheduling framework ExSched. Neither ExSched nor the presented scheduler require any modifications to the Linux kernel. Hence, this makes the installation and kernel-version updates easier. We also present a user-space simulator which can be used when developing new multi-core hierarchical schedulers (plug-ins) for ExSched.  We evaluate the overhead of our new multi-core hierarchical scheduler and compare it to a single-core hierarchical scheduler. Our results can be useful for developers that want to minimize the scheduler overhead when using partitioned hierarchical multi-core scheduling.
Keywords: hierarchical scheduling, implementation, partitioned multi-core scheduling, real-time systems (ID#: 15-4398)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2668138.2668140

 

Rafael Maestrelli, Luis Almeida, Daniel Coutinho, Ubirajara Moreno; “Dynamic Bandwidth Management in Networked Control Systems Using Quantization,” ACM SIGBED Review - Special Issue on the 6th Workshop on Adaptive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems; Volume 11 Issue 3, October 2014, Pages 58-61. Doi: 10.1145/2692385.2692396 Modern networked control systems integrate multiple independent feedback control loops that require guaranteed bandwidth for timely operation. However, planning the distributed control systems considering worst-case requirements leads to expensive and inefficient designs. This motivated the development of dynamic rate adaptation as a technique to support higher integration in these systems while providing an efficient use of the network bandwidth. This bandwidth can also be managed by varying the quantization used in each loop but, surprisingly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this approach has not been explored yet. In this work-in-progress paper, we propose managing the network bandwidth varying the number of bits used to represent the transmitted variables (sensor readings and actuation values) while keeping the loop rates constant. We present the basics of the quantization-based bandwidth management as well as a qualitative discussion on the pros and cons of this method.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4399)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2692385.2692396

 

Shahab Mokarizadeh, Peep Küngas, Mihhail Matskin; “A Framework for Evaluating Semantic Annotations of Web Services: A Network Theory Based Approach For Measuring Annotation Quality,” Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, Volume 12 Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 15-34. Doi: (none provided) In the past years various methods have been developed which require semantic annotations of Web services as an input. Such methods typically leverage discovery, match-making, composition and execution of Web services in dynamic settings. At the same time a number of automated Web service annotation approaches have been proposed for enabling application of these methods in settings where it is not feasible to provide the annotations manually. However, lack of effective automated evaluation frameworks has seriously limited proper assessment of the constructed annotations in settings where the overall annotation quality of large quantities of Web services needs to be evaluated. This paper describes an evaluation framework for measuring the quality of semantic annotations for a large number of real-world Web services from heterogeneous application domains. The evaluation framework is generally based on analyzing properties of Web service networks constructed from semantic annotations of the Web services. More specifically, we measure scale-free, small-world and correlation degree properties of the networks to evaluate the overall quality of annotations. The evaluation is demonstrated using annotations constructed semi-automatically for a set of publicly available WSDL documents containing descriptions of about 200 000 Web service operations.
Keywords: Evaluation of Annotation Quality, Network Theory, Semantic Web Services, Web Service Annotation, Web Service Networks (ID#: 15-4400)
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2590104.2590106

 

Backes, Michael; Manoharan, Praveen; Mohammadi, Esfandiar, "TUC: Time-Sensitive and Modular Analysis of Anonymous Communication," Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2014 IEEE 27th, pp.383,397, 19-22 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSF.2014.34 The anonymous communication protocol Tor constitutes the most widely deployed technology for providing anonymity for user communication over the Internet. Several frameworks have been proposed that show strong anonymity guarantees, none of these, however, are capable of modeling the class of traffic-related timing attacks against Tor, such as traffic correlation and website fingerprinting. In this work, we present TUC: the first framework that allows for establishing strong anonymity guarantees in the presence of time-sensitive adversaries that mount traffic-related timing attacks. TUC incorporates a comprehensive notion of time in an asynchronous communication model with sequential activation, while offering strong compositionality properties for security proofs. We apply TUC to evaluate a novel countermeasure for Tor against website fingerprinting attacks. Our analysis relies on a formalization of the onion routing protocol that underlies Tor and proves rigorous anonymity guarantees in the presence of traffic-related timing attacks.
Keywords: Analytical models; Clocks; Frequency modulation; Routing protocols; Security; Timing; Anonymity Guarantees; Anonymous Communication Protocols; Timing Attacks; Tor (ID#: 15-4401)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957124&isnumber=6957090

 

Rafnsson, Willard; Sabelfeld, Andrei, "Compositional Information-Flow Security for Interactive Systems," Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2014 IEEE 27th , vol., no., pp.277,292, 19-22 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSF.2014.27
Abstract: To achieve end-to-end security in a system built from parts, it is important to ensure that the composition of secure components is itself secure. This work investigates the compositionality of two popular conditions of possibilistic noninterference. The first condition, progress-insensitive noninterference (PINI), is the security condition enforced by practical tools like JSFlow, Paragon, sequential LIO, Jif, Flow Caml, and SPARK Examiner. We show that this condition is not preserved under fair parallel composition: composing a PINI system fairly with another PINI system can yield an insecure system. We explore constraints that allow recovering compositionality for PINI. Further, we develop a theory of compositional reasoning. In contrast to PINI, we show what PSNI behaves well under composition, with and without fairness assumptions. Our work is performed within a general framework for nondeterministic interactive systems.
Keywords: Cognition; Computational modeling; Interactive systems; Security; Semantics; Sensitivity; Synchronization (ID#: 15-4402)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957117&isnumber=6957090

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

 

Insider Threats (2014 Year in Review)

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	Insider Threats (2014 Year in Review)

Insider threats are a difficult problem.  The research cited here looks at both intentional and accidental threats, including the effects of social engineering, and methods of identifying potential threats. These works were presented in 2014.

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Kammuller, Florian; Probst, Christian W., "Combining Generated Data Models with Formal Invalidation for Insider Threat Analysis," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 229, 235, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.45 In this paper we revisit the advances made on invalidation policies to explore attack possibilities in organizational models. One aspect that has so far eloped systematic analysis of insider threat is the integration of data into attack scenarios and its exploitation for analyzing the models. We draw from recent insights into generation of insider data to complement a logic based mechanical approach. We show how insider analysis can be traced back to the early days of security verification and the Lowe-attack on NSPK. The invalidation of policies allows model checking organizational structures to detect insider attacks. Integration of higher order logic specification techniques allows the use of data refinement to explore attack possibilities beyond the initial system specification. We illustrate this combined invalidation technique on the classical example of the naughty lottery fairy. Data generation techniques support the automatic generation of insider attack data for research. The data generation is however always based on human generated insider attack scenarios that have to be designed based on domain knowledge of counter-intelligence experts. Introducing data refinement and invalidation techniques here allows the systematic exploration of such scenarios and exploit data centric views into insider threat analysis.
Keywords: Analytical models; Computational modeling; Data models; Internet; Protocols; Public key; Insider threats; policies; formal methods (ID#: 15-5454)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957308&isnumber=6957265

 

Greitzer, Frank L.; Strozer, Jeremy R.; Cohen, Sholom; Moore, Andrew P.; Mundie, David; Cowley, Jennifer, "Analysis of Unintentional Insider Threats Deriving from Social Engineering Exploits," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp.236,250, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.39 Organizations often suffer harm from individuals who bear no malice against them but whose actions unintentionally expose the organizations to risk-the unintentional insider threat (UIT). In this paper we examine UIT cases that derive from social engineering exploits. We report on our efforts to collect and analyze data from UIT social engineering incidents to identify possible behavioral and technical patterns and to inform future research and development of UIT mitigation strategies.
Keywords: Computers; Context; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Organizations; Security; Taxonomy; social engineering; unintentional insider threat  (ID#: 15-5455)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957309&isnumber=6957265

 

Yi-Lu Wang; Sang-Chin Yang, "A Method of Evaluation for Insider Threat," Computer, Consumer and Control (IS3C), 2014 International Symposium on, pp. 438, 441, 10-12 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/IS3C.2014.121 Due to cyber security is an important issue of the cloud computing. Insider threat becomes more and more important for cyber security, it is also much more complex issue. But till now, there is no equivalent to a vulnerability scanner for insider threat. We survey and discuss the history of research on insider threat analysis to know system dynamics is the best method to mitigate insider threat from people, process, and technology. In the paper, we present a system dynamics method to model insider threat. We suggest some concludes for future research who are interested in insider threat issue The study.
Keywords: cloud computing; security of data; cloud computing; cyber security; insider threat analysis; insider threat evaluation; insider threat mitigation; vulnerability scanner; Analytical models; Computer crime; Computers; Educational institutions; Organizations; Insider threat; System Dynamic  (ID#: 15-5456)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6845913&isnumber=6845429

 

Young, William T.; Memory, Alex; Goldberg, Henry G.; Senator, Ted E., "Detecting Unknown Insider Threat Scenarios," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp.277,288, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.42 This paper reports results from a set of experiments that evaluate an insider threat detection prototype on its ability to detect scenarios that have not previously been seen or contemplated by the developers of the system. We show the ability to detect a large variety of insider threat scenario instances imbedded in real data with no prior knowledge of what scenarios are present or when they occur. We report results of an ensemble-based, unsupervised technique for detecting potential insider threat instances over eight months of real monitored computer usage activity augmented with independently developed, unknown but realistic, insider threat scenarios that robustly achieves results within 5% of the best individual detectors identified after the fact. We explore factors that contribute to the success of the ensemble method, such as the number and variety of unsupervised detectors and the use of prior knowledge encoded in scenario-based detectors designed for known activity patterns. We report results over the entire period of the ensemble approach and of ablation experiments that remove the scenario-based detectors.
Keywords: Computers; Detectors; Feature extraction; Monitoring; Organizations; Prototypes; Uniform resource locators; anomaly detection; experimental case study; insider threat; unsupervised ensembles  (ID#: 15-5457)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957312&isnumber=6957265

 

Nurse, Jason R.C.; Buckley, Oliver; Legg, Philip A.; Goldsmith, Michael; Creese, Sadie; Wright, Gordon R.T.; Whitty, Monica, "Understanding Insider Threat: A Framework for Characterising Attacks," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp. 214, 228, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.38 The threat that insiders pose to businesses, institutions and governmental organisations continues to be of serious concern. Recent industry surveys and academic literature provide unequivocal evidence to support the significance of this threat and its prevalence. Despite this, however, there is still no unifying framework to fully characterise insider attacks and to facilitate an understanding of the problem, its many components and how they all fit together. In this paper, we focus on this challenge and put forward a grounded framework for understanding and reflecting on the threat that insiders pose. Specifically, we propose a novel conceptualisation that is heavily grounded in insider-threat case studies, existing literature and relevant psychological theory. The framework identifies several key elements within the problem space, concentrating not only on noteworthy events and indicators- technical and behavioural- of potential attacks, but also on attackers (e.g., the motivation behind malicious threats and the human factors related to unintentional ones), and on the range of attacks being witnessed. The real value of our framework is in its emphasis on bringing together and defining clearly the various aspects of insider threat, all based on real-world cases and pertinent literature. This can therefore act as a platform for general understanding of the threat, and also for reflection, modelling past attacks and looking for useful patterns.
Keywords: Companies; Context; Educational institutions; Employment; History; Psychology; Security; attack chain; case studies; insider threat; psychological indicators; technical; threat framework  (ID#: 15-5458)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957307&isnumber=6957265

 

Gritzalis, D.; Stavrou, V.; Kandias, M.; Stergiopoulos, G., "Insider Threat: Enhancing BPM through Social Media," New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), 2014 6th International Conference on, pp.1,6, March 30 2014-April 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/NTMS.2014.6814027 Modern business environments have a constant need to increase their productivity, reduce costs and offer competitive products and services. This can be achieved via modeling their business processes. Yet, even in light of modelling's widespread success, one can argue that it lacks built-in security mechanisms able to detect and fight threats that may manifest throughout the process. Academic research has proposed a variety of different solutions which focus on different kinds of threat. In this paper we focus on insider threat, i.e. insiders participating in an organization's business process, who, depending on their motives, may cause severe harm to the organization. We examine existing security approaches to tackle down the aforementioned threat in enterprise business processes. We discuss their pros and cons and propose a monitoring approach that aims at mitigating the insider threat. This approach enhances business process monitoring tools with information evaluated from Social Media. It exams the online behavior of users and pinpoints potential insiders with critical roles in the organization's processes. We conclude with some observations on the monitoring results (i.e. psychometric evaluations from the social media analysis) concerning privacy violations and argue that deployment of such systems should be only allowed on exceptional cases, such as protecting critical infrastructures.
Keywords: {business data processing; organisational aspects; process monitoring; social networking (online);BPM enhancement; built-in security mechanism; business process monitoring tools; cost reduction; enterprise business processes; insider threat; organization business process management; privacy violations; social media; Media; Monitoring; Organizations; Privacy; Security; Unified modeling language  (ID#: 15-5459)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6814027&isnumber=6813963

 

Bishop, Matt; Conboy, Heather M.; Phan, Huong; Simidchieva, Borislava I.; Avrunin, George S.; Clarke, Lori A.; Osterweil, Leon J.; Peisert, Sean, "Insider Threat Identification by Process Analysis," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp.251,264, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.40 The insider threat is one of the most pernicious in computer security. Traditional approaches typically instrument systems with decoys or intrusion detection mechanisms to detect individuals who abuse their privileges (the quintessential "insider"). Such an attack requires that these agents have access to resources or data in order to corrupt or disclose them. In this work, we examine the application of process modeling and subsequent analyses to the insider problem. With process modeling, we first describe how a process works in formal terms. We then look at the agents who are carrying out particular tasks, perform different analyses to determine how the process can be compromised, and suggest countermeasures that can be incorporated into the process model to improve its resistance to insider attack.
Keywords: Analytical models; Drugs; Fault trees; Hazards; Logic gates; Nominations and elections; Software; data exfiltration; elections; insider threat; process modeling; sabotage  (ID#: 15-5460)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957310&isnumber=6957265

 

Greitzer, F.L.; Strozer, J.; Cohen, S.; Bergey, J.; Cowley, J.; Moore, A.; Mundie, D., "Unintentional Insider Threat: Contributing Factors, Observables, and Mitigation Strategies," System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, pp.2025,2034, 6-9 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2014.256 Organizations often suffer harm from individuals who bear them no malice but whose actions unintentionally expose the organizations to risk in some way. This paper examines initial findings from research on such cases, referred to as unintentional insider threat (UIT). The goal of this paper is to inform government and industry stakeholders about the problem and its possible causes and mitigation strategies. As an initial approach to addressing the problem, we developed an operational definition for UIT, reviewed research relevant to possible causes and contributing factors, and provided examples of UIT cases and their frequencies across several categories. We conclude the paper by discussing initial recommendations on mitigation strategies and countermeasures.
Keywords: organisational aspects; security of data; UIT; contributing factors; government; industry stakeholders; mitigation strategy; organizations; unintentional insider threat;  Electronic mail; Human factors;Law;Organizations;Security;Stress;Contributing;Definition;Ethical;Factors; Feature; Human; Insider;Legal;Mitigation;Model;Organizational;Overservables;Psychosocial;Strategies; Threat; Unintentional; demographic (ID#: 15-5461)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6758854&isnumber=6758592

 

Kajtazi, M.; Bulgurcu, B.; Cavusoglu, H.; Benbasat, I., "Assessing Sunk Cost Effect on Employees' Intentions to Violate Information Security Policies in Organizations," System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, pp.3169, 3177, 6-9 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2014.393 It has been widely known that employees pose insider threats to the information and technology resources of an organization. In this paper, we develop a model to explain insiders' intentional violation of the requirements of an information security policy. We propose sunk cost as a mediating factor. We test our research model on data collected from three information-intensive organizations in banking and pharmaceutical industries (n=502). Our results show that sunk cost acts as a mediator between the proposed antecedents of sunk cost (i.e., completion effect and goal in congruency) and intentions to violate the ISP. We discuss the implications of our results for developing theory and for re-designing current security agendas that could help improve compliance behavior in the future.
Keywords: organisational aspects; personnel; security of data; ISP; banking; compliance behavior; employees intentions; information security policy; information-intensive organizations; insider intentional violation; mediating factor; pharmaceutical industries; sunk cost effect assessment; technology resources; Educational institutions; Information security; Mathematical model; Organizations; Pharmaceuticals; Reliability; completion effect; goal incongruency; information security violation; insider threats; sunk cost (ID#: 15-5462)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6758995&isnumber=6758592

 

Vartanian, A.; Shabtai, A., "TM-Score: A Misuseability Weight Measure for Textual Content," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol.9, no.12, pp.2205, 2219, Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2014.2359370 In recent years, data leakage prevention solutions became an inherent component of the organizations' security suite. These solutions focus mainly on the data and its sensitivity level, and on preventing it from reaching an unauthorized entity. They ignore, however, the fact that an insider is gradually exposed to more and more sensitive data to which she is authorized to access. Such data may cause great damage to the organization when leaked or misused. In this research, we propose an extension to the misuseability weight concept. Our main goal is to define a misuseability measure called TM-Score for textual data. Using this measure, the organization can estimate the extent of damage that can be caused by an insider that is continuously and gradually exposed to textual content (e.g., documents and emails). The extent of damage is determined by the amount, type, and quality of information to which the insider was exposed. We present a two-step method for the continuous assignment of a misuseability score to a set of documents and evaluate the proposed method using the Enron email data set.
Keywords: Data security; Document handling; Electronic mail; Fingerprint recognition; Sensitivity; Text analysis; Data misuse; insider threat; misuseability weight; security measures; text analysis(ID#: 15-5463)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6905807&isnumber=6953163

 

Oberle, A.; Larbig, P.; Kuntze, N.; Rudolph, C., "Integrity Based Relationships And Trustworthy Communication Between Network Participants," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.610, 615, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883386 Establishing trust relationships between network participants by having them prove their operating system's integrity via a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides interesting approaches for securing local networks at a higher level. In the introduced approach on OSI layer 2, attacks carried out by already authenticated and participating nodes (insider threats) can be detected and prevented. Forbidden activities and manipulations in hard- and software, such as executing unknown binaries, loading additional kernel modules or even inserting unauthorized USB devices, are detected and result in an autonomous reaction of each network participant. The provided trust establishment and authentication protocol operates independently from upper protocol layers and is optimized for resource constrained machines. Well known concepts of backbone architectures can maintain the chain of trust between different kinds of network types. Each endpoint, forwarding and processing unit monitors the internal network independently and reports misbehaviours autonomously to a central instance in or outside of the trusted network.
Keywords: computer network security; cryptographic protocols; trusted computing; OSI layer 2; authenticated node; authentication protocol; insider threat; integrity based relationship; network participants; operating system integrity; participating node; trust establishment; trusted platform module; trustworthy communication; Authentication; Encryption; Payloads; Protocols; Servers; Unicast; Cyber-physical systems; Security; authentication; industrial networks; integrity; protocol design; trust (ID#: 15-5463)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883386&isnumber=6883277

 

Shatilov, K.; Boiko, V.; Krendelev, S.; Anisutina, D.; Sumaneev, A., "Solution for Secure Private Data Storage In A Cloud," Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS), 2014 Federated Conference on, pp.885,889, 7-10 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.15439/2014F43 Cloud computing and, more particularly, cloud databases, is a great technology for remote centralized data managing. However, there are some drawbacks including privacy issues, insider threats and potential database thefts. Full encryption of remote database does solve the problem, but disables many operations that can be held on DBMS side; therefore problem requires much more complex solution and specific encryptions. In this paper, we propose a solution for secure private data storage that protects confidentiality of user's data, stored in cloud. Solution uses order preserving and homomorphic proprietary developed encryptions. Proposed approach includes analysis of user's SQL queries, encryption of vulnerable data and decryption of data selection, returned from DBMS. We have validated our approach through the implementation of SQL queries and DBMS replies processor, which will be discussed in this paper. Secure cloud database architecture and used encryptions also will be covered.
Keywords: cloud computing; cryptography; data privacy; distributed databases; DBMS replies processor; SQL queries; cloud computing; cloud databases; data selection; database thefts; encryption; privacy issues; remote centralized data managing; remote database; secure cloud database architecture; secure private data storage; user data; vulnerable data; Encoding; Encryption; Query processing; Vectors (ID#: 15-5464)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933109&isnumber=6932982

 

Maghrabi, L.A., "The Threats Of Data Security Over The Cloud As Perceived By Experts And University Students," Computer Applications & Research (WSCAR), 2014 World Symposium on, pp. 1, 6, 18-20 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/WSCAR.2014.6916842 This research investigates the privacy, confidentiality and integrity of data over the Cloud. It explores different data security concerns over the Cloud as perceived by experts and university students. This topic is significant because of the increasing demand for Cloud services that attracts many people to use it more frequently. Being aware of data security concerns will undoubtedly help users take precautions from unauthorized access up to data theft. The comparison between the views of experts and users of data threats over the Cloud encourages investigators to conduct further research to increase awareness and maximize security measures. This study is based on the assumption that data over the Cloud are secure. This paper reviews the literature that focuses on the experts' findings and interpretations of data security issues and threats over the Cloud. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) [I] points out seven security threats: abuse and nefarious use of Cloud Computing, insecure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), malicious insiders, shared technology vulnerabilities, data loss or leakage, account or service hijacking, and unknown risk profile. In addition, experts state different attacks that may occur at any time: DoS attacks, Cloud malware injection, side channels attack, authentication attacks, and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) cryptographic attack. In this study, completed questionnaires were collected from students of the University of the West of England to examine their perception and awareness of data threats over the Cloud. Both perceptions from experts and students were compared and analyzed to derive conclusions about data security over the Cloud. A number of findings are discovered. As experts prove that data might be compromised over the Cloud, the outcome of this research reveals that users are unaware of these threats. Many users are unaware of the issues they face concerning their data's privacy, confidentiality, and integrity. However, the - articipants value their data privacy. The results also show that they utilize the Cloud for different purposes and various benefits. As for further research, many ideas are proposed with regard to research settings in terms of size of sample, type and background of population, and the choice of qualitative methodology.
Keywords: application program interfaces; authorisation; cloud computing; cryptography; data integrity; data privacy; invasive software; risk analysis; API; CSA; DoS attacks; MITM; University of the West of England; account hijacking; authentication attacks; cloud computing; cloud malware injection; cloud security alliance; cloud services; data confidentiality; data integrity; data leakage; data loss; data privacy; data security threats; data theft; insecure application programming interfaces; malicious insiders; man-in-the-middle cryptographic attack; qualitative methodology; service hijacking; shared technology vulnerabilities; side channels attack; unauthorized access; university students; unknown risk profile; Cryptography; Data privacy; Educational institutions; Cloud Computing; data security; data threats; information security; security threats (ID#: 15-5465)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916842&isnumber=6916766

 

Jana, D.; Bandyopadhyay, D., "Management of Security And Privacy Issues Of Application Development In Mobile Cloud Environment: A survey," Recent Advances and Innovations in Engineering (ICRAIE), 2014, pp.1, 6, 9-11 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICRAIE.2014.6909296 The widespread adoption of programmable smart mobile devices like smart phones or Tablet and connecting to public domain of Internet as well as cloud service providers provide newer privacy as well as security challenges across enterprises. Mobile cloud computing has become extremely popular among mobile users and developers who can see a direct benefit albeit resource limitations in mobile devices including battery life, memory space or processing power. Data loss from stolen or decommissioned mobile devices, unsecured information exchange through rouge access points and access of vulnerable network fetch privacy as well as security threats of mobile cloud computing. Data breaches, account hijacking, insecure API exposure, denial of services, malicious insider attacks, loss of encryption key, virtual machine isolation bring forth some of the additional security and privacy threats. In this paper, we have attempted to enumerate several privacy plus security threats and put forth best practices and recommendations as preventive as well counter measures on incidence. We have evaluated the secure coding practices and code offloading frameworks. We have also analyzed the occurrence of software flaws in applications which were developed for payment application domain for last two years and effort put on tokenization to achieve higher level of security using cloud computing.
Keywords: authorisation; cloud computing; computer crime; cryptography; data privacy; mobile computing; mobile radio; telecommunication security; Internet; account hijacking; application development; battery life; cloud service providers; code offloading frameworks; data breaches; data loss; decommissioned mobile devices; denial of services; encryption key loss ;enterprises; insecure API exposure; malicious insider attacks; memory space; mobile cloud computing; mobile cloud environment; payment application domain; privacy threats; processing power; programmable smart mobile devices; resource limitations; rouge access points; secure coding practices; security threats; smart phones; software flaws ;stolen mobile devices; tablet; tokenization; unsecured information exchange; virtual machine isolation; Adaptation models; Computational modeling; Cryptography; Databases; HTML; Mobile communication; AAA Vulnerabilities; Cloud Computing; Mobile Cloud Computing; STRIDE (ID#: 15-5466)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6909296&isnumber=6909103

 

Virvilis, N.; Serrano, O.S.; Vanautgaerden, B., "Changing the Game: The Art Of Deceiving Sophisticated Attackers," Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2014), 2014 6th International Conference On, pp. 87, 97, 3-6 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/CYCON.2014.6916397 The number and complexity of cyber-attacks has been increasing steadily in the last years. Adversaries are targeting the communications and information systems (CIS) of government, military and industrial organizations, as well as critical infrastructures, and are willing to spend large amounts of money, time and expertise on reaching their goals. In addition, recent sophisticated insider attacks resulted in the exfiltration of highly classified information to the public. Traditional security solutions have failed repeatedly to mitigate such threats. In order to defend against such sophisticated adversaries we need to redesign our defences, developing technologies focused more on detection than prevention. In this paper, we address the attack potential of advanced persistent threats (APT) and malicious insiders, highlighting the common characteristics of these two groups. In addition, we propose the use of multiple deception techniques, which can be used to protect both the external and internal resources of an organization and significantly increase the possibility of early detection of sophisticated attackers.
Keywords: computer network security; information filtering; information systems; advanced persistent threats; communication and information systems; critical infrastructures; cyber-attacks; external resources; government organization; highly classified information exfiltration; industrial organization; internal resources; malicious insiders; military organization; multiple deception techniques; sophisticated attacker detection; sophisticated insider attacks; Electronic mail; Monitoring; Organizations; Planning; Security; Servers; Standards organizations; Advanced persistent threat;deception; honey net; honey tokens; honeypot; insiders (ID#: 15-5467)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916397&isnumber=6916383

 

Goryczka, S.; Li Xiong; Fung, B.C.M., " m-Privacy for Collaborative Data Publishing," Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 26, no. 10, pp.2520, 2533, Oct, 2014. doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2013.18 In this paper, we consider the collaborative data publishing problem for anonymizing horizontally partitioned data at multiple data providers. We consider a new type of “insider attack” by colluding data providers who may use their own data records (a subset of the overall data) to infer the data records contributed by other data providers. The paper addresses this new threat, and makes several contributions. First, we introduce the notion of m-privacy, which guarantees that the anonymized data satisfies a given privacy constraint against any group of up to m colluding data providers. Second, we present heuristic algorithms exploiting the monotonicity of privacy constraints for efficiently checking m-privacy given a group of records. Third, we present a data provider-aware anonymization algorithm with adaptive m-privacy checking strategies to ensure high utility and m-privacy of anonymized data with efficiency. Finally, we propose secure multi-party computation protocols for collaborative data publishing with m-privacy. All protocols are extensively analyzed and their security and efficiency are formally proved. Experiments on real-life datasets suggest that our approach achieves better or comparable utility and efficiency than existing and baseline algorithms while satisfying m-privacy.
Keywords: cryptographic protocols; data privacy; publishing; adaptive m-privacy checking strategy; collaborative data publishing problem; data provider-aware anonymization algorithm; data providers; data records; heuristic algorithms; insider attack; multiple data providers; privacy constraint; privacy constraint monotonicity; secure multiparty computation protocols; Collaboration; Data privacy; Distributed databases; Heuristic algorithms; Privacy; Protocols; Publishing; Computers and Society; Computing Milieux; Database Management; Distributed databases; General; Information Technology and Systems ;Privacy; Public Policy Issues; Security; Systems and protection; distributed databases; integrity; security (ID#: 15-5468)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6420833&isnumber=6891519

 

Cho, Youngho; Qu, Gang, "Enhancing Trust-Aware Routing by False Alarm Detection and Recovery," Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), 2014 IEEE, pp. 52, 59, 6-8 Oct, 2014. doi: 10.1109/MILCOM.2014.18 Insider packet drop attacks have become a serious threat to wireless sensor networks. To distinguish a packet dropped by inside attackers from network failures, each node will use a trust mechanism to evaluate its neighbor node's trustworthiness so it can send packets only to the trustworthy neighbors. One problem associated with such trust-aware routing algorithms is the false alarm which occurs when a good node's trust value goes down and being eliminated from the routing paths. This wastes network's resource and shortens network lifetime as most trust mechanisms seek to aggressively identify attackers at the cost of increasing false alarm rate. We propose a False Alarm Detection and Recovery (FADER) technique to solve this problem. Instead of abandoning a node with low trust value from the network, we put it into an intermediate state between trusted and untrusted, known as suspicious node. We find alternate routing path for packet forwarding to guarantee the network's packet delivery rate. Meanwhile, we continue to send packet to the suspicious node and monitoring its trust value in order to determine whether the node is untrusted or a false alarm. We have conducted extensive OPNET simulations and the results demonstrate that the proposed FADER approach can improve the performance of the trust-aware routing protocol in terms of the network lifetime, the packet delivery rate, and many other routing performance measures. FADER is able to recover at least 60% of the false alarms without recovering any of the real attackers, this results in an average increase of about 40% in network's lifetime and can be as high as 83%.
Keywords: Conferences; Military communication; false alarm recovery; packet drop attacks; trust-aware routing; watchdog (ID#: 15-5469)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6956737&isnumber=6956719

 

Szott, S., "Selfish insider attacks in IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks," Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.52, no.6, pp.227,233, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6829968
Abstract: The IEEE 802.11s amendment for wireless mesh networks does not provide incentives for stations to cooperate and is particularly vulnerable to selfish insider attacks in which a legitimate network participant hopes to increase its QoS at the expense of others. In this tutorial we describe various attacks that can be executed against 802.11s networks and also analyze existing attacks and identify new ones. We also discuss possible countermeasures and detection methods and attempt to quantify the threat of the attacks to determine which of the 802.11s vulnerabilities need to be secured with the highest priority.
Keywords: telecommunication security; wireless LAN; wireless mesh networks; IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks; selfish insider attacks; Ad hoc networks; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Logic gates; Protocols; Quality of service; Routing; Wireless mesh networks (ID#: 15-5470)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6829968&isnumber=6829933

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Note:

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Internet of Things Security Problems

 

	Internet of Things Security Problems

 

The term Internet of Things (IoT) refers to advanced connectivity of the Internet with devices, systems and services that include both machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and a variety of protocols, domains and applications.  Since the concept incorporates literally billions of devices, the security implications are huge.  The articles presented here identify and discuss broad security problems that the IoT engenders.  

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Stankovic, J.A., "Research Directions for the Internet of Things," Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, vol.1, no.1, pp.3,  9, Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2014.2312291 Many technical communities are vigorously pursuing research topics that contribute to the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, as sensing, actuation, communication, and control become even more sophisticated and ubiquitous, there is a significant overlap in these communities, sometimes from slightly different perspectives. More cooperation between communities is encouraged. To provide a basis for discussing open research problems in IoT, a vision for how IoT could change the world in the distant future is first presented. Then, eight key research topics are enumerated and research problems within these topics are discussed.
Keywords: Internet; Internet of Things; Internet of Things; IoT; Actuators; Internet of Things; Mobile computing; Network security; Privacy; Real-time systems; Research and development; Wireless sensor networks; Cyber physical systems; Internet of Things (IoT);mobile computing; pervasive computing; wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-4709)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6774858&isnumber=6810798

 

Zhang Li-ming; Liu Bao-cheng; Tang Qing-hua; Wu Li-ping, "The Development And Technological Research Of Intelligent Electrical Building," Electricity Distribution (CICED), 2014 China International Conference on, pp.88,92, 23-26 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CICED.2014.6991669 With the popularization of Internet of things technology and the rise of the smart grid concept, a lot of theoretical research and practical exploration have been carried out on intelligent electrical construction at home and abroad. Intelligent building is an important outcome of the application of computer technology in information age, and it is an important part of power segment of smart grid. Through the perfect combination of modern high-tech and building, intelligent building creates a comfortable, safe, economic, efficient, convenient and sustainable development of work and living environment for the user, provides intelligent and interactive electricity services, supplies a convenient management means for managers, reduces the energy consumption and the cost of management for the operators, provides the material basis for the modern property management. At the same time, the development of `three networks convergence' of the State Council is of great significance for promoting the growth of information and cultural industry, improving the level of national economy and social information, contenting people's diversified demand of production and life service, boosting domestic consumption, forming new economic point of growth. This paper explains the basic concepts of intelligent building, describes the significance and development goals of intelligent electricity building construction firstly, then analyzes the current situation of intelligent electricity building, points out the existing problems at present, and discusses the key technology of intelligent building. Finally this paper looks into the distance of the development trend for intelligent building, the developing direction of intelligent building is clear and definite. The basic requirement of intelligent building is intelligent and automated office equipment, high performance communication system, flexible architecture, and automated construction management service. The composition of the basis- technical of intelligent building is illustrated in this paper, and it mainly contains modern building technology, modern computer technology, modern communication technology and modern control technology. The equipment and cable security of weak current system for intelligent building must rely on electrical technology. Modern construction technology is a series of theory, technology and behavior norms which is born and developed in the modern construction practice. The core of modern computer technology is distributed computer network technology in parallel. Modern communication technology is the rapid transmission of data, voice, video through wireless and wired communication technology. Modern control technology is mainly about the distribution type of monitoring system. Through research and analysis, this paper thinks that the structure of intelligent building system will be changed by the progress of information technology, and it is need to reconsider and adjust the function, role and service mode of intelligent building system. The simulation technology of intelligent building will change to digital technology, its transmission system will change from proprietary network to IP network. So the system integration is higher, the appearance is more beautiful, the operation is more convenient. Through the establishment of advanced technology, scientific management and integrated highly intelligent management system, intelligent building not only save the consumption of energy source, reduces the waste of resources, cuts down the daily operating costs, but also provides safety, comfortable, fast, efficient high-quality service, good work and living environment for human beings.
Keywords: building management systems; intelligent structures; office automation; research and development management; automated construction management service; automated office equipment; cost of management; distributed computer network technology; electricity services; energy consumption; flexible architecture; high performance communication system; information technology; intelligent electrical building; intelligent electrical construction; living environment; modern building technology; modern communication technology; modern computer technology; modern control technology;smart grid; sustainable development; work environment; Abstracts; Artificial intelligence; Buildings; Communities; Fires; Lighting; Smart grids; Smart grid; building automation; intelligent electrical building; technological research (ID#: 15-5358)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6991669&isnumber=6991649

 

Strobel, D.; Oswald, D.; Richter, B.; Schellenberg, F.; Paar, C., "Microcontrollers as (In)Security Devices for Pervasive Computing Applications," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol.102, no.8, pp.1157,1173, Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2014.2325397 Often overlooked, microcontrollers are the central component in embedded systems which drive the evolution toward the Internet of Things (IoT). They are small, easy to handle, low cost, and with myriads of pervasive applications. An increasing number of microcontroller-equipped systems are security and safety critical. In this tutorial, we take a critical look at the security aspects of today's microcontrollers. We demonstrate why the implementation of sensitive applications on a standard microcontroller can lead to severe security problems. To this end, we summarize various threats to microcontroller-based systems, including side-channel analysis and different methods for extracting embedded code. In two case studies, we demonstrate the relevance of these techniques in real-world applications: Both analyzed systems, a widely used digital locking system and the YubiKey 2 onetime password generator, turned out to be susceptible to attacks against the actual implementations, allowing an adversary to extract the cryptographic keys which, in turn, leads to a total collapse of the system security.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptography; embedded systems; microcontrollers; ubiquitous computing; Internet of Things; IoT; YubiKey 2 onetime password generator; cryptographic key extraction; digital locking system; embedded code extraction; embedded systems; microcontroller-equipped systems; pervasive computing applications; security devices; side-channel analysis; Algorithm design and analysis; Cryptography; Embedded systems; Field programmable gate arrays; Integrated circuit modeling; Microcontrollers; Pervasive computing; Security; Code extraction; microcontroller; real-world attacks; reverse engineering; side-channel analysis (ID#: 15-4710)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6826474&isnumber=6860340

 

Kai Fan; Chen Liang; Hui Li; Yintang Yang, "LRMAPC: A Lightweight RFID Mutual Authentication Protocol with Cache in the Reader for IoT," Computer and Information Technology (CIT), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.276, 280, 11-13 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CIT.2014.80 As one of the core techniques in the Internet of Things (IoT), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) plays a crucial role in IoT development. Although the low-cost RFID system has wide prospect, it has to face with huge challenges because of potential security risks, privacy problems and efficiency due to its limitations of processing capability, and storage space and power supply in RFID tags. The lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol is one of the possible solutions in secure authentication of the low-cost RFID system. In this paper, we propose a lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol with cache in the reader, named LRMAPC, to store the recent visited key of tags in LRMAPC, so that recent visited tags can be authenticated directly in the reader. The LRMAPC can greatly reduce the computational and transmission cost. Especially, it can reduce computational costs greatly when a large number of tags want to be authenticated. We prove the correctness of LRMAPC using GNY Logic. Compared with other existing works, LRMAPC achieves stronger security and higher efficiency.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cache storage; cryptographic protocols; radiofrequency identification; GNY logic; Internet of Things; IoT reader; LRMAPC; lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol with cache; radio frequency identification; secure authentication; security risks; storage space; Authentication; Databases; Law; Privacy; Protocols; Radiofrequency identification; RFID; authentication; efficiency; security (ID#: 15-4711)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6984666&isnumber=6984594

 

Kwantae Cho; Byung-Gil Lee; Dong Hoon Lee, "Low-Priced and Energy-Efficient Detection of Replicas for Wireless Sensor Networks," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 11, no.5, pp.454, 466, Sept.-Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2013.41 The forthcoming internet of things - an intelligent collaboration of resource-limited devices such as wireless sensor nodes that are embedded in the daily lives of users - poses new challenges to security and end-user privacy. One of the most challenging problems is the thwarting of replica attacks. Once a sensor node is physically captured, it can be reprogrammed and replicated into a large number of replicas, which may maliciously occupy the network. Thus far, various schemes have been proposed to detect replicas; however, most of them require expensive hardware such as a global positioning system. In general, the ideal price for a sensor node is as low as one dollar, and thus, it is equipped with limited resources; hence, it is not practical to employ additional devices. In this paper, we propose a low-priced and efficient solution for replica detection in static wireless sensor networks. Although the proposed solution does not need any additional hardware, it exhibits similar or better performance, as compared to existing schemes. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed solution provides comparable performance in terms of the replica detection ratio and the time required to detect replicas. Furthermore, we show that the proposed solution saves more energy than existing schemes in most of our simulations.
Keywords: Internet of Things; data privacy; power aware computing; ubiquitous computing; wireless sensor networks; Internet of things; end-user privacy; energy-efficient replica detection; expensive hardware; global positioning system; low-priced solution; replica attacks; replica detection ratio; resource-limited devices; static wireless sensor networks; wireless sensor nodes; Base stations; Educational institutions; Global Positioning System; Hardware; Internet; Security; Wireless sensor networks; Security and protection; authentication; network protocols; ubiquitous computing (ID#: 15-4712)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6616549&isnumber=6893064

 

Licai Liu; Lihua Yin; Yunchuan Guo; Bingxing Fang, "EAC: A Framework of Authentication Property for the IOTs," Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC), 2014 International Conference on, pp.102,105, 13-15 Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CyberC.2014.25 Authentication is a slick and important security property and its proposed formal definitions are not widely agreed upon. Moreover, these definitions cannot faithfully express the requirements of diverse security and privacy in the Internet of Things (IOTs). To solve these problems, we proposed a framework of authentication, which including three forms of authentication -- entity authentication, action authentication and claim authentication -- and formalized each definition by using CSP for IOTs in this paper. We show that the framework can easily express different security requirements of IOTs and verify authentication of protocols.
Keywords: Internet; Internet of Things; communicating sequential processes; message authentication; protocols; CSP; EAC; IOT; Internet of Things; action authentication; authentication property; claim authentication; entity authentication; formal definition; protocol authentication; security property; security requirement; Algebra; Authentication; Conferences; Internet of Things; Privacy; Protocols; Authentication Property; Communicating Sequential Processes; Internet of Things; Security Property; Trace Model (ID#: 15-4713)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6984288&isnumber=6984259

 

Yanbing Liu; Qin Wu, "A Lightweight Anomaly Mining Algorithm in the Internet of Things," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp.1142,1145, 27-29 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933768 The security of Internet of Things (IoT) has already become a thorny problem because of opening deployment and limited resources. Thus, as the essential part of intrusion detection anomaly mining gets more and more attention. However, complexity of algorithm is the vital issue due to the specialty of IoT. Meanwhile, traditional methods with Euclidean distance may cause misjudgment at some extent. So this paper proposes a lightweight anomaly mining algorithm which employ Jaccard coefficient firstly as the judging criterion instead of Euclidean distance. The experiment verifies the availability of proposed algorithm.
Keywords: Internet of Things; data mining; security of data; Euclidean distance; Internet of Things; IoT security; Jaccard coefficient; intrusion detection; judging criterion; lightweight anomaly mining algorithm; Complexity theory; Euclidean distance; Internet of Things; Sensors; Vectors; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; Internet of things; anomaly mining; Intrusion detection (ID#: 15-4714)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933768&isnumber=6933501

 

Guozi Sun; Siqi Huang; Wan Bao; Yitao Yang; Zhiwei Wang, "A Privacy Protection Policy Combined With Privacy Homomorphism in the Internet of Things," Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2014 23rd International Conference on, pp.1,6, 4-7 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2014.6911856 Recently, IOT (Internet of Things) develops very rapidly. However, the personal privacy protection is one of directly important factors that impact the large-scale applications of IOT. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a privacy protection policy based on privacy homomorphism. It can protect the security of personal information well by processing the needs of users without acquiring of plaintext. In another aspect, it also greatly improves the performance of the original multiplication homomorphism algorithm.
Keywords: Internet; Internet of Things; data privacy; IOT; Internet of Things; multiplication homomorphism algorithm; personal information; personal privacy protection; plaintext; privacy homomorphism; privacy protection policy; Algorithm design and analysis; Encryption; Internet of Things; Privacy; IOT; homomorphism; personal privacy; security (ID#: 15-4715)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911856&isnumber=6911704

 

Fan Zhang; Dojen, R., "EWAIP: An empirical Wireless Sensor Network applications implementation platform," Future Generation Communication Technology (FGCT), 2014 Third International Conference on, pp.72,77, 13-15 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/FGCT.2014.6933226 Internet of Things (IOT) is experiencing a super-fast growing phase. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), as the “five sense organs” and teleneuron of IOT, is developing fast along. Owing to the application-oriented characteristics of WSN, WSN applications may differ enormously in implementation methods. The WSN developers may have to rewrite the code for each and every application. Along with the increasing demand to WSN applications, WSN developers may have heavier tasks of programming for these applications. Thanks to TinyOS and NesC, an operating system and programming language designed especially for WSN, raises the WSN application's programming to a higher level. Large number of supported sensor hardware plus system provided and user-de-fined libraries eases WSN application programmers' jobs. How-ever, the massive amount of nodes' communication and networking, and security protection slows down the development pace. A unified and empirical WSN application implementation platform is one of the available solutions to the problem. This paper introduces an empirical WSN application implementation platform, which avails the WSN developers build an application with unified code template and network packet generation and processing strategies.
Keywords: Internet of Things; digital libraries; telecommunication computing; wireless sensor networks; EWAIP; IOT; Internet of Things; NesC operating system; TinyOS operating system; WSN application; application programming; application-oriented characteristics; empirical wireless sensor network application implementation platform; five sense organs; network packet generation; programming language; security protection; teleneuron; unified code template; user-defined libraries; Encryption; Hardware; Libraries; Radio transceivers; Software; Wireless sensor networks; Empirical Implementation Platform; Wireless Sensor Networks (ID#: 15-4716)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933226&isnumber=6933219

 

Stojmenovic, Ivan, "Fog computing: A Cloud To The Ground Support For Smart Things And Machine-To-Machine Networks," Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC), 2014 Australasian, pp.117,122, 26-28 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ATNAC.2014.7020884 Cloud services to smart things face latency and intermittent connectivity issues. Fog devices are positioned between cloud and smart devices. Their high speed Internet connection to the cloud, and physical proximity to users, enable real time applications and location based services, and mobility support. Cisco promoted fog computing concept in the areas of smart grid, connected vehicles and wireless sensor and actuator networks. This survey article expands this concept to the decentralized smart building control, recognizes cloudlets as special case of fog computing, and relates it to the software defined networks (SDN) scenarios. Our literature review identifies a handful number of articles. Cooperative data scheduling and adaptive traffic light problems in SDN based vehicular networks, and demand response management in macro station and micro-grid based smart grids are discussed. Security, privacy and trust issues, control information overhead and network control policies do not seem to be studied so far within the fog computing concept.
Keywords: Actuators; Cloud computing; Mobile communication; Optimal scheduling; Smart grids; Vehicles; Wireless communication; Fog computing; Machine-to-machine networks (ID#: 15-4717)

URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7020884&isnumber=7020854

 

Hwajeong Seo; Jongseok Choi; Hyunjin Kim; Taehwan Park; Howon Kim, "Pseudo Random Number Generator And Hash Function For Embedded Microprocessors," Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum on, pp.37,40, 6-8 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/WF-IoT.2014.6803113 Embedded microprocessors are commonly used for future technologies such as Internet of Things(IoT), RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN). However, the microprocessors have limited computing power and storages so straight-forward implementation of traditional services on resource constrained devices is not recommenced. To overcome this problem, lightweight implementation techniques should be concerned for practical implementations. Among various requirements, security applications should be conducted on microprocessors for secure and robust service environments. In this paper, we presented a light weight implementation techniques for efficient Pseudo Random Number Generator(PRNG) and Hash function. To reduce memory consumption and accelerate performance, we adopted AES accelerator based implementation. This technique is firstly introduced in INDOCRYPT'12, whose idea exploits peripheral devices for efficient hash computations. With this technique, we presented block cipher based light-weight pseudo random number generator and simple hash function on embedded microprocessors.
Keywords: cryptography; embedded systems; microprocessor chips; random number generation; AES accelerator;INDOCRYPT'12;PRNG;block cipher based lightweight pseudo random number generator; embedded microprocessors; future technologies; hash computations; hash function; lightweight implementation techniques; peripheral devices; resource constrained devices; robust service environments; secure service environments ;security applications; straight-forward implementation; Ciphers; Clocks; Encryption; Generators; Microprocessors (ID#: 15-4718)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6803113&isnumber=6803102

 

Schukat, M.; Flood, P., "Zero-knowledge Proofs in M2M Communication," Irish Signals & Systems Conference 2014 and 2014 China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (ISSC 2014/CIICT 2014), 25th IET, pp.269, 273, 26-27 June 2013. doi: 10.1049/cp.2014.0697 The advent of the IoT with an estimated 50 billion internet enabled devices by the year 2020 raises questions about the suitability and scalability of existing mechanisms to provide privacy, data integrity and end-entity authentication between communicating peers. In this paper we present a new protocol that combines zero-knowledge proofs and key exchange mechanisms to provide secure and authenticated communication in static M2M networks, therefore addressing all the above problems. The protocol is suitable for devices with limited computational resources and can be deployed in wireless sensor networks. While the protocol requires an a-priori knowledge about the network setup and structure, it guarantees perfect forward secrecy.
Keywords: Internet of Things; computer network security; cryptographic protocols; wireless sensor networks; Internet enabled devices; Internet of Things;IoT;M2M communication; data integrity; data privacy; end-entity authentication; key exchange mechanisms; machine-to-machine communication; perfect forward secrecy; static M2M networks; wireless sensor networks; zero-knowledge proofs; Diffle Heilman key exchange; GMW protocol; Zero knowledge proof (ID#: 15-4719)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6912768&isnumber=6912720

 

Fysarakis, K.; Papaefstathiou, I.; Rantos, K.; Manifavas, C.; Sultatos, O., "Policy-Based Access Control For DPWS-Enabled Ubiquitous Devices," Emerging Technology and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014 IEEE, pp.1,8, 16-19 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ETFA.2014.7005233 As computing becomes ubiquitous, researchers and engineers aim to exploit the potential of the pervasive systems in order to introduce new types of services and address inveterate and emerging problems. This process will, eventually, lead us to the era of urban computing and the Internet of Things; the ultimate goal being to improve our quality of life. But these concepts typically require direct and constant interaction of computing systems with the physical world in order to be realized, which inevitably leads to the introduction of a range of safety and privacy issues that must be addressed. One such important aspect is the fine-grained control of access to the resources of these pervasive embedded systems, in a secure and scalable manner. This paper presents an implementation of such a secure policy-based access control scheme, focusing on the use of well-established, standardized technologies and considering the potential resource-constraints of the target heterogeneous embedded devices. The proposed framework adopts a DPWS-compliant approach for smart devices and introduces XACML-based access control mechanisms. The proof-of-concept implementation is presented in detail, along with a performance evaluation on typical embedded platforms.
Keywords: Internet of Things; Web services; XML; authorisation; data privacy; embedded systems; DPWS-enabled ubiquitous devices; Devices Profile for Web Services; Internet of Things; XACML-based access control mechanisms; heterogeneous embedded devices; pervasive embedded systems; policy-based access control; privacy issues; resource-constraints; safety issues; smart devices; urban computing; Authorization; Computer architecture; Internet of Things; Performance evaluation; Web services; DPWS; XACML; access control; authorization; security; ubiquitous computing (ID#: 15-4720)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7005233&isnumber=7005023

 

Xiaoying Zhang; Hong Chen; Ke Wang; Hui Peng; Yongjian Fan; Deying Li, "Rotation-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation In Wireless Sensor Networks," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on,, pp.4184,4189, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883977 Wireless Sensor Network is an important part of the Internet of Things. Data privacy preservation in wireless sensor networks is extremely urgent and challenging. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a privacy-preserving data aggregation protocol in wireless sensor networks. Compared to the previous research, our protocol protects the actual data from other nodes based on a rotation scheme while reducing communication overhead dramatically. The protocol achieves accurate aggregation results. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the high privacy and efficiency of our proposal.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptographic protocols; data protection; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; Internet of Things; communication overhead reduction; data protection; rotation-based privacy-preserving data aggregation protocol; wireless sensor networks; Data privacy; Educational institutions; Merging; Privacy; Protocols; Silicon; Wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-4721)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883977&isnumber=6883277

 

Diogo, P.; Reis, L.P.; Vasco Lopes, N., "Internet of Things: A System's Architecture Proposal," Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), 2014 9th Iberian Conference on, pp. 1, 6, 18-21 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/CISTI.2014.6877072 Internet of Things (IoT) is seen as the future of Internet. We will step out from typical current communication paradigm, to a much wider spectrum, where normal “things” will talk to each other, independent of human interaction. Emphasizing its importance in health industry, it can save lives and improve the ageing and disabled population's quality of living. It is not just things connected to the Internet - it is intelligent systems that we will be able to build on top of IoT that will introduce us to a better quality of life. However, IoT is facing a major problem: fragmentation and interoperability problems. If we want things to communicate with each other, intelligently and autonomously, then the new future Internet must be structured to allow such thing. The industry must adopt current standards and provide interoperability among other systems and developers must be aware of this issue too. Every new device should be IoT proof for future integration in IoT. In this article, there is a focus on these health-related use cases where they are detailed and explained how IoT could be deployed to aid in specific cases. The second part of the article takes the current IoT problem and tackles its issues, presenting a communication paradigm and proposes a new IoT system's architecture.
Keywords: Internet of Things; health care; medical information systems; open systems; Internet of Things; IoT system architecture; ageing population quality of living improvement; communication paradigm; disabled population quality of living improvement; fragmentation problem; health industry; intelligent systems; interoperability problem; quality of life; Internet of Things; Logic gates; Security; Telecommunication standards; Web services; Internet of Things; M2M; architecture; communication; e-health; fragmentation; interoperability (ID#: 15-4722)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6877072&isnumber=6876860

 

Miloslavskaya, N.; Senatorov, M.; Tolstoy, A.; Zapechnikov, S., "Information Security Maintenance Issues for Big Security-Related Data," Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), 2014 International Conference on, pp.361,366, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/FiCloud.2014.64 The need to protect big data, particularly those relating to information security (IS) maintenance (ISM) of an enterprise's IT infrastructure, is shown. A worldwide experience of addressing big data ISM issues is briefly summarized and a big data protection problem statement is formulated. An infrastructure for big data ISM is proposed. New applications areas for big data IT after addressing ISM issues are listed in conclusion.
Keywords: Big Data; security of data; ISM; IT infrastructure; big data protection problem statement; big security-related data; information security maintenance; information security maintenance issues; Arrays; Big data; Data models; Data visualization; Distributed databases; Real-time systems ;Security; big data; data visualization; information security; secure infrastructure; security-related data (ID#: 15-4723)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6984220&isnumber=6984143

 

van Thuan, Do; Butkus, Pranas; van Thanh, Do, "A User Centric Identity Management for Internet of Things," IT Convergence and Security (ICITCS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,4, 28-30 Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICITCS.2014.7021724 In the future Internet of Things, it is envisioned that things are collaborating to serve people. Unfortunately, this vision could not be realised without relations between things and people. To solve the problem this paper proposes a user centric identity management system that incorporates user identity, device identity and the relations between them. The proposed IDM system is user centric and allows device authentication and authorization based on the user identity. A typical compelling use case of the proposed solution is also given.
Keywords: Authentication; Identity management systems; Internet of Things; Medical services; Mobile handsets (ID#: 15-4724)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7021724&isnumber=7021698

 

“The Development Trend And Future of IOTs in China," Communications, China, vol.11, no.9, pp.1, 5, Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CC.2014.6969706 In recent years, in spite of the rapid growth of the IOTs in technical research and development, standard development, industrial fostering and industrial applications, there are deep-seated problems which have been restraining the development of IOTs. The Chinese government is strengthening the guidance of the development of the IoTs, constantly optimizing the environment for the development of IOTs, so as to promote the orderly and healthy development of the Internet of Things in China.
Keywords: Internet of Things; government policies; research and development management; Chinese government; IOT; Internet of Things; industrial applications; industrial fostering; standard development; technical research and development; Computer security ;Internet; Internet of things; Mobile communication; Monitoring; Radiofrequency identification; Research and development (ID#: 15-4725)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6969706&isnumber=6969702

 

Razouk, W., "Zigbee Security within the Framework of IoT," Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), 2014 IEEE 7th International Conference on, pp.265,265, 17-19 Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SOCA.2014.57 The latest version of ZigBee offers improvement over many aspects like low power consumption, flexibility and inexpensive deployment. However problems persist as the enhanced protocol still has many security weaknesses. In this presentation we highlight relevant security concerns related to the latest ZigBee security features, then we propose countermeasure mechanisms to address some of these weaknesses. We also propose a new approach suitable for ZigBee enabled wireless sensor networks. The proposed solution improves security and decreases considerably the likelihood of successful attacks. Lastly we discuss the security and performance related to the proposed scheme.
Keywords: Internet of Things; Zigbee; computer network security; wireless sensor networks; Internet of things; IoT framework; ZigBee enabled wireless sensor networks; ZigBee security features; enhanced protocol; power consumption; Communication system security; IEEE 802.15 Standards; Protocols; Security; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; Zigbee; Internet of Things; Security; Wireless sensor networks; ZigBee (ID#: 15-4726)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6978620&isnumber=6978154

 

Hwajeong Seo; Jongseok Choi; Hyunjin Kim; Taehwan Park; Howon Kim, "Short Paper: Surveillance System With Light Sensor," Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum on, pp.165,166, 6-8 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/WF-IoT.2014.6803141 Traditional surveillance system is enabled by closed-circuit television(CCTV) monitoring each district in real time. However, this approach should install expensive CCTV to every destination and collected images or videos should go through complex post-processing to get useful and meaningful information. Furthermore nowadays CCTV violates people's private life, which is crucial problem in modern society. If our goal is secure and robust street, more simple and cheap approaches could be favorable. In this paper, we present a novel surveillance system using light sensor which is commonly available in embedded processors or modern smart-phones. On the contrast to the traditional method, light sensor is cheap module and easy to install and process the information. After processing, we can determine the secure or insecure places with derived information. For practical evaluation, we made micro testbed in our campus. First we collected light information from several locations in different time domains. And then secure or insecure places are determined in each time domain. We defined bright and dark places as secure and insecure places, respectively. The evaluation shows that our approach is unprecedented ultra light-weight approach and cost effective method to improve security in our society.
Keywords: closed circuit television; intelligent sensors; optical sensors; smart phones; video surveillance; CCTV; closed-circuit television; embedded processors; light sensor; smart-phones; surveillance system; Educational institutions; Lighting; Roads; Servers; Surveillance; Time-domain analysis; Wireless networks (ID#: 15-4727)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6803141&isnumber=6803102

 

Yang Li; Nakasone, T.; Ohta, K.; Sakiyama, K., "Privacy-mode Switching: Toward Flexible Privacy Protection for RFID tags in Internet of Things," Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2014 IEEE 11th, pp.519,520, 10-13 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2014.6940531 The privacy problem becomes the biggest obstacle when applying the RFID technology to personal customers usage in Internet of Things. Privacy protection is in the cost of computational overhead and feasibility loss, and necessary for privacy-sensitive usages. We propose a RFID system in which the privacy protection can be turned on or off by validate authorities. The privacy-mode switching increases diversity of RFID usage, enables RFID recycles, and has limited hardware overhead for RFID tags. Based on a symmetric-key crypto-based mutual authentication protocol called OMHSO, we describe a construction of a RFID system with flexible privacy-mode switching.
Keywords: Internet of Things; computer network security; cryptographic protocols; data protection; radiofrequency identification; Internet of Things; OMHSO; RFID tags; computational overhead; feasibility loss; flexible privacy protection; hardware overhead; personal customers usage; privacy-mode switching; privacy-sensitive usages; symmetric-key crypto-based mutual authentication protocol; Cryptography; Privacy; Protocols; RFID tags; Servers; Switches (ID#: 15-4728)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6940531&isnumber=6866537

 

Rghioui, A.; Bouchkaren, S.; Khannous, A.; Bouhorma, M., "Securing Private Wireless Sensors In A Shared Environment In The Internet Of Things Context," Security Days (JNS4), Proceedings of the 4th Edition of National, pp.1,6, 12-13 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/JNS4.2014.6850126 To lead to the Smart Cities, we should have the possibility of obtaining information from different places and objects anytime and anywhere, in order to collect sufficient data to anticipate problems and take a good decisions. This will promote to an effective and autonomous organization by creating interacted and communicated objects around the city. So, we need to install various and specific IP-based wireless sensors everywhere to collect data remotely and in a real time. The idea of mixing sensors belonging to organizations from different specialties in the same places will involve several experts and encourages competition. But on the other side, it will open the door to new security threats and issues, also this will impose new management problems like how to limit the access to each organization to its sensors. In this paper, we study the security of a set of IP-based wireless sensors, which belongs to different organizations, and form a local network. We propose a model to ensure exchanged information confidentiality and manage the sensors accessibility, while considering the wireless sensors constrained characteristics.
Keywords: {Internet of Things; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; IP-based wireless sensors; Internet of Things context; communicated objects; exchanged information confidentiality; interacted objects; local network; management problems; private wireless sensors; shared environment; smart cities;Cryptography;Erbium;Nickel;Organizations;Sensors;Wireless sensor networks;6LoWPAN;IEEE 802.15.4;Internet of Things; IoT; Network Security; Smart City; WSN (ID#: 15-4729)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6850126&isnumber=6847906

 

Moriyama, D., "Provably Secure Two-Round RFID Grouping Proof Protocols," RFID Technology and Applications Conference (RFID-TA), 2014 IEEE, pp.272, 276, 8-9 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/RFID-TA.2014.6934242 A witness to show the coexistence of multiple RFID tags is called grouping-proof and it is useful to handle a lot of commercial products in Internet of Things (IoT). Many of the existing grouping-proof protocols have a common problem that the RFID reader incrementally communicates with the RFID tags in the group and the round complexity is quite high. In this paper, we show that there exists a provably secure RFID grouping-proof protocol which the grouping-proof is generated in the constant round. Especially, we propose two-round RFID grouping-proof protocols secure against the impersonation attack and man-in-the-middle attack, respectively.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptographic protocols; radiofrequency identification; telecommunication security; Internet of Things; IoT; RFID grouping proof protocols; RFID reader; RFID tags; impersonation attack; man-in-the-middle attack; Authentication; Cryptography; Protocols; RFID tags; Zinc; RFID; authentication; grouping-proof; provable security (ID#: 15-4730)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6934242&isnumber=6934187

 

Jiye Park; Namhi Kang, "Lightweight Secure Communication For Coap-Enabled Internet Of Things Using Delegated DTLS Handshake," Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC), 2014 International Conference on, pp.28,33, 22-24 Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICTC.2014.6983078 IETF CoRE working group proposed to use DTLS for supporting secure IoT services. In this paper, we examine problems that can happen when applying the DTLS protocol to IoT networks directly. To solve the problems, we separate the DTLS protocol into two; the handshake phase and the encryption phase. Our approach enhances performance in both device and network by using a way to delegate the DTLS handshake phase. We also present two scenarios (inbound and outbound) based on the properties of Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) enabled sensors. The proposed scheme supports secure end-to-end communication despite using delegation.
Keywords: Internet of Things; cryptography; telecommunication security; CoAP enabled sensors; CoAP-enabled Internet of Things; DTLS protocol; IETF CoRE working group; IoT networks; constrained application protocol; delegated DTLS handshake; delegation; encryption phase; handshake phase; lightweight secure communication; secure end-to-end communication;Encryption;Internet;Protocols;Sensors;Servers;CoAP Security; DTLS; Delegation; End-to-end Security; Internet of Things (ID#: 15-4731)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6983078&isnumber=6983064

 

Nguyen, T.; Leneutre, J., "Formal Analysis of Secure Device Pairing Protocols," Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2014 IEEE 13th International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.291,295, 21-23 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/NCA.2014.50 The need to secure communications between personal devices is increasing nowadays, especially in the context of Internet of Things. Authentication between devices which have no prior common knowledge is a challenging problem. One solution consists in using a pre-authenticated auxiliary channel, human assisted or location limited, usually called out-of-band channel. A large number of device pairing protocols using an out-of-band channel were proposed, but they usually suffer from a lack of formal analysis. In this paper, we introduce a formal model, conceived as an extension of Strand Spaces, to analyze such protocols. We use it to analyze a device pairing protocol with unilateral out-of-band channel proposed by Wong & Stajano. This leads us to discover some vulnerabilities in this protocol. We propose a modified version of the protocol together with a correctness proof in our model.
Keywords: {cryptographic protocols; data privacy; telecommunication security; Internet of Things; formal analysis; human assisted channel; location limited channel; pre-authenticated auxiliary channel; secure communication; secure device pairing protocol; strand space extension; unilateral out-of-band channel; Adaptation models; Authentication; Communication system security; DH-HEMTs; Protocols; Wireless communication (ID#: 15-4732)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6924241&isnumber=6924186

 

Stankovic, J.A., "Research Directions for the Internet of Things," Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, vol.1, no.1, pp. 3, 9, Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2014.2312291 Many technical communities are vigorously pursuing research topics that contribute to the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, as sensing, actuation, communication, and control become even more sophisticated and ubiquitous, there is a significant overlap in these communities, sometimes from slightly different perspectives. More cooperation between communities is encouraged. To provide a basis for discussing open research problems in IoT, a vision for how IoT could change the world in the distant future is first presented. Then, eight key research topics are enumerated and research problems within these topics are discussed.
Keywords: Internet; Internet of Things; Internet of Things; IoT; Actuators; Internet of Things; Mobile computing; Network security; Privacy; Real-time systems; Research and development; Wireless sensor networks; Cyber physical systems; Internet of Things (IoT); mobile computing; pervasive computing; wireless sensor networks (ID#: 15-4733)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6774858&isnumber=6810798

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Operating Systems Security (2014 Year in Review), Part 1

 

	Operating Systems Security (2014 Year in Review)  Part 1

In a previous Newsletter, the editors offered a series of citations from late 2013 about operating systems.  In this set, we offer an update of publications and presentations from 2014, focused specifically upon security issues.  The general topic has produced prolific work.  We will present these in multiple parts.

Sihan Qing, "Some Issues Regarding Operating System Security," Computer and Information Science (ICIS), 2014 IEEE/ACIS 13th International Conference on, pp. 1,1, 4-6 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICIS.2014.6912096 Summary form only given. In this presentation, several issues regarding operating system security will be investigated. The general problems of OS security are to be addressed. We also discuss why we should consider the security aspects of the OS, and when a secure OS is needed. We delve into the topic of secure OS design as well focusing on covert channel analysis. The specific operating systems under consideration include Windows and Android.
Keywords: Android (operating system);security of data; software engineering; Android; Windows; covert channel analysis; operating system security; secure OS design; Abstracts; Focusing; Information security; Laboratories; Operating systems; Standards development (ID#: 15-4306)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6912096&isnumber=6912089

 

Kaczmarek, J.; Wrobel, M.R., "Operating System Security By Integrity Checking And Recovery Using Write-Protected Storage," Information Security, IET, vol.8, no.2, pp.122, 131, March 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2012.0346 An integrity checking and recovery (ICAR) system is presented here, which protects file system integrity and automatically restores modified files. The system enables files cryptographic hashes generation and verification, as well as configuration of security constraints. All of the crucial data, including ICAR system binaries, file backups and hashes database are stored in a physically write-protected storage to eliminate the threat of unauthorised modification. A buffering mechanism was designed and implemented in the system to increase operation performance. Additionally, the system supplies user tools for cryptographic hash generation and security database management. The system is implemented as a kernel extension, compliant with the Linux security model. Experimental evaluation of the system was performed and showed an approximate 10% performance degradation in secured file access compared to regular access.
Keywords: Linux; database management systems; security of data; ICAR system binaries; Linux security model; buffering mechanism; cryptographic hashes generation; file backups; file system integrity; hashes database; integrity checking and recovery system; security constraints; security database management; system security; unauthorised modification; write-protected storage (ID#: 15-4307)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6748546&isnumber=6748540

 

Almohri, H.M.J.; Danfeng Yao; Kafura, D., "Process Authentication for High System Assurance," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on , vol.11, no.2, pp.168,180, March-April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2013.29
Abstract: This paper points out the need in modern operating system kernels for a process authentication mechanism, where a process of a user-level application proves its identity to the kernel. Process authentication is different from process identification. Identification is a way to describe a principal; PIDs or process names are identifiers for processes in an OS environment. However, the information such as process names or executable paths that is conventionally used by OS to identify a process is not reliable. As a result, malware may impersonate other processes, thus violating system assurance. We propose a lightweight secure application authentication framework in which user-level applications are required to present proofs at runtime to be authenticated to the kernel. To demonstrate the application of process authentication, we develop a system call monitoring framework for preventing unauthorized use or access of system resources. It verifies the identity of processes before completing the requested system calls. We implement and evaluate a prototype of our monitoring architecture in Linux. The results from our extensive performance evaluation show that our prototype incurs reasonably low overhead, indicating the feasibility of our approach for cryptographically authenticating applications and their processes in the operating system.
Keywords: Linux; authorisation; cryptography; operating system kernels; software architecture; software performance evaluation; system monitoring; Linux; cryptographic authenticating applications; high system assurance; modern operating system kernels; monitoring architecture; performance evaluation; process authentication mechanism; process identification; requested system calls; secure application authentication framework; system call monitoring framework; unauthorized system resource access prevention; unauthorized system resource use prevention; user-level application; Authentication; Kernel; Malware; Monitoring; Runtime; Operating system security; process authentication; secret application credential; system call monitoring (ID#: 15-4308)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6560050&isnumber=6785951

 

Prakash, A.; Venkataramani, E.; Yin, H.; Lin, Z., "On the Trustworthiness of Memory Analysis —An Empirical Study from the Perspective of Binary Execution," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no. 99, pp.1,1, 31 October 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2014.2366464 Memory analysis serves as a foundation for many security applications such as memory forensics, virtual machine introspection and malware investigation. However, malware, or more specifically a kernel rootkit, can often tamper with kernel memory data, putting the trustworthiness of memory analysis under question. With the rapid deployment of cloud computing and increase of cyber attacks, there is a pressing need to systematically study and understand the problem of memory analysis. In particular, without ground truth, the quality of the memory analysis tools widely used for analyzing closed-source operating systems (like Windows) has not been thoroughly studied. Moreover, while it is widely accepted that value manipulation attacks pose a threat to memory analysis, its severity has not been explored and well understood. To answer these questions, we have devised a number of novel analysis techniques including (1) binary level ground-truth collection, and (2) value equivalence set directed field mutation. Our experimental results demonstrate not only that the existing tools are inaccurate even under a non-malicious context, but also that value manipulation attacks are practical and severe. Finally, we show that exploiting information redundancy can be a viable direction to mitigate value manipulation attacks, but checking information equivalence alone is not an ultimate solution.
Keywords: Context; Data structures; Kernel; Robustness; Security; Semantics; Virtual machining; DKOM; Invasive Software; Kernel Rootkit; Memory Forensics; Operating Systems Security; Virtual Machine Introspection (ID#: 15-4309)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6942280&isnumber=4358699

 

Eletriby, M.R.; Sobh, M.; Bahaa Eldin, A.M.; Fahmy, H.M.A., "High Performance Java Card Operating System," Software Security and Reliability (SERE), 2014 Eighth International Conference on, pp. 30, 39, June 30 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SERE.2014.16 Due to the fast evolving of trusted computing environments and internet-of-things an eager need has been established for open platforms which support interchangeable technologies to co-exist without threatening system's security. Certainly, future embedded applications will need high performance operating systems to support the intensive-computing algorithms required for satisfying acceptable response and secure the application inside the vulnerable open environment, hence, new inevitable requirements for embedded operating systems have arisen including hard real-time response, support for native applications, system openness and system scalability. This paper introduces a new design for secure and open smart card operating system, called ESCOS (Egypt Smart Card Operating System), based on the prevalent Java Card technology. The new design provides competitive characteristics in the main three factors of judging smart card platforms, namely, system security, supported technology and system response. In addition, ESCOS is designed to have high degree of modularity and re-configurability to meet fast-changing business needs and diverse hardware platforms.
Keywords: Internet of Things; Java; embedded systems; operating systems (computers);smart cards; trusted computing; ESCOS; Egypt smart card operating system; Internet-of-Things; Java card technology; embedded operating systems; high performance Java card operating system; intensive-computing algorithms; interchangeable technologies; open platforms; open smart card operating system; secure smart card operating system; trusted computing environments; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Hardware; Java; Operating systems; Smart cards; Java Card; computer security; cryptography systems; embedded software design; multi-application smart cards; operating systems (ID#: 15-4310)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6895413&isnumber=6895396

 

Xing, Luyi; Pan, Xiaorui; Wang, Rui; Yuan, Kan; Wang, XiaoFeng, "Upgrading Your Android, Elevating My Malware: Privilege Escalation through Mobile OS Updating," Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pp.393,408, 18-21 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SP.2014.32 Android is a fast evolving system, with new updates coming out one after another. These updates often completely overhaul a running system, replacing and adding tens of thousands of files across Android's complex architecture, in the presence of critical user data and applications (apps for short). To avoid accidental damages to such data and existing apps, the upgrade process involves complicated program logic, whose security implications, however, are less known. In this paper, we report the first systematic study on the Android updating mechanism, focusing on its Package Management Service (PMS). Our research brought to light a new type of security-critical vulnerabilities, called Pileup flaws, through which a malicious app can strategically declare a set of privileges and attributes on a low-version operating system (OS) and wait until it is upgraded to escalate its privileges on the new system. Specifically, we found that by exploiting the Pileup vulnerabilities, the app can not only acquire a set of newly added system and signature permissions but also determine their settings (e.g., protection levels), and it can further substitute for new system apps, contaminate their data (e.g., cache, cookies of Android default browser) to steal sensitive user information or change security configurations, and prevent installation of critical system services. We systematically analyzed the source code of PMS using a program verification tool and confirmed the presence of those security flaws on all Android official versions and over 3000 customized versions. Our research also identified hundreds of exploit opportunities the adversary can leverage over thousands of devices across different device manufacturers, carriers and countries. To mitigate this threat without endangering user data and apps during an upgrade, we also developed a new detection service, called SecUP, which deploys a scanner on the user's device to capture the malicious apps designed to exploit Pileu- vulnerabilities, based upon the vulnerability-related information automatically collected from newly released Android OS images.
Keywords: Androids; Google; Humanoid robots; Mobile communication; Registers; Security; Smart phones; Android; OS update; Package Manager Service; Privilege Escalation (ID#: 15-4311)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6956577&isnumber=6956545

 

Dejun Mu; Wei Hu; Baolei Mao; Bo Ma, "A Bottom-Up Approach To Verifiable Embedded System Information Flow Security," Information Security, IET, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 12, 17, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2012.0342 With the wide deployment of embedded systems and constant increase in their inter-connections, embedded systems tend to be confronted with attacks through security holes that are hard to predict using typical security measures such as access control or data encryption. To eliminate these security holes, embedded security should be accounted for during the design phase from all abstraction levels with effective measures taken to prevent unintended interference between different system components caused by harmful flows of information. This study proposes a bottom-up approach to designing verifiably information flow secure embedded systems. The proposed method enables tight information flow controls by monitoring all flows of information from the level of Boolean gates. It lays a solid foundation to information flow security in the underlying hardware and exposes the ability to prove security properties to all abstraction levels in the entire system stack. With substantial amounts of modifications made to the instruction set architecture, operating system, programming language and input/output architecture, the target system can be designed to be verifiably information flow secure.
Keywords: embedded systems; formal verification; instruction sets; operating systems (computers); security of data; access control; bottom up approach; data encryption; information flow controls; input-output architecture; instruction set architecture; operating system; programming language; security holes; verifiable embedded system information flow security (ID#: 15-4312)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6687153&isnumber=6687150

 

Al-Qershi, F.; Al-Qurishi, M.; Md Mizanur Rahman, S.; Al-Amri, A., "Android vs. iOS: The Security Battle," Computer Applications and Information Systems (WCCAIS), 2014 World Congress on, pp.1,8, 17-19 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/WCCAIS.2014.6916629 Smartphones are one of the most demanding popular technologies in this current era of technology. They are comfortable for personnel use, and their adaptable functionalities give them a reputation in current competitive technology world. One of the important functionalities of these devices is to store - personal data of the users. The personal data of an user contains privacy and sensitive information which is very important. That is why now-a-days, the smartphones become primary target of a hacker. Therefore, the security technology of the smartphones becomes one of the prime research concerns within the smartphone research community. In the world of smartphones' operating systems, iOS and Android are considered the leaders. This paper focuses on those two operating systems in terms of their adopted security technologies. A review on security technologies of iOS and Android literature is presented in this research article. Furthermore, the policies and security mechanisms of the existing security models for these (iOS and Android) operating systems (OS) are discussed. Threats and malwares which target the iOS or Android are reviewed generally and specially. Two taxonomies for attacks are selected from literature and discussed for both the operating systems. Finally, the paper makes a comparison between iOS and Android based on different security criteria. The reviews result try to answer the difficult question “which OS is more secure between iOS and Android?”.
Keywords: Android (operating system); data privacy; iOS (operating system);security of data; smart phones; Android; data privacy; iOS; personal data; sensitive information; smartphones; Androids; Computer hacking; Grippers; Hardware; Humanoid robots; Malware; World Wide Web; Android; Security; Threats; iOS (ID#: 15-4313)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916629&isnumber=6916540

 

Lee, Byoungyoung; Lu, Long; Wang, Tielei; Kim, Taesoo; Lee, Wenke, "From Zygote to Morula: Fortifying Weakened ASLR on Android," Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pp.424,439, 18-21 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SP.2014.34 There have been many research efforts to secure Android applications and the high-level system mechanisms. The low-level operating system designs have been overlooked partially due to the belief that security issues at this level are similar to those on Linux, which are well-studied. However, we identify that certain Android modifications are at odds with security and result in serious vulnerabilities that need to be addressed immediately. In this paper, we analyze the Zygote process creation model, an Android operating system design for speeding up application launches. Zygote weakens Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) because all application processes are created with largely identical memory layouts. We design both remote and local attacks capable of bypassing the weakened ASLR and executing return-oriented programming on Android. We demonstrate the attacks using real applications, such as the Chrome Browser and VLC Media Player. Further, we design and implement Morula, a secure replacement for Zygote. Morula introduces a small amount of code to the Android operating system and can be easily adopted by device vendors. Our evaluation shows that, compared to Zygote, Morula incurs a 13 MB memory increase for each running application but allows each Android process to have an individually randomized memory layout and even a slightly shorter average launch time.
Keywords: Androids; Browsers; Humanoid robots; Layout; Libraries; Media; Security; ASLR; Android; Security (ID#: 15-4314)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6956579&isnumber=6956545

 

Agosta, G.; Barenghi, A.; Maggi, M.; Pelosi, G., "Design Space Extension For Secure Implementation Of Block Ciphers," Computers & Digital Techniques, IET, vol. 8, no.6, pp.256, 263, 11 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-cdt.2014.0037 Security has been identified as a critical dimension in the design of embedded systems for almost a decade. A well-recognised critical threat against the security of embedded systems is represented by `side-channel attacks (SCAs)', which mandate the application of specially tailored countermeasures. These countermeasures are significantly demanding in terms of computation effort, and have traditionally been applied by hand. The recent introduction of a methodology to gauge the security margins provided by software cipher implementations, allows the integration of the automated application of countermeasures into platform-based system-level design methodologies. The authors introduce in the design space of block cipher implementations a new metric concerning the resistance against SCAs, provide a systematic method for the selection of the most appropriate cipher given the security and performance trade-offs, and point out the performance requirements for the random number generator. Moreover, they discuss the implications of the design space extension on system runtime adaptivity. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that a single cipher does not cover optimally a range of convenient operating points and that ciphers like a Serpent, which are considered slow in non-protected implementations, can outperform primitives like the Advanced Encryption Standard when implementations with equal security guarantees against SCAs are considered.
Keywords: cryptography; embedded systems; SCAs; Serpent; advanced encryption standard; block ciphers; countermeasure automated application; design space extension; embedded systems; performance trade-offs; platform-based system-level design methodology; random number generator; security margins; side-channel attacks; software cipher; system runtime adaptivity; systematic method (ID#: 15-4315)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6962953&isnumber=6962932

 

Min Zheng; Mingshen Sun; Lui, J.C.S., "DroidTrace: A Ptrace Based Android Dynamic Analysis System With Forward Execution Capability," Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2014 International, pp.128,133, 4-8 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWCMC.2014.6906344 Android, being an open source smartphone operating system, enjoys a large community of developers who create new mobile services and applications. However, it also attracts malware writers to exploit Android devices in order to distribute malicious apps in the wild. In fact, Android malware are becoming more sophisticated and they use advanced “dynamic loading” techniques like Java reflection or native code execution to bypass security detection. To detect dynamic loading, one has to use dynamic analysis. Currently, there are only a handful of Android dynamic analysis tools available, and they all have shortcomings in detecting dynamic loading. The aim of this paper is to design and implement a dynamic analysis system which allows analysts to perform systematic analysis of dynamic payloads with malicious behaviors. We propose “DroidTrace”, a ptrace based dynamic analysis system with forward execution capability. Our system uses ptrace to monitor selected system calls of the target process which is running the dynamic payloads, and classifies the payloads behaviors through the system call sequence, e.g., behaviors such as file access, network connection, inter-process communication and even privilege escalation. Also, DroidTrace performs “physical modification” to trigger different dynamic loading behaviors within an app. Using DroidTrace, we carry out a large scale analysis on 36,170 dynamic payloads in 50,000 apps and 294 malware in 10 families (four of them are zero-day) with various dynamic loading behaviors.
Keywords: Android (operating system); Java; invasive software; mobile computing; program diagnostics; public domain software; Android malware; DroidTrace; Java reflection; dynamic loading detection; dynamic payload analysis; file access; forward execution capability; interprocess communication; malicious apps; malicious behaviors; mobile applications; mobile services; native code execution; network connection; open source smartphone operating system; physical modification; privilege escalation; ptrace based Android dynamic analysis system; security detection; system call monitoring; Androids; Humanoid robots; Java; Loading; Malware; Monitoring; Payloads (ID#: 15-4316)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906344&isnumber=6906315

 

Derhab, A.; Saleem, K.; Youssef, A., "Third Line Of Defense Strategy To Fight Against SMS-Based Malware In Android Smartphones," Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2014 International, pp. 542, 547, 4-8 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWCMC.2014.6906414 In this paper, we inspire from two analogies: the warfare kill zone and the airport check-in system, to design and deploy a new line in the defense-in-depth strategy, called the third line. This line is represented by a security framework, named the Intrusion Ambushing System and is designed to tackle the issue of SMS-based malware in the Android-based Smartphones. The framework exploits the security features offered by Android operating system to prevent the malicious SMS from going out of the phone and detect the corresponding SMS-based malware. We show that the proposed framework can ensure full security against SMS-based malware. In addition, an analytical study demonstrates that the framework offers optimal performance in terms of detection time and execution cost in comparison to intrusion detection systems based on static and dynamic analysis.
Keywords: Android (operating system); electronic messaging; invasive software; smart phones; Android-based smart phones; SMS-based malware; airport check-in system; analytical analysis; defense-in-depth strategy; detection time; execution cost; intrusion ambushing system; malicious SMS prevention; operating system; optimal performance; security features; security framework; third line-of-defense strategy; warfare kill zone; Airports; Cryptography; Intrusion detection; Malware; Operating systems; Smart phones; Malware; SMS; intrusion ambushing; intrusion detection; third line of defense (ID#: 15-4317)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906414&isnumber=6906315

 

Allalouf, M.; Ben-Av, R.; Gerdov, A., "StoreDroid: Sensor-Based Data Protection Framework for Android," Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2014 International, pp.511, 517, 4-8 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWCMC.2014.6906409 Android has become the most prevalent smartphone operating system. Despite its popularity, Android has a lot of flaws in security. In this research study we target a wide range of smartphone applications that share secret and local data with the service provider so that this data will not be leaked or accessed by other entities. The StoreDroid framework, described in this paper, addresses possible data violations that can occur in the current Android system by adding protection mechanisms in several layers as follows: (1) at the Linux level we use the security-enhanced Linux and security-enhanced Android plugins that prevent today's privileged escalation data access; (2) StoreDroidApp is a generic sensor-based access control mechanism where the sensors (such as biometric sensors and GPS) and the rules to access the data are defined by the service provider for better protection - we took advantage of the fact that Android systems are usually integrated with various hardware sensors in order to protect the user as well as the service provider; and (3) a secured message passing protocol to ensure that sensitive data will not be compromised by unwanted applications. The StoreDroid framework makes the following contributions: (1) the generic StoreDroidApp stub that is installed when the ROM is built narrows possible illegal data access for assigned application by the set of semantic and limiting sensor-based access rules, and (2) on top of the regular Linux used in Android, the customized security-enhanced Linux ensures that the sensor-based application will keep the data isolated and secured.
Keywords: Android (operating system);authorisation; cryptographic protocols; message passing; read-only storage; sensors; smart phones; Android system; GPS; ROM; StoreDroid framework; StoreDroidApp; biometric sensors; generic StoreDroid App stub; generic sensor-based access control mechanism; hardware sensors; illegal data access; secured message passing protocol; security-enhanced Android plug-ins; security-enhanced Linux; sensor-based data protection framework; service provider; smartphone operating system; Access control; Androids; Humanoid robots; Linux; Sensors; Smart phones; Android; Data Security; Mobile Computing; Security-Enhanced Linux (ID#: 15-4318)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906409&isnumber=6906315

 

Longfei Wu; Xiaojiang Du; Xinwen Fu, "Security Threats To Mobile Multimedia Applications: Camera-Based Attacks On Mobile Phones," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol.52, no. 3, pp.80, 87, March 2014. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6766089 Today's mobile smartphones are very powerful, and many smartphone applications use wireless multimedia communications. Mobile phone security has become an important aspect of security issues in wireless multimedia communications. As the most popular mobile operating system, Android security has been extensively studied by researchers. However, few works have studied mobile phone multimedia security. In this article, we focus on security issues related to mobile phone cameras. Specifically, we discover several new attacks that are based on the use of phone cameras. We implement the attacks on real phones, and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the attacks. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight defense scheme that can effectively detect these attacks.
Keywords: Android (operating system);cameras; multimedia communication operating systems (computers); radiocommunication; smart phones; telecommunication security; Android security; camera-based attacks; mobile multimedia applications; mobile operating system; mobile phone cameras; mobile phone security; mobile phones; mobile smartphones; wireless multimedia communications; Cameras; Multimedia communication; Network security; Privacy; Real-time systems; Smart phones; Videos; Wireless communication (ID#: 15-4319)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6766089&isnumber=6766068

 

Reitze, D.D., "Using Commercial Web Services To Build Automated Test Equipment Cloud Based Applications," AUTOTESTCON, 2014 IEEE, pp.246, 250, 15-18 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/AUTEST.2014.6935153 The purpose of this paper is to present a framework from which Automated Test Equipment (ATE) manufacturers can use to help them develop, integrate, and deliver ATE cloud-based applications to the consumers of their products. In order to create these applications, the developer can utilize Commercial Web Services (CWS) as a means to help access compute power, storage devices, and other services that provide the flexibility to choose a development platform or programming model that makes the most sense in trying to resolve the problem at hand. CWS provides a flexible environment from which to choose various programming models, operating systems, databases, and architectures to serve the consumers needs. CWS is highly cost-effective in that the developers and consumers pay only for what they use. Using CWS makes it extremely easy to create scalable and elastic systems as the developers can quickly add and subtract resources to their applications in order to meet current or future consumer needs. Furthermore, security is always a concern so CWS builds services in accordance with security best practices by providing the appropriate security features in those services. Using a CWS provides a level of scale, security, reliability, and privacy that are often cost prohibitive for most organizations to meet. This paper will examine available CWS cloud service platforms that organizations can potentially use to help deploy applications and services in a cost effective manner. The CWS platform consists of the following six main services, which will be discussed in more detail in this paper - (1) Computational/Networking, (2) Storage/Content Delivery, (3) Databases, (4) Analytics, (5) Applications, and (6) Deployment and Management services. One or more of these services may be utilized to help develop, integrate, and deliver ATE cloud-based applications to the consumer. The goals of ATE are to (1) quickly and accurately detect and isolate each fault, (2) provide software tool- for analyzing historical data, (3) gather, manage, and distribute accurate and reliable maintenance information for the failed Unit Under Test (UUT). The CWS cloud platform will aid in the development of cloud based tools and applications that are cost effective, flexible, scalable, and secure that can be used by multiple end users to aid in the development of ATE system software tool sets. One example of a cloud-based application is a diagnostic reasoner that could be used to aid in diagnosing UUT repair actions. This paper will show how developers can use CWS to develop ATE cloud-based applications and tools that will help improve the overall ATE testing throughput, thus resulting in bottom line improvements to ATE life cycle costs.
Keywords: Web services; automatic test equipment; cloud computing; data privacy; life cycle costing; operating systems (computers);reliability; ATE; CWS; UUT; automated test equipment; cloud-based application; commercial Web service; computational-networking; elastic system; fault isolation; life cycle costing; operating system; privacy; programming model; reliability; security; storage device; storage-content delivery; unit under test; Cloud computing; Databases; Organizations; Security; ATE; cloud based applications; commercial web services; maintenance; testing (ID#: 15-4320)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6935153&isnumber=6935108

 

Lopes, H.; Chatterjee, M., "Application H-Secure for Mobile Security," Circuits, Systems, Communication and Information Technology Applications (CSCITA), 2014 International Conference on, pp.370,374, 4-5 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSCITA.2014.6839289 Mobile security is as critical as the PIN number on our ATM card or the lock on our front door. More than our phone itself, the information inside needs safeguarding as well. Not necessarily for scams, but just peace of mind. Android seems to have attracted the most attention from malicious code writers due to its popularity. The flexibility to freely download apps and content has fueled the explosive growth of smart phones and mobile applications but it has also introduced a new risk factor. Malware can mimic popular applications and transfer contacts, photos and documents to unknown destination servers. There is no way to disable the application stores on mobile operating systems. Fortunately for end-users, our smart phones are fundamentally open devices however they can quite easily be hacked. Enterprises now provide business applications on these devices. As a result, confidential business information resides on employee-owned device. Once an employee quits, the mobile operating system wipe-out is not an optimal solution as it will delete both business and personal data. Here we propose H-Secure application for mobile security where one can store their confidential data and files in encrypted form. The encrypted file and encryption key are stored on a Web server so that unauthorized person cannot access the data. If user loses the mobile then he can login into Web and can delete the file and key to stop further decryption process.
Keywords: Android (operating system); authorisation; graphical user interfaces; invasive software; mobile computing; private key cryptography; smart phones; Android smart phones; H-Secure application; Web server; application stores; business applications; business data; confidential business information; confidential data storage; confidential file storage; data access; decryption process; destination servers; employee-owned device ;encrypted file; encryption key; free-download apps; free-download content; malicious code; malware; mobile operating system; mobile operating systems; mobile security applications; open devices; personal data; unauthorized person; Authentication; Encryption; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Servers; AES Encryption and Decryption; Graphical Password (ID#: 15-4321)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6839289&isnumber=6839219

 

Yusoff, M.N.; Mahmod, R.; Dehghantanha, A.; Abdullah, M.T., "An Approach For Forensic Investigation in Firefox OS," Cyber Security, Cyber Warfare and Digital Forensic (CyberSec), 2014 Third International Conference on, pp.22, 26, April 29 2014-May 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/CyberSec.2014.6913966 The advancement of smartphone technology has attracted many companies in developing mobile operating system. Mozilla Corporation recently released Linux-based open source operating system, named Firefox OS. The emergence of Firefox OS has created new challenges, concentrations and opportunities for digital investigators. In general, Firefox OS is designed to allow smartphones to communicate directly with HTML5 applications using JavaScript and newly introduced WebAPI. However, the used of JavaScript in HTML5 applications and solely no OS restriction might lead to security issues and potential exploits. Therefore, forensic analysis for Firefox OS is urgently needed in order to investigate any criminal intentions. This paper will present an approach and methodology in forensically sound manner for Firefox OS.
Keywords: Internet; Java; Linux; application program interfaces; digital forensics; hypermedia markup languages; mobile computing; public domain software; smart phones; Firefox OS; HTML5 applications; JavaScript; Linux-based open source operating system; Mozilla Corporation; OS restriction; WebAPI; criminal intentions; digital investigation; forensic analysis; forensic investigation; mobile operating system; potential exploits; security issues; smartphone technology; Forensics; Google; Mobile communication; Operating systems; Security; Smart phones; Firefox OS; Forensic Method; Mobile forensics; digital investigation (ID#: 15-4322)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6913966&isnumber=6913961

 

Xinwen Zhang; Seifert, J.-P.; Aciicmez, O., "Design and Implementation of Efficient Integrity Protection for Open Mobile Platforms," Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 13, no. 1, pp.188, 201, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TMC.2012.232 The security of mobile devices such as cellular phones and smartphones has gained extensive attention due to their increasing usage in people's daily life. The problem is challenging as the computing environments of these devices have become more open and general-purpose while at the same time they have the constraints of performance and user experience. We propose and implement SEIP, a simple and efficient but yet effective solution for the integrity protection of real-world cellular phone platforms, which is motivated by the disadvantages of applying traditional integrity models on these performance and user experience constrained devices. The major security objective of SEIP is to protect trusted services and resources (e.g., those belonging to cellular service providers and device manufacturers) from third-party code. We propose a set of simple integrity protection rules based upon open mobile operating system environments and application behaviors. Our design leverages the unique features of mobile devices, such as service convergence and limited permissions of user installed applications, and easily identifies the borderline between trusted and untrusted domains on mobile platforms. Our approach, thus, significantly simplifies policy specifications while still achieves a high assurance of platform integrity. SEIP is deployed within a commercially available Linux-based smartphone and demonstrates that it can effectively prevent certain malware. The security policy of our implementation is less than 20 kB, and a performance study shows that it is lightweight.
Keywords: cellular radio; smart phones; telecommunication security; Linux-based smartphone; cellular phone; efficient integrity protection; mobile device; open mobile operating system; simple integrity protection rule; trusted resource; trusted service; Bluetooth; Malware; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Smart phones; Bluetooth; Integrity protection; Malware; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Smart phones; open mobile platforms; smartphone security (ID#: 15-4323)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6357189&isnumber=6674931

 

Bosman, Erik; Bos, Herbert, "Framing Signals - A Return to Portable Shellcode," Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pp.243, 258, 18-21 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SP.2014.23 Signal handling has been an integral part of UNIX systems since the earliest implementation in the 1970s. Nowadays, we find signals in all common flavors of UNIX systems, including BSD, Linux, Solaris, Android, and Mac OS. While each flavor handles signals in slightly different ways, the implementations are very similar. In this paper, we show that signal handling can be used as an attack method in exploits and backdoors. The problem has been a part of UNIX from the beginning, and now that advanced security measures like ASLR, DEP and stack cookies have made simple exploitation much harder, our technique is among the lowest hanging fruit available to an attacker. Specifically, we describe Sigreturn Oriented Programming (SROP), a novel technique for exploits and backdoors in UNIX-like systems. Like return-oriented programming (ROP), sigreturn oriented programming constructs what is known as a 'weird machine' that can be programmed by attackers to change the behavior of a process. To program the machine, attackers set up fake signal frames and initiate returns from signals that the kernel never really delivered. This is possible, because UNIX stores signal frames on the process' stack. Sigreturn oriented programming is interesting for attackers, OS developers and academics. For attackers, the technique is very versatile, with pre-conditions that are different from those of existing exploitation techniques like ROP. Moreover, unlike ROP, sigreturn oriented programming programs are portable. For OS developers, the technique presents a problem that has been present in one of the two main operating system families from its inception, while the fixes (which we also present) are non-trivial. From a more academic viewpoint, it is also interesting because we show that sigreturn oriented programming is Turing complete. We demonstrate the usefulness of the technique in three applications. First, we describe the exploitation of a vulnerable web server on different Linux distributions. Second, we build a very stealthy proof-of-concept backdoor. Third, we use SROP to bypass Apple's code signing and security vetting process by building an app that can execute arbitrary system calls. Finally, we discuss mitigation techniques.
Keywords: Context; Kernel; Linux; Program processors; Programming; Registers; Security; Operatings system security; backdoors; exploits (ID#: 15-4324)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6956568&isnumber=6956545

 

Afzal, H.; Maheta, V.D., "Low cost smart phone controlled car security system," Industrial Technology (ICIT), 2014 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.670,675, Feb. 26 2014-March 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICIT.2014.6894911
Abstract: Vehicle security and keeping pace of advancement in car features with technology have been major concern in automobile industries. Many people have to face difficulties in locking/unlocking and switching ON/OFF the car engine upon losing the car key. In addition to that in most of the higher range car, people have to wait for few minutes after turning on the car engine to allow the car engine to attain its normal operating temperature to get better performance of the car engine and improve its life. Moreover, if a car gets stolen and used for some illegal activities banned by the government then a car owner will face many legal hitches. So to tackle all these issues, an electronic system is designed and implemented in a real car that does not provide only car security feature but provides additional features such as unlocking and locking of the car, and switching ON and OFF the car engine remotely using smart phone. This paper basically discusses the technical aspects of such electronic system.
Keywords: access control; automobile industry; automotive electronics; microcontrollers; smart phones; automobile industry; car engine; car key; car security feature; electronic system; normal operating temperature; smart phone controlled car security system; vehicle security; Engines; GSM; Global Positioning System; Microcontrollers; Modems; Relays; Switches; GPS modem; GSM modem; Microcontroller; Relays; Transistors (ID#: 15-4325)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6894911&isnumber=6894858

 

Thompson, M.; Evans, N.; Kisekka, V., "Multiple OS Rotational Environment An Implemented Moving Target Defense," Resilient Control Systems (ISRCS), 2014 7th International Symposium on, pp.1,6, 19-21 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISRCS.2014.6900086 Cyber-attacks continue to pose a major threat to existing critical infrastructure. Although suggestions for defensive strategies abound, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has only recently gained attention as a possible solution for mitigating cyber-attacks. The current work proposes a MTD technique that provides enhanced security through a rotation of multiple operating systems. The MTD solution developed in this research utilizes existing technology to provide a feasible dynamic defense solution that can be deployed easily in a real networking environment. In addition, the system we developed was tested extensively for effectiveness using CORE Impact Pro (CORE), Nmap, and manual penetration tests. The test results showed that platform diversity and rotation offer improved security. In addition, the likelihood of a successful attack decreased proportionally with time between rotations.
Keywords: operating systems (computers);security of data; CORE; CORE Impact Pro; MTD technique; Nmap; cyber-attacks mitigation; defensive strategies; manual penetration test; moving target defense; multiple OS rotational environment; operating systems; Availability; Fingerprint recognition; IP networks; Operating systems; Security; Servers; Testing; insert (ID#: 15-4326)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6900086&isnumber=6900080

 

Gu, Y.; Fu, Y.; Prakash, A.; Lin, Z.; Yin, H., "Multi-Aspect, Robust, and Memory Exclusive Guest OS Fingerprinting," Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1, 1, 11 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/TCC.2014.2338305 Precise fingerprinting of an operating system (OS) is critical to many security and forensics applications in the cloud, such as virtual machine (VM) introspection, penetration testing, guest OS administration, kernel dump analysis, and memory forensics. The existing OS fingerprinting techniques primarily inspect network packets or CPU states, and they all fall short in precision and usability. As the physical memory of a VM always exists in all these applications, in this article, we present OSSOMMELIER +, a multi-aspect, memory exclusive approach for precise and robust guest OS fingerprinting in the cloud. It works as follows: given a physical memory dump of a guest OS, OS-SOMMELIER+ first uses a code hash based approach from kernel code aspect to determine the guest OS version. If code hash approach fails, OS-SOMMELIER+ then uses a kernel data signature based approach from kernel data aspect to determine the version. We have implemented a prototype system, and tested it with a number of Linux kernels. Our evaluation results show that the code hash approach is faster but can only fingerprint the known kernels, and data signature approach complements the code signature approach and can fingerprint even unknown kernels.
Keywords:  Linux;cloud computing;digital forensics;digital signatures;Linux kernels;OS-SOMMELIER;code hash based approach;code signature approach;kernel code aspect;kernel data signature;memory exclusive guest OS fingerprinting;multiaspect memory exclusive approach;operating system precise fingerprinting;physical memory dump;Cloud computing;Computer security;Data structures;Fingerprint recognition;Forensics;Linux;Virtual machining;Operating system fingerprinting;memory forensics;virtual machine introspection (ID#: 15-4327)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6853383&isnumber=6562694

 

Jing, Y.; Ahn, G.; Zhao, Z.; Hu, H., "Towards Automated Risk Assessment and Mitigation of Mobile Application," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,1, 31 October 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2014.2366457 Mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, have supported a ballooning market of feature rich mobile applications. However, helping users understand and mitigate security risks of mobile applications is still an ongoing challenge. While recent work has developed various techniques to reveal suspicious behaviors of mobile applications, there exists little work to answer the following question: are those behaviors necessarily inappropriate? In this paper, we seek an approach to cope with such a challenge and present a continuous and automated risk assessment framework called RISKMON that uses machine-learned ranking to assess risks incurred by users’ mobile applications, especially Android applications. RISKMON combines users’ coarse expectations and runtime behaviors of trusted applications to generate a risk assessment baseline that captures appropriate behaviors of applications. With the baseline, RISKMON assigns a risk score on every access attempt on sensitive information and ranks applications by their cumulative risk scores. Furthermore, we demonstrate how RISKMON supports risk mitigation with automated permission revocation. We also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation of RISKMON as an extension of the Android mobile platform and provide both system evaluation and usability study of our methodology.
Keywords: Androids; Feature extraction; Humanoid robots; Mobile communication; Risk management; Runtime; Security; Android; Risk Assessment; Risk Mitigation; Smartphones (ID#: 15-4328)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6942253&isnumber=4358699

 

Patil, M.; Sahu, V.; Jain, A., "SMS text Compression and Encryption on Android O.S," Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference on, vol., no., pp. 1, 6, 3-5 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCI.2014.6921767 Today in the world of globalization mobile communication is one of the fastest growing medium though which one sender can interact with other in short time. During the transmission of data from sender to receiver, size of data is important, since more data takes more time. But one of the limitations of sending data through mobile devices is limited use of bandwidth and number of packets transmitted. Also the security of these data is important. Hence various protocols are implemented which not only provides security to the data but also utilizes bandwidth. Here we proposed an efficient technique of sending SMS text using combination of compression and encryption. The data to be send is first encrypted using Elliptic curve Cryptographic technique, but encryption increases the size of the text data, hence compression is applied to this encrypted data so the data gets compressed and is send in short time. The Compression technique implemented here is an efficient one since it includes an algorithm which compresses the text by 99.9%, hence a great amount of bandwidth gets saved. The hybrid technique of Compression-Encryption of SMS text message is implemented for Android Operating Systems.
Keywords: Android (operating system); cryptographic protocols; data communication; data compression; electronic messaging; public key cryptography; smart phones; Android OS;SMS text encryption-compression technique; data security; data transmission; elliptic curve cryptographic technique; mobile communication; mobile devices; security protocols; Algorithm design and analysis; Bandwidth; Computers; Encryption; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; ECDSA; Look ahead buffer; PDA; SMS; lossless compression (ID#: 15-4329)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6921767&isnumber=6921705

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Operating Systems Security (2014 Year in Review), Part 2

 

	Operating Systems Security  (2014 Year in Review) Part 2

 

In a previous Newsletter, the editors offered a series of citations from late 2013 about operating systems.  In this set, we offer an update of publications and presentations from 2014, focused specifically upon security issues.  The general topic has produced prolific work.  We will present these in multiple parts.

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Shuang Liang; Xiaojiang Du; Tan, C.C.; Wei Yu, "An Effective Online Scheme For Detecting Android Malware," Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2014 23rd International Conference on, pp. 1, 8, 4-7 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2014.6911740 The growing popularity of Android-based smart-phones have led to the rise of Android based malware. In particular, profit-motivated malware is becoming increasingly popular in Android malware distribution. These malware typically profit by sending premium-rate SMS messages and/or make premium-rate phone calls from infected devices without user consent. In this paper, we investigate the telephony framework of the Android operating system and propose a novel process user-identification (UID) based online detection scheme. Our scheme can effectively detect premium-rate and background SMS messages as well as premium-rate phone calls initiated by malware. We implemented our detection system on a Samsung Google Nexus 4 running Android Jelly Bean and tested the effectiveness of detecting real malware from Android markets. The experimental results show that our scheme is efficient and effective in detecting background messages and premium-rate messages and phone calls. Our scheme can detect and block all the background and premium-rate SMS messages and phone calls initiated by popular malware.
Keywords: Android (operating system); invasive software; Android Jelly Bean; Android malware distribution; Android markets; Android operating system; Android-based smart phones; Samsung Google Nexus 4; UID based online detection scheme; online scheme; premium rate SMS messages; premium-rate phone calls; process user identification; profit-motivated malware; telephony framework; Libraries; Linux; Malware; Mobile communication; Smart phones; Sockets; Telephony; Android; malware detection; security; smartphone (ID#: 15-4330)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911740&isnumber=6911704

 

Skillen, A.; Mannan, M., "Mobiflage: Deniable Storage Encryption for Mobile Devices," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 11, no .3, pp.224,237, May-June 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2013.56 Data confidentiality can be effectively preserved through encryption. In certain situations, this is inadequate, as users may be coerced into disclosing their decryption keys. Steganographic techniques and deniable encryption algorithms have been devised to hide the very existence of encrypted data. We examine the feasibility and efficacy of deniable encryption for mobile devices. To address obstacles that can compromise plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) in a mobile environment, we design a system called Mobiflage. Mobiflage enables PDE on mobile devices by hiding encrypted volumes within random data in a devices free storage space. We leverage lessons learned from deniable encryption in the desktop environment, and design new countermeasures for threats specific to mobile systems. We provide two implementations for the Android OS, to assess the feasibility and performance of Mobiflage on different hardware profiles. MF-SD is designed for use on devices with FAT32 removable SD cards. Our MF-MTP variant supports devices that instead share a single internal partition for both apps and user accessible data. MF-MTP leverages certain Ext4 file system mechanisms and uses an adjusted data-block allocator. These new techniques for soring hidden volumes in Ext4 file systems can also be applied to other file systems to enable deniable encryption for desktop OSes and other mobile platforms.
Keywords: Android (operating system); cryptography; mobile computing; steganography; Android OS; Ext4 file system mechanisms; FAT32 removable SD cards; MF-MTP variant; MF-SD; Mobiflage; PDE; data confidentiality; data-block allocator; decryption keys; deniable storage encryption; desktop OS; desktop environment; mobile devices; mobile environment; plausibly deniable encryption; steganographic techniques; Androids; Encryption; Humanoid robots; Law; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; File system security; deniable encryption; mobile platform security; storage encryption (ID#: 15-4331)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6682886&isnumber=6813632

 

Cooper, V.N.; Shahriar, H.; Haddad, H.M., "A Survey of Android Malware Characteristics and Mitigation Techniques," Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), 2014 11th International Conference on, pp. 327, 332, 7-9 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITNG.2014.71 As mobile applications are being developed at a faster pace, the security aspect of is being neglected. A solid understanding of the characteristics of malware is the first step to preventing many unwanted consequences. This paper provides an overview of popular security threats posed by Android malware. In particular, we focus on the characteristics commonly found in malware applications and understand the code level features that can enable detection techniques. We also discuss some common defense techniques to mitigate the impact of malware applications.
Keywords: Android (operating system); invasive software; mobile computing; smart phones; Android malware characteristics; code level features; defense technique; detection technique; malware mitigation technique; mobile applications; security threats; Kernel; Libraries; Malware; Mobile communication; Smart phones; Social network services; Android Malware; Mobile application; Mobile security; Software Security (ID#: 15-4332)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6822218&isnumber=6822158

 

Shao Shuai; Dong Guowei; Guo Tao; Yang Tianchang; Shi Chenjie, "Modelling Analysis and Auto-detection of Cryptographic Misuse in Android Applications," Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on, pp. 75, 80, 24-27 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DASC.2014.22 Cryptographic misuse affects a sizeable portion of Android applications. However, there is only an empirical study that has been made about this problem. In this paper, we perform a systematic analysis on the cryptographic misuse, build the cryptographic misuse vulnerability model and implement a prototype tool Crypto Misuse Analyser (CMA). The CMA can perform static analysis on Android apps and select the branches that invoke the cryptographic API. Then it runs the app following the target branch and records the cryptographic API calls. At last, the CMA identifies the cryptographic API misuse vulnerabilities from the records based on the pre-defined model. We also analyze dozens of Android apps with the help of CMA and find that more than a half of apps are affected by such vulnerabilities.
Keywords: Android (operating system); application program interfaces; cryptography; program diagnostics; Android application; CMA; cryptographic API; cryptographic misuse autodetection; cryptographic misuse vulnerability model; prototype tool crypto misuse analyser; static analysis; Analytical models; Androids; Encryption; Humanoid robots; Runtime; Android; Cryptographic Misuse; Modelling Analysis; Vulnerability (ID#: 15-4333)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6945307&isnumber=6945641

 

Zhiyong Shan; Xin Wang, "Growing Grapes in Your Computer to Defend Against Malware," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 9, no. 2, pp.196, 207, Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2013.2291066 Behavior-based detection is promising to resolve the pressing security problem of malware. However, the great challenge lies in how to detect malware in a both accurate and light-weight manner. In this paper, we propose a novel behavior-based detection method, named growing grapes, aiming to enable accurate online detection. It consists of a clustering engine and detection engine. The clustering engine groups the objects, e.g., processes and files, of a suspicious program together into a cluster, just like growing grapes. The detection engine recognizes the cluster as malicious if the behaviors of the cluster match a predefined behavior template formed by a set of discrete behaviors. The approach is accurate since it identifies a malware based on multiple behaviors and the source of the processes requesting the behaviors. The approach is also light-weight as it uses OS-level information flows instead of data flows that generally impose significant performance impact on the system. To further improve the performance, a novel method of organizing the behavior template and template database is proposed, which not only makes the template matching process very quick, but also makes the storage space small and fixed. Furthermore, the detection accuracy and performance are optimized to the best degree using a combinatorial optimization algorithm, which properly selects and combines multiple behaviors to form a template for malware detection. Finally, the approach novelly identifies malicious OS objects in a cluster fashion rather than one by one as done in traditional methods, which help users to thoroughly eliminate the changes of a malware without malware family knowledge. Compared with commercial antimalware tools, extensive experiments show that our approach can detect new malware samples with higher detection rate and lower false positive rate while imposing low overhead on the system.
Keywords: combinatorial mathematics; database management systems; invasive software; operating systems (computers); optimisation; pattern clustering; OS-level information flow; behavior template database; behavior-based detection method; clustering engine; combinatorial optimization algorithm; detection accuracy optimization; detection engine; discrete behaviors; false positive rate; growing grapes; malicious OS object identification; malicious cluster recognition; malware; object grouping; overhead; performance improvement; performance optimization; process source; security problem; suspicious program; template matching process; Databases; Detectors; Engines; Joints; Malware; Monitoring; Pipelines; Malware detection; OS-level information flow; behavior (ID#: 15-4334)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6663657&isnumber=6705647

 

Xiaolei Li; Guangdong Bai; Thian, B.; Zhenkai Liang; Heng Yin, "A Light-Weight Software Environment for Confining Android Malware," Software Security and Reliability-Companion (SERE-C), 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on, pp.158,167, June 30 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SERE-C.2014.34 Mobile devices are becoming increasingly general-purpose, and therefore the physical boundary used to separate important resources disappears. As a result, malicious applications (apps) get chances to abuse resources that are available on the mobile platform. In this paper, we propose resource virtualization as a security mechanism for the Android system to strengthen the physical barrier between many types of resources and confine resource-abusing Android apps. The physical resources on a mobile device are virtualized to a different virtual view for selected Android apps. Resource virtualization simulates a partial but consistent virtual view of the Android resources. Therefore, it can not only confine the resource-abusing apps effectively, but also ensure the usability of these apps. We implement a system prototype, RVL, and evaluate it with real-world apps of various types. Our results demonstrate its effectiveness on malicious Android apps and its compatibility and usability on benign Android apps.
Keywords: Android (operating system); invasive software; mobile computing; telecommunication security; Android malware; RVL; light-weight software environment; malicious Android apps; mobile device; resource virtualization; resource-abusing Android apps; security mechanism; Androids; Humanoid robots; Linux; Resource virtualization; Security; Smart phones; Virtualization; Android malware ;isolation; mobile security
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901653&isnumber=6901618

 

Yuru Shao; Xiapu Luo; Chenxiong Qian, "RootGuard: Protecting Rooted Android Phones," Computer, vol. 47, no.6, pp. 32, 40, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/MC.2014.163 Though popular for achieving full operation functionality, rooting Android phones opens these devices to significant security threats. RootGuard offers protection from malware with root privileges while providing user flexibility and control. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/-KMMfxOoCjg is a video demonstration of how RootGuard manages root privileges of Android apps in a flexible and robust manner. First, we use the popular root-required app Root Explorer to show the configuration and effectiveness of RootGuard policies. Then, we use DKFBootkit, a real-world malicious app that leverages root access to do evil, to show how malware attacks performed with root privileges are mitigated by RootGuard.
Keywords: Android (operating system); invasive software; smart phones; Android apps; DKFBootkit; Root Explorer; RootGuard policies; malware attacks; malware protection; root access; root-required app; rooted Android phone protection; security threats; Androids; Computer security; Malware; Servers; Smart phones; Android; RootGuard; malware; root privilege; root-management systems; security; smartphone security (ID#: 15-4335)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6838907&isnumber=6838865

 

Yong Li; Pan Hui; Depeng Jin; Li Su; Lieguang Zeng, "Optimal Distributed Malware Defense in Mobile Networks with Heterogeneous Devices," Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 13, no. 2, pp.377, 391, Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TMC.2012.255 As malware attacks become more frequently in mobile networks, deploying an efficient defense system to protect against infection and to help the infected nodes to recover is important to prevent serious spreading and outbreaks. The technical challenges are that mobile devices are heterogeneous in terms of operating systems, the malware infects the targeted system in any opportunistic fashion via local and global connectivity, while the to-be-deployed defense system on the other hand would be usually resource limited. In this paper, we investigate the problem of how to optimally distribute the content-based signatures of malware, which helps to detect the corresponding malware and disable further propagation, to minimize the number of infected nodes. We model the defense system with realistic assumptions addressing all the above challenges that have not been addressed in previous analytical work. Based on the framework of optimizing the system welfare utility, which is the weighted summation of individual utility depending on the final number of infected nodes through the signature allocation, we propose an encounter-based distributed algorithm based on Metropolis sampler. Through theoretical analysis and simulations with both synthetic and realistic mobility traces, we show that the distributed algorithm achieves the optimal solution, and performs efficiently in realistic environments.
Keywords: invasive software; mobile radio; operating systems (computers); telecommunication security; Metropolis sampler; content-based signatures; encounter-based distributed algorithm; global connectivity; heterogeneous devices; infected node minimization; infection protection; local connectivity; malware attacks; mobile devices; mobile networks; operating systems; optimal distributed malware defense; realistic mobility trace; signature allocation; synthetic mobility trace; system welfare utility; theoretical analysis; to-be-deployed defense system; Distributed algorithms; Educational institutions; Malware; Mathematical model; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Mobile handsets; Security threat; distributed algorithm; heterogeneous mobile networks; mobile malware (ID#: 15-4336)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6381416&isnumber=6689256

 

Yusoff, M.N.; Mahmod, R.; Abdullah, M.T.; Dehghantanha, A., "Mobile Forensic Data Acquisition in Firefox OS," Cyber Security, Cyber Warfare and Digital Forensic (CyberSec), 2014 Third International Conference on, pp.27,31, April 29 2014-May 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/CyberSec.2014.6913967 Mozilla Corporation has recently released a Linux-based open source operating system, namely Firefox OS. The arrival of this Firefox OS has created new challenges, concentrations and opportunities for digital investigators. Currently, Firefox OS is still not fully supported by most of the existing mobile forensic tools. Even when the phone is detected as Android, only pictures from removable card was able to be captured. Furthermore, the internal data acquisition is still not working. Therefore, there are very huge opportunities to explore the Firefox OS on every stages of mobile forensic procedures. This paper will present an approach for mobile forensic data acquisition in a forensically sound manner from a Firefox OS running device. This approach will largely use the UNIX dd command to create a forensic image from the Firefox OS running device. (ID#: 15-4337)
Keywords: Linux; data acquisition; image forensics; mobile computing; public domain software; Android phone; Firefox OS; Linux-based open source operating system; Mozilla Corporation; UNIX dd command; digital investigators; forensic image; internal data acquisition; mobile forensic data acquisition; Data acquisition; Flash memories; Forensics; GSM; Mobile communication; Smart phones; Firefox OS; Mobile forensic; data acquisition
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6913967&isnumber=6913961

 

Kataria, A.; Anjali, T.; Venkat, R., "Quantifying Smartphone Vulnerabilities," Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 645,649, 20-21 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPIN.2014.6777033 Nowadays, smartphones are an integral part of our lives. They provide a wide variety of functionality through their applications (apps), whether it's the latest news, social connectivity, market updates or picture editing and many more similar things. People rely on their smartphones for all these small tasks. These applications often have sensitive data/information about the users. As a result, smartphones are hot target for the hackers these days. Due to this, the number of vulnerabilities in smartphones is on a rise too. As soon as a new version of a smartphone operating system is launched, hackers look to exploit that and new vulnerabilities are discovered. In this paper we analyze the various versions of Google's Android and Apple's iOS operating systems and the vulnerabilities present in them.
Keywords: Android (operating system); mobile computing; security of data; smart phones; telecommunication security; Apple iOS operating system; Google Android operating system; market updates; picture editing; smartphone operating system; smartphone security; smartphone vulnerability quantification; social connectivity; Computer hacking; Ice; Mobile communication; Operating systems; Smart phones; Android vulnerabilities and iOS vulnerabilities; Mobile vulnerabilities; Smartphone Vulnerabilities; Smartphone security; Smartphones (ID#: 15-4338)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6777033&isnumber=6776904

 

Kato, M.; Matsuura, S., "Improve User's Security Literacy by Experiencing Behavior of Pseudo Android Malware," Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2014 IEEE 38th Annual, pp. 602, 603, 21-25 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/COMPSAC.2014.92 Recent years, Android malware which execute malicious attacks within the scope of permissions which was approved by user is increasing. Generally it is installed by user. Therefore user can avoid being infected with obvious malware by checking permissions which application requires. However many users install applications without checking permissions and get infected. Such Android malware have various kinds of threats, so user need to protect his assets by himself. In this paper we propose an educational method to improve user's security literacy by having experience of pseudo malware's behavior and recognize threats, risks, assets and relations between permissions and adverse actions.
Keywords: Android (operating system); computer aided instruction; computer literacy; invasive software; user interfaces; educational method; malicious attacks; pseudo Android malware; user security literacy; Androids; Availability; Control systems; Humanoid robots; Malware; Smart phones; Android; education; malware; security (ID#: 15-4339)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6899269&isnumber=6899181

 

Jerome, Q.; Allix, K.; State, R.; Engel, T., "Using Opcode-Sequences to Detect Malicious Android Applications," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 914, 919, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883436 Recently, the Android platform has seen its number of malicious applications increased sharply. Motivated by the easy application submission process and the number of alternative market places for distributing Android applications, rogue authors are developing constantly new malicious programs. While current anti-virus software mainly relies on signature detection, the issue of alternative malware detection has to be addressed. In this paper, we present a feature based detection mechanism relying on opcode-sequences combined with machine learning techniques. We assess our tool on both a reference dataset known as Genome Project as well as on a wider sample of 40,000 applications retrieved from the Google Play Store.
Keywords: Android (operating system); digital signatures; invasive software ;learning (artificial intelligence); Genome project; google play store; anti-virus software; application submission process; feature based detection mechanism; machine learning techniques; malicious Android application detection; malicious programs; malware detection opcode-sequences; reference dataset; signature detection; Androids; Feature extraction; Google; Humanoid robots; Malware; Software; Android malware; machine learning; opcode-sequences (ID#: 15-4340)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883436&isnumber=6883277

 

Yerima, S.Y.; Sezer, S.; McWilliams, G., "Analysis_of_Bayesian_Classification-Based Approaches for Android Malware Detection," Information Security, IET, vol. 8, no.1, pp. 25, 36, January 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2013.0095 Mobile malware has been growing in scale and complexity spurred by the unabated uptake of smartphones worldwide. Android is fast becoming the most popular mobile platform resulting in sharp increase in malware targeting the platform. Additionally, Android malware is evolving rapidly to evade detection by traditional signature-based scanning. Despite current detection measures in place, timely discovery of new malware is still a critical issue. This calls for novel approaches to mitigate the growing threat of zero-day Android malware. Hence, the authors develop and analyse proactive machine-learning approaches based on Bayesian classification aimed at uncovering unknown Android malware via static analysis. The study, which is based on a large malware sample set of majority of the existing families, demonstrates detection capabilities with high accuracy. Empirical results and comparative analysis are presented offering useful insight towards development of effective static-analytic Bayesian classification-based solutions for detecting unknown Android malware.
Keywords: invasive software; learning (artificial intelligence); operating system kernels; pattern classification; smart phones; Android malware detection; machine learning; mobile malware; signature based scanning; smartphones; static analysis; static analytic Bayesian classification (ID#: 15-4341)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6687155&isnumber=6687150

 

Lokhande, B.; Dhavale, S., "Overview of Information Flow Tracking Techniques Based On Taint Analysis for Android," Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2014 International Conference on, pp.749,753, 5-7 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/IndiaCom.2014.6828062 Smartphones today are ubiquitous source of sensitive information. Information leakage instances on the smartphones are on the rise because of exponential growth in smartphone market. Android is the most widely used operating system on smartphones. Many information flow tracking and information leakage detection techniques are developed on Android operating system. Taint analysis is commonly used data flow analysis technique which tracks the flow of sensitive information and its leakage. This paper provides an overview of existing Information flow tracking techniques based on the Taint analysis for android applications. It is observed that static analysis techniques look at the complete program code and all possible paths of execution before its run, whereas dynamic analysis looks at the instructions executed in the program-run in the real time. We provide in depth analysis of both static and dynamic taint analysis approaches.
Keywords: Android (operating system); data flow analysis; smart phones; Android; Information leakage instances; data flow analysis technique; dynamic analysis; dynamic taint analysis approaches; exponential smartphone market growth; information flow tracking techniques; information leakage detection techniques; program code; program-run; static analysis techniques; static taint analysis approaches; Androids; Humanoid robots; Operating systems; Privacy; Real-time systems; Security; Smart phones; Android Operating System; Mobile Security; data flow analysis; static and dynamic taint analysis (ID#: 15-4342)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6828062&isnumber=6827395

 

Lee Mengxuan; Song Jiaxing; Liu Weidong, "Android Privacy Information Encoding Mechanism (APIEM)," Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Programming (PAAP), 2014 Sixth International Symposium on, pp.224,229, 13-15 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PAAP.2014.16 This paper proposes APIEM as an encoding mechanism for privacy information in Android system. By encoding privacy information in cursor queried from database and decoding them before drawing to the screen, the text-based privacy information can be protected from leaking by third-party applications. APIEM provides more protection and has less overhead compared to traditional taint and trace methods.
Keywords: Android (operating system); data protection; encoding; APIEM; Android privacy information encoding mechanism; text-based privacy information protection; Androids; Data privacy; Databases; Encoding; Humanoid robots; Painting; Privacy; Android; privacy; security (ID#: 15-4343)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916469&isnumber=6916413

 

Wei Wang; Xing Wang; Dawei Feng; Jiqiang Liu; Zhen Han; Xiangliang Zhang, "Exploring Permission-Induced Risk in Android Applications for Malicious Application Detection," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 9, no. 11, pp.1869,1882, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2014.2353996 Android has been a major target of malicious applications (malapps). How to detect and keep the malapps out of the app markets is an ongoing challenge. One of the central design points of Android security mechanism is permission control that restricts the access of apps to core facilities of devices. However, it imparts a significant responsibility to the app developers with regard to accurately specifying the requested permissions and to the users with regard to fully understanding the risk of granting certain combinations of permissions. Android permissions requested by an app depict the app's behavioral patterns. In order to help understanding Android permissions, in this paper, we explore the permission-induced risk in Android apps on three levels in a systematic manner. First, we thoroughly analyze the risk of an individual permission and the risk of a group of collaborative permissions. We employ three feature ranking methods, namely, mutual information, correlation coefficient, and T-test to rank Android individual permissions with respect to their risk. We then use sequential forward selection as well as principal component analysis to identify risky permission subsets. Second, we evaluate the usefulness of risky permissions for malapp detection with support vector machine, decision trees, as well as random forest. Third, we in depth analyze the detection results and discuss the feasibility as well as the limitations of malapp detection based on permission requests. We evaluate our methods on a very large official app set consisting of 310 926 benign apps and 4868 real-world malapps and on a third-party app sets. The empirical results show that our malapp detectors built on risky permissions give satisfied performance (a detection rate as 94.62% with a false positive rate as 0.6%), catch the malapps' essential patterns on violating permission access regulations, and are universally applicable to unknown malapps (detection rate as 74.03%).
Keywords: Android (operating system); invasive software; principal component analysis; smart phones; Android security mechanism; T-test; collaborative permissions; correlation coefficient; decision trees; malapp detection; malicious applications; mutual information; permission control; permission-induced risk; principal component analysis; random forest; sequential forward selection; support vector machine; third-party app sets; Androids; Correlation; Humanoid robots; Principal component analysis; Security; Smart phones; Support vector machines; Android security; Android system; intrusion detection; malware detection; permission usage analysis (ID#: 15-4344)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6891250&isnumber=6912034

 

Yang Chen; Ghorbanzadeh, M.; Ma, K.; Clancy, C.; McGwier, R., "A Hidden Markov Model Detection Of Malicious Android Applications At Runtime," Wireless and Optical Communication Conference (WOCC), 2014 23rd, pp.1,6, 9-10 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/WOCC.2014.6839912 A hidden Markov model approach is leveraged to detect potentially malicious Android applications at runtime based on analyzing the Intents passing through the binder. Real world applications are emulated, their Intents are parsed, and, after appropriate discretization of the Intent action fields, they train the hidden Markov models for recognizing anomalous and benign Android application behaviors. The inferred stochastic processes can probabilistically estimate whether an application is performing a malicious or benign action as it is running on the device. Such a decision is realized through a maximum likelihood estimation. The results show that the method is capable of detecting malicious Android applications as they run on the platform.
Keywords: Android (operating system); hidden Markov models; maximum likelihood estimation; mobile computing; security of data; Android application behaviors; hidden Markov model detection; malicious Android applications; maximum likelihood estimation; real world applications; stochastic processes; Androids; Hidden Markov models; Humanoid robots; Runtime; Security; Smart phones; Training (ID#: 15-4345)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6839912&isnumber=6839906

 

Jun Li; Lidong Zhai; Xinyou Zhang; Daiyong Quan, "Research of Android Malware Detection Based On Network Traffic Monitoring," Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), 2014 IEEE 9th Conference on, pp.1739, 1744, 9-11 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICIEA.2014.6931449 With Android terminal into the life of people, the spread of Android malware seriously affected people's life. As a result of the Android security flaws, attackers can easily collect private information of users, and the information can be utilized in APT attacks. It is not only a threat to the end user, but also poses a threat to industrial control systems and mobile Internet. In this paper, we propose a network traffic monitoring system used in the detection of Android malware. The system consists of four components: traffic monitoring, traffic anomaly recognition, response processing and cloud storage. The system parses the protocol of data packets and extracts the feature data, then use SVM classification algorithm for data classification, determine whether the network traffic is abnormal, and locate the application that produced abnormal through the correlation analysis. The system not only can automatic response and process the malicious software, but also can generate new security policy from existing information and training data; When training data is reaching a certain amount, it will trigger a new round of training to improve the ability of detection. Finally, we experiment on the system, the experimental results show that our system can effectively detect the Android malware and control the application.
Keywords: Android (operating system); cloud computing; invasive software; mobile computing; pattern classification; support vector machines; telecommunication traffic; APT attacks; Android malware detection; Android security flaws; Android terminal; SVM classification algorithm; cloud storage; correlation analysis; data packets protocol; feature data; industrial control systems; mobile Internet; network traffic; network traffic monitoring; private information; response processing; security policy; traffic anomaly recognition; Feature extraction; Malware; Monitoring; Smart phones; Software; Telecommunication traffic; Android; Malware; Network traffic monitoring; SVM (ID#: 15-4346)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6931449&isnumber=6931119

 

Naito, K.; Mori, K.; Kobayashi, H.; Kamienoo, K.; Suzuki, H.; Watanabe, A., "End-to-end IP Mobility Platform In Application Layer for iOS and Android OS," Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2014 IEEE 11th, pp. 92, 97, 10-13 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2014.6866554 Smartphones are a new type of mobile devices that users can install additional mobile software easily. In the almost all smartphone applications, client-server model is used because end-to-end communication is prevented by NAT routers. Recently, some smartphone applications provide real time services such as voice and video communication, online games etc. In these applications, end-to-end communication is suitable to reduce transmission delay and achieve efficient network usage. Also, IP mobility and security are important matters. However, the conventional IP mobility mechanisms are not suitable for these applications because most mechanisms are assumed to be installed in OS kernel. We have developed a novel IP mobility mechanism called NTMobile (Network Traversal with Mobility). NTMobile supports end-to-end IP mobility in IPv4 and IPv6 networks, however, it is assumed to be installed in Linux kernel as with other technologies. In this paper, we propose a new type of end-to-end mobility platform that provides end-to-end communication, mobility, and also secure data exchange functions in the application layer for smartphone applications. In the platform, we use NTMobile, which is ported as the application program. Then, we extend NTMobile to be suitable for smartphone devices and to provide secure data exchange. Client applications can achieve secure end-to-end communication and secure data exchange by sharing an encryption key between clients. Users also enjoy IP mobility which is the main function of NTMobile in each application. Finally, we confirmed that the developed module can work on Android system and iOS system.
Keywords: Android (operating system);IP networks; client-server systems; cryptography; electronic data interchange; iOS (operating system); real-time systems; smart phones; Android OS; IPv4 networks; IPv6 networks; Linux kernel; NAT routers; NTMobile; OS kernel; application layer; client-server model; encryption key; end-to-end IP mobility platform; end-to-end communication; iOS system ;network traversal with mobility; network usage; real time services; secure data exchange; smartphones; transmission delay; Authentication; Encryption; IP networks; Manganese; Relays; Servers (ID#: 15-4347)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866554&isnumber=6866537

 

Ming-Yang Su; Wen-Chuan Chang, "Permission-based Malware Detection Mechanisms For Smart Phones," Information Networking (ICOIN), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 449, 452, 10-12 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2014.6799722 Smart phone users often neglect security issues, and directly confirm the pop-up windows without reading the permission requirement of the software. As a result, many smart phones have been implanted with virus. In the Android market, malicious software is disguised as games for users to download, thus resulting in malicious consumption, phone resource consumption, assistance in crime, or information theft. This study focuses on the prevention of the malware installed on Android smart phones, and analyzes whether an app is malware according to the announced permission combinations of the application.
Keywords: computer viruses; smart phones; Android market; crime assistance; information theft; malicious consumption; malicious software; permission requirement; permission-based malware detection mechanisms; phone resource consumption; security issues; smart phone users; Internet; Malware; Operating systems; Probability; Smart phones; Android; permission; security; smart phone (ID#: 15-4348)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6799722&isnumber=6799467

 

Khan, A.U.S.; Qureshi, M.N.; Qadeer, M.A., "Anti-Theft Application For Android Based Devices," Advance Computing Conference (IACC), 2014 IEEE International, pp.365, 369, 21-22 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IAdCC.2014.6779350 This paper presents a technique to improve anti-theft for android based mobile phones by using different services like MMS instead of SMS. As the use of smartphones, tablets, phablets based on android operating system is increasing, many scenarios related with anti-theft have already been proposed and many software based on anti-theft have also been developed, but most of these software are not freely available and it's difficult to identify the thief by using these software's e.g. GPS Tracking. We put forward a new scheme, which enhances the present scenario, based on new technologies like Multimedia Messages. The scenario proposed in this work is totally dependent on the hardware of your smartphone like camera (front & back) and support for multimedia messages. Once this software is installed, it will work in the background, stores the current SIM number in a variable and keeps checking continuously for SIM change, whenever SIM gets changed from mobile, it will take snapshots and record a video in the background i.e., without taking user permission and then it will send an MMS, and number of snap shots, to an alternate mobile number and an email id, which was provided during installation. The enviable advantage of this software is that it is very easy to configure and it keeps running in the background without interrupting the user. To some extent it helps the owner to identify the thief.
Keywords: Android (operating system); multimedia communication; security of data; smart phones; Android based devices; Android based mobile phones; Android operating system; GPS tracking; Global Positioning Systems; MMS; Multimedia Messaging Service; SIM change; SIM number; SMS; Short Messaging Service; anti-theft application; multimedia messages; phablets; smart phones; tablets; Androids; Cameras; Hardware; Humanoid robots; Mobile communication; Smart phones; Android; Email; MMS; Multimedia Messages; Snapshots (ID#: 15-4349)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6779350&isnumber=6779283

 

Junliang Shu; Juanru Li; Yuanyuan Zhang; Dawu Gu, "Android App Protection via Interpretation Obfuscation," Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on, pp.63,68, 24-27 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DASC.2014.20 To protect Android app from malicious reproduction or tampering, code obfuscation techniques are introduced to increase the difficulty of reverse engineering and program understanding. Current obfuscation schemes focus more on the protection of the meta information over the executable code which contains valuable or patented algorithms. Therefore, a more sophisticated obfuscator is needed to improve the protection on the executable code. In this paper we propose SMOG, a comprehensive executable code obfuscation system to protect Android app. SMOG is composed of two parts, an obfuscation engine and an execution environment. The obfuscation engine is at software vendor's side to conduct the obfuscation on the app's executable code, and then release the obfuscated app to the end-user along with an execution token. The execution environment is setup by integrating the received execution token, which endows the Android Dalvik VM the capability to execute the obfuscated app. SMOG is an easily deployed system which proves fine-grained level protection. The obfuscated app generated by SMOG could resist static and dynamic reverse engineering. Moreover, the benchmark result shows SMOG only costs about 5% more performance in dispatching the incoming bytecode to the proper interpreter.
Keywords: Android (operating system); computer crime; data protection; reverse engineering; source code (software); Android Dalvik VM; Android app protection; SMOG; code obfuscation techniques; dynamic reverse engineering; executable code obfuscation system; executable code protection; execution environment; execution token; fine-grained level protection; interpretation obfuscation; malicious reproduction; meta information protection; obfuscated app; obfuscation engine; obfuscator; program understanding; software vendor; static reverse engineering; tampering; Conferences; Android App; Execution Token; Interpretation Obfuscation; Reverse Engineering; Static Disassembly (ID#: 15-4350)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6945305&isnumber=6945641

 

Borting Chen; Ming Wei Shih; Yu Lun Huang, "An Anomaly Detection Module for Firefox OS," Software Security and Reliability-Companion (SERE-C), 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on, pp. 176, 184, June 30 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SERE-C.2014.36 Firefox OS, a new Web-based OS developed by Mozilla mainly for mobile platforms, is designed to realize the "Boot to the Web" concept for the open Web. It supports users booting to the network directly, launching remote applications and accessing remote data with the standard Web technologies. Although Firefox OS has adopted several mechanisms to enhance its security, its current design is lack of a mechanism to detect 1) applications calling Web API with unusual frequency, and 2) applications consuming abnormal amount of resources. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection module which takes the system resource usage and the amount of inter-process communication as the inputs to detect whether the system has an anomaly. We also conduct several experiments to examine the ability of the proposed module. The results show that detection accuracy of our module is 0% in false negative rate and 12.5% in false positive rate.
Keywords: Internet; application program interfaces; mobile computing; operating systems (computers); Firefox OS; Mozilla; Web API; Web-based OS; anomaly detection module; boot to the Web concept; detection accuracy; inter-process communication; mobile platforms; open Web; remote data; standard Web technology; system resource usage; Browsers; Kernel; Mobile communication; Permission; Training; Vectors; Anomaly Detection; Firefox OS; Mobile Security (ID#: 15-4351)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901655&isnumber=6901618

 

Sharma, R.K.; Mohammad, A.; Kalita, H.; Kalita, D., "Android interface based GSM home security system," Issues and Challenges in Intelligent Computing Techniques (ICICT), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 196, 201, 7-8 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICICICT.2014.6781278 The security of one's belongings when a person leaves his/her house is always a concern with increasing number of incidents of theft, robbery etc. Many automated systems has been developed which informs the owner in a remote location about any intrusion or attempt to intrude in the house. 8051 has been extensively used in past projects. However, this paper looks into the development of an ANDROID application which interprets the message a mobile device receives on possible intrusion and subsequently a reply (Short Message Service) SMS which triggers an alarm/buzzer in the remote house making others aware of the possible intrusion.
Keywords: Android (operating system) ;alarm systems; cellular radio; domestic safety; electronic messaging; home automation; mobile computing; Android interface; GSM home security system; SMS; mobile device; remote location; short message service; Androids; Automation; GSM; Ground penetrating radar; Humanoid robots; Land mobile radio; Switches; ANDROID; Global Communication for mobile system (GSM); Short Message Service (SMS) (ID#: 15-4352)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6781278&isnumber=6781240

 

Won Shin; Jin-Lee Lee; Doo-Ho Park; Chun-Hyon Chang, "Design of Authenticity Evaluation Metric For Android Applications," Digital Information and Communication Technology and it's Applications (DICTAP), 2014 Fourth International Conference on, pp.275,278, 6-8 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/DICTAP.2014.6821695 For enforcing security, Android platform uses authorizing system which grants permission per application at install-time. With authorized privilege, user applications can modify and delete user's personal information. Therefore, inspection of granted permission usage can be used to detect security vulnerabilities. ISO/IEC 25 010 defines software product security characteristic and provides guidelines to evaluate software product quality. Among sub-characteristics of security, Authenticity is related to Android permission system. In this paper, we present authenticity metric for android application. This metric can quantify the permission usage of application and measured information can be used to classify the malware applications. To verify the applicability of metric, we perform evaluation to benign and malware application and compare its results.
Keywords: Android (operating system); authorisation; invasive software; software metrics; software quality; Android applications; Android permission system; Android platform; authenticity evaluation metric design; authorizing system; malware applications; security vulnerabilities; software product quality; software product security; user personal information; Androids; Humanoid robots; Malware; Measurement; Smart phones; Software; android; authenticity; least privilege; metric; permissions; security (ID#: 15-4353)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6821695&isnumber=6821645

 

Al Barghouthy, N.B.; Marrington, A., "A Comparison of Forensic Acquisition Techniques for Android Devices: A Case Study Investigation of Orweb Browsing Sessions," New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), 2014 6th International Conference on, pp.1,4, March 30 2014-April 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/NTMS.2014.6813993 The issue of whether to "root" a small scale digital device in order to be able to execute acquisition tools with kernel-level privileges is a vexing one. In the early research literature about Android forensics, and in the commercial forensic tools alike, the common wisdom was that "rooting" the device modified its memory only minimally, and enabled more complete acquisition of digital evidence, and thus was, on balance, an acceptable procedure. This wisdom has been subsequently challenged, and alternative approaches to complete acquisition without "rooting" the device have been proposed. In this work, we address the issue of forensic acquisition techniques for Android devices through a case study we conducted to reconstruct browser sessions carried out using the Orweb private web browser. Orweb is an Android browser which uses Onion Routing to anonymize web traffic, and which records no browsing history. Physical and logical examinations were performed on both rooted and non-rooted Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphones running Android 4.1.1. The results indicate that for investigations of Orweb browsing history, there is no advantage to rooting the device. We conclude that, at least for similar investigations, rooting the device is unnecessary and thus should be avoided.
Keywords: Android (operating system); Internet; digital forensics; online front-ends; smart phones; Android 4.1.1; Android browser; Android devices; Android forensics; Onion Routing; Orweb browsing sessions; Orweb private Web browser; Web traffic anonymization; browser session reconstruction; browsing history; device rooting; digital evidence acquisition; forensic acquisition techniques; forensic tools; kernel-level privilege; nonrooted Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone; small scale digital device; Androids; Browsers; Forensics; Humanoid robots; Random access memory; Smart phones; Workstations (ID#: 15-4354)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6813993&isnumber=6813963

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Operating Systems Security (2014 Year in Review), Part 3

 

	Operating Systems Security (2014 Year in Review)  Part 3

 

In a previous Newsletter, the editors offered a series of citations from late 2013 about operating systems.  In this set, we offer an update of publications and presentations from 2014, focused specifically upon security issues.  The general topic has produced prolific work.  We will present these in multiple parts.

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Gadyatskaya, O.; Massacci, F.; Zhauniarovich, Y., "Security in the Firefox OS and Tizen Mobile Platforms," Computer, vol. 47, no.6, pp.57,63, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/MC.2014.165 Emerging mobile platforms Firefox OS and Tizen are learning from Android's security successes and trying to avoid its limitations. Although these platforms offer largely novel solutions, they can still learn from one another.
Keywords: Android (operating system) ;mobile computing; security of data; Android; Firefox OS; Tizen mobile platforms; security successes; Androids; Computer security; Humanoid robots; Linux; Mobile communication; Android; Firefox OS; Tizen; mobile; mobile platform security; security (ID#: 15-4355)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6838872&isnumber=6838865

 

Xiao Xuan; Ye Wang; Shanping Li, "Privacy Requirements Patterns For Mobile Operating Systems," Requirements Patterns (RePa), 2014 IEEE 4th International Workshop on, pp.39, 42, 26-26 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/RePa.2014.6894842 Nowadays mobile devices have rapidly developed. Privacy protection for mobile operating systems has become a hot topic in industry and research, which also brings new challenges. The scenarios in mobile operating systems are different from those in tradition systems. Users of mobile systems face more and more new risks in new scenarios. On the other hand, personal data is growing exponentially every day. It reminds us the importance of privacy protection is also increasing at the same time. In this paper, we study the privacy patterns for mobile operating systems. We elicit privacy-related requirements in three ways - knowledge from domain experts, literature review on public documents of existing mature systems and feedback from real users. Based on these requirements, we propose 7 privacy patterns which are presented with the RePa Requirements Pattern Template. All of these patterns were refined by professional business analysts which concrete the result of our work. We believe that our findings can help business analysts with the description for privacy requirements in future mobile operating system development projects.
Keywords: data privacy; formal specification; mobile computing; operating systems (computers);security of data; systems analysis; RePa Requirements Pattern Template; domain expert knowledge; feedback; mobile devices; mobile operating systems; personal data ;privacy patterns; privacy protection; privacy requirements patterns; privacy-related requirements elicitation; public document literature review; Data privacy; Mobile communication; Operating systems; Privacy; Security; Smart phones; Mobile Operating System; Privacy Protection; Privacy Requirements Pattern (ID#: 15-4356)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6894842&isnumber=6894833

 

Yu Ding; Zhuo Peng; Yuanyuan Zhou; Chao Zhang, "Android Low Entropy Demystified," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.659,664, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883394 We look into the issue that the amount of entropy kept by the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) of Android is constantly low. We find that the accusation against this issue of causing poor performance and low frame rate experienced by users is ungrounded. We also investigate possible security vulnerabilities resulting from this issue. We find that this issue does not affect the quality of random numbers that are generated by the PRNG and used in Android applications because recent Android devices do not lack entropy sources. However, we identify a vulnerability in which the stack canary for all future Android applications is generated earlier than the PRNG is properly setup. This vulnerability makes stack overflow simpler and threats Android applications linked with native code (through NDK) as well as Dalvik VM instances. An attacker could nullify the stack protecting mechanism, given the knowledge of the time of boot or a malicious app running on the victim device. This vulnerability also affects the address space layout randomization (ASLR) mechanism on Android, and can turn it from a weak protection to void. We discuss in this paper several possible attacks against this vulnerability as well as ways of defending. As this vulnerability is rooted in an essential Android design choice since the very first version, it is difficult to fix.
Keywords: Android (operating system);random number generation; security of data; ASLR mechanism; Android applications; Android design choice; Android devices; Dalvik VM instances; NDK; PRNG; address space layout randomization mechanism; entropy demystification; entropy sources; native code; pseudorandom number generator; stack canary; stack protecting mechanism; Androids; Entropy; Humanoid robots; Kernel; Linux; Security; Smart phones (ID#: 15-4357)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883394&isnumber=6883277

 

Won Shin; Doo-Ho Park; Tae-Wan Kim; Chun-Hyon Chang, "Behavior-Based Portability Analysis Methodology For Android Applications," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp. 714, 717, 27-29 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933667 As Android is an open-source operating system, numerous device-specific updates are frequently published by various developers. Thus, in order to increase the portability of an application, the development of an Android application requires an efficient porting process. However, many analytical time-consuming problems arise when developers convert the application for other versions of platform. In this paper, we propose a behavior-based portability analysis methodology for Android applications. Using this methodology, a developer can extract the ideal behavior of an application and use it to compare the similarity of application flows. We study Android applications to determine whether the proposed methodology can be adopted to detect potential errors. The principal contribution of this paper is to enable developers to use behavior-based analysis for detecting potential errors related to portability by utilizing the porting process easily and quickly.
Keywords: Android (operating system); public domain software; software portability; Android applications; application behavior; application flow similarity; behavior-based portability analysis; device-specific updates; open-source operating system; porting process; Androids; Data mining; Feature extraction; Humanoid robots; Security; Software; Testing; Android application; behavioral-analysis; fragmentation; portability (ID#: 15-4358)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933667&isnumber=6933501

 

Shi Pu; Zhouguo Chen; Chen Huang; Yiming Liu; Bing Zen, "Threat Analysis Of Smart Mobile Device," General Assembly and Scientific Symposium (URSI GASS), 2014 XXXIth URSI, pp. 1, 3, 16-23 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/URSIGASS.2014.6929439 With the development of telecommunication and network bands, there is a great increase in the number of services and applications available for smart mobile devices while the population of malicious mobile software is growing rapidly. Most smart mobile devices do not run anti-malware programs to protect against threats, such as virus, trojan, ddos, malware and botnet, which give the chance for hackers to control the system. The paper mainly analyses the typical threats which smart mobile devices face.
Keywords: mobile computing; security of data; DDOS; anti-malware programs; botnet; malicious mobile software; malware; mobile security; network bands; smart mobile device; telecommunication network; threat analysis; trojan; virus; Market research; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Operating systems; Trojan horses (ID#: 15-4359)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6929439&isnumber=6928981

 

Graa, M.; Boulahia, N.C.; Cuppens, F.; Cavalliy, A., "Protection against Code Obfuscation Attacks Based on Control Dependencies in Android Systems," Software Security and Reliability-Companion (SERE-C), 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on, pp.149,157, June 30 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SERE-C.2014.33 In Android systems, an attacker can obfuscate an application code to leak sensitive information. TaintDroid is an information flow tracking system that protects private data in smartphones. But, TainDroid cannot detect control flows. Thus, it can be circumvented by an obfuscated code attack based on control dependencies. In this paper, we present a collection of obfuscated code attacks on TaintDroid system. We propose a technical solution based on a hybrid approach that combines static and dynamic analysis. We formally specify our solution based on two propagation rules. Finally, we evaluate our approach and show that we can avoid the obfuscated code attacks based on control dependencies by using these propagation rules.
Keywords: Android (operating system);data flow analysis; data protection; program control structures; Android systems; TaintDroid; code obfuscation attack protection; control dependencies; control flow detection; information flow tracking system; private data; sensitive information; smartphones; Androids; Context; Humanoid robots; Resists; Security; Smart phones; Android system; Code obfuscation attacks; Control dependencies; Information flow tracking; Leakage of sensitive information; Propagation rules (ID#: 15-4360)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901652&isnumber=6901618

 

Bartel, A.; Klein, J.; Monperrus, M.; Le Traon, Y., "Static Analysis for Extracting Permission Checks of a Large Scale Framework: The Challenges and Solutions for Analyzing Android," Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 40, no. 6, pp.617,632, June 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2014.2322867 A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they actually need, which facilitates all kinds of malicious usage (e.g., through code injection). The analysis of permission-based framework requires a precise mapping between API methods of the framework and the permissions they require. In this paper, we show that naive static analysis fails miserably when applied with off-the-shelf components on the Android framework. We then present an advanced class-hierarchy and field-sensitive set of analyses to extract this mapping. Those static analyses are capable of analyzing the Android framework. They use novel domain specific optimizations dedicated to Android.
Keywords: Android (operating system);optimisation; program diagnostics; security of data; API methods; Android framework; advanced class-hierarchy analysis; common security architecture; field-sensitive set analysis ;large scale framework; novel domain specific optimizations; permission checks; permission-based framework; static analysis; Androids; Cameras; Humanoid robots; Java; Security; Servers; Sparks; Android; Java; Large scale framework; Soot; call-graph; permissions; security; static analysis (ID#: 15-4361)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6813664&isnumber=6835149

 

Hubbard, J.; Weimer, K.; Yu Chen, "A Study Of SSL Proxy Attacks On Android And iOS Mobile applications," Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2014 IEEE 11th, pp.86,91, 10-13 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2014.6866553 According to recent articles in popular technology websites, some mobile applications function in an insecure manner when presented with untrusted SSL certificates. These non-browser based applications seem to, in the absence of a standard way of alerting a user of an SSL error, accept any certificate presented to it. This paper intends to research these claims and show whether or not an invisible proxy based SSL attack can indeed steal user's credentials from mobile applications, and which types applications are most likely to be vulnerable to this attack vector. To ensure coverage of the most popular platforms, applications on both Android 4.2 and iOS 6 are tested. The results of our study showed that stealing credentials is indeed possible using invisible proxy man in the middle attacks.
Keywords: Android (operating system);iOS (operating system); mobile computing; security of data; Android 4.2;SSL error; SSL proxy attacks; attack vector; iOS 6; iOS mobile applications; invisible proxy man; middle attacks; untrusted SSL certificates; user credentials; Androids; Humanoid robots; Mobile communication; Security; Servers; Smart phones; Android; Man-in-the-middle; Mobile Devices; Proxy; SSL; Security; TLS; iOS (ID#: 15-4362)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866553&isnumber=6866537

 

Savola, R.M.; Kylanpaa, M., "Security Objectives, Controls And Metrics Development For An Android Smartphone Application," Information Security for South Africa (ISSA), 2014pp.1, 8, 13-14 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISSA.2014.6950501 Security in Android smartphone platforms deployed in public safety and security mobile networks is a remarkable challenge. We analyse the security objectives and controls for these systems based on an industrial risk analysis. The target system of the investigation is an Android platform utilized for public safety and security mobile network. We analyse how a security decision making regarding this target system can be supported by effective and efficient security metrics. In addition, we describe implementation details of security controls for authorization and integrity objectives of a demonstration of the target system.
Keywords: Android (operating system); authorisation; data integrity; decision making; risk analysis; safety; smart phones; Android smartphone application; authorization objective; industrial risk analysis integrity objective; metrics development; public safety; security controls; security decision making; security metrics; security mobile networks; security objectives; Authorization; Libraries; Monitoring; Android; risk analysis; security effectiveness; security metrics; security objectives (ID#: 15-4363)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6950501&isnumber=6950479

 

Mollus, K.; Westhoff, D.; Markmann, T., "Curtailing Privilege Escalation Attacks Over Asynchronous Channels on Android," Innovations for Community Services (I4CS), 2014 14th International Conference on, pp.87,94, 4-6 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/I4CS.2014.6860558 Recently we presented QuantDroid [7], a quantitative approach towards mitigating privilege escalation attacks on Android. By monitoring all synchronous IPC via overt channels on-the-fly, a so called flow-graph service detects an abnormal amount of traffic exchanged between DVMs running different Apps to indicate a potential horizontal privilege escalation attack. However, although certainly a valuable first step, our initial QuantDroid approach fails when dealing with asynchronous IPC via persistent storage containers on the Android system. To also address this issue, in this work we extend QuantDroid to QuantDroid++ by providing i) a central storage of taints when operating on system-internal databases of Android, ii) an extension of the SQL cursor object to preserve taints and link requested data with such taints, and, finally iii) an inspection of the information flow with such newly available taints for all relevant database operations.
Keywords: Android (operating system);SQL; security of data; Android system;DVM; QuantDroid; asynchronous channels; flow-graph service; privilege escalation attacks; synchronous IPC; system-internal databases; the SQL cursor object; Androids; Databases; Humanoid robots; Monitoring; Permission; Smart phones; Android; Horizontal Privilege Escalation; IPC (ID#: 15-4364)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6860558&isnumber=6860533

 

Rastogi, V.; Yan Chen; Xuxian Jiang, "Catch Me If You Can: Evaluating Android Anti-Malware Against Transformation Attacks," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol.9, no.1, pp.99, 108, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2013.2290431 Mobile malware threats (e.g., on Android) have recently become a real concern. In this paper, we evaluate the state-of-the-art commercial mobile anti-malware products for Android and test how resistant they are against various common obfuscation techniques (even with known malware). Such an evaluation is important for not only measuring the available defense against mobile malware threats, but also proposing effective, next-generation solutions. We developed DroidChameleon, a systematic framework with various transformation techniques, and used it for our study. Our results on 10 popular commercial anti-malware applications for Android are worrisome: none of these tools is resistant against common malware transformation techniques. In addition, a majority of them can be trivially defeated by applying slight transformation over known malware with little effort for malware authors. Finally, in light of our results, we propose possible remedies for improving the current state of malware detection on mobile devices.
Keywords: invasive software; mobile computing; mobile handsets; operating systems (computers); Android antimalware; DroidChameleon; commercial mobile antimalware products; malware authors; malware detection; malware transformation; mobile devices; mobile malware threats; next-generation solutions; obfuscation techniques; transformation attacks; Androids; Encryption; Humanoid robots; Malware; Mobile communication; Android; Mobile; anti-malware; malware (ID#: 15-4365)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6661334&isnumber=6684617

 

Xiong Ping; Wang Xiaofeng; Niu Wenjia; Zhu Tianqing; Li Gang, "Android Malware Detection With Contrasting Permission Patterns," Communications, China, vol.11, no.8, pp.1,14, Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CC.2014.6911083 As the risk of malware is sharply increasing in Android platform, Android malware detection has become an important research topic. Existing works have demonstrated that required permissions of Android applications are valuable for malware analysis, but how to exploit those permission patterns for malware detection remains an open issue. In this paper, we introduce the contrasting permission patterns to characterize the essential differences between malwares and clean applications from the permission aspect. Then a framework based on contrasting permission patterns is presented for Android malware detection. According to the proposed framework, an ensemble classifier, Enclamald, is further developed to detect whether an application is potentially malicious. Every contrasting permission pattern is acting as a weak classifier in Enclamald, and the weighted predictions of involved weak classifiers are aggregated to the final result. Experiments on real-world applications validate that the proposed Enclamald classifier outperforms commonly used classifiers for Android Malware Detection.
Keywords: Android (operating system);invasive software; pattern classification; Android malware detection;  Enclamald ensemble classifier; contrasting permission patterns; weak classifiers; weighted predictions; Androids; Educational institutions; Humanoid robots; Internet; Malware; Smart phones; Training; Android; classification; contrast set; malware detection; permission pattern (ID#: 15-4366)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911083&isnumber=6911078

 

Kasmi, C.; Lopes-Esteves, J.; Picard, N.; Renard, M.; Beillard, B.; Martinod, E.; Andrieu, J.; Lalande, M., "Event Logs Generated by an Operating System Running on a COTS Computer During IEMI Exposure," Electromagnetic Compatibility, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,4, 22 September 2014. doi: 10.1109/TEMC.2014.2357060 Many studies were devoted to the analysis and the detection of electromagnetic attacks against critical electronic systems at the system or the component levels. Some attempts have been made to correlate effects scenarios with events logged by the kernel of the operating system (OS) of commercial-off-the-shelf computer running Windows. Due to the closed principle of the last OS, we decided to perform such an analysis on a computer running a Linux distribution in which a complete access to logs is available. It will be demonstrated that a computer running such an open OS allows detecting the perturbations induced by intentional electromagnetic interferences at different levels of the targeted computer.
Keywords: Computers; Hardware; Kernel; Monitoring; Protocols; Sensors; Universal Serial Bus; Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC);electromagnetic interference; software engineering; system analysis and design (ID#: 15-4367)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906268&isnumber=4358749

 

Gilad, Y.; Herzberg, A.; Trachtenberg, A., "Securing Smartphones: A µTCB Approach," Pervasive Computing, IEEE, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 72, 79, Oct.-Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MPRV.2014.72 As mobile phones have evolved into smartphones, with complex operating systems running third-party software, they have become increasingly vulnerable to malicious applications (malware). The authors introduce a new design for mitigating malware attacks against smartphone users based on a small trusted computing base module, denoted μTCB. The μTCB manages sensitive data and sensors and provides core services to applications, independently of the operating system. The user invokes μTCB by pressing a simple secure attention key that validates physical possession of the device and authorizes a sensitive action. This approach protects private information even if the device is infected with malware. This article presents a proof-of-concept implementation of μTCB based on ARM's TrustZone, a secure execution environment increasingly found in smartphones. It also includes an evaluation of the implementation using simulations.
Keywords: invasive software; mobile computing; smart phones; trusted computing ;μTCB approach; ARM TrustZone; complex operating systems; core services; malicious applications; malware attacks ;mobile phones; operating system; physical possession; proof-of-concept implementation; securing smartphones; sensitive action; trusted computing base module; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Malware; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Smart phones; mobile; pervasive computing; security; security kernels; invasive software; smartphones; trusted physical interfaces (ID#: 15-4368)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6926719&isnumber=6926649

 

Allix, K.; Jerome, Q.; Bissyande, T.F.; Klein, J.; State, R.; Le Traon, Y., "A Forensic Analysis of Android Malware -- How is Malware Written and How it Could Be Detected?," Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2014 IEEE 38th Annual, pp.384,393, 21-25 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/COMPSAC.2014.61 We consider in this paper the analysis of a large set of malware and benign applications from the Android ecosystem. Although a large body of research work has dealt with Android malware over the last years, none has addressed it from a forensic point of view. After collecting over 500,000 applications from user markets and research repositories, we perform an analysis that yields precious insights on the writing process of Android malware. This study also explores some strange artifacts in the datasets, and the divergent capabilities of state-of-the-art antivirus to recognize/define malware. We further highlight some major weak usage and misunderstanding of Android security by the criminal community and show some patterns in their operational flow. Finally, using insights from this analysis, we build a naive malware detection scheme that could complement existing anti virus software.
Keywords: Android (operating system); digital forensics; invasive software; Android ecosystem; Android malware; Android security; antivirus software; criminal community; forensic analysis; malware detection; operational flow patterns; writing process; Androids; Bioinformatics; Genomics; Google; Humanoid robots; Malware; Software; Android Security; Digital Forensics; Malware Analysis; Malware development (ID#: 15-4369)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6899240&isnumber=6899181

 

Schnarz, Pierre; Fischer, Clemens; Wietzke, Joachim; Stengel, Ingo, "On a Domain Block Based Mechanism To Mitigate Dos Attacks On Shared Caches In Asymmetric Multiprocessing Multi Operating Systems," Information Security for South Africa (ISSA), 2014, pp.1,8, 13-14 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISSA.2014.6950494 Asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) based multi-OSs are going to be established in future to enable parallel execution of different functionalities while fulfilling requirements for real-time, reliability, trustworthiness and security. Especially for in-car multimedia systems, also known as In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems, the composition of different OS-types onto a system-on-chip (SoC) offers a wide variety of advantages in embedded system development. However, the asymmetric paradigm, which implies the division and assignment of every hardware resource to OS-domains, is not applicable to every part of a system-on-chip (SoC). Caches are often shared between multiple processors on multi processor SoCs (MP-SoC). According to their association to the main memory, OSs running on the processor cores are naturally vulnerable to DoS attacks. An adversary who has compromised one of the OS-domains is able to attack an arbitrary memory location of a co-OS-domain. This introduces performance degradations on victim's memory accesses. In this work a method is proposed which prohibits the surface for interference, introduced by the association of cache and main memory. Therefore, the contribution of this article is twofold. It introduces an attack vector, by deriving an algorithm from the cache way associativity, to affect the co-OSs running on the same platform. Using this vector it is shown that the mapping of contiguous memory blocks intensifies the effect. Subsequently, a memory mapping method is proposed which mitigates the interference effects of cache coherence. The approach is evaluated by a proof-of-concept implementation, which illustrates the performance impact of the attack and the countermeasure, respectively. The method enables a more reliable implementation of AMP-based multi-OSs on MP-SoCs using shared caches without the need to modify the hardware layout.
Keywords: Computer architecture; Computer crime; Hardware; Interference; Program processors; System-on-chip; Vectors (ID#: 15-4370)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6950494&isnumber=6950479

 

Anh Nguyen-Tuong; Hiser, J.D.; Co, M.; Davidson, J.W.; Knight, J.C.; Kennedy, N.; Melski, D.; Ella, W.; Hyde, D., "To B or not to B: Blessing OS Commands with Software DNA Shotgun Sequencing," Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC), 2014 Tenth European, pp.238,249, 13-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/EDCC.2014.13 We introduce Software DNA Shotgun Sequencing (S3), a novel, biologically-inspired approach to combat OS Injection Attacks, the #2 most dangerous software error as identified by MITRE. To thwart such attacks, researchers have advocated various forms of taint-tracking techniques. Despite promising results, e.g., few missed attacks and few false alarms, taint-tracking has not seen widespread adoption. Impediments to adoption include high overhead and difficulty of deployment. S3 is based on a novel technique: positive taint inference which dynamically reassembles string fragments from a binary to infer blessed, i.e. trusted, parts of an OS command. S3 incurs negligible performance overhead and is easy to deploy as it operates directly on binary programs.
Keywords: DNA; biology computing; operating systems (computers); security of data; binary programs; biologically inspired approach; blessing OS commands; combat OS injection attacks; operating system; software DNA shotgun sequencing; software error; taint tracking techniques; Computer architecture; DNA; Operating systems; Security; Sequential analysis; Servers; command injection; injection; security; taint inference; taint tracking (ID#: 15-4371)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6821110&isnumber=6821069

 

Xiang-Dong Qu; Ge Yu, "Coordinated Attack Research Between Android Applications And Solutions," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp.718,722, 27-29 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933668 This article mainly discusses the the Android's security mechanism and the possibility of the coordinated attack caused by the android application's component structure. Then we put forward the data filtering solution and the implement for the data transfer of the android applications. This solution is based on the k-divided bloom filter. At the end we evaluate the experiment results. We could see that the solution can effectively resist the coordinated attack from the applications.
Keywords: Android (operating system);data structures; security of data; Android application component structure; Android security mechanism; coordinated attack research; data filtering solution; data transfer; k-divided bloom filter; Androids; Data transfer; Filtering; Filtering algorithms; Humanoid robots; Security; Vectors; Bloom Filter; android security; component structure; coordinated attack (ID#: 15-4372)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933668&isnumber=6933501

 

Longfei Wu; Xiaojiang Du; Jie Wu, "MobiFish: A Lightweight Anti-Phishing Scheme For Mobile Phones," Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2014 23rd International Conference on, pp.1,8, 4-7 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2014.6911743 Recent years have witnessed the increasing threat of phishing attacks on mobile platforms. In fact, mobile phishing is more dangerous due to the limitations of mobile phones and mobile user habits. Existing schemes designed for phishing attacks on computers/laptops cannot effectively address phishing attacks on mobile devices. This paper presents MobiFish, a novel automated lightweight anti-phishing scheme for mobile platforms. MobiFish verifies the validity of web pages and applications (Apps) by comparing the actual identity to the identity claimed by the web pages and Apps. MobiFish has been implemented on the Nexus 4 smartphone running the Android 4.2 operating system. We experimentally evaluate the performance of MobiFish with 100 phishing URLs and corresponding legitimate URLs, as well as fake Facebook Apps. The result shows that MobiFish is very effective in detecting phishing attacks on mobile phones.
Keywords: Android (operating system);smart phones; Android 4.2 operating system; MobiFish; Nexus 4 smartphone; Web pages; automated lightweight antiphishing scheme; fake Facebook Apps; mobile devices; mobile phishing ;mobile phones; mobile platforms; mobile user habits; phishing URL; phishing attacks; Browsers; HTML; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Optical character recognition software; Superluminescent diodes; Web pages; Android; Mobile phones; phishing attack; security (ID#: 15-4373)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911743&isnumber=6911704

 

Hu Ge; Li Ting; Dong Hang; Yu Hewei; Zhang Miao, "Malicious Code Detection for Android Using Instruction Signatures," Service Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2014 IEEE 8th International Symposium on, pp.332,337, 7-11 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/SOSE.2014.48 This paper provides an overview of the current static analysis technology of Android malicious code, and a detailed analysis of the format of APK which is the application name of Android platform executable file (dex). From the perspective of binary sequence, Dalvik VM file is syncopated in method, and these test samples are analyzed by automated DEX file parsing tools and Levenshtein distance algorithm, which can detect the malicious Android applications that contain the same signatures effectively. Proved by a large number of samples, this static detection system that based on signature sequences can't only detect malicious code quickly, but also has a very low rate of false positives and false negatives.
Keywords: Android (operating system);digital signatures; program compilers; program diagnostics; APK format; Android malicious code detection; Android platform executable file;Dalvik VM file; Levenshtein distance algorithm; automated DEX file parsing tools; binary sequence; instruction signatures; malicious Android applications detection; signature sequences; static analysis technology; static detection system; Libraries; Malware; Mobile communication; Smart phones; Software; Testing; Android; DEX; Static Analysis; malicious code (ID#: 15-4374)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6830926&isnumber=6825948

 

D'Orazio, C.; Ariffin, A.; Choo, K.-K.R., "iOS Anti-forensics: How Can We Securely Conceal, Delete and Insert Data?," System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, pp.4838,4847, 6-9 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2014.594 With increasing popularity of smart mobile devices such as iOS devices, security and privacy concerns have emerged as a salient area of inquiry. A relatively under-studied area is anti-mobile forensics to prevent or inhibit forensic investigations. In this paper, we propose a "Concealment" technique to enhance the security of non-protected (Class D) data that is at rest on iOS devices, as well as a "Deletion" technique to reinforce data deletion from iOS devices. We also demonstrate how our "Insertion" technique can be used to insert data into iOS devices surreptitiously that would be hard to pick up in a forensic investigation.
Keywords: data privacy; digital forensics; iOS (operating system); mobile computing; mobile handsets; antimobile forensics; concealment technique; data deletion; deletion technique; forensic investigations; iOS antiforensics; iOS devices; insertion technique; nonprotected data security; privacy concerns; security concerns; smart mobile devices; Cryptography; File systems; Forensics; Mobile handsets; Random access memory; Videos; iOS anti-forensics; iOS forensics; mobile anti-forensics; mobile forensics (ID#: 15-4375)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6759196&isnumber=6758592

 

Junghwan Rhee; Riley, R.; Zhiqiang Lin; Xuxian Jiang; Dongyan Xu, "Data-Centric OS Kernel Malware Characterization," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 9, no. 1, pp.72,87, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2013.2291964 Traditional malware detection and analysis approaches have been focusing on code-centric aspects of malicious programs, such as detection of the injection of malicious code or matching malicious code sequences. However, modern malware has been employing advanced strategies, such as reusing legitimate code or obfuscating malware code to circumvent the detection. As a new perspective to complement code-centric approaches, we propose a data-centric OS kernel malware characterization architecture that detects and characterizes malware attacks based on the properties of data objects manipulated during the attacks. This framework consists of two system components with novel features: First, a runtime kernel object mapping system which has an un-tampered view of kernel data objects resistant to manipulation by malware. This view is effective at detecting a class of malware that hides dynamic data objects. Second, this framework consists of a new kernel malware detection approach that generates malware signatures based on the data access patterns specific to malware attacks. This approach has an extended coverage that detects not only the malware with the signatures, but also the malware variants that share the attack patterns by modeling the low level data access behaviors as signatures. Our experiments against a variety of real-world kernel rootkits demonstrate the effectiveness of data-centric malware signatures.
Keywords: data encapsulation; digital signatures; invasive software; operating system kernels; attack patterns; code-centric approach; data access patterns; data object manipulation; data-centric OS kernel malware characterization architecture; dynamic data object hiding; low level data access behavior modeling; malware attack characterization; malware signatures; real-world kernel rootkits; runtime kernel object mapping system; Data structures; Dynamic scheduling; Kernel; Malware; Monitoring; Resource management; Runtime; OS kernel malware characterization; data-centric malware analysis; virtual machine monitor (ID#: 15-4376)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6671356&isnumber=6684617

 

Kishore, K.R.; Mallesh, M.; Jyostna, G.; Eswari, P.R.L.; Sarma, S.S., "Browser JS Guard: Detects and Defends Against Malicious Javascript Injection Based Drive By Download Attacks," Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies (ICADIWT), 2014 Fifth International Conference on the, pp.92, 100, 17-19 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICADIWT.2014.6814705 In the recent times, most of the systems connected to Internet are getting infected with the malware and some of these systems are becoming zombies for the attacker. When user knowingly or unknowingly visits a malware website, his system gets infected. Attackers do this by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the web browser and acquire control over the underlying operating system. Once attacker compromises the users web browser, he can instruct the browser to visit the attackers website by using number of redirections. During the process, users web browser downloads the malware without the intervention of the user. Once the malware is downloaded, it would be placed in the file system and responds as per the instructions of the attacker. These types of attacks are known as Drive by Download attacks. Now-a-days, Drive by Download is the major channel for delivering the Malware. In this paper, Browser JS Guard an extension to the browser is presented for detecting and defending against Drive by Download attacks via HTML tags and JavaScript.
Keywords: Java; Web sites; authoring languages; invasive software; online front-ends; operating systems (computers); security of data; HTML tags; Internet; browser JS guard; download attacks; drive by download attacks; file system; malicious JavaScript injection; malware Web site; operating system; user Web browser; Browsers; HTML; Malware; Monitoring; Web pages; Web servers; DOM Change Methods; Drive by Download Attacks; HTML tags; JavaScript Functions; Malware; Web Browser; Web Browser Extensions (ID#: 15-4377)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6814705&isnumber=6814661

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Note:

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Phishing (ACM) (2014 Year in Review)

 

	Phishing (ACM) (2014 Year in Review)

 

This set of bibliographical references is about phishing.  All works cited here were published by ACM and posted in its digital  library during 2014. 

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Teh-Chung Chen, Torin Stepan, Scott Dick, James Miller; An Anti-Phishing System Employing Diffused Information; ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) Volume 16 Issue 4, April 2014, Article No. 16. Doi: 10.1145/2584680 The phishing scam and its variants are estimated to cost victims billions of dollars per year. Researchers have responded with a number of anti-phishing systems, based either on blacklists or on heuristics. The former cannot cope with the churn of phishing sites, while the latter usually employ decision rules that are not congruent to human perception. We propose a novel heuristic anti-phishing system that explicitly employs gestalt and decision theory concepts to model perceptual similarity. Our system is evaluated on three corpora contrasting legitimate Web sites with real-world phishing scams. The proposed system’s performance was equal or superior to current best-of-breed systems. We further analyze current anti-phishing warnings from the perspective of warning theory, and propose a new warning design employing our Gestalt approach.
Keywords: Phishing, compression-based learning(ID#: 15-4479)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2584680

 

Rucha Tembe, Olga Zielinska, Yuqi Liu, Kyung Wha Hong, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Chris Mayhorn, Xi Ge; Phishing in International Waters: Exploring Cross-National Differences In Phishing Conceptualizations Between Chinese, Indian And American Samples;  HotSoS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security , April 2014, Article No. 8. Doi:  10.1145/2600176.2600178 One hundred-sixty four participants from the United States, India and China completed a survey designed to assess past phishing experiences and whether they engaged in certain online safety practices (e.g., reading a privacy policy). The study investigated participants' reported agreement regarding the characteristics of phishing attacks, types of media where phishing occurs and the consequences of phishing. A multivariate analysis of covariance indicated that there were significant differences in agreement regarding phishing characteristics, phishing consequences and types of media where phishing occurs for these three nationalities. Chronological age and education did not influence the agreement ratings; therefore, the samples were demographically equivalent with regards to these variables. A logistic regression analysis was conducted to analyze the categorical variables and nationality data. Results based on self-report data indicated that (1) Indians were more likely to be phished than Americans, (2) Americans took protective actions more frequently than Indians by destroying old documents, and (3) Americans were more likely to notice the "padlock" security icon than either Indian or Chinese respondents. The potential implications of these results are discussed in terms of designing culturally sensitive anti-phishing solutions.
Keywords: China, India, cultural differences, nationality, online privacy, phishing, susceptibility (ID#: 15-4480)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2600176.2600178

 

Bastian Braun, Martin Johns, Johannes Koestler, Joachim Posegga; PhishSafe: Leveraging Modern Javascript API's For Transparent and Robust Protection; CODASPY '14 Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Data And Application Security And Privacy, March 2014, Pages 61-72.  Doi: 10.1145/2557547.2557553 The term "phishing" describes a class of social engineering attacks on authentication systems, that aim to steal the victim's authentication credential, e.g., the username and password. The severity of phishing is recognized since the mid-1990's and a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the topic. However, currently deployed or proposed countermeasures are either incomplete, cumbersome for the user, or incompatible with standard browser technology. In this paper, we show how modern JavaScript API's can be utilized to build PhishSafe, a robust authentication scheme, that is immune against phishing attacks, easily deployable using the current browser generation, and requires little change in the end-user's interaction with the application. We evaluate the implementation and find that it is applicable to web applications with low efforts and causes no tangible overhead.
Keywords: phishing, protection, web security (ID#: 15-4481)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2557547.2557553

 

Elie Bursztein, Borbala Benko, Daniel Margolis, Tadek Pietraszek, Andy Archer, Allan Aquino, Andreas Pitsillidis, Stefan Savage; Handcrafted Fraud and Extortion: Manual Account Hijacking in the Wild; IMC '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, November 2014, Pages 347-358. Doi:  10.1145/2663716.2663749 Online accounts are inherently valuable resources---both for the data they contain and the reputation they accrue over time. Unsurprisingly, this value drives criminals to steal, or hijack, such accounts. In this paper we focus on manual account hijacking---account hijacking performed manually by humans instead of botnets. We describe the details of the hijacking workflow: the attack vectors, the exploitation phase, and post-hijacking remediation. Finally we share, as a large online company, which defense strategies we found effective to curb manual hijacking.
Keywords: google, hijacking, phishing (ID#: 15-4482)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2663716.2663749

 

Adrian Dabrowski, Katharina Krombholz, Johanna Ullrich, Edgar R. Weippl; QR Inception: Barcode-in-Barcode Attacks; SPSM '14 Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones & Mobile Devices, November 2014, Pages 3-10. Doi:  10.1145/2666620.2666624 2D barcodes offer many benefits compared to 1D barcodes, such as high information density and robustness. Before their introduction to the mobile phone ecosystem, they have been widely used in specific applications, such as logistics or ticketing. However, there are multiple competing standards with different benefits and drawbacks. Therefore, reader applications as well as dedicated devices have to support multiple standards. In this paper, we present novel attacks based on deliberately caused ambiguities when especially crafted barcodes conform to multiple standards. Implementation details decide which standard the decoder locks on. This way, two users scanning the same barcode with different phones or apps will receive different content. This potentially opens way for multiple problems related to security. We describe how embedding one barcode symbology into another can be used to perform phishing attacks as well as targeted exploits. In addition, we evaluate the extent to which popular 2D barcode reader applications on smartphones are susceptible to these barcode-in barcode attacks. We furthermore discuss mitigation techniques against this type of attack.
Keywords: barcode, packet-in-packet, protocol decoding ambiguity, qr, security, steganography (ID#: 15-4483)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2666620.2666624

 

Adwait Nadkarni, Vasant Tendulkar, William Enck; NativeWrap: Ad Hoc Smartphone Application Creation for End Users; WiSec '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference On Security And Privacy In Wireless & Mobile Networks, July 2014, Pages 13-24. Doi:  10.1145/2627393.2627412 Smartphones have become a primary form of computing. As a result, nearly every consumer, company, and organization provides an "app" for the popular smartphone platforms. Many of these apps are little more than a WebView widget that renders downloaded HTML and JavaScript content. In this paper, we argue that separating Web applications into separate OS principals has valuable security and privacy advantages. However, in the current smartphone application ecosystem, many such apps are fraught with privacy concerns. To this end, we propose NativeWrap as an alternative model for security and privacy conscious consumers to access Web content. NativeWrap "wraps" the domain for given URL into a native platform app, applying best practices for security configuration. We describe the design of a prototype of NativeWrap for the Android platform and test compatibility on the top 250 Alexa Websites. By using NativeWrap, third-party developers are removed from platform code, and users are placed in control of privacy sensitive operation.
Keywords: mobile applications, smartphone security, web browsers (ID#: 15-4484)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2627393.2627412

 

Ping Chen, Nick Nikiforakis, Lieven Desmet, Christophe Huygens; Security Analysis of the Chinese Web: How Well Is It Protected?; SafeConfig '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Cyber Security Analytics, Intelligence and Automation, November 2014, pages 3-9. Doi:  10.1145/2665936.2665938  As the web rapidly expands and gets integrated into the daily lives of more and more people, so does the number of cyber attacks against it. To defend against attackers, website operators can utilize a wide range of defense mechanisms, both at the server-side, as well as the client-side of their web applications. From a security-metrics standpoint, the presence or absence of these mechanisms can be used as a security indicator of any given website.  In this paper, through a large-scale analysis of the 10,000 most popular Chinese websites, we analyze the security of the Chinese web by investigating the usage of client-side security policies, and evaluating the discovered HTTPS implementations. We show that, when compared to popular websites of the rest of the world, a significant fraction of Chinese websites lag behind on the adoption of good security practices. Among other findings, we report on the fact that 6% of websites inadvertently leak private user information, such as Chinese identity numbers, by placing spreadsheet files with sensitive content in directories indexed by search engines.
Keywords: chinese websites, security metrics, security policies, web security (ID#: 15-4485)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2665936.2665938

 

Sauvik Das, Adam D.I. Kramer, Laura A. Dabbish, Jason I. Hong; Increasing Security Sensitivity With Social Proof: A Large-Scale Experimental Confirmation; CCS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 2014, Pages 739-749.  November 2014. Doi:   10.1145/2660267.2660271 One of the largest outstanding problems in computer security is the need for higher awareness and use of available security tools. One promising but largely unexplored approach is to use social proof: by showing people that their friends use security features, they may be more inclined to explore those features, too. To explore the efficacy of this approach, we showed 50,000 people who use Facebook one of 8 security announcements'7 variations of social proof and 1 non-social control-to increase the exploration and adoption of three security features: Login Notifications, Login Approvals, and Trusted Contacts. Our results indicated that simply showing people the number of their friends that used security features was most effective, and drove 37% more viewers to explore the promoted security features compared to the non-social announcement (thus, raising awareness). In turn, as social announcements drove more people to explore security features, more people who saw social announcements adopted those features, too. However, among those who explored the promoted features, there was no difference in the adoption rate of those who viewed a social versus a non-social announcement. In a follow up survey, we confirmed that the social announcements raised viewer's awareness of available security features.
Keywords: facebook, persuasion, security, security feature adoption, social cybersecurity, social influence (ID#: 15-4486)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660267.2660271

 

Ting-Fang Yen, Victor Heorhiadi, Alina Oprea, Michael K. Reiter, Ari Juels; An Epidemiological Study of Malware Encounters in a Large Enterprise; CCS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 2014, Pages 1117-1130. Doi:  10.1145/2660267.2660330 We present an epidemiological study of malware encounters in a large, multi-national enterprise. Our data sets allow us to observe or infer not only malware presence on enterprise computers, but also malware entry points, network locations of the computers (i.e., inside the enterprise network or outside) when the malware were encountered, and for some web-based malware encounters, web activities that gave rise to them. By coupling this data with demographic information for each host's primary user, such as his or her job title and level in the management hierarchy, we are able to paint a reasonably comprehensive picture of malware encounters for this enterprise. We use this analysis to build a logistic regression model for inferring the risk of hosts encountering malware; those ranked highly by our model have a >3x higher rate of encountering malware than the base rate. We also discuss where our study confirms or refutes other studies and guidance that our results suggest.
Keywords: enterprise security, logistic regression, malware encounters, measurement (ID#: 15-4487)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660267.2660330

 

Gianluca Stringhini, Oliver Hohlfeld, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna; The Harvester, The Botmaster, And The Spammer: On The Relations Between The Different Actors In The Spam Landscape;  ASIA CCS '14 Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium On Information, Computer And Communications security, June 2014, Pages 353-364.  Doi:  10.1145/2590296.2590302 A spammer needs three elements to run a spam operation: a list of victim email addresses, content to be sent, and a botnet to send it. Each of these three elements are critical for the success of the spam operation: a good email list should be composed of valid email addresses, a good email content should be both convincing to the reader and evades anti-spam filters, and a good botnet should efficiently sent spam. Given how critical these three elements are, figures specialized on one of these elements have emerged in the spam ecosystem. Email harvesters crawl the web and compile email lists, botmasters infect victim computers and maintain efficient botnets for spam dissemination, and spammers rent botnets and buy email lists to run spam campaigns. Previous research suggested that email harvesters and botmasters sell their services to spammers in a prosperous underground economy. No rigorous research has been performed, however, on understanding the relations between these three actors. This paper aims to shed some light on the relations between harvesters, botmasters, and spammers. By disseminating email addresses on the Internet, fingerprinting the botnets that contact these addresses, and looking at the content of these emails, we can infer the relations between the actors involved in the spam ecosystem. Our observations can be used by researchers to develop more effective anti-spam systems.
Keywords: botnets, cybercrime, spam, underground economy (ID#: 15-4488)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2590296.2590302

 

Andreas Mayer, Marcus Niemietz, Vladislav Mladenov, Jörg Schwenk; Guardians of the Clouds: When Identity Providers Fail; CCSW '14 Proceedings of the 6th edition of the ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security, November 2014, Pages 105-116. Doi: 10.1145/2664168.2664171 Many cloud-based services offer interfaces to Single Sign-On (SSO) systems. This helps companies and Internet users to keep control over their data: By using an Identity Provider (IdP), they are able to enforce various access control strategies (e.g., RBAC) on data processed in the cloud.  On the other hand, IdPs provide a valuable single point of attack: If the IdP can be compromised, all cloud services are affected, including well-protected applications such as Google Apps and Salesforce. This increases the impact of the attack by several orders of magnitude.  In this paper, we analyze the security of six real-world SAML-based IdPs (OneLogin, Okta, WSO2 Stratos, Cloudseal, SSOCircle, and Bitium) which are used to protect cloud services. We present a novel attack technique (ACS Spoofing), which allows the adversary to successfully impersonate the victim in four of these SSO systems. To complete our survey on IdP security, we additionally evaluated the security of these six IdPs against well-known web attacks, and we were successful against four of them. In summary, we were able to break all six SSO systems.  We present a online penetration test tool, ACSScanner, which is able to detect ACS Spoofing vulnerabilities on arbitrary IdPs. Additionally, we discuss several countermeasures for each attack type, ranging from simple whitelisting to the signing of authentication requests, and from anti-CSRF tokens and HTTP-Only cookies to cookie-TLS-bindings. We have implemented a combination of two advanced countermeasures.
Keywords: holder-of-key, identity theft, saml, sso, web security (ID#: 15-4489)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2664168.2664171

 

Matthew F. Der, Lawrence K. Saul, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker; Knock It Off: Profiling The Online Storefronts Of Counterfeit Merchandise; KDD '14 Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference On Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining, April 2014, Pages 1759-1768. Doi: 10.1145/2623330.2623354 We describe an automated system for the large-scale monitoring of Web sites that serve as online storefronts for spam-advertised goods. Our system is developed from an extensive crawl of black-market Web sites that deal in illegal pharmaceuticals, replica luxury goods, and counterfeit software. The operational goal of the system is to identify the affiliate programs of online merchants behind these Web sites; the system itself is part of a larger effort to improve the tracking and targeting of these affiliate programs. There are two main challenges in this domain. The first is that appearances can be deceiving: Web pages that render very differently are often linked to the same affiliate program of merchants. The second is the difficulty of acquiring training data: the manual labeling of Web pages, though necessary to some degree, is a laborious and time-consuming process. Our approach in this paper is to extract features that reveal when Web pages linked to the same affiliate program share a similar underlying structure. Using these features, which are mined from a small initial seed of labeled data, we are able to profile the Web sites of forty-four distinct affiliate programs that account, collectively, for hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit e-commerce. Our work also highlights several broad challenges that arise in the large-scale, empirical study of malicious activity on the Web.
Keywords: email spam, web page classification (ID#: 15-4490)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2623330.2623354

 

Warren He, Devdatta Akhawe, Sumeet Jain, Elaine Shi, Dawn Song; ShadowCrypt: Encrypted Web Applications for Everyone; CCS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 2014, Pages 1028-1039. Doi: 10.1145/2660267.2660326 A number of recent research and industry proposals discussed using encrypted data in web applications. We first present a systematization of the design space of web applications and highlight the advantages and limitations of current proposals. Next, we present ShadowCrypt, a previously unexplored design point that enables encrypted input/output without trusting any part of the web applications. ShadowCrypt allows users to transparently switch to encrypted input/output for text-based web applications. ShadowCrypt runs as a browser extension, replacing input elements in a page with secure, isolated shadow inputs and encrypted text with secure, isolated cleartext. ShadowCrypt's key innovation is the use of Shadow DOM, an upcoming primitive that allows low-overhead isolation of DOM trees. Evaluation results indicate that ShadowCrypt has low overhead and of practical use today. Finally, based on our experience with ShadowCrypt, we present a study of 17 popular web applications, across different domains, and the functionality impact and security advantages of encrypting the data they handle.
Keywords: privacy, shadow dom, web security (ID#: 15-4491)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660267.2660326

 

Mohit Sethi, Elena Oat, Mario Di Francesco, Tuomas Aura; Secure Bootstrapping Of Cloud-Managed Ubiquitous Displays; UbiComp '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, September 2014, Pages 739-750.  Doi: 10.1145/2632048.2632049    Eventually, all printed signs and bulletins will be replaced by electronic displays, which are wirelessly connected to the Internet and cloud-based services. Deploying such ubiquitous displays can be cumbersome since they need to be correctly configured and authorized to access both the Internet and the necessary services, despite the fact that they have minimal input capabilities and may be in inaccessible locations. Our goal is to enable easy and secure configuration of ubiquitous displays such as digital signage and advertisements, which are managed by cloud services and show HTML5 content. In our solution, the display shows a QR code which, when scanned by the user with a camera phone, allows automatic configuration of the wireless network along with the content to be shown. This is accomplished by a long-term trust relation configured between the cloud service and the wireless access network. We build on existing technologies and standard protocols, including RADIUS and EAP, without requiring new software to be installed on the phone or changes to the network infrastructure.
Keywords: EAP, QR code, WiFi, access-point, bootstrapping, cloud, configuration, digital signage, displays, security, smart phone (ID#: 15-4492)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2632048.2632049

 

Ting-Kai Huang, Bruno Ribeiro, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Michalis Faloutsos; The Socio-Monetary Incentives Of Online Social Network Malware Campaigns; COSN '14 Proceedings of the Second ACM Conference On Online Social networks, October 2014, Pages 259-270.  Doi:  10.1145/2660460.2660478   Online social networks (OSNs) offer a rich medium of malware propagation. Unlike other forms of malware, OSN malware campaigns direct users to malicious websites that hijack their accounts, posting malicious messages on their behalf with the intent of luring their friends to the malicious website, thus triggering word-of-mouth infections that cascade through the network compromising thousands of accounts. But how are OSN users lured to click on the malicious links? In this work, we monitor 3.5 million Facebook accounts and explore the role of pure monetary, social, and combined socio-monetary psychological incentives in OSN malware campaigns. Among other findings we see that the majority of the malware campaigns rely on pure social incentives. However, we also observe that malware campaigns using socio-monetary incentives infect more accounts and last longer than campaigns with pure monetary or social incentives. The latter suggests the efficiency of an epidemic tactic surprisingly similar to the mechanism used by biological pathogens to cope with diverse gene pools.
Keywords: labor markets, monetary incentives, osn malware, social incentives (ID#: 15-4493)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660460.2660478

 

 Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, H. Colleen Stuart, Hsu-Chun Hsiao, Yue-Hsun Lin, Leon Zhang, Laura Dabbish, Sara Kiesler; YourPassword: Applying Feedback Loops To Improve Security Behavior Of Managing Multiple Passwords; ASIA CCS '14 Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium On Information, Computer And Communications Security, June 2014, Pages 513-518.  Doi:  10.1145/2590296.2590345 Various mechanisms exist to secure users' passwords, yet users continue to struggle with the complexity of multiple password management. We explore the effectiveness of a feedback loop to improve users' password management. We introduce YourPassword, a web-based application that uses feedback to inform users about the security of their password behavior. YourPassword has two main components: a password behavior checker that converts password strengths into numerical scores and a dashboard interface that visualizes users' overall password behavior and provides visual feedback in real time. YourPassword not only provides a total score on all passwords, but also visualizes when passwords are too similar to each other. To test the efficacy of YourPassword, we conducted a between-subjects experiment and think-aloud test with 48 participants. Participants either had access to YourPassword, an existing commercial password checker, or no password tool (control condition). YourPassword helped participants improve their password behavior as compared with the commercial tool or no tool.
Keywords: authentication, feedback loops, password management (ID#: 15-4494)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2590296.2590345

 

Sruti Bhagavatula, Christopher Dunn, Chris Kanich, Minaxi Gupta, Brian Ziebart; Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve Unwanted Resource Filtering; AISec '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security Workshop, November 2014, Pages 95-102. Doi: 10.1145/2666652.2666662 Advertisements simultaneously provide both economic support for most free web content and one of the largest annoyances to end users. Furthermore, the modern advertisement ecosystem is rife with tracking methods which violate user privacy. A natural reaction is for users to install ad blockers which prevent advertisers from tracking users or displaying ads. Traditional ad blocking software relies upon hand-crafted filter expressions to generate large, unwieldy regular expressions matched against resources being included within web pages. This process requires a large amount of human overhead and is susceptible to inferior filter generation. We propose an alternate approach which leverages machine learning to bootstrap a superior classifier for ad blocking with less human intervention. We show that our classifier can simultaneously maintain an accuracy similar to the hand-crafted filters while also blocking new ads which would otherwise necessitate further human intervention in the form of additional handmade filter rules.
Keywords: machine learning, web privacy, web security (ID#: 15-4495)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2666652.2666662

 

Abdullah Almaatouq, Ahmad Alabdulkareem, Mariam Nouh, Erez Shmueli, Mansour Alsaleh, Vivek K. Singh, Abdulrahman Alarifi, Anas Alfaris, Alex (Sandy) Pentland; Twitter: Who Gets Caught? Observed Trends in Social Micro-Blogging Spam; WebSci '14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference On Web Science, June 2014, Pages 33-41. Doi: 10.1145/2615569.2615688 Spam in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a systemic problem that imposes a threat to these services in terms of undermining their value to advertisers and potential investors, as well as negatively affecting users' engagement. In this work, we present a unique analysis of spam accounts in OSNs viewed through the lens of their behavioral characteristics (i.e., profile properties and social interactions). Our analysis includes over 100 million tweets collected over the course of one month, generated by approximately 30 million distinct user accounts, of which over 7% are suspended or removed due to abusive behaviors and other violations. We show that there exist two behaviorally distinct categories of twitter spammers and that they employ different spamming strategies. The users in these two categories demonstrate different individual properties as well as social interaction patterns. As the Twitter spammers continuously keep creating newer accounts upon being caught, a behavioral understanding of their spamming behavior will be vital in the design of future social media defense mechanisms.
Keywords: account abuse, microblogging, online social networks, spam (ID#: 15-4496)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2615569.2615688

 

Ben Stock, Martin Johns; Protecting Users Against XSS-Based Password Manager Abuse; ASIA CCS '14 Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium On Information, Computer And Communications Security, June 2014, Pages 183-194.  Doi:  10.1145/2590296.2590336 To ease the burden of repeated password authentication on multiple sites, modern Web browsers provide password managers, which offer to automatically complete password fields on Web pages, after the password has been stored once. Unfortunately, these managers operate by simply inserting the clear-text password into the document's DOM, where it is accessible by JavaScript. Thus, a successful Cross-site Scripting attack can be leveraged by the attacker to read and leak password data which has been provided by the password manager. In this paper, we assess this potential threat through a thorough survey of the current password manager generation and observable characteristics of password fields in popular Web sites. Furthermore, we propose an alternative password manager design, which robustly prevents the identified attacks, while maintaining compatibility with the established functionality of the existing approaches.
Keywords: XSS, countermeasure, cross-site scripting, password managers, passwords, web security (ID#: 15-4497)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2590296.2590336

 

Marian Harbach, Markus Hettig, Susanne Weber, Matthew Smith; Using Personal Examples To Improve Risk Communication For Security & Privacy Decisions;  CHI '14 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2014, Pages 2647-2656.  Doi:  10.1145/2556288.2556978   IT security systems often attempt to support users in taking a decision by communicating associated risks. However, a lack of efficacy as well as problems with habituation in such systems are well known issues. In this paper, we propose to leverage the rich set of personal data available on smartphones to communicate risks using personalized examples. Examples of private information that may be at risk can draw the users' attention to relevant information for a decision and also improve their response. We present two experiments that validate this approach in the context of Android app permissions. Private information that becomes accessible given certain permissions is displayed when a user wants to install an app, demonstrating the consequences this installation might have. We find that participants made more privacy-conscious choices when deciding which apps to install. Additionally, our results show that our approach causes a negative affect in participants, which makes them pay more attention.
Keywords: android, consequences, examples, permissions, personalization, privacy, risks, usable security (ID#: 15-4498)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2556288.2556978

 

Michael Maass, William L. Scherlis, Jonathan Aldrich; In-Nimbo Sandboxing; HotSoS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security, April 2014, Article No. 1.  Doi: 10.1145/2600176.2600177  Sandboxes impose a security policy, isolating applications and their components from the rest of a system. While many sandboxing techniques exist, state of the art sandboxes generally perform their functions within the system that is being defended. As a result, when the sandbox fails or is bypassed, the security of the surrounding system can no longer be assured. We experiment with the idea of in-nimbo sandboxing, encapsulating untrusted computations away from the system we are trying to protect. The idea is to delegate computations that may be vulnerable or malicious to virtual machine instances in a cloud computing environment.  This may not reduce the possibility of an in-situ sandbox compromise, but it could significantly reduce the consequences should that possibility be realized. To achieve this advantage, there are additional requirements, including: (1) A regulated channel between the local and cloud environments that supports interaction with the encapsulated application, (2) Performance design that acceptably minimizes latencies in excess of the in-situ baseline.  To test the feasibility of the idea, we built an in-nimbo sandbox for Adobe Reader, an application that historically has been subject to significant attacks. We undertook a prototype deployment with PDF users in a large aerospace firm. In addition to thwarting several examples of existing PDF-based malware, we found that the added increment of latency, perhaps surprisingly, does not overly impair the user experience with respect to performance or usability.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4499)
URL:  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2600176.2600177

 

Julian Horsch, Konstantin Böttinger, Michael Weiß, Sascha Wessel, Frederic Stumpf;  TrustID: Trustworthy Identities For Untrusted Mobile Devices; CODASPY '14 Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference On Data And Application Security And Privacy; March 2014, Pages 281-288. Doi: 10.1145/2557547.2557593 Identity theft has deep impacts in today's mobile ubiquitous environments. At the same time, digital identities are usually still protected by simple passwords or other insufficient security mechanisms. In this paper, we present the TrustID architecture and protocols to improve this situation. Our architecture utilizes a Secure Element (SE) to store multiple context-specific identities securely in a mobile device, e.g., a smartphone. We introduce protocols for securely deriving identities from a strong root identity into the SE inside the smartphone as well as for using the newly derived IDs. Both protocols do not require a trustworthy smartphone operating system or a Trusted Execution Environment. In order to achieve this, our concept includes a secure combined PIN entry mechanism for user authentication, which prevents attacks even on a malicious device. To show the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype running on a Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphone utilizing a microSD card SE. The German identity card nPA is used as root identity to derive context-specific identities.
Keywords: android, combined pin entry, identity derivation, identity provider, mobile security, npa, secure element, smartphone (ID#: 15-4500)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2557547.2557593

 

Jelena Isacenkova, Davide Balzarotti; Shades of Gray: A Closer Look at Emails in the Gray Area; ASIA CCS '14 Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security, June 2014, Pages 377-388. Doi: 10.1145/2590296.2590344 Every day, millions of users spend a considerable amount of time browsing through the messages in their spam folders. With newsletters and automated notifications responsible for 42% of the messages in the user's inboxes, inevitably some important emails get misclassified as spam. Unfortunately, users are often unable to take security related decisions, and tools provide no assistance to easily distinguish harmless commercial messages from the ones that are most certainly malevolent. Most of the previous studies focused on the detection of spam. Instead, in this paper we look into the often overlooked area of gray emails, i.e., those messages that cannot be clearly categorized one way or the other by automated spam filters. In particular, we analyze real-world emails by grouping them into clusters of bulk email campaigns. Our approach is able to automatically classify and reduce by half the gray emails area with only 0.2% false positives. Moreover, we identify a number of campaign features that can be used to predict the campaign category and we discuss their effectiveness and their limitations. Our experiments show that a large fraction of emails in the gray area are composed of legitimate bulk emails: newsletters, notifications, and marketing offers. The latter appears to be a large e-marketing business industry that has grown into a complex infrastructure for sending legitimate bulk emails. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world empirical study of such emails.

Keywords: email campaigns, newsletters, spam (ID#: 15-4501)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2590296.2590344

 

Eva Zangerle, Günther Specht; "Sorry, I Was Hacked": A Classification of Compromised Twitter Accounts; SAC '14 Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, March 2014,Pages 587-593. Doi:  10.1145/2554850.2554894 Online social networks like Facebook or Twitter have become powerful information diffusion platforms as they have attracted hundreds of millions of users. The possibility of reaching millions of users within these networks not only attracted standard users, but also cyber-criminals who abuse the networks by spreading spam. This is accomplished by either creating fake accounts, bots, cyborgs or by hacking and compromising accounts. Compromised accounts are subsequently used to spread spam in the name of their legitimate owner. This work sets out to investigate how Twitter users react to having their account hacked and how they deal with compromised accounts. We crawled a data set of tweets in which users state that their account was hacked and subsequently performed a supervised classification of these tweets based on the reaction and behavior of the respective user. We find that 27.30% of the analyzed Twitter users change to a new account once their account was hacked. 50.91% of all users either state that they were hacked or apologize for any unsolicited tweets or direct messages.
Keywords: abuse, account compromising, machine learning, microblogging, social media, spam, twitter (ID#: 15-4502)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2554850.2554894

 

Ala' Eshmawi, Suku Nair; Semi-Synthetic Data for Enhanced SMS Spam Detection: [Using Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique SMOTE];  MEDES '14 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems, September 2014, Pages 206-212. Doi: 10.1145/2668260.2668307 In this paper, we study the effect of using Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique on the detection of SMS spam. The study shows an improved spam detection performance of the classifiers trained on semi-synthetic datasets compared to the performance of the same classifiers trained on the original dataset.
Keywords: Classification, SMS Spam, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (ID#: 15-4503)
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2668260.2668307

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Phishing (IEEE) (2014 Year in Review), Part 1

 

	Phishing (IEEE) (2014 Year in Review)  Part 1

This set of bibliographical references is about phishing.  All works cited here appeared in the IEEE library during 2014.  They are presented in two parts.

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Gupta, S.; Kumaraguru, P., "Emerging Phishing Trends And Effectiveness Of The Anti-Phishing Landing Page," Electronic Crime Research (eCrime), 2014 APWG Symposium on, pp.36,47, 23-25 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECRIME.2014.6963163 Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to share their personal, financial information. Acquired sensitive information is then used for personal benefits, like, gain access to money of the individuals from whom the information was taken. Phishing costs Internet users billions of dollars every year. A recent report highlighted phishing loss of around $448 million to organizations in April 2014. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors, government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April 30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We observed that phishers are exploiting Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) accredited registrars to launch their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims in 2- 08 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs.
Keywords: Internet; computer crime; trusted computing; unsolicited e-mail; ICANN accredited registrars; Internet; URLs; antiphishing landing page; free subdomain registration services; internet corporation for assigned names and numbers accredited registrars; phishing e-mails; phishing trends; trusted entity; Browsers; Electronic mail; IP networks; Internet; Organizations; Training; Uniform resource locators (ID#: 15-4489)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6963163&isnumber=6963155

 

Husak, Martin; Cegan, Jakub, "PhiGARo: Automatic Phishing Detection and Incident Response Framework," Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), 2014 Ninth International Conference on,  pp.295, 302, 8-12 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ARES.2014.46 We present a comprehensive framework for automatic phishing incident processing and work in progress concerning automatic phishing detection and reporting. Our work is based upon the automatic phishing incident processing tool PhiGARo which locates users responding to phishing attack attempts and prevents access to phishing sites from the protected network. Although PhiGARo processes the phishing incidents automatically, it depends on reports of phishing incidents from users. We propose a framework which introduces honey pots into the process in order to eliminate the reliance on user input. The honey pots are used to capture e-mails, automatically detect messages containing phishing and immediately transfer them to PhiGARo. There is a need to propagate e-mail addresses of a honey pot to attract phishers. We discuss approaches to the honey pot e-mail propagation and propose a further enhancement to using honey pots in response to phishing incidents. We propose providing phishers with false credentials, accounts and documents that will grant them access to other honey pot services. Tracing these honey tokens may lead us to the originators of the phishing attacks and help investigations into phishing incidents.
Keywords: Educational institutions; Electronic mail; IP networks; Monitoring; Security; Servers; Uniform resource locators; CSIRT; IPFIX; PhiGARo; honeypot; phishing (ID#: 15-4490)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6980295&isnumber=6980232

 

Dewan, P.; Kashyap, A.; Kumaraguru, P., "Analyzing Social And Stylometric Features To Identify Spear Phishing Emails," Electronic Crime Research (eCrime), 2014 APWG Symposium on, pp.1,13, 23-25 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECRIME.2014.6963160 Targeted social engineering attacks in the form of spear phishing emails, are often the main gimmick used by attackers to infiltrate organizational networks and implant state-of-the-art Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Spear phishing is a complex targeted attack in which, an attacker harvests information about the victim prior to the attack. This information is then used to create sophisticated, genuine-looking attack vectors, drawing the victim to compromise confidential information. What makes spear phishing different, and more powerful than normal phishing, is this contextual information about the victim. Online social media services can be one such source for gathering vital information about an individual. In this paper, we characterize and examine a true positive dataset of spear phishing, spam, and normal phishing emails from Symantec's enterprise email scanning service. We then present a model to detect spear phishing emails sent to employees of 14 international organizations, by using social features extracted from LinkedIn. Our dataset consists of 4,742 targeted attack emails sent to 2,434 victims, and 9,353 non targeted attack emails sent to 5,912 non victims; and publicly available information from their LinkedIn profiles. We applied various machine learning algorithms to this labeled data, and achieved an overall maximum accuracy of 97.76% in identifying spear phishing emails. We used a combination of social features from LinkedIn profiles, and stylometric features extracted from email subjects, bodies, and attachments. However, we achieved a slightly better accuracy of 98.28% without the social features. Our analysis revealed that social features extracted from LinkedIn do not help in identifying spear phishing emails. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts to make use of a combination of stylometric features extracted from emails, and social features extracted from an online social network to detect targeted spear phishing emails.
Keywords: computer crime; learning (artificial intelligence); organisational aspects; social networking (online);unsolicited e-mail; APT; LinkedIn profiles; Symantec enterprise e-mail scanning service; advanced persistent threats; attack emails; complex targeted attack; confidential information; contextual information; e-mail attachments; e-mail bodies; e-mail subjects; information gathering; international organization employees; labeled data; machine learning algorithms; normal phishing emails; online social media services; organizational network infiltration; overall maximum accuracy; publicly available information; social engineering attacks; social feature analysis; social feature extraction; spams; spear phishing e-mail identification; stylometric feature analysis; stylometric feature extraction; Accuracy; Feature extraction; LinkedIn; Media; Organizations; Unsolicited electronic mail (ID#: 15-4491)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6963160&isnumber=6963155

 

Longfei Wu; Xiaojiang Du; Jie Wu, "MobiFish: A Lightweight Anti-Phishing Scheme For Mobile Phones," Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2014 23rd International Conference on, pp.1,8, 4-7 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2014.6911743 Recent years have witnessed the increasing threat of phishing attacks on mobile platforms. In fact, mobile phishing is more dangerous due to the limitations of mobile phones and mobile user habits. Existing schemes designed for phishing attacks on computers/laptops cannot effectively address phishing attacks on mobile devices. This paper presents MobiFish, a novel automated lightweight anti-phishing scheme for mobile platforms. MobiFish verifies the validity of web pages and applications (Apps) by comparing the actual identity to the identity claimed by the web pages and Apps. MobiFish has been implemented on the Nexus 4 smartphone running the Android 4.2 operating system. We experimentally evaluate the performance of MobiFish with 100 phishing URLs and corresponding legitimate URLs, as well as fake Facebook Apps. The result shows that MobiFish is very effective in detecting phishing attacks on mobile phones.
Keywords: Android (operating system);smart phones; Android 4.2 operating system; MobiFish; Nexus 4 smartphone; Web pages; automated lightweight antiphishing scheme; fake Facebook Apps; mobile devices; mobile phishing;mobile phones;mobile platforms; mobile user habits; phishing URL; phishing attacks; Browsers; HTML; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Optical character recognition software; Superluminescent diodes; Web pages; Android; Mobile phones; phishing attack; security (ID#: 15-4492)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6911743&isnumber=6911704

 

Marchal, S.; Francois, J.; State, R.; Engel, T., "PhishStorm: Detecting Phishing with Streaming Analytics," Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 11, no.4, pp.458,471, Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TNSM.2014.2377295 Despite the growth of prevention techniques, phishing remains an important threat since the principal countermeasures in use are still based on reactive URL blacklisting. This technique is inefficient due to the short lifetime of phishing Web sites, making recent approaches relying on real-time or proactive phishing URLs detection techniques more appropriate. In this paper we introduce PhishStorm, an automated phishing detection system that can analyse in real-time any URL in order to identify potential phishing sites. PhishStorm can interface with any email server or HTTP proxy. We argue that phishing URLs usually have few relationships between the part of the URL that must be registered (low level domain) and the remaining part of the URL (upper level domain, path, query). We show in this paper that experimental evidence supports this observation and can be used to detect phishing sites. For this purpose, we define the new concept of intra-URL relatedness and evaluate it using features extracted from words that compose a URL based on query data from Google and Yahoo search engines. These features are then used in machine learning based classification to detect phishing URLs from a real dataset. Our technique is assessed on 96,018 phishing and legitimate URLs that results in a correct classification rate of 94.91% with only 1.44% false positives. An extension for a URL phishingness rating system exhibiting high confidence rate (> 99%) is proposed. We discuss in the paper efficient implementation patterns that allow real time analytics using Big Data architectures like STORM and advanced data structures based on Bloom filter.
Keywords: Feature extraction; Google; Internet; Market research; Search engines; Uniform resource locators; Big Data; Machine Learning; Mining and Statistical Methods; Phishing Detection; STORM; Search Engine Query Data; Security Management; URL Rating; Word Relatedness (ID#: 15-4493)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6975177&isnumber=5699970

 

Luong Anh Tuan Nguyen; Ba Lam To; Huu Khuong Nguyen; Minh Hoang Nguyen, "A Novel Approach For Phishing Detection Using URL-Based Heuristic," Computing, Management and Telecommunications (ComManTel), 2014 International Conference on, pp.298, 303, 27-29 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ComManTel.2014.6825621 Together with the growth of e-commerce transaction, Phishing - the act of stealing personal information - rises in quantity and quality. The phishers try to make fake-sites look similar to legitimate sites in terms of interface and uniform resource locator (URL) address. Therefore, the numbers of victim have been increasing due to inefficient methods using blacklist to detect phishing. This paper proposes a new phishing detection approach based on the features of URL. Specifically, the proposed method focuses on the similarity of phishing site's URL and legitimate site's URL. In addition, the ranking of site is also considered as an important factor to decide whether the site is a phishing site. The proposed technique is evaluated with a dataset of 11,660 phishing sites and 5,000 legitimate sites. The results show that the technique can detect over 97% phishing sites.
Keywords: Web sites; computer crime; electronic commerce; unsolicited e-mail; URL address; URL-based heuristic; e-commerce transaction; fake-sites; legitimate site URL; personal information stealing; phishing detection approach; phishing site URL; uniform resource locator address; Accuracy; Feature extraction; Google; Heuristic algorithms; Search engines; Testing; Training; Heuristic; Phishing; URL-Based (ID#: 15-4494)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6825621&isnumber=6825559

 

Al-Daeef, M.M.; Basir, N.; Saudi, M.M., "A Method to Measure the Efficiency of Phishing Emails Detection Features," Information Science and Applications (ICISA), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,5, 6-9 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICISA.2014.6847332 Phishing is a threat in which users are sent fake emails that urge them to click a link (URL) which takes to a phisher's website. At that site, users' accounts information could be lost. Many technical and non-technical solutions have been proposed to fight phishing attacks. To stop such attacks, it is important to select the correct feature(s) to detect phishing emails. Thus, the current work presents a new method to selecting more efficient feature in detecting phishing emails. Best features can be extracted from email's body (content) part. Keywords and URLs are known features that can be extracted from email's body part. These two features are very relevant to the three general aspects of email, these aspects are, email's sender, email's content, and email's receiver. In this work, three effectiveness criteria were derived based on these aspects of email. Such criteria were used to evaluate the efficiency of Keywords and URLs features in detecting phishing emails by measuring their Effectiveness Metric (EM) values. The experimental results obtained from analyzing more than 8000 ham (legitimate) and phishing emails from two different datasets show that, relying upon the URLs feature in detecting phishing emails will predominantly give more precise results than relying upon the keywords feature in a such task.
Keywords: Web sites; feature extraction; security of data; unsolicited e-mail; EM value; URL feature; effectiveness metric value; fake emails; feature extraction; phisher Web site; phishing attack; phishing emails detection feature; Data mining; Electronic mail; Feature extraction; Internet; Measurement; Receivers; Security (ID#: 15-4495)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6847332&isnumber=6847317

 

Mohammad, R.M.; Thabtah, F.; McCluskey, L., "Intelligent Rule-Based Phishing Websites classification," Information Security, IET , vol.8, no.3, pp.153,160, May 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2013.0202 Phishing is described as the art of echoing a website of a creditable firm intending to grab user's private information such as usernames, passwords and social security number. Phishing websites comprise a variety of cues within its content-parts as well as the browser-based security indicators provided along with the website. Several solutions have been proposed to tackle phishing. Nevertheless, there is no single magic bullet that can solve this threat radically. One of the promising techniques that can be employed in predicting phishing attacks is based on data mining, particularly the `induction of classification rules' since anti-phishing solutions aim to predict the website class accurately and that exactly matches the data mining classification technique goals. In this study, the authors shed light on the important features that distinguish phishing websites from legitimate ones and assess how good rule-based data mining classification techniques are in predicting phishing websites and which classification technique is proven to be more reliable.
Keywords: Web sites; data mining; data privacy; pattern classification; security of data; unsolicited e-mail; Web site echoing; Website class; antiphishing solutions; browser-based security indicators; creditable firm; intelligent rule-based phishing Web site classification; phishing attack prediction; rule-based data mining classification techniques; social security number; user private information (ID#: 15-4496)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6786863&isnumber=6786849

 

Holm, Hannes; Flores, Waldo Rocha; Nohlberg, Marcus; Ekstedt, Mathias, "An Empirical Investigation of the Effect of Target-Related Information in Phishing Attacks," Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops and Demonstrations (EDOCW), 2014 IEEE 18th International, pp.357,363, 1-2 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/EDOCW.2014.59 Analyzing the role of target-related information in a security attack is an understudied topic in the behavioral information security research field. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effect of adding information about the target in phishing attacks. Data was collected by conducting two phishing experiments using a sample of 158 employees at five Swedish organizations. The first experiment included a traditional mass-email attack with no target-related information, and the second experiment was a targeted phishing attack in which we included specific information related to the targeted employees' organization. The results showed that the number of organizational employees falling victim to phishing significantly increased when target-related information was added in the attack. During the first experiment 5.1 % clicked on the malicious link compared to 27.2 % of the second phishing attack, and 8.9 % of those executed the binary compared to 3.2 % of the traditional phishing attack. Adding target-related information is an effective way for attackers to significantly increase the effectiveness of their phishing attacks. This is the first study that has showed this significant effect using organizational employees as a sample. The implications of the results are further discussed.
Keywords: Context; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Organizations; Security; Servers; Software; Social engineering; direct observations; experiments; phishing; security behavior (ID#: 15-4497)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6975383&isnumber=6975303

 

Ba Lam To; Luong Anh Tuan Nguyen; Huu Khuong Nguyen; Minh Hoang Nguyen, "A Novel Fuzzy Approach For Phishing Detection," Communications and Electronics (ICCE), 2014 IEEE Fifth International Conference on, pp.530,535, July 30 2014-Aug. 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/CCE.2014.6916759 Phishing is one of the luring techniques used by phishers in the intention of exploiting the personal information. Phishing website is a fake website that looks similar to legitimate site in terms of interface and uniform resource locator (URL) address. Therefore, the numbers of victim have been increasing due to inefficient methods using blacklist to detect phishing. This paper proposed a new technique that apply fuzzy logic based on the features of URL to detect phishing sites. The proposed technique was evaluated with the dataset of 11,660 phishing sites and 5,000 legitimate sites. The results show that the technique can detect over 98% phishing sites.
Keywords: Web sites; computer crime; fuzzy logic; fuzzy set theory; unsolicited e-mail; URL address; blacklist; dataset; fuzzy approach; fuzzy logic; interface address; legitimate site; luring techniques; personal information; phishing Web site; uniform resource locator address; Educational institutions; Pragmatics (ID#: 15-4498)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916759&isnumber=6916663

 

Roopak, S.; Thomas, T., "A Novel Phishing Page Detection Mechanism Using HTML Source Code Comparison and Cosine Similarity," Advances in Computing and Communications (ICACC), 2014 Fourth International Conference on, pp.167,170, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICACC.2014.47 Phishing is a social engineering technique used by hackers to steal information and sometimes money from online users. Phishing web sites are imitating sites of other legitimate web sites. Our aim is to detect the phishing pages and block it. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting phishing pages by searching the similar web pages through mining the web and compares them by matching the HTML source codes as well as computing the cosine similarity of their textual contents. We then developed a browser capable of detecting phishing pages. The browser is tested with more than 20 phishing sites from Phishtank.com with different tag match percentage and cosine similarity values. The results indicate that the detection rate of the proposed mechanism is high compared to the other existing methods.
Keywords: Web sites; computer crime; hypermedia markup languages; source code (software); HTML source code comparison;Phishtank.com; Web pages; Web sites; cosine similarity; hackers; information stealing; phishing page detection mechanism; social engineering technique; Browsers; Electronic mail; Google; HTML; IP networks; Web pages; cosine similarity; social engineering; web mining (ID#: 15-4499)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906016&isnumber=6905967

 

Frauenstein, E.D.; von Solms, R., "Combatting Phishing: A Holistic Human Approach," Information Security for South Africa (ISSA), 2014, pp.1, 10, 13-14 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISSA.2014.6950508 Phishing continues to remain a lucrative market for cyber criminals, mostly because of the vulnerable human element. Through emails and spoofed-websites, phishers exploit almost any opportunity using major events, considerable financial awards, fake warnings and the trusted reputation of established organizations, as a basis to gain their victims' trust. For many years, humans have often been referred to as the `weakest link' towards protecting information. To gain their victims' trust, phishers continue to use sophisticated looking emails and spoofed websites to trick them, and rely on their victims' lack of knowledge, lax security behavior and organizations' inadequate security measures towards protecting itself and their clients. As such, phishing security controls and vulnerabilities can arguably be classified into three main elements namely human factors (H), organizational aspects (O) and technological controls (T). All three of these elements have the common feature of human involvement and as such, security gaps are inevitable. Each element also functions as both security control and security vulnerability. A holistic framework towards combatting phishing is required whereby the human feature in all three of these elements is enhanced by means of a security education, training and awareness programme. This paper discusses the educational factors required to form part of a holistic framework, addressing the HOT elements as well as the relationships between these elements towards combatting phishing. The development of this framework uses the principles of design science to ensure that it is developed with rigor. Furthermore, this paper reports on the verification of the framework.
Keywords: computer crime; computer science education; human factors; organisational aspects; unsolicited e-mail; HOT elements; ails; awareness programme; cyber criminals; design science principles; educational factors; fake warnings; financial awards; holistic human approach; human factors ;lax security behavior; organizational aspects; phishing security controls; security education; security gaps; security training; security vulnerability; spoofed-Web sites; technological controls; trusted reputation; ISO; Lead; Security; Training; COBIT; agency theory; human factors; organizational aspects; phishing; security education training and awareness; social engineering; technological controls; technology acceptance model (ID#: 15-4450)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6950508&isnumber=6950479

 

Abraham, Dona; Raj, Nisha S, "Approximate String Matching Algorithm For Phishing Detection," Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI, 2014 International Conference on, pp.2285,2290, 24-27 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICACCI.2014.6968578 Phishing is an act of stealing personal and sensitive user information through internet and using it for financial transactions. The goal of phishers is to carry out fraudulent transactions on behalf of the victims by using the information stealed from them. Availing the services of internet has become a dangerous task to the common people with these kinds of attacks. Many methods have been developed to fight against phishing attacks. But, as the attacker uses more sophisticated techniques each method fails to perform well in detecting the attacks. Here we propose a string matching method for detecting phishing attacks, which determines the degree of similarity a URL is having with the blacklisted URLs. Thus based on the textual properties of a URL it can be classified as phishing or non-phishing. Two string matching algorithms i.e. Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) and Edit Distance are used in the hostname comparison. The accuracy rate obtained for LCS is 99.1% and for Edit Distance it is 99.5%.
Keywords: Accuracy; Electronic mail ;Feature extraction; IP networks; Internet; Training; Uniform resource locators; Approximate String matching; Blacklist; Edit Distance; Longest Common Subsequence(LCS); Phishing Attacks (ID#: 15-4451)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6968578&isnumber=6968191

 

Park, Gilchan; Stuart, Lauren M.; Taylor, Julia M.; Raskin, Victor, "Comparing Machine And Human Ability To Detect Phishing Emails," Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.2322,2327, 5-8 Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SMC.2014.6974273 This paper compares the results of computer and human efforts to determine whether an email is legitimate or a phishing attempt. For this purpose, we have run two series of experiments, one for the computer and the other for human subjects. Both experiments addressed the same corpora, one of phishing emails, and the other of legitimate ones. Both the computer and human subjects were asked to detect which emails were phishing and which were legitimate. The results are interesting, both separately and in comparison. Even at this limited, non-semantic state of computation, they indicate that human and computer competences should complement each other, and that, of course, will lead to the integration of human-accessible semantics into computation.
Keywords: Conferences; Cybernetics; computer phishing detection; human phishing detection; human-computer collaboration; maximization of human and computer cognitive capacities in collaboration; semanticalization (ID#: 15-4452)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6974273&isnumber=6973862

 

Fatt, Jeffrey Choo Soon; Leng, Chiew Kang; Nah, Sze San, "Phishdentity: Leverage Website Favicon to Offset Polymorphic Phishing Website," Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), 2014 Ninth International Conference onpp.114,119, 8-12 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ARES.2014.21 Phishing attacks involve the use of fuzzy techniques to create polymorphic phishing web pages to give the impression of legitimate websites. Many websites are subject to the threat of phishing, including financial, social networks, tourism, e-commerce etc. For example, phishers are particularly fond of travel-related services by imitating as trip consultant, airline reservation, hotel booking etc. However, the targeted legitimate websites still maintain the webpage appearance visually similar to the original. In this paper, we propose an approach which is based on the website favicon to find the identity of a website and use it to evaluate the genuineness of a website. This approach utilizes Google search-by-image API to return the search results pages. Then, we perform latent semantic analysis based on the search results pages. We collected 1,000 webpages to verify the effectiveness of this approach. The results show that our proposed method achieved 97.2% true positive with only 5.4% false positive.
Keywords: Browsers; Feature extraction; Google; Search engines; Superluminescent diodes; Uniform resource locators; Visualization; Google search; favicon; latent semantic analysis; phishing detection; phishing website identity (ID#: 15-4453)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6980270&isnumber=6980232

 

Biedermann, S.; Ruppenthal, T.; Katzenbeisser, S., "Data-centric Phishing Detection Based On Transparent Virtualization Technologies," Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2014 Twelfth Annual International Conference on, pp.215,223, 23-24 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PST.2014.6890942 We propose a novel phishing detection architecture based on transparent virtualization technologies and isolation of the own components. The architecture can be deployed as a security extension for virtual machines (VMs) running in the cloud. It uses fine-grained VM introspection (VMI) to extract, filter and scale a color-based fingerprint of web pages which are processed by a browser from the VM's memory. By analyzing the human perceptual similarity between the fingerprints, the architecture can reveal and mitigate phishing attacks which are based on redirection to spoofed web pages and it can also detect “Man-in-the-Browser” (MitB) attacks. To the best of our knowledge, the architecture is the first anti-phishing solution leveraging virtualization technologies. We explain details about the design and the implementation and we show results of an evaluation with real-world data.
Keywords: Web sites; cloud computing; computer crime; online front-ends; virtual machines; virtualisation; MitB attack; VM introspection; VMI; antiphishing solution; cloud; color-based fingerprint extraction; color-based fingerprint filtering; color-based fingerprint scaling; component isolation; data-centric phishing detection; human perceptual similarity; man-in-the-browser attack; phishing attacks; spoofed Web pages; transparent virtualization technologies; virtual machines; Browsers; Computer architecture; Data mining; Detectors; Image color analysis; Malware; Web pages (ID#: 15-4454)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6890942&isnumber=6890911

 

Barraclough, P.A.; Sexton, G.; Hossain, M.A.; Aslam, N., "Intelligent Phishing Detection Parameter Framework For E-Banking Transactions Based on Neuro-fuzzy," Science and Information Conference (SAI), 2014, pp.545,555, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SAI.2014.6918240 Phishing attacks have become more sophisticated in web-based transactions. As a result, various solutions have been developed to tackle the problem. Such solutions including feature-based and blacklist-based approaches applying machine learning algorithms. However there is still a lack of accuracy and real-time solution. Most machine learning algorithms are parameter driven, but the parameters are difficult to tune to a desirable output. In line with Jiang and Ma's findings, this study presents a parameter tuning framework, using Neuron-fuzzy system with comprehensive features in order to maximize systems performance. The neuron-fuzzy system was chosen because it has ability to generate fuzzy rules by given features and to learn new features. Extensive experiments were conducted, using different feature-sets, two cross-validation methods, a hybrid method and different parameters and achieved 98.4% accuracy. Our results demonstrated a high performance compared to other results in the field. As a contribution, we introduced a novel parameter tuning framework based on a neuron-fuzzy with six feature-sets and identified different numbers of membership functions different number of epochs, different sizes of feature-sets on a single platform. Parameter tuning based on neuron-fuzzy system with comprehensive features can enhance system performance in realtime. The outcome will provide guidance to the researchers who are using similar techniques in the field. It will decrease difficulties and increase confidence in the process of tuning parameters on a given problem.
Keywords: Internet; banking; fuzzy neural nets; learning (artificial intelligence);security of data; Web-based transactions; blacklist-based approach; e-banking transactions; feature-based approach; intelligent phishing detection parameter framework; machine learning algorithms; membership functions; neuron-fuzzy system; novel parameter tuning framework; Accuracy; Error analysis; Feature extraction; Fuzzy logic; Training; Tuning; FIS; Intelligent phishing detection; fuzzy inference system; neuro-fuzzy (ID#: 15-4455)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6918240&isnumber=6918164

 

Kearney, W.D.; Kruger, H.A., "Considering the Influence Of Human Trust In Practical Social Engineering Exercises," Information Security for South Africa (ISSA), 2014, pp.1, 6, 13-14 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISSA.2014.6950509 There are numerous technical advances in the field of information security. However, the application of information security technologies alone is often not sufficient to address security issues. Human factors play an increasing role in securing computer assets and are often detrimental to the security of an organisation. One of the salient aspects of security, which is linked to humans, is trust. It is safe to assume that trust will play an important role in any information security environment and may influence security behaviour significantly. In this paper the results of a practical phishing exercise and a trust survey are considered. The research project is part of a larger project and the phishing exercise is a follow-up to an earlier first practical phishing test. Results of the phishing test are compared with the first exercise. In addition, the newly obtained trust information from the survey is also incorporated into the report in order to try and explain security behaviour. The research was performed at a large organisation. Results indicate that although there is a general high level of trust in the organisation's ability to provide safe and secure information systems, a large number of staff was still victim to a simple phishing exercise. A possible explanation, which opens up further avenues for research, is offered.
Keywords: computer crime; human factors; human factors; human trust; information security technologies; phishing; secure information systems; social engineering; Information security; Online banking; Reliability; Information security; Phishing; Social engineering; Trust (ID#: 15-4456)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6950509&isnumber=6950479

 

Podins, K.; Skujina, I.; Teivans, V., "Low-cost Active Cyber Defence," Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2014), 2014 6th International Conference On, pp.1,16, 3-6 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/CYCON.2014.6916412 The authors of this paper investigated relatively simple active strategies against selected popular cyber threat vectors. When cyber attacks are analysed for their severity and occurrence, many incidents are usually classified as minor, e.g. span or phishing. We are interested in the various types of low-end cyber incidents (as opposed to high-end states-ponsored incidents and advanced persistent threats) for two reasons: (1) being the least complicated incidents, we expect to find simple active response strategies; (2) being the most common incidents, fighting them will most effectively make cyberspace more secure. We present a literature review encompassing results from academia and practitioners, and describe a previously unpublished hands-on effort to actively hinder phishing incidents. Before that, we take a look at several published definitions of active cyber defence, and identify some contradictions between them. So far we have identified active strategies for the following cyber threats: (1) Nigerian letters - keep up conversation by an artificial intelligence (Al) text analyser and generator; (2) spar - traffic generation for advertised domains; (3) phishing - upload of fake credentials and/or special monitored sandboxed accounts; (4) information collection botnets - fake data (credit card, credentials etc.) upload. The authors analysed the proposed strategies from the security economics point of view to determine why and how these strategies might be effective. We also discuss the legal aspects of the proposed strategies.
Keywords: economics; law; security of data; Nigerian letters; active response strategy; cyber attacks; cyber threat vectors; cyberspace; information collection botnets; legal aspects; low-cost active cyber defence; low-end cyber incidents; phishing; phishing incidents; security economics point-of-view; spar; Artificial intelligence; Cyberspace; Economics; Electronic mail; Employment; Security; US Department of Defense; Nigerian letters; active cyber defence;botnet;cyber crime; phishing; security economics; spam (ID#: 15-4457)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916412&isnumber=6916383

 

Zawoad, Shams; Hasan, Ragib; Haque, Md Munirul; Warner, Gary, "CURLA: Cloud-Based Spam URL Analyzer for Very Large Datasets," Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2014 IEEE 7th International Conference on, pp.729, 736, June 27 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/CLOUD.2014.102 URL blacklisting is a widely used technique for blocking phishing websites. To prepare an effective blacklist, it is necessary to analyze possible threats and include the identified malicious sites in the blacklist. Spam emails are good source for acquiring suspected phishing websites. However, the number of URLs gathered from spam emails is quite large. Fetching and analyzing the content of this large number of websites are very expensive tasks given limited computing and storage resources. Moreover, a high percentage of URLs extracted from spam emails refer to the same website. Hence, preserving the contents of all the websites causes significant storage waste. To solve the problem of massive computing and storage resource requirements, we propose and develop CURLA - a Cloud-based spam URL Analyzer, built on top of Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). CURLA allows processing large number of spam-based URLs in parallel, which reduces the cost of establishing equally capable local infrastructure. Our system builds a database of unique spam-based URLs and accumulates the content of these unique websites in a central repository, which can be later used for phishing or other counterfeit websites detection. We show the effectiveness of our proposed architecture using real-life spam-based URL data.
Keywords: Cloud computing; Databases; Electronic mail; Parallel processing; Queueing analysis; Uniform resource locators; Cloud; Parallel Architecture; Phishing; Spam URL (ID#: 15-4458)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6973808&isnumber=6973706

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Note:

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Phishing (IEEE) (2014 Year in Review), Part 2

 

	Phishing (IEEE) (2014 Year in Review) Part 2

 

This set of bibliographical references is about phishing.  All works cited here appeared in the IEEE library during 2014.  They are presented in two parts.

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Kharraz, A.; Kirda, E.; Robertson, W.; Balzarotti, D.; Francillon, A., "Optical Delusions: A Study of Malicious QR Codes in the Wild," Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2014 44th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on, pp.192,203, 23-26 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/DSN.2014.103 QR codes, a form of 2D barcode, allow easy interaction between mobile devices and websites or printed material by removing the burden of manually typing a URL or contact information. QR codes are increasingly popular and are likely to be adopted by malware authors and cyber-criminals as well. In fact, while a link can "look" suspicious, malicious and benign QR codes cannot be distinguished by simply looking at them. However, despite public discussions about increasing use of QR codes for malicious purposes, the prevalence of malicious QR codes and the kinds of threats they pose are still unclear. In this paper, we examine attacks on the Internet that rely on QR codes. Using a crawler, we performed a large-scale experiment by analyzing QR codes across 14 million unique web pages over a ten-month period. Our results show that QR code technology is already used by attackers, for example to distribute malware or to lead users to phishing sites. However, the relatively few malicious QR codes we found in our experiments suggest that, on a global scale, the frequency of these attacks is not alarmingly high and users are rarely exposed to the threats distributed via QR codes while surfing the web.
Keywords: Internet; Web sites; computer crime; invasive software; telecommunication security; 2D barcode; Internet; URL; Web crawler; Web sites; contact information; malicious QR code; mobile device; optical delusion; phishing sites; Crawlers; Malware; Mobile communication; Servers; Smart phones; Web pages; Mobile devices; malicious QR codes; malware; phishing (ID#: 15-4459)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6903579&isnumber=6903544

 

Yang Xiao; Chung-Chih Li; Ming Lei; Vrbsky, S.V., "Differentiated Virtual Passwords, Secret Little Functions, and Codebooks for Protecting Users From Password Theft," Systems Journal, IEEE, vol. 8, no.2, pp.406,416, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2012.2183755 In this paper, we discuss how to prevent users' passwords from being stolen by adversaries in online environments and automated teller machines. We propose differentiated virtual password mechanisms in which a user has the freedom to choose a virtual password scheme ranging from weak security to strong security, where a virtual password requires a small amount of human computing to secure users' passwords. The tradeoff is that the stronger the scheme, the more complex the scheme may be. Among the schemes, we have a default method (i.e., traditional password scheme), system recommended functions, user-specified functions, user-specified programs, and so on. A function/program is used to implement the virtual password concept with a tradeoff of security for complexity requiring a small amount of human computing. We further propose several functions to serve as system recommended functions and provide a security analysis. For user-specified functions, we adopt secret little functions in which security is enhanced by hiding secret functions/algorithms.
Keywords: security of data; automated teller machines; codebooks; differentiated virtual password mechanism; online environments; password theft protection; secret algorithms; secret little functions; security analysis; strong security; user passwords; user-specified functions; virtual password scheme; weak security; Authentication; Electronic mail; Encryption; Humans; Optimized production technology; Servers; Codebooks; differentiated virtual passwords; key logger; phishing; secret little functions; shoulder-surfing (ID#: 15-4460)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6153047&isnumber=6819870

 

Gupta, S.; Pilli, E.S.; Mishra, P.; Pundir, S.; Joshi, R.C., "Forensic Analysis Of E-Mail Address Spoofing," Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence), 2014 5th International Conference , pp.898,904, 25-26 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CONFLUENCE.2014.6949302 E-mail is the most widely used application on the internet. However E-mail application is not totally reliable and safe communication medium as loopholes in protocols make the attacker able to misuse it for sending spoofed E-mails. E-mail sender spoofing is a major problem of the E-mail system. E-mail sender spoofing is a malicious activity in which the source is being modified and presented as if the E-mail is coming from intended sender whereas the original sender is an attacker. This paper presents the behavior of different E-mail client applications while receiving the sender spoofed E-mails. We propose an investigation algorithm for sender spoofing which will check for spoofed addresses in E-mail by performing extensive analysis on E-mail header fields. We have taken basically four fields into consideration i.e. Received SPF, DKIM, DKIM-Signature, and DMARC. Our algorithm checks for valid values of the fields; any invalid value indicates an unauthorized E-mail. We have created dataset of spoofed & legitimate E-mails in our lab and performed the analysis on E-mail headers for invalid values. Our proposed algorithm is able to detect address spoofed E-mails.
Keywords: Internet; digital forensics; protocols; unsolicited e-mail; DKIM-Signature; DMARC; Internet; e-mail address spoofing; forensic analysis; loopholes; protocols; reliable communication medium; safe communication medium; Algorithm design and analysis; Authentication; Electronic mail; Forensics; Postal services; Receivers; Servers; E-mail Forensic; E-mail Investigation; E-mail Sender spoofing; E-mail Spoofing; Phishing (ID#: 15-4461)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6949302&isnumber=6949036

 

Bicakci, K.; Unal, D.; Ascioglu, N.; Adalier, O., "Mobile Authentication Secure against Man-in-the-Middle Attacks," Mobile Cloud Computing, Services, and Engineering (MobileCloud), 2014 2nd IEEE International Conference on, pp.273,276, 8-11 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/MobileCloud.2014.43 Current mobile authentication solutions puts a cognitive burden on users to detect and avoid Man-In-The-Middle attacks. In this paper, we present a mobile authentication protocol named Mobile-ID which prevents Man-In-The-Middle attacks without relying on a human in the loop. With Mobile-ID, the message signed by the secure element on the mobile device incorporates the context information of the connected service provider. Hence, upon receiving the signed message the Mobile-ID server could easily identify the existence of an on-going attack and notify the genuine service provider.
Keywords: message authentication; mobile communication; mobile computing; telecommunication security; Mobile-ID; man-in-the-middle attack; mobile authentication protocol; Authentication; Context; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Protocols; Servers; Man-In-The-Middle attack; authentication; mobile signature; phishing; secure element; security protocol (ID#: 15-4462)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6834975&isnumber=6823830

 

Grzonkowski, S.; Mosquera, A.; Aouad, L.; Morss, D., "Smartphone Security: An Overview Of Emerging Threats," Consumer Electronics Magazine, IEEE, vol.3, no.4, pp.40, 44, Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MCE.2014.2340211 The mobile threat landscape has undergone rapid growth as smartphones have increased in popularity. The first generation of mobile threats saw attackers relying on various scams delivered through SMS. As the technology progressed and Web browsers, e-mail clients, and custom applications became standard on smartphones, attackers started exploiting new possibilities beyond traditional e-mail spam and phishing attacks. The landscape continues to evolve with mobile bitcoin miners, botnets, and ransomware.
Keywords: computer crime; invasive software; online front-ends; smart phones ;telecommunication security; unsolicited e-mail; SMS; Web browsers; attackers; botnets; custom applications; e-mail clients; e-mail spam; emerging threats; mobile bitcoin miners; mobile threat landscape; phishing attacks; ransomware; scams; smartphone security; Computer security; Malware; Mobile communication; Network security; Privacy; Smart phones; Software development (ID#: 15-4463)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6914660&isnumber=6914657

 

Bhat, S.Y.; Abulaish, M.; Mirza, A.A., "Spammer Classification Using Ensemble Methods over Structural Social Network Features," Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), 2014 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on, vol. 2, no., pp.454,458, 11-14 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/WI-IAT.2014.133 The overwhelming growth and popularity of online social networks is also facing the issues of spamming, which mainly leads to uncontrolled dissemination of malware/viruses, promotional ads, phishing, and scams. It also consumes large amounts of network bandwidth leading to less revenue and significant financial losses to organizations. In literature, various machine learning techniques have been extensively used to detect spam and spammers in online social networks. Most commonly, individual classifiers are learnt over content-based features extracted from users' interactions and profiles to label them as spam/spammers or legitimate. Recently, new network structure-based features have also been proposed for spammer detection task, but their significance using ensemble learning methods has not been extensively evaluated yet. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of some ensemble learning methods using community-based structural features extracted from an interaction network for the task of spammer detection in online social networks.
Keywords: computer crime; computer viruses; feature extraction; invasive software; learning (artificial intelligence); pattern classification; social networking (online);community-based structural feature extraction; content-based feature extraction; ensemble learning methods; interaction network; machine learning techniques; malware; network structure-based features; online social networks; phishing; promotional ads; scams; spammer classification; spammer detection; spamming; structural social network features; viruses; Bagging; Boosting; Communities; Conferences; Feature extraction; Social network services; Stacking; Classifier ensemble; Machine learning; Social network security; Spam detection (ID#: 15-4464)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927660&isnumber=6927590

 

Moura, G.; Sadre, R.; Pras, A., "Bad Neighborhoods On The Internet," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol.52, no.7, pp.132, 139, July 2014. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6852094 Analogous to the real world, sources of malicious activities on the Internet tend to be concentrated in certain networks instead of being evenly distributed. In this article we formally define and frame such areas as Internet Bad Neighborhoods. By extending the reputation of malicious IP addresses to their neighbors, the bad neighborhood approach ultimately enables attack prediction from unforeseen addresses. We investigate spam and phishing bad neighborhoods, and show how their underlying business models, counter-intuitively, influences the location of the neighborhoods (both geographically and in the IP addressing space). We also show how bad neighborhoods are highly concentrated at a few Internet Service Providers and discuss how our findings can be employed to improve current network and spam filters and incentivize botnet mitigation initiatives.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; information filters; invasive software; unsolicited e-mail; Internet bad neighborhoods; attack prediction; botnet mitigation initiatives; malicious IP addresses; malicious activities; phishing; spam filters; Business; Computer security; Databases; IP networks; Internet; Unsolicited electronic mail (ID#: 15-4465)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6852094&isnumber=6852071

 

Armknecht, F.; Hauptmann, M.; Roos, S.; Strufe, T., "An Additional Protection Layer For Confidential Osns Posts," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.3746,3752, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883904 The design of secure and usable access schemes to personal data represent a major challenge of online social networks (OSNs). State of the art requires prior interaction to grant access. Sharing with users who are not subscribed or previously have not been accepted as contacts in any case is only possible via public posts, which can easily be abused by automatic harvesting for user profiling, targeted spear-phishing, or spamming. Moreover, users are restricted to the access rules defined by the provider, which may be overly restrictive, cumbersome to define, or insufficiently fine-grained. We suggest a complementary approach that can be easily deployed in addition to existing access control schemes, does not require any interaction, and includes even public, unsubscribed users. It exploits the fact that different social circles of a user share different experiences and hence encrypts arbitrary posts. Assembling only well-established cryptographic primitives, we prove that the security of our scheme is determined by the entropy of the required knowledge. We consequently analyze the efficiency of an informed dictionary attack and assess the entropy to be on par with common passwords. A fully functional implementation is used for performance evaluations, and available for download on the Web.
Keywords: authorisation; cryptography; social networking (online); Web; access control schemes; access rules; confidential OSN posts; cryptographic primitives; dictionary attack; online social networks; protection layer; public posts; spamming; spear-phishing; user profiling; Access control; Ciphers; Dictionaries; Entropy; Social network services; Secret Sharing; Social Network Security; Spam Protection (ID#: 15-4466)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883904&isnumber=6883277

 

Janbeglou, M.; Naderi, H.; Brownlee, N., "Effectiveness of DNS-Based Security Approaches in Large-Scale Networks," Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2014 28th International Conference on, vol., no., pp.524, 529, 13-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/WAINA.2014.87 The Domain Name System (DNS) is widely seen as a vital protocol of the modern Internet. For example, popular services like load balancers and Content Delivery Networks heavily rely on DNS. Because of its important role, DNS is also a desirable target for malicious activities such as spamming, phishing, and botnets. To protect networks against these attacks, a number of DNS-based security approaches have been proposed. The key insight of our study is to measure the effectiveness of security approaches that rely on DNS in large-scale networks. For this purpose, we answer the following questions, How often is DNS used? Are most of the Internet flows established after contacting DNS? In this study, we collected data from the University of Auckland campus network with more than 33,000 Internet users and processed it to find out how DNS is being used. Moreover, we studied the flows that were established with and without contacting DNS. Our results show that less than 5 percent of the observed flows use DNS. Therefore, we argue that those security approaches that solely depend on DNS are not sufficient to protect large-scale networks.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; protocols; DNS-based security approaches; Internet protocol; botnets; content delivery networks; domain name system; large-scale networks; load balancers; malicious activities; phishing; spamming; Databases; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; IP networks; Internet; Ports (Computers);Servers; DNS; large-scale network; network measurement; passive monitoring; statistical analysis (ID#: 15-4467)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6844690&isnumber=6844560

 

Algarni, A.; Yue Xu; Chan, T., "Social Engineering in Social Networking Sites: The Art of Impersonation," Services Computing (SCC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.797,804, June 27 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SCC.2014.108 Social networking sites (SNSs), with their large number of users and large information base, seem to be the perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, who are considered the weakest link in security. Deceiving, persuading, or influencing people to provide information or to perform an action that will benefit the attacker is known as "social engineering." Fraudulent and deceptive people use social engineering traps and tactics through SNSs to trick users into obeying them, accepting threats, and falling victim to various crimes such as phishing, sexual abuse, financial abuse, identity theft, and physical crime. Although organizations, researchers, and practitioners recognize the serious risks of social engineering, there is a severe lack of understanding and control of such threats. This may be partly due to the complexity of human behaviors in approaching, accepting, and failing to recognize social engineering tricks. This research aims to investigate the impact of source characteristics on users' susceptibility to social engineering victimization in SNSs, particularly Facebook. Using grounded theory method, we develop a model that explains what and how source characteristics influence Facebook users to judge the attacker as credible.
Keywords: computer crime; fraud; social aspects of automation; social networking (online);Facebook; SNS; attacker; deceptive people; financial abuse; fraudulent people; grounded theory method; human behaviors complexity ;identity theft; impersonation; large information base; phishing; physical crime; security; sexual abuse; social engineering traps; social engineering victimization; social engineering tactics; social networking sites; threats; user susceptibility; Encoding; Facebook; Interviews; Organizations; Receivers; Security; impersonation; information security management; social engineering; social networking sites; source credibility; trust management (ID#: 15-4468)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6930610&isnumber=6930500

 

Gupta, N.; Aggarwal, A.; Kumaraguru, P., "bit.ly/Malicious: Deep Dive Into Short URL Based E-Crime Detection," Electronic Crime Research (eCrime), 2014 APWG Symposium on, pp.14,24, 23-25 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECRIME.2014.6963161 Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a massive e-crime. To counter the dissemination of long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the concept of URL shortening has gained a lot of traction. URL shorteners take as input a long URL and output a short URL with the same landing page (as in the long URL) in return. With their immense popularity over time, URL shorteners have become a prime target for the attackers giving them an advantage to conceal malicious content. Bitly, a leading service among all shortening services is being exploited heavily to carry out phishing attacks, work-from-home scams, pornographic content propagation, etc. This imposes additional performance pressure on Bitly and other URL shorteners to be able to detect and take a timely action against the illegitimate content. In this study, we analyzed a dataset of 763,160 short URLs marked suspicious by Bitly in the month of October 2013. Our results reveal that Bitly is not using its claimed spam detection services very effectively. We also show how a suspicious Bitly account goes unnoticed despite of a prolonged recurrent illegitimate activity. Bitly displays a warning page on identification of suspicious links, but we observed this approach to be weak in controlling the overall propagation of spam. We also identified some short URL based features and coupled them with two domain specific features to classify a Bitly URL as malicious or benign and achieved an accuracy of 86.41%. The feature set identified can be generalized to other URL shortening services as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale study to highlight the issues with the implementation of Bitly's spam detection policies and proposing suitable countermeasures.
Keywords: computer crime; social networking (online);unsolicited e-mail; Twitter; URL based e-crime detection; URL shortening; bit.ly/malicious; emails; online social media; phishing attack; pornographic content propagation; spam URL; spam detection; work-from-home scam; Accuracy; Communities; Data collection; Facebook; Real-time systems; Twitter; Uniform resource locators (ID#: 15-4469)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6963161&isnumber=6963155

 

Enache, A.-C.; Sgarciu, V., "Spam Host Classification Using PSO-SVM," Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics, 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 5, 22-24 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/AQTR.2014.6857840 Search engines have become a de facto place to start information acquisition on the Internet. Sabotaging the quality of the results retrieved by search engines can lead users to doubt the search engine provider. Spam websites can serve as means of phishing. This paper shows a spam host detection approach that uses support vector machines(SVM) for classification. We create a parallel version of standard Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) to determine free parameters of the SVM classifier and apply our proposed model to a content web spamming dataset, WEBSPAM-UK2011. Our implementation of the parallel PSO is constructed on a pool of threads and each thread executes tasks associated to a particle from the swarm. Experiments showed that our proposed model can achieve a higher accuracy than regular SVM and outperforms other classifiers (C4.5, Naive Bayes). Furthermore, parallel version of standard Particle Swam Optimization(PSO) can efficiently select parameters for SVM.
Keywords: Internet; Web sites; parallel algorithms; particle swarm optimisation; search engines; security of data; support vector machines; unsolicited e-mail; Internet; PSO; SVM; Web spamming dataset; particle swarm optimization; phishing; search engines; spam Websites; spam host classification; spam host detection; support vector machines; Accuracy; Kernel; Particle swarm optimization; Sensitivity;Standards;Support vector machines; Unsolicited electronic mail; Particle Swarm Optimization; Support Vector Machine; parallelism; spam host (ID#: 15-4470)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6857840&isnumber=6857810

 

Enache, A.-C.; Patriciu, V.V., "Spam Host Classification Using Swarm Intelligence," Communications (COMM), 2014 10th International Conference on, pp.1,4, 29-31 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICComm.2014.6866669 Web Spam, or Spamdexing, is a form of Search Engine Optimization(SEO) spamming that hinders the efficiency of search engines. These types of exploits use unethical methods in order to place a web page into the first rank. Sabotaging the quality of the results retrieved by search engines can lead users to mistrust the search engine provider. Moreover, spam websites can be a starting point for phishing or malware attacks. Over the last decade Web Spamming has become an important problem. This paper shows a spam host detection approach that uses swarm intelligence. We test our model on two datasets (WEBSPAM-UK2011 and WEBSPAM-UK2007) and show that it can obtain a good accuracy. Moreover, we compared our approach with other popular classifiers (C4.5, SVM and Logistic Regression ) and empirically demonstrated that it can outperform them in some cases.
Keywords: Internet; optimisation; search engines; swarm intelligence; unsolicited e-mail; WEBSPAM-UK2007; WEBSPAM-UK2011; Web spamming; search engine optimization spamming; spam host classification; spam host detection; spamdexing; swarm intelligence; Accuracy; Data mining; Feature extraction; Particle swarm optimization; Support vector machines; Training; Unsolicited electronic mail; ant colony classification algorithm; host spam; swarm intelligence (ID#: 15-4471)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866669&isnumber=6866648

 

Drew, Jake; Moore, Tyler, "Automatic Identification of Replicated Criminal Websites Using Combined Clustering," Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2014 IEEE, pp.116, 123, 17-18 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SPW.2014.26 To be successful, cyber criminals must figure out how to scale their scams. They duplicate content on new websites, often staying one step ahead of defenders that shut down past schemes. For some scams, such as phishing and counterfeit-goods shops, the duplicated content remains nearly identical. In others, such as advanced-fee fraud and online Ponzi schemes, the criminal must alter content so that it appears different in order to evade detection by victims and law enforcement. Nevertheless, similarities often remain, in terms of the website structure or content, since making truly unique copies does not scale well. In this paper, we present a novel combined clustering method that links together replicated scam websites, even when the criminal has taken steps to hide connections. We evaluate its performance against two collected datasets of scam websites: fake-escrow services and high-yield investment programs (HYIPs). We find that our method more accurately groups similar websites together than does existing general-purpose consensus clustering methods.
Keywords: Clustering algorithms; Clustering methods; HTML; Indexes; Investment; Manuals; Sociology (ID#: 15-4472)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6957294&isnumber=6957265

 

Khan, M.S.; Ferens, K.; Kinsner, W., "A Chaotic Measure For Cognitive Machine Classification Of Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks," Cognitive Informatics & Cognitive Computing (ICCI*CC), 2014 IEEE 13th International Conference on, pp.100,108, 18-20 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCI-CC.2014.6921448 Today's evolving cyber security threats demand new, modern, and cognitive computing approaches to network security systems. In the early years of the Internet, a simple packet inspection firewall was adequate to stop the then-contemporary attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), ports scans, and phishing. Since then, DoS has evolved to include Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, especially against the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS based DDoS amplification attacks cannot be stopped easily by traditional signature based detection mechanisms because the attack packets contain authentic data, and signature based detection systems look for specific attack-byte patterns. This paper proposes a chaos based complexity measure and a cognitive machine classification algorithm to detect DNS DDoS amplification attacks. In particular, this paper computes the Lyapunov exponent to measure the complexity of a flow of packets, and classifies the traffic as either normal or anomalous, based on the magnitude of the computed exponent. Preliminary results show the proposed chaotic measure achieved a detection (classification) accuracy of about 66%, which is greater than that reported in the literature. This approach is capable of not only detecting offline threats, but has the potential of being applied over live traffic flows using DNS filters.
Keywords: Internet; firewalls; pattern classification; DNS DDoS amplification attacks; DNS filters; Internet; attack-byte patterns; chaos based complexity measure; classification accuracy; cognitive computing approach; cognitive machine classification algorithm; cyber security threats; distributed denial-of-service attacks; domain name service; network security systems; signature based detection mechanisms; simple packet inspection firewall; Chaos; Classification algorithms; Computer crime; Internet; Mathematical model; Nonlinear dynamical systems; Time series analysis; Anomaly Detection; Chaos; Cognitive Machine Learning; Cyber threats; DDoS Amplification; DNS; Data traffic;Fractal; Internet; Lyapunov exponent (ID#: 15-4473)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6921448&isnumber=6921429

 

Dainotti, A.; King, A.; Claffy, K.; Papale, F.; Pescape, A., "Analysis of a “/0” Stealth Scan from a Botnet," Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on, vol.23, no. 2, pp341,354, April 2015 doi: 10.1109/TNET.2013.2297678 Botnets are the most common vehicle of cyber-criminal activity. They are used for spamming, phishing, denial-of-service attacks, brute-force cracking, stealing private information, and cyber warfare. Botnets carry out network scans for several reasons, including searching for vulnerable machines to infect and recruit into the botnet, probing networks for enumeration or penetration, etc. We present the measurement and analysis of a horizontal scan of the entire IPv4 address space conducted by the Sality botnet in February 2011. This 12-day scan originated from approximately 3 million distinct IP addresses and used a heavily coordinated and unusually covert scanning strategy to try to discover and compromise VoIP-related (SIP server) infrastructure. We observed this event through the UCSD Network Telescope, a /8 darknet continuously receiving large amounts of unsolicited traffic, and we correlate this traffic data with other public sources of data to validate our inferences. Sality is one of the largest botnets ever identified by researchers. Its behavior represents ominous advances in the evolution of modern malware: the use of more sophisticated stealth scanning strategies by millions of coordinated bots, targeting critical voice communications infrastructure. This paper offers a detailed dissection of the botnet's scanning behavior, including general methods to correlate, visualize, and extrapolate botnet behavior across the global Internet.

Keywords: Animation; Geology; IP networks; Internet; Ports (Computers); Servers; Telescopes; Botnet; Internet background radiation; Internet telephony; Network Telescope; VoIP; communication system security; darknet; network probing; scanning (ID#: 15-4474)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6717049&isnumber=4359146

 

Li, Zhou; Alrwais, Sumayah; Wang, XiaoFeng; Alowaisheq, Eihal, "Hunting the Red Fox Online: Understanding and Detection of Mass Redirect-Script Injections," Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pp.3, 18, 18-21 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/SP.2014.8 Compromised websites that redirect web traffic to malicious hosts play a critical role in organized web crimes, serving as doorways to all kinds of malicious web activities (e.g., drive-by downloads, phishing etc.). They are also among the most elusive components of a malicious web infrastructure and extremely difficult to hunt down, due to the simplicity of redirect operations, which also happen on legitimate sites, and extensive use of cloaking techniques. Making the detection even more challenging is the recent trend of injecting redirect scripts into JavaScript (JS) files, as those files are not indexed by search engines and their infections are therefore more difficult to catch. In our research, we look at the problem from a unique angle: the adversary's strategy and constraints for deploying redirect scripts quickly and stealthily. Specifically, we found that such scripts are often blindly injected into both JS and HTML files for a rapid deployment, changes to the infected JS files are often made minimum to evade detection and also many JS files are actually JS libraries (JS-libs) whose uninfected versions are publicly available. Based upon those observations, we developed JsRED, a new technique for the automatic detection of unknown redirect-script injections. Our approach analyzes the difference between a suspicious JS-lib file and its clean counterpart to identify malicious redirect scripts and further searches for similar scripts in other JS and HTML files. This simple, lightweight approach is found to work effectively against redirect injection campaigns: our evaluation shows that JsRED captured most of compromised websites with almost no false positives, significantly outperforming a commercial detection service in terms of finding unknown JS infections. Based upon the compromised websites reported by JsRED, we further conducted a measurement study that reveals interesting features of redirect payloads and a new Peer-to-Peer network the adversary const- ucted to evade detection.
Keywords: Browsers; Feeds; HTML; Libraries; Payloads; Security; Servers; Compromised Web Sites; Differential Analysis; Web Redirection (ID#: 15-4475)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6956553&isnumber=6956545

 

Manek, Asha S; Sumithra, V; Shenoy, P Deepa; Mohan, M.Chandra; Venugopal, K R; Patnaik, L M, "DeMalFier: Detection of Malicious Web Pages Using An Effective Classifier," Data Science & Engineering (ICDSE), 2014 International Conference on, pp. 83,88, 26-28 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICDSE.2014.6974616 The web has become an indispensable global platform that glues together daily communication, sharing, trading, collaboration and service delivery. Web users often store and manage critical information that attracts cybercriminals who misuse the web and the internet to exploit vulnerabilities for illegitimate benefits. Malicious web pages are transpiring threatening issue over the internet because of the notoriety and their capability to influence. Detecting and analyzing them is very costly because of their qualities and intricacies. The complexities of attacks are increasing day by day because the attackers are using blended approaches of various existing attacking techniques. In this paper, a model DeMalFier (Detection of Malicious Web Pages using an Effective ClassiFier) has been developed to apply supervised learning approaches to identify malicious web pages relevant to malware distribution, phishing, drive-by-download and injection by extracting the content of web pages, URL-based features and features based on host information. Experimental evaluation of DeMalFier model achieved 99.9% accuracy recommending the impact of our approach for real-life deployment.
Keywords: Accuracy; Crawlers; Data models; Feature extraction; HTML; Uniform resource locators; Web pages; DeMalFier; Malicious Web Pages; Pre-Processing Techniques; Supervised Learning; Web Security (ID#: 15-4476)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6974616&isnumber=6974596

 

Lee, J.; Bauer, L.; Mazurek, M., "Studying the Effectiveness of Security Images in Internet Banking," Internet Computing, IEEE, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 54,62, Jan.-Feb., 09 2015.  doi: 10.1109/MIC.2014.108 Security images are often used as part of the login process on internet banking websites, under the theory that they can help foil phishing attacks. Previous studies, however, have yielded inconsistent results about users' ability to notice that a security image is missing. This paper describes an online study of 482 users that attempts to clarify to what extent users notice and react to the absence of security images. The majority of our participants (73 percent) entered their password when we removed the security image and caption. We found changing the appearance and other characteristics of the security image generally had little effect on whether users logged in when the security image was absent. Additionally, we subjected the passwords created by participants to a password-cracking algorithm and found that participants with stronger passwords were less likely (64.7 percent vs 80.1 percent) to enter their passwords when the security image was missing.
Keywords: Banking; Electronic mail; Internet; Maintenance engineering; Online banking; Security; Visualization (ID#: 15-4477)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6894474&isnumber=5226613

 

Singh, Surbhi; Sharma, Sangeeta, "Improving Security Mechanism To Access HDFS Data By Mobile Consumers Using Middleware-Layer Framework," Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,7, 11-13 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCCNT.2014.6963051 Revolution in the field of technology leads to the development of cloud computing which delivers on-demand and easy access to the large shared pools of online stored data, softwares and applications. It has changed the way of utilizing the IT resources but at the compromised cost of security breaches as well such as phishing attacks, impersonation, lack of confidentiality and integrity. Thus this research work deals with the core problem of providing absolute security to the mobile consumers of public cloud to improve the mobility of user's, accessing data stored on public cloud securely using tokens without depending upon the third party to generate them. This paper presents the approach of simplifying the process of authenticating and authorizing the mobile user's by implementing middleware-centric framework called MiLAMob model with the huge online data storage system i.e. HDFS. It allows the consumer's to access the data from HDFS via mobiles or through the social networking sites e.g., Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo,  etc. using OAuth 2.0 protocol. For authentication, the tokens are generated using one-time password generation technique and then encrypting them using AES method. By implementing the flexible user based policies and standards, this model improves the authorization process.
Keywords: Authentication; Cloud computing; Data models; Mobile communication; Permission; Social network services; Authentication; Authorization; Computing; HDFS; MiLAMob; OAuth 2.0; Security; Token (ID#: 15-4478)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6963051&isnumber=6962988

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review), Part 1

 

	Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review) Part 1

 

Vulnerability detection is a topic for which a great deal of research is being done.  In 2014, more than one hundred major research presentations relevant to the Science of Security were made and published.  To facilitate finding articles, we will present these in four parts. In Part 1, we will cite the first 25.

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Antunes, N.; Vieira, M., "Assessing and Comparing Vulnerability Detection Tools for Web Services: Benchmarking Approach and Examples," Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1, 1, 11 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/TSC.2014.2310221 Selecting a vulnerability detection tool is a key problem that is frequently faced by developers of security-critical web services. Research and practice shows that state-of-the-art tools present low effectiveness both in terms of vulnerability coverage and false positive rates. The main problem is that such tools are typically limited in the detection approaches implemented, and are designed for being applied in very concrete scenarios. Thus, using the wrong tool may lead to the deployment of services with undetected vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a benchmarking approach to assess and compare the effectiveness of vulnerability detection tools in web services environments. This approach was used to define two concrete benchmarks for SQL Injection vulnerability detection tools. The first is based on a predefined set of web services, and the second allows the benchmark user to specify the workload that best portrays the specific characteristics of his environment. The two benchmarks are used to assess and compare several widely used tools, including four penetration testers, three static code analyzers, and one anomaly detector. Results show that the benchmarks accurately portray the effectiveness of vulnerability detection tools (in a relative manner) and suggest that the proposed benchmarking approach can be applied in the field.
Keywords: Benchmark testing; Computer bugs; Measurement; Security; Web services (ID#: 15-4093)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6763052&isnumber=4629387

 

Gupta, M.K.; Govil, M.C.; Singh, G., "An Approach To Minimize False Positive In SQLI Vulnerabilities Detection Techniques Through Data Mining," Signal Propagation and Computer Technology (ICSPCT), 2014 International Conference on, pp.407,410, 12-13 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSPCT.2014.6884962 Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, the presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) attacks exploit most dangerous security vulnerabilities in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on taint based vulnerability detection has been quite intensive in the past decade. However, these techniques are not free from false positive and false negative results. In this paper, we propose an approach to minimize false positive in SQLI vulnerability detection techniques using data mining concepts. We have implemented a prototype tool for PHP, MySQL technologies and evaluated it on six real world applications and NIST Benchmarks. Our evaluation and comparison results show that proposed technique detects SQLI vulnerabilities with low percentage of false positives.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; data mining; security of data; social networking (online); software reliability; Facebook; Google; MySQL technology; PHP; SQL injection attack; SQLI vulnerability detection techniques; Twitter; data mining; eBay; false positive minimization; financial transaction; health problem; social communications; taint based vulnerability detection; Computers; Software; SQLI attack; SQLI vulnerability; false positive; input validation; sanitization; taint analysis (ID#: 15-4094)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6884962&isnumber=6884878

 

Cai, Jun; Yang, Shangfei; Men, Jinquan; He, Jun, "Automatic Software Vulnerability Detection Based On Guided Deep Fuzzing," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp.231,234, 27-29 June 2014.doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933551 Software security has become a very import part of information security in recent years. Fuzzing has proven successful in finding software vulnerabilities which are one major cause of information security incidents. However, the efficiency of traditional fuzz testing tools is usually very poor due to the blindness of test generation. In this paper, we present Sword, an automatic fuzzing system for software vulnerability detection, which combines fuzzing with symbolic execution and taint analysis techniques to tackle the above problem. Sword first uses symbolic execution to collect program execution paths and their corresponding constrains, then uses taint analysis to check these paths, the most dangerous paths which most likely lead to vulnerabilities will be further deep fuzzed. Thus, with the guidance of symbolic execution and taint analysis, Sword generates test cases most likely to trigger potential vulnerabilities lying deep in applications.
Keywords: Databases; Engines; Information security; Monitoring; Software; Software testing; fuzzing; software vulnerability detection; symbolic execution; taint analysis (ID#: 15-4096)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933551&isnumber=6933501

 

Li, Hui; Zhang, Weishi; Zhou, Weifu; Su, Bo, "A Novel Vulnerability Detection Method for ZigBee MAC Layer," Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on, pp.121,124, 24-27 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DASC.2014.30 Due to the limitation, such as low computation, low calculation and limited energy, wireless sensor networks (WSN) usually have some vulnerabilities, such as data overflow, 0-divides etc. This paper designed a MAC Layer Tester (called MLT) based on fuzz and border conditions algorithm to detect vulnerabilities according to IEEE 802.15.4. MLT can test protocols stack for IEEE 802.15.4, such as ZigBee. MLT builds testing architecture and simulation environment in MAC layer and can test the performance and functions of it if adopted some representative data.
Keywords: Computer crashes; IEEE 802.15 Standards; Network topology; Testing; Topology; Wireless sensor networks; Zigbee; IoT; MAC; MLT; PAN; WSN; vulnerability (ID#: 15-4097)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6945675&isnumber=6945641

 

Kulenovic, M.; Donko, D., "A Survey Of Static Code Analysis Methods For Security Vulnerabilities Detection," Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO), 2014 37th International Convention on, pp. 1381, 1386, 26-30 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/MIPRO.2014.6859783 Software security is becoming highly important for universal acceptance of applications for many kinds of transactions. Automated code analyzers can be utilized to detect security vulnerabilities during the development phase. This paper is aimed to provide a survey on Static code analysis and how it can be used to detect security vulnerabilities. The most recent findings and publications are summarized and presented in this paper. This paper provides an overview of the gains, flows and algorithms of static code analyzers. It can be considered a stepping stone for further research in this domain.
Keywords: program diagnostics; security of data; software engineering; development phase; software security vulnerabilities detection; static code analysis methods; Access control; Analytical models; Java; Privacy; Software; security; static code analysis; survey; vulnerability(ID#: 15-4098)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6859783&isnumber=6859515

 

Bo Wu; Mengjun Li; Bin Zhang; Quan Zhang; Chaojing Tang, "Directed Symbolic Execution For Binary Vulnerability Mining," Electronics, Computer and Applications, 2014 IEEE Workshop on, pp. 614, 617, 8-9 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWECA.2014.6845694 Despite more than two decades of independent, academic, and industry-related research, software vulnerabilities remain the main reason that undermine the security of our systems. Taint analysis and symbolic execution are among the most promising approaches for vulnerability detection, but either one can't remit the problem separately. In this paper, we try to combine taint analysis and symbolic execution for binary vulnerability mining and proposed a method named directed symbolic execution. Our three-step approach firstly adopts dynamic taint analysis technology to identify the safety-related data, and then uses symbolic execution system to execute the binary software while marks those safety-related data as symbols, and finally discovers vulnerabilities with our check-model. The evaluation shows that our method can be used to detect vulnerabilities in binary software more efficiently.
Keywords: data mining; program diagnostics; security of data; software reliability; binary software; binary vulnerability mining; check-model; directed symbolic execution method; dynamic taint analysis technology; safety-related data identification; software vulnerability detection; Context; Protocols; Software; Symbolic Execution; Vulnerability detection; Vulnerability model (ID#: 15-4099)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6845694&isnumber=6845536

 

Yuan-Hsin Tung; Chen-Chiu Lin; Hwai-Ling Shan, "Test as a Service: A Framework for Web Security TaaS Service in Cloud Environment," Service Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2014 IEEE 8th International Symposium on, pp.212,217, 7-11 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/SOSE.2014.36 As its name suggests, cloud testing is a form of software testing which uses cloud infrastructure. Its effective unlimited storage, quick availability of the infrastructure with scalability, flexibility and availability of distributed testing environment translate to reducing the execution time of testing of large applications and hence lead to cost-effective solutions. In cloud testing, Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) is a new model to effectively provide testing capabilities and on-demand testing to end users. There are many studies and solutions to support TaaS service. And security testing is the most suitable form for TaaS service. To leverage the features of TaaS, we propose a framework of TaaS for security testing. We implement the prototype system, Security TaaS (abbrev. S-TaaS), based on our proposed framework. The experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our framework and prototype system. The experiment results indicate that our prototype system can provide quality and stable service.
Keywords: cloud computing; program testing; security of data; TaaS service; Web security; cloud environment; cloud infrastructure; cloud testing; distributed testing environment; on-demand testing; software testing; testing capabilities; testing-as-a-service; Cloud computing; Computational modeling; Monitoring; Prototypes; Security; Software testing; TaaS; Test as a Service; cloud computing; security test; vulnerability detection; web vulnerability (ID#: 15-4100)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6830908&isnumber=6825948

 

Guowei Dong; Yan Zhang; Xin Wang; Peng Wang; Liangkun Liu, "Detecting Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities Introduced by HTML5," Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), 2014 11th International Joint Conference on, pp.319, 323, 14-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/JCSSE.2014.6841888 Recent years, HTML5 is widely adopted in popular browsers. Unfortunately, as a new Web standard, HTML5 may expand the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack surface as well as improve the interactivity of the page. In this paper, we identified 14 XSS attack vectors related to HTML5 by a systematic analysis about new tags and attributes. Based on these vectors, a XSS test vector repository is constructed and a dynamic XSS vulnerability detection tool focusing on Webmail systems is implemented. By applying the tool to some popular Webmail systems, seven exploitable XSS vulnerabilities are found. The evaluation result shows that our tool can efficiently detect XSS vulnerabilities introduced by HTML5.
Keywords: Internet; Web sites; hypermedia markup languages; security of data;HTML5;Web standard; Webmail system; XSS attack surface; XSS attack vectors; XSS test vector repository; cross site scripting vulnerability detection; dynamic XSS vulnerability detection tool; systematic analysis;HTML5;attack surface; dynamic detection (ID#: 15-4101)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6841888&isnumber=6841829

 

Gupta, M.K.; Govil, M.C.; Singh, G., "Static Analysis Approaches To Detect SQL Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities In Web Applications: A Survey," Recent Advances and Innovations in Engineering (ICRAIE), 2014, pp. 1, 5, 9-11 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICRAIE.2014.6909173 Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are most dangerous security vulnerabilities exploited in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on defensive programming, vulnerability detection and attack prevention techniques has been quite intensive in the past decade. Defensive programming is a set of coding guidelines to develop secure applications. But, mostly developers do not follow security guidelines and repeat same type of programming mistakes in their code. Attack prevention techniques protect the applications from attack during their execution in actual environment. The difficulties associated with accurate detection of SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities in coding phase of software development life cycle. This paper proposes a classification of software security approaches used to develop secure software in various phase of software development life cycle. It also presents a survey of static analysis based approaches to detect SQL Injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in source code of web applications. The aim of these approaches is to identify the weaknesses in source code before their exploitation in actual environment. This paper would help researchers to note down future direction for securing legacy web applications in early phases of software development life cycle.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; program diagnostics; security of data; software maintenance; software reliability; source code (software);SQL injection; SQLI; Web applications; XSS; attack prevention; cross site scripting vulnerabilities; defensive programming; financial transaction; health problem; legacy Web applications; malicious users; programming mistakes; security vulnerabilities; security weaknesses; social communications; software development life cycle; source code; static analysis; vulnerability detection; Analytical models; Guidelines; Manuals; Programming; Servers; Software; Testing; SQL injection; cross site scripting; static analysis; vulnerabilities; web application (ID#: 15-4102)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6909173&isnumber=6909103

 

Alqahtani, S.M.; Al Balushi, M.; John, R., "An Intelligent Intrusion Prevention System for Cloud Computing (SIPSCC)," Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), 2014 International Conference on, vol. 2, no., pp. 152, 158, 10-13 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSCI.2014.161 Cloud computing is a fast growing IT model for the exchange and delivery of different services through the Internet. However there is a plethora of security concerns in cloud computing which still need to be tackled (e.g. confidentiality, auditability and Privileged User Access). To detect and prevent such issues, the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) are effective mechanism against attacks such as SQL Injection. This study proposes a new service of IPS that prevents SQL injections when it comes over cloud computing website(CCW) using signature-based devices approach. A model has been implemented on three virtual machines. Through this implementation, a service-based intrusion prevention system in cloud computing (SIPSCC) is proposed, investigated and evaluated from three perspectives the vulnerability detection, average time, and false positives.
Keywords: SQL; Web sites; cloud computing; digital signatures; security of data; virtual machines; CCW;IDS; IPS; Internet; SIPSCC; SQL injections; cloud computing Web site; intelligent intrusion prevention system; intrusion detection system; service-based intrusion prevention system in cloud computing; signature-based device approach; virtual machines; vulnerability detection; Cloud computing; Databases; Educational institutions; Intrusion detection; Servers; SIPSCC; CCW; IDS; IPS; Open Source Hostbased Intrusion Detection System (OSSEC) (ID#: 15-4103)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6822321&isnumber=6822285

 

Fang Yu; Yi-Yang Tung, "Patcher: An Online Service for Detecting, Viewing and Patching Web Application Vulnerabilities," System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, pp.4878,4886, 6-9 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2014.598 Web application security becomes a critical issue as more and more web applications appear and serve common life and business routines in recent years. It is known that web applications are vulnerable due to software defects. Open to public users, vulnerable websites may encounter lots of malicious attacks from the Internet. We present a new web service platform where system developers can detect, view and patch potential vulnerabilities of their web applications online. Taking advantage of static string analysis techniques, our analysis ensures that the patched programs are free from vulnerabilities with respect to given attack patterns. Specifically, we integrate the service front end with program visualization techniques, developing a 3D interface/presentation for users to access and view the analysis result under visualization environment with the aim of improving users' comprehension on programs, especially how vulnerabilities get exploited and patched. We report our analysis result on several open source applications, finding and patching various unknown/known vulnerabilities.
Keywords: Web services; Web sites; program diagnostics; program visualisation; public domain software; security of data; software maintenance;3D interface development;3D presentation development; Internet; Patcher; Web application security; Web application vulnerability detection; Web application vulnerability patching; Web application vulnerability viewing; Web service platform; Web sites; malicious attacks; online service; open source applications; program comprehension; program visualization techniques; service front end integration; software defects; static string analysis techniques; Automata; Mobile handsets; Reachability analysis; Security; Three-dimensional displays; Visualization; Web services; program comprehension; string analysis; visualization; web security (ID#: 15-4104)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6759201&isnumber=6758592

 

Zhou Lin; Liu Fei; Gan Shuitao; Qin Xiaojun; Han Wenbao, "Symbolic Execution of Network Software Based on Unit Testing," Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS), 2014 9th IEEE International Conference on, pp.128,132, 6-8 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/NAS.2014.28 Complex interactions and the distributed nature of network software make automated testing and debugging before deployment a necessity. Symbolic execution is a systematic program analysis technique that has become increasingly popular in network software testing, due to algorithmic advances and availability of computational power and constraint solving technology. However, A main challenge is to detect determining symbolic values for program variables related to library, loops and cryptograph algorithms which are widely used in network software. In this paper, we propose a unit symbolic analysis, a hybrid technique that enables fully automatic symbolic analysis even for the traditionally challenging code. The novelties of this work are threefold: 1) we flexibly employs static symbolic execution to amplify the effect of dynamic symbolic execution on demand, 2) dynamic executions and regression analysis are performed on the unit tests constructed from the code segments to infer program semantics needed by static analysis, and 3) symbolic analysis is utilized to tackle loop structure and cryptograph algorithm module. We developed the Net Sym framework, consisting of a static component that performs symbolic analysis and partitions a program, a dynamic analysis that synthesizes unit tests and automatically infers symbolic values for program variables, and a protocol that enables static and dynamic analyses to be run interactively and concurrently. Our experimental results show that by handling cryptograph algorithms, loops and library calls that a traditional symbolic analysis cannot process, unit symbolic analysis detects more vulnerabilities in less time. The technique is scalable for real-world programs such as GHttpd, SQL Server and GDI.
Keywords: cryptography; distributed processing; program control structures; program debugging; program slicing; program testing; regression analysis; software libraries; GDI; GHttpd; Net Sym framework; SQL Server; algorithmic advances; automated debugging; automated testing; code segments; computational power; concurrent analysis; constraint solving technology; cryptograph algorithm module; cryptograph algorithms; dynamic executions; dynamic symbolic execution; fully automatic symbolic analysis; library; loop structure; network software symbolic execution; network software testing; program partitioning; program semantics inference; program variables; protocol; regression analysis; software deployment; static analysis; static component; static symbolic execution; symbolic value inference; systematic program analysis technique; unit symbolic analysis; unit test synthesis; unit testing; vulnerability detection; Algorithm design and analysis; Cryptography; Heuristic algorithms; Libraries; Performance analysis; Software; Testing (ID#: 15-4105)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6923171&isnumber=6923143

 

Busby Earle, C.C.R.; France, R.B.; Ray, I., "Analysing Requirements to Detect Latent Security Vulnerabilities," Software Security and Reliability-Companion (SERE-C), 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on, pp.168,175, June 30 2014-July 2 2014. doi: 10.1109/SERE-C.2014.35 To fully embrace the challenge of securing software, security concerns must be considered at the earliest stages of software development. Studies have shown that this reduces the time, cost and effort required to integrate security features into software during development. In this paper we describe a technique for uncovering potential vulnerabilities through an analysis of software requirements and describe its use using a small, motivating example.
Keywords: security of data; software engineering; latent security vulnerabilities detection; security features; software development; software requirements; software security; Context; Educational institutions; Natural languages; Object recognition; Ontologies; Security; Software; Loophole Analysis; Requirements; Security; Vulnerabilities (ID#: 15-4106)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6901654&isnumber=6901618

 

Hong, Junho; Liu, Chen-Ching; Govindarasu, Manimaran, "Integrated Anomaly Detection for cyber security of the substations," PES General Meeting | Conference & Exposition, 2014 IEEE, pp.1, 1, 27-31 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PESGM.2014.6939779 Cyber intrusions to substations of a power grid are a source of vulnerability since most substations are unmanned and with limited protection of the physical security. In the worst case, simultaneous intrusions into multiple substations can lead to severe cascading events, causing catastrophic power outages. In this paper, an integrated Anomaly Detection System (ADS) is proposed which contains host- and network-based anomaly detection systems for the substations, and simultaneous anomaly detection for multiple substations. Potential scenarios of simultaneous intrusions into the substations have been simulated using a substation automation testbed. The host-based anomaly detection considers temporal anomalies in the substation facilities, e.g., user interfaces, Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) and circuit breakers. The malicious behaviors of substation automation based on multicast messages, e.g., Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) and Sampled Measured Value (SMV), are incorporated in the proposed network-based anomaly detection. The proposed simultaneous intrusion detection method is able to identify the same type of attacks at multiple substations and their locations. The result is a new integrated tool for detection and mitigation of cyber intrusions at a single substation or multiple substations of a power grid.
Keywords: Computer science Computer security; Educational institutions; Electrical engineering; Power grids; Substation automation (ID#: 15-4107)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6939779&isnumber=6938773

 

Junho Hong; Chen-Ching Liu; Govindarasu, M., "Integrated Anomaly Detection for Cyber Security of the Substations," Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on, vol.5, no.4, pp.1643, 1653, July 2014. doi: 10.1109/TSG.2013.2294473 Cyber intrusions to substations of a power grid are a source of vulnerability since most substations are unmanned and with limited protection of the physical security. In the worst case, simultaneous intrusions into multiple substations can lead to severe cascading events, causing catastrophic power outages. In this paper, an integrated Anomaly Detection System (ADS) is proposed which contains host- and network-based anomaly detection systems for the substations, and simultaneous anomaly detection for multiple substations. Potential scenarios of simultaneous intrusions into the substations have been simulated using a substation automation testbed. The host-based anomaly detection considers temporal anomalies in the substation facilities, e.g., user-interfaces, Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) and circuit breakers. The malicious behaviors of substation automation based on multicast messages, e.g., Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) and Sampled Measured Value (SMV), are incorporated in the proposed network-based anomaly detection. The proposed simultaneous intrusion detection method is able to identify the same type of attacks at multiple substations and their locations. The result is a new integrated tool for detection and mitigation of cyber intrusions at a single substation or multiple substations of a power grid.
Keywords: computer network security; power engineering computing; power grids; power system reliability; substation automation; ADS; GOOSE; IED; SMV; catastrophic power outages; circuit breakers; cyber intrusions; generic object oriented substation event; host-based anomaly detection systems; integrated anomaly detection system; intelligent electronic devices; malicious behaviors; multicast messages; network-based anomaly detection systems; physical security; power grid; sampled measured value; severe cascading events; simultaneous anomaly detection; simultaneous intrusion detection method; substation automation testbed; substation facilities; substations; temporal anomalies; user-interfaces; Circuit breakers; Computer security; Intrusion detection; Power grids; Substation automation; Anomaly detection; GOOSE anomaly detection; SMV anomaly detection and intrusion detection; cyber security of substations (ID#: 15-4108)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6786500&isnumber=6839066

 

Park, Seongwook; Kim, Gyeonghoon; Park, Junyoung; Yoo, Hoi-Jun, "A 1.5nJ/Pixel Super-Resolution Enhanced FAST Corner Detection Processor For High Accuracy AR," European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), ESSCIRC 2014 - 40th , vol., no., pp.191,194, 22-26 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ESSCIRC.2014.6942054 Most vision applications such as object recognition and augmented reality require a high resolution image because their performance is heavily dependent on a local feature point like an edge and a corner. Unfortunately, the vulnerability of correct feature detection always exists in vision applications. Moreover, it is hard to increase image resolution because there is the trade-off between the image resolution and the system power consumption in a wearable device. To resolve this, we present an energy-efficient Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) corner detection processor with a high-throughput super-resolution 4-core cluster for low-power and high accuracy AR applications. To perform high throughput super-resolution, the hardware is proposed with an adaptive multi-issue multiply-accumulate (AMMAC) unit and a shift register (SHR) based angle integrator. Finally, a proposed super-resolution enhanced FAST corner detection processor performs 13.51% detection accuracy enhanced FAST corner detection on up to a 16× super-resolution image with only 1.5nJ/pixel energy efficiency.
Keywords: Accuracy; Augmented reality; Energy resolution; Feature extraction; Image resolution; Real-time systems; Signal resolution (ID#: 15-4109)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6942054&isnumber=6941994

 

Maniatakos, M.; Michael, M.K.; Makris, Y., "Multiple-Bit Upset Protection in Microprocessor Memory Arrays Using Vulnerability-Based Parity Optimization and Interleaving," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1, 1, 11 November 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2014.2365032 We propose a technology-independent vulnerability-driven parity selection method for protecting modern microprocessor in-core memory arrays against multiple-bit upsets (MBUs). As MBUs constitute over 50% of the upsets in recent technologies, error correcting codes or physical interleaving are typically employed to effectively protect out-of-core memory structures, such as caches. Such methods, however, are not applicable to high performance in-core arrays, due to computational complexity, high delay, and area overhead. Therefore, we investigate vulnerability-based parity forest formation as an effective mechanism for detecting errors. Checkpointing and pipeline flushing can subsequently be used for correction. As the optimal parity tree construction for MBU detection is a computationally complex problem, an integer linear program formulation is introduced. In addition, vulnerability-based interleaving (VBI) is explored as a mechanism for further enhancing in-core array resiliency in constrained, single parity tree cases. VBI first physically disperses bitlines based on their vulnerability factor and then applies selective parity to these lines. Experimental results on Alpha 21264 and Intel P6 in-core memory arrays demonstrate that the proposed parity tree selection and VBI methods can achieve vulnerability reduction up to 86%, even when a small number of bits are added to the parity trees.
Keywords: Cost function; Delays; Equations; Error correction codes; Microprocessors; Random access memory; Architectural vulnerability factor (AVF);interleaving; memory array; modern microprocessor; optimization; parity (ID#: 15-4110)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6953332&isnumber=4359553

 

Shila, D.M.; Venugopal, V., "Design, Implementation And Security Analysis of Hardware Trojan Threats in FPGA," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.719, 724, 10-14 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICC.2014.6883404 Hardware Trojan Threats (HTTs) are stealthy components embedded inside integrated circuits (ICs) with an intention to attack and cripple the IC similar to viruses infecting the human body. Previous efforts have focused essentially on systems being compromised using HTTs and the effectiveness of physical parameters including power consumption, timing variation and utilization for detecting HTTs. We propose a novel metric for hardware Trojan detection coined as HTT detectability metric (HDM) that uses a weighted combination of normalized physical parameters. HTTs are identified by comparing the HDM with an optimal detection threshold; if the monitored HDM exceeds the estimated optimal detection threshold, the IC will be tagged as malicious. As opposed to existing efforts, this work investigates a system model from a designer perspective in increasing the security of the device and an adversary model from an attacker perspective exposing and exploiting the vulnerabilities in the device. Using existing Trojan implementations and Trojan taxonomy as a baseline, seven HTTs were designed and implemented on a FPGA testbed; these Trojans perform a variety of threats ranging from sensitive information leak, denial of service to beat the Root of Trust (RoT). Security analysis on the implemented Trojans showed that existing detection techniques based on physical characteristics such as power consumption, timing variation or utilization alone does not necessarily capture the existence of HTTs and only a maximum of 57% of designed HTTs were detected. On the other hand, 86% of the implemented Trojans were detected with HDM. We further carry out analytical studies to determine the optimal detection threshold that minimizes the summation of false alarm and missed detection probabilities.
Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; integrated logic circuits; invasive software; FPGA testbed; HDM; HTT detectability metric; HTT detection; ICs; RoT; Trojan taxonomy; denial of service; hardware Trojan detection technique; hardware Trojan threats; integrated circuits; missed detection probability; normalized physical parameters; optimal detection threshold; power consumption; root of trust; security analysis; sensitive information leak; summation of false alarm; timing variation; Encryption; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Power demand; Timing; Trojan horses; Design; Hardware Trojans; Resiliency; Security (ID#: 15-4111)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6883404&isnumber=6883277

 

Badawy, M.A.; El-Fishawy, N.A.; Elshakankiry, O., "Using Patch Management Tools to Enhance the Signature Customization for IDS Based on Vulnerability Scanner," Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), 2014 11th International Conference on, pp.529, 533, 7-9 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ITNG.2014.78 Signature customization is a technique to help the misuse network based IDS to select an appropriate signature for the protected hosts. Additionally, it eliminates unnecessary signature matching in order to enhance the detection capabilities for the NIDS. This paper assesses the effectiveness of depending only on vulnerability scanners to perform signature customization. In addition, it introduces the integration of vulnerability scanners with patch management tools to limit the number of false positive and false negative customizations. The results show that adding the patch management tools to the integration between the NIDS and vulnerability scanners can reduce the false signature customization. The proposed system will insure tuning accuracy for average of 30% of all shielded rules in the original signature customization system, accordingly improving the overall detection efficiency for the IDS.
Keywords: computer network security; digital signatures; NIDS; false negative customizations; false positive customizations; intrusion detection system; network based IDS; patch management tools; signature customization system; signature matching; vulnerability scanners; Accuracy; Computer architecture; Computers; Intrusion detection; NIST; Software; NIDS; Snort; Vulnerability assessment; WSUS; risk assessment (ID#: 15-4112)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6822251&isnumber=6822158

 

Jovanovic, A.; Botteron, C.; Farine, P.-A., "Multi-test Detection And Protection Algorithm Against Spoofing Attacks On GNSS Receivers," Position, Location and Navigation Symposium - PLANS 2014, 2014 IEEE/ION, pp.1258,1271, 5-8 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/PLANS.2014.6851501 The vulnerability against interference, spoofing, and jamming of GNSS receivers is considered nowadays a major security concern. This security threat is exacerbated with the existing market availability of GPS jamming and spoofing equipment sold at reasonable prices. If jamming is the main issue faced at present, spoofing, which allows hijacking someone from the expected path, may lead to even worse consequences. Even with the latest security measures that are going to be deployed on the Galileo PRS signals, GNSS receivers are prone to attacks that are relatively easy to implement. In this paper, we identify different countermeasures and security schemes that can be used against spoofing attacks. These countermeasures include some modifications on the GNSS receiver's side, rather than requiring modifications of the whole existing GNSS infrastructure. More specifically, we propose a detection and protection scheme consisting of several statistical tests, based on the computations of moving variances of Doppler offset and C/No estimates, together with a consistency test of the PVT computation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme through simulations and using a measurement setup consisting of a Spirent GSS8000 full constellation simulator whose output is combined with the one from a rooftop GPS antenna before being fed to a receiver front-end. Finally, we compute the probability of detection and false alarm in spoofing detection using the proposed scheme.
Keywords: Doppler effect; Global Positioning System; antenna feeds; jamming; radio receivers; statistical testing; telecommunication security; C/No estimates; Doppler offset; GNSS receivers; GPS jamming equipment; GPS spoofing equipment; Galileo PRS signals; PVT computation; Spirent GSS8000 full constellation simulator; consistency test; detection probability computation; false alarm probability computation; interference; measurement setup; multitest detection algorithm; multitest protection algorithm; receiver front-end; rooftop GPS antenna; security measures; security threat; spoofing attacks; statistical tests; Cryptography; Global Positioning System; Monitoring; Receivers; Satellite broadcasting; Satellites; GPS; Galileo; Vulnerability; countermeasures; detection; protection; security; spoofing attacks; statistical tests (ID#: 15-4113)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6851501&isnumber=6851348

 

Gupta, A.; Pandey, O.J.; Shukla, M.; Dadhich, A.; Ingle, A.; Ambhore, V., "Intelligent Perpetual Echo Attack Detection on User Datagram Protocol Port 7 Using Ant Colony Optimization," Electronic Systems, Signal Processing and Computing Technologies (ICESC), 2014 International Conference on, pp.419,424, 9-11 Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICESC.2014.82 The escalating complexity of computer networks on a daily basis has increased the probability of malicious exploitation. Even a rare vulnerability in a single computer might compromise the network security of an entire organisation. Intrusion Detection Systems form an integral component of the mechanisms designed to prevent internet and data communication systems from such attacks. The attacks on the network comprise of information gathering and modification through unauthorized access to resources and denial of service to legitimate users. IDS play a key role in detecting the patterns of behaviour on the network that might be indicative of impending attacks. Majority of groundbreaking research on IDS is carried out on KDD'99 dataset and focuses on either all the attacks in the network or the attacks corresponding to TCP/IP protocol. This paper presents a step forward in this direction where the IDS model addresses a specific part of the network attacks commonly detected at port 7 in UDP. Port scans in UDP account for a sizable portion of the Internet traffic and comparatively little research characterizes security in UDP port scan activity. To meet the growing trend of attacks and other security challenges in the constantly evolving internet arena, this is paper presents a computationally intelligent intrusion detection mechanism using swarm intelligence paradigm, particularly ant colony optimisation, to analyze sample network traces in UDP port scans. This work aims at generating customised and efficient network intrusion detection systems using soft computing to increase general network security through specific network security.
Keywords: ant colony optimisation; computer network security; transport protocols; Internet traffic; TCP/IP protocol; ant colony optimization; computer network security; computer networks escalating complexity; denial of service; intelligent intrusion detection mechanism; intelligent perpetual echo attack detection; malicious exploitation probability; unauthorized access; user datagram protocol port 7; Computers; Internet; Intrusion detection; Ports (Computers); Protocols; Real-time systems; Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO);Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS); User Datagram Protocol (UDP);attacks; network security; perpetual echo; port scans (ID#: 15-4114)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6745415&isnumber=6745317

 

Fonseca, J.; Vieira, M.; Madeira, H., "Evaluation of Web Security Mechanisms Using Vulnerability & Attack Injection," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 11, no. 5, pp.440, 453, Sept.-Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2013.45 In this paper we propose a methodology and a prototype tool to evaluate web application security mechanisms. The methodology is based on the idea that injecting realistic vulnerabilities in a web application and attacking them automatically can be used to support the assessment of existing security mechanisms and tools in custom setup scenarios. To provide true to life results, the proposed vulnerability and attack injection methodology relies on the study of a large number of vulnerabilities in real web applications. In addition to the generic methodology, the paper describes the implementation of the Vulnerability & Attack Injector Tool (VAIT) that allows the automation of the entire process. We used this tool to run a set of experiments that demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The experiments include the evaluation of coverage and false positives of an intrusion detection system for SQL Injection attacks and the assessment of the effectiveness of two top commercial web application vulnerability scanners. Results show that the injection of vulnerabilities and attacks is indeed an effective way to evaluate security mechanisms and to point out not only their weaknesses but also ways for their improvement.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; fault diagnosis; security of data; software fault tolerance; SQL Injection attacks; VAIT; Web application security mechanism evaluation; attack injection methodology; fault injection; intrusion detection system; vulnerability injection methodology; vulnerability-&-attack injector tool; Databases; Educational institutions; Input variables; Probes; Security; Software; TV; Security; fault injection; internet applications; review and evaluation (ID#: 15-4115)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6629992&isnumber=6893064

 

Fonseca, J.; Seixas, N.; Vieira, M.; Madeira, H., "Analysis of Field Data on Web Security Vulnerabilities," Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 11, no.2, pp. 89, 100, March-April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2013.37 Most web applications have critical bugs (faults) affecting their security, which makes them vulnerable to attacks by hackers and organized crime. To prevent these security problems from occurring it is of utmost importance to understand the typical software faults. This paper contributes to this body of knowledge by presenting a field study on two of the most widely spread and critical web application vulnerabilities: SQL Injection and XSS. It analyzes the source code of security patches of widely used Web applications written in weak and strong typed languages. Results show that only a small subset of software fault types, affecting a restricted collection of statements, is related to security. To understand how these vulnerabilities are really exploited by hackers, this paper also presents an analysis of the source code of the scripts used to attack them. The outcomes of this study can be used to train software developers and code inspectors in the detection of such faults and are also the foundation for the research of realistic vulnerability and attack injectors that can be used to assess security mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, vulnerability scanners, and static code analyzers.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; security of data; software fault tolerance; source code (software); SQL injection; Web application vulnerabilities; Web security vulnerabilities; XSS; attack injectors; code inspectors; field data analysis; intrusion detection systems; realistic vulnerability; security mechanisms; security patches; software faults; source code; static code analyzers; vulnerability scanners; Awards activities; Blogs; Internet; Java; Security; Software; Internet applications; Security; languages; review and evaluation (ID#: 15-4116)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6589556&isnumber=6785951

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review), Part 2

 

	Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review) Part 2

 

Vulnerability detection is a topic for which a great deal of research is being done.  In 2014, more than one hundred major research presentations relevant to the Science of Security were made and published.  To facilitate finding articles, we will present these in four parts. In Part 2, we will cite the next 25.

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Liban, A.; Hilles, S.M.S., "Enhancing Mysql Injector Vulnerability Checker Tool (Mysql Injector) Using Inference Binary Search Algorithm For Blind Timing-Based Attack," Control and System Graduate Research Colloquium (ICSGRC), 2014 IEEE 5th, pp.47, 52, 11-12 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSGRC.2014.6908694 Securing the database against frequent attacks is a big concern; attackers usually intend to snitch private information and damage databases. These days, web applications are widely used as a meddler between computer users. Web applications are also used mostly by e-commerce companies, and these types of applications need a secured database in order to keep sensitive and confidential information. Since Blind SQL injection attacks occurred as a new way of accessing database through the application rather than directly through the database itself, they have become popular among hackers and malicious users. Many detection tools are developed to handle this problem but they have limitations. This study enhances SQL-injection vulnerability scanning tool for automatic creation of SQL-injection attacks (MYSQL Injector) using time-based attack with Inference Binary Search Algorithm. It covers four types of blind SQL injection attacks, true/false, true error, time-based and order by attacks. This tool will automate the process of the blind SQL injection attacks to check the blind SQL injection vulnerability in the PHP-based websites that use MySQL databases. Forty four vulnerable websites and thirty non vulnerable websites were tested to ensure the accuracy of the tool. The result shows 93% accuracy for detecting the vulnerability while MySQL injector performs 84%.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; Web sites; computer crime; electronic commerce; formal verification;search problems; MySQL databases; MySQL injector vulnerability checker tool; PHP-based Web sites; SQL-injection vulnerability scanning tool; Web applications; blind SQL injection attacks; blind timing-based attack; confidential information; e-commerce companies; hackers; inference binary search algorithm; malicious users; sensitive information; Accuracy; Control systems; Databases; HTML; Inference algorithms; Servers; Testing; SQL Injection; Web Security; blind Sql Injection (ID#: 15-4117)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6908694&isnumber=6908680

 

Gersch, J.; Massey, D.; Papadopoulos, C., "Incremental Deployment Strategies for Effective Detection and Prevention of BGP Origin Hijacks," Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2014 IEEE 34th International Conference on, pp.670, 679, June 30 2014-July 3 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICDCS.2014.74 A variety of solutions have been proposed for detecting and preventing IP hijack attacks. Despite potentially serious consequences these solutions have not been widely deployed, partially because many ISPs do not view their risk as large enough to warrant investment. Nevertheless, a number of organizations such as critical national infrastructure are at a very high risk level and require a deployed solution. Is it possible for these sites to be protected despite the majority apathy, given that a critical mass of ISPs is generally required to participate in the solution? We examine this conflict by presenting an approach which determines AS vulnerability based on topological location. We next examine the effectiveness of incremental security deployment. We separately examine BGP hijack detection which, if improperly peered, may completely miss a hijack. Finally, we address a pessimistic view with respect to deployment and propose an approach in which an autonomous system can act in its own self-interest to determine a minimal threshold for hijack detection or prevention.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; AS vulnerability; BGP origin hijacks; IP hijack attacks; Internet protocol; Internet service providers; border gateway protocol; critical national infrastructure; hijack detection; hijack prevention; incremental deployment strategies ;incremental security deployment; topological location; Analytical models; IP networks; Internet; Measurement Resistance; Routing; Security; BGP; BGP Security; BGP hijack prevention; IP Hijacking; ROVER; Routing; Security; simulation (ID#: 15-4118)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6888942&isnumber=6888866

 

Strobl, Christian, "Arc Fault Detection - a Model-based Approach," ICEC 2014; The 27th International Conference on Electrical Contacts; Proceedings on pp.1,6, 22-26 June 2014. Abstract: Especially in electrical networks with distributed sources and a large variety of possible loads it makes sense to combine models of the components in a modular conception in order to analyze the vulnerability to arc faults and to develop reliable arc fault detection referring to the specific system characteristics. Therefore it is appropriate to analyze the small-signal behavior of the sources, the lines and the loads at a great variety of operating points and to consider the inherent characteristics in the time and frequency domain (e.g. switching frequencies of converters), if normal operation is to be distinguished from operation with arc fault and its typical broadband noise. This model-based approach allows a system-adapted design of pre-processing analogue filters in LF- or VLF-sensors and precise feature selection in pattern recognition algorithms for the purpose of arc fault detection and classification. After a generalized description the model-based methods are specified for the application field of photovoltaics and for lithium-ion-batteries.
Keywords:  (not provided) (ID#: 15-4119)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6857196&isnumber=6857134

 

Qinghai Liu; Hong Shen; Hui Tian; Yingpeng Sang, "Using Symmetry Dicke State as Security Detection Particle in Quantum "Ping-Pong" Protocol," Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Programming (PAAP), 2014 Sixth International Symposium on, pp.244,249, 13-15 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PAAP.2014.58 Quantum Mechanics is one of the basic theories in modern physics, which has been widely used in many modern applications. In order to transmit a secure message, the deterministic secure quantum direct communication protocol was proposed. It has attracted great interest of researchers afterwards. But the protocol was proved to have many vulnerabilities, and can be attacked by eavesdropper. Many researchers have tried to improve it, with the concentration on the security detection strategy. In this paper, the symmetry Dicke state is used to detect eavesdropper. The quantum direct communication protocol that uses symmetry Dicke state as security detection particle and the method of entropy theory are introduced, and three detection strategies are compared. During the security analysis, we found that the efficiency of the proposed mothed is higher than the original "Ping-Pong" Protocol and the mothed that use two particles of EPR pair.
Keywords: entropy; protocols; quantum communication; telecommunication security; deterministic secure quantum direct communication protocol; eavesdropper detection; entropy theory; modern physics; quantum mechanics; quantum ping-pong protocol; secure message; security analysis; security detection particle; security detection strategy; symmetry Dicke state; Atmospheric measurements; Encoding; Particle measurements; Photonics; Protocols; Quantum mechanics; Security; "Ping-Pong" Protocol; Security Detection Strategy; Symmetry Dicke state; protocol security (ID#: 15-4120)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916472&isnumber=6916413

 

Bou-Harb, E.; Debbabi, M.; Assi, C., "Cyber Scanning: A Comprehensive Survey," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol.16, no.3, pp.1496, 1519, Third Quarter 2014. doi: 10.1109/SURV.2013.102913.00020 Cyber scanning refers to the task of probing enterprise networks or Internet wide services, searching for vulnerabilities or ways to infiltrate IT assets. This misdemeanor is often the primarily methodology that is adopted by attackers prior to launching a targeted cyber attack. Hence, it is of paramount importance to research and adopt methods for the detection and attribution of cyber scanning. Nevertheless, with the surge of complex offered services from one side and the proliferation of hackers' refined, advanced, and sophisticated techniques from the other side, the task of containing cyber scanning poses serious issues and challenges. Furthermore recently, there has been a flourishing of a cyber phenomenon dubbed as cyber scanning campaigns - scanning techniques that are highly distributed, possess composite stealth capabilities and high coordination - rendering almost all current detection techniques unfeasible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the entire cyber scanning topic. It categorizes cyber scanning by elaborating on its nature, strategies and approaches. It also provides the reader with a classification and an exhaustive review of its techniques. Moreover, it offers a taxonomy of the current literature by focusing on distributed cyber scanning detection methods. To tackle cyber scanning campaigns, this paper uniquely reports on the analysis of two recent cyber scanning incidents. Finally, several concluding remarks are discussed.
Keywords: Internet; security of data ;Internet wide services; cyber scanning technique; distributed cyber scanning detection method; enterprise networks; targeted cyber attack; Cyberspace; Internet; Monitoring; Ports (Computers); Probes; Protocols; Servers; Cyber scanning; Network reconnaissance; Probing; Probing campaigns; Scanning events (ID#: 15-4121)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6657498&isnumber=6880447

 

Alegre, Federico; Soldi, Giovanni; Evans, Nicholas; Fauve, Benoit; Liu, Jasmin, "Evasion and Obfuscation In Speaker Recognition Surveillance And Forensics," Biometrics And Forensics (IWBF), 2014 International Workshop on, pp. 1, 6, 27-28 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/IWBF.2014.6914244 This paper presents the first investigation of evasion and obfuscation in the context of speaker recognition surveillance and forensics. In contrast to spoofing, which aims to provoke false acceptances in authentication applications, evasion and obfuscation target detection and recognition modules in order to provoke missed detections. The paper presents our analysis of each vulnerability and the potential for countermeasures using standard NIST datasets and protocols and six different speaker recognition systems (from a standard GMM-UBM system to a state-of-the-art i-vector system). Results show that all systems are vulnerable to both evasion and obfuscation attacks and that a new generalised countermeasure shows promising detection performance. While all evasion attacks and almost all obfuscation attacks are detected in the case of this particular setup, the work nonetheless highlights the need for further research.
Keywords: Biometrics (access control);Forensics; Speaker recognition; Speech; Speech recognition; Standards; Surveillance; biometrics; evasion; forensics; obfuscation; speaker recognition; spoofing; surveillance (ID#: 15-4122)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6914244&isnumber=6914235

 

Goseva-Popstojanova, K.; Dimitrijevikj, A., "Distinguishing between Web Attacks and Vulnerability Scans Based on Behavioral Characteristics," Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2014 28th International Conference on, pp.42, 48, 13-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/WAINA.2014.15 The number of vulnerabilities and reported attacks on Web systems are showing increasing trends, which clearly illustrate the need for better understanding of malicious cyber activities. In this paper we use clustering to classify attacker activities aimed at Web systems. The empirical analysis is based on four datasets, each in duration of several months, collected by high-interaction honey pots. The results show that behavioral clustering analysis can be used to distinguish between attack sessions and vulnerability scan sessions. However, the performance heavily depends on the dataset. Furthermore, the results show that attacks differ from vulnerability scans in a small number of features (i.e., session characteristics). Specifically, for each dataset, the best feature selection method (in terms of the high probability of detection and low probability of false alarm) selects only three features and results into three to four clusters, significantly improving the performance of clustering compared to the case when all features are used. The best subset of features and the extent of the improvement, however, also depend on the dataset.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; Web attacks; Web systems; behavioral characteristics; behavioral clustering analysis; feature selection method; high-interaction honey pots; malicious cyber activities; vulnerability scans; Blogs; Encyclopedias; Feature extraction; Radio access networks; Support vector machines; Web 2.0;Web applications; attacks; classification of malicious cyber activities; honeypots; vulnerability scans (ID#: 15-4123)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6844611&isnumber=6844560

 

Salman, A.; Elhajj, I.H.; Chehab, A.; Kayssi, A., "DAIDS: An Architecture for Modular Mobile IDS," Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2014 28th International Conference on, pp. 328, 333, 13-16 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/WAINA.2014.54 The popularity of mobile devices and the enormous number of third party mobile applications in the market have naturally lead to several vulnerabilities being identified and abused. This is coupled with the immaturity of intrusion detection system (IDS) technology targeting mobile devices. In this paper we propose a modular host-based IDS framework for mobile devices that uses behavior analysis to profile applications on the Android platform. Anomaly detection can then be used to categorize malicious behavior and alert users. The proposed system accommodates different detection algorithms, and is being tested at a major telecom operator in North America. This paper highlights the architecture, findings, and lessons learned.
Keywords: Android (operating system); mobile computing; mobile radio; security of data; Android platform; DAIDS; North America; anomaly detection ;behavior analysis; detection algorithms; intrusion detection system; malicious behavior; mobile devices; modular mobile IDS; profile applications; telecom operator; third party mobile applications; Androids; Databases; Detectors; Humanoid robots; Intrusion detection; Malware; Monitoring; behavior profiling; dynamic analysis; intrusion detection (ID#: 15-4124)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6844659&isnumber=6844560

 

Upasani, G.; Vera, X.; Gonzalez, A., "Framework for Economical Error Recovery In Embedded Cores," On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS), 2014 IEEE 20th International, pp.146, 153, 7-9 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/IOLTS.2014.6873687 The vulnerability of the current and future processors towards transient errors caused by particle strikes is expected to increase rapidly because of exponential growth rate of on-chip transistors, the lower voltages and the shrinking feature size. This encourages innovation in the direction of finding new techniques for providing robustness in logic and memories that allow meeting the desired failures in-time (FIT) budget in future chip multiprocessors (CMPs) present in embedded systems. In embedded systems two aspects of robustness, error detection and containment, are of paramount importance. This paper proposes a light-weight and scalable architecture that uses acoustic wave detectors for error detection and contains errors at the core level. We show how selectively applying error containment can reduce the number of detectors required for error containment. We observe that by using 17 detectors we can achieve error containment coverage of 97.8%.
Keywords: acoustic transducers; embedded systems; error detection; failure analysis; integrated logic circuits; microprocessor chips; radiation hardening (electronics);storage management chips; CMPs; FIT budget; acoustic wave detectors; chip multiprocessors; core level; economical error recovery; embedded cores; embedded systems; error containment ;error detection; exponential growth rate; failures in-time; future processors; memories; on-chip transistors; particle strikes; transient errors; Acoustic waves; Checkpointing; Detectors; Embedded systems; Memory management; Program processors; Robustness (ID#: 15-4125)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6873687&isnumber=6873658

 

Cam, H.; Mouallem, P.; Yilin Mo; Sinopoli, B.; Nkrumah, B., "Modeling Impact Of Attacks, Recovery, And Attackability Conditions For Situational Awareness," Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), 2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on , vol., no., pp.181,187, 3-6 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/CogSIMA.2014.6816560 A distributed cyber control system comprises various types of assets, including sensors, intrusion detection systems, scanners, controllers, and actuators. The modeling and analysis of these components usually require multi-disciplinary approaches. This paper presents a modeling and dynamic analysis of a distributed cyber control system for situational awareness by taking advantage of control theory and time Petri net. Linear time-invariant systems are used to model the target system, attacks, assets influences, and an anomaly-based intrusion detection system. Time Petri nets are used to model the impact and timing relationships of attacks, vulnerability, and recovery at every node. To characterize those distributed control systems that are perfectly attackable, algebraic and topological attackability conditions are derived. Numerical evaluation is performed to determine the impact of attacks on distributed control system.
Keywords: {Petri nets; distributed processing; security of data; actuators; anomaly-based intrusion detection system; assets influence; control theory; controllers; distributed control system; distributed cyber control system; dynamic analysis; linear time-invariant system; modeling impact; numerical evaluation; scanners; situational awareness; time Petri nets; timing relationships; topological attackability condition; Analytical models; Decentralized control; Fires; Intrusion detection; Linear systems; Sensors (ID#: 15-4126)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6816560&isnumber=6816529

 

Chen, Lin; Chen, Xingshu; Jiang, Junfang; Yin, Xueyuan; Shao, Guolin, "Research and Practice Of Dynamic Network Security Architecture For Iaas Platforms," Tsinghua Science and Technology, vol. 19, no. 5, pp.496, 507, Oct. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TST.2014.6919826 Network security requirements based on virtual network technologies in IaaS platforms and corresponding solutions were reviewed. A dynamic network security architecture was proposed, which was built on the technologies of software defined networking, Virtual Machine (VM) traffic redirection, network policy unified management, software defined isolation networks, vulnerability scanning, and software updates. The proposed architecture was able to obtain the capacity for detection and access control for VM traffic by redirecting it to configurable security appliances, and ensured the effectiveness of network policies in the total life cycle of the VM by configuring the policies to the right place at the appropriate time, according to the impacts of VM state transitions. The virtual isolation domains for tenants' VMs could be built flexibly based on VLAN policies or Netfilter/Iptables firewall appliances, and vulnerability scanning as a service and software update as a service were both provided as security supports. Through cooperation with IDS appliances and automatic alarm mechanisms, the proposed architecture could dynamically mitigate a wide range of network-based attacks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
Keywords: Access control; Communication networks; Computer architecture; Home appliances; Software; Switches;IaaS; cloud computing; life cycle; network policy; network security (ID#: 15-4127)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6919826&isnumber=6919815

 

Orini, M.; Hanson, B.; Monasterio, V.; Martinez, J.P.; Hayward, M.; Taggart, P.; Lambiase, P., "Comparative Evaluation of Methodologies for T-Wave Alternans Mapping in Electrograms," Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 61, no. 2, pp.308,316, Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2013.2289304 Electrograms (EGM) recorded from the surface of the myocardium are becoming more and more accessible. T-wave alternans (TWA) is associated with increased vulnerability to ventricular tachycardia/fibrillation and it occurs before the onset of ventricular arrhythmias. Thus, accurate methodologies for time-varying alternans estimation/detection in EGM are needed. In this paper, we perform a simulation study based on epicardial EGM recorded in vivo in humans to compare the accuracy of four methodologies: the spectral method (SM), modified moving average method, laplacian likelihood ratio method (LLR), and a novel method based on time-frequency distributions. A variety of effects are considered, which include the presence of wide band noise, respiration, and impulse artifacts. We found that 1) EGM-TWA can be detected accurately when the standard deviation of wide-band noise is equal or smaller than ten times the magnitude of EGM-TWA. 2) Respiration can be critical for EGM-TWA analysis, even at typical respiratory rates. 3) Impulse noise strongly reduces the accuracy of all methods, except LLR. 4) If depolarization time is used as a fiducial point, the localization of the T-wave is not critical for the accuracy of EGM-TWA detection. 5) According to this study, all methodologies provided accurate EGM-TWA detection/quantification in ideal conditions, while LLR was the most robust, providing better detection-rates in noisy conditions. Application on epicardial mapping of the in vivo human heart shows that EGM-TWA has heterogeneous spatio-temporal distribution.
Keywords: electrocardiography; impulse noise; medical signal detection; moving average processes; pneumodynamics; spectral analysis; time-frequency analysis; EGM-TWA detection; T-wave alternans mapping; T-wave localization; depolarization time; electrograms; epicardial EGM; epicardial mapping; heterogeneous spatiotemporal distribution; impulse artifacts; impulse noise ;in vivo human heart; laplacian likelihood ratio method; modified moving average method; myocardium; respiration; spectral method; time-frequency distributions; ventricular arrhythmia; ventricular fibrillation; ventricular tachycardia; wide band noise; Accuracy; Electrodes; Estimation; Heart beat; Morphology; Noise; Standards; Electrograms (EGM); T-wave alternans; intracardiac ECG; repolarization; ventricular arrhythmia (ID#: 15-4128)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6656846&isnumber=6714426

 

Yajuan Tang; Xiapu Luo; Qing Hui; Chang, R.K.C., "Modeling the Vulnerability of Feedback-Control Based Internet Services to Low-Rate DoS Attacks," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 339, 353, March 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2013.2291970 Feedback control is a critical element in many Internet services (e.g., quality-of-service aware applications). Recent research has demonstrated the vulnerability of some feedback-control based applications to low-rate denial-of-service (LRDoS) attacks, which send high-intensity requests in an ON/OFF pattern to degrade the victim's performance and evade the detection designed for traditional DoS attacks. However, the intricate interaction between LRDoS attacks and the feedback control mechanism remains largely unknown. In this paper, we address two fundamental questions: 1) what is the impact of an LRDoS attack on a general feedback-control based system and 2) how to conduct a systematic evaluation of the impact of an LRDoS attack on specific feedback-control based systems. To tackle these problems, we model the system under attack as a switched system and then examine its properties. We conduct the first theoretical investigation on the impact of the LRDoS attack on a general feedback control system. We formally show that the attack can make the system's steady-state error oscillate along with the attack period, and prove the existence of LRDoS attacks that can force the system to be far off the desired state. In addition, we propose a novel methodology to systematically characterize the impact of an LRDoS attack on specific systems, and apply it to a web server and an IBM Notes server. This investigation obtains many new insights, such as new attack scenarios, the bound of the system's states, the relationship between the bound and the LRDoS attacks, the close-formed equations for quantifying the impact, and so on. The extensive experimental results are congruent with the theoretical analysis.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; quality of service; IBM Notes server; Internet services; LRDoS attacks; Web server; feedback control mechanism; low-rate DoS attacks; low-rate denial-of-service; quality-of-service aware applications; switched system; Computer crime; Feedback control; Steady-state; Switched systems; Switches; Web servers; Feedback control ;low-rate DoS attack; performance degradation; stability; switched system (ID#: 15-4129)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6670771&isnumber=6727454

 

Hari, S.K.S.; Venkatagiri, R.; Adve, S.V.; Naeimi, H., "GangES: Gang Error Simulation For Hardware Resiliency Evaluation," Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2014 ACM/IEEE 41st International Symposium on, pp.61,72, 14-18 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISCA.2014.6853212 As technology scales, the hardware reliability challenge affects a broad computing market, rendering traditional redundancy based solutions too expensive. Software anomaly based hardware error detection has emerged as a low cost reliability solution, but suffers from Silent Data Corruptions (SDCs). It is crucial to accurately evaluate SDC rates and identify SDC producing software locations to develop software-centric low-cost hardware resiliency solutions.A recent tool, called Relyzer, systematically analyzes an entire application's resiliency to single bit soft-errors using a small set of carefully selected error injection sites. Relyzer provides a practical resiliency evaluation mechanism but still requires significant evaluation time, most of which is spent on error simulations. This paper presents a new technique called GangES (Gang Error Simulator) that aims to reduce error simulation time. GangES observes that a set or gang of error simulations that result in the same intermediate execution state (after their error injections) will produce the same error outcome; therefore, only one simulation of the gang needs to be completed, resulting in significant overall savings in error simulation time. GangES leverages program structure to carefully select when to compare simulations and what state to compare. For our workloads, GangES saves 57% of the total error simulation time with an overhead ofjust 1.6%. This paper also explores pure program analyses based techniques that could obviate the needfor tools such as GangES altogether. The availability of Relyzer+GangES allows us to perform a detailed evaluation of such techniques. We evaluate the accuracy of several previously proposed program metrics. We find that the metrics we considered and their various linear combinations are unable to adequately predict an instruction's vulnerability to SDCs, further motivating the use of Relyzer+GangES style techniques as valuable solutions for the hardware error resiliency - valuation problem.
Keywords: error detection; fault tolerant computing; program diagnostics; redundancy; software reliability; GangES; Relyzer; SDC producing software location; SDC rates; computing market; error injection site; error simulation time; gang error simulation; hardware error resiliency evaluation problem; hardware reliability challenge; hardware resiliency evaluation; program metrics; redundancy based solution; reliability solution; resiliency evaluation mechanism; silent data corruptions; soft-error; software anomaly based hardware error detection; software-centric low-cost hardware resiliency solution; Accuracy; Analytical models; Error analysis; Hardware; Registers; Software; Transient analysis (ID#: 15-4130)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6853212&isnumber=6853187

 

Kui Wu; Wenyin Tang; Mao, K.Z.; Gee-Wah Ng; Lee Onn Mak, "Semantic-Level Fusion Of Heterogenous Sensor Network And Other Sources Based On Bayesian Network," Information Fusion (FUSION), 2014 17th International Conference on, pp. 1, 7, 7-10 July 2014. Information fusion systems that involve the use of heterogeneous sensor networks often face the problems of loss of data and uncertainty in data caused by vulnerability of networks where sensor nodes may be attacked or break down, limited bandwidth which may cause network congestion, and urban environments which may affect the sensor measurements. In this paper, we propose to address the above mentioned problem by employing information from other sources (e.g., textual situation reports, open-source web information, news reports and social media etc.) to augment estimation from physical sensors (e.g., video, acoustic, seismic, radar and multispectral data). A semantic-level information fusion (SELF) framework is developed based on Bayesian network, which is capable of (i) integrating information of different types (hard and soft data); (ii) incorporating contextual information and prior knowledge into the process; and (iii) dealing with loss of data and uncertainties inherent in all data sources. An adversarial event detection problem is used as an example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Keywords: belief networks; semantic networks; sensor fusion; wireless sensor networks; Bayesian network; contextual information; heterogeneous sensor networks; heterogeneous sensor network; information fusion systems; network congestion; physical sensors; semantic level fusion; semantic level information fusion framework; sensor measurements; Bayes methods; Computational modeling; Context; Event detection; Semantics; Taxonomy; Uncertainty; Bayesian network; contextual information; hard and soft information fusion; semantic-level fusion (ID#: 15-4131)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916161&isnumber=6915967

 

Pin-Yu Chen; Shin-Ming Cheng; Kwang-Cheng Chen, "Information Fusion to Defend Intentional Attack in Internet of Things," Internet of Things Journal, IEEE, vol. 1, no. 4, pp.337, 348, Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2014.2337018 Robust network design against attacks is one of the most fundamental issues in Internet of Things (IoT) architecture as IoT operations highly rely on the support of the underlaying communication infrastructures. In this paper, the vulnerability of IoT infrastructure under intentional attacks is investigated by relating the network resilience to the percolation-based connectivity. Intentional attacks impose severe threats on the network operations as it can effectively disrupt a network by paralyzing a small fraction of nodes, and therefore deteriorating IoT operations. A fusion-based defense mechanism is proposed to mitigate the damage caused by such attacks, where each node feedbacks minimum (one-bit) local decision to the fusion center for attack inference. By formulating the attack and defense strategy as a zero-sum game, the outcome of the game equilibrium is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. The robustness of the Internet-oriented and the cyber-physical system (CPS)-oriented networks are specifically analyzed to illustrate the foundation of future IoT infrastructure. Both analytical and empirical results show that the proposed mechanism greatly enhances the robustness of IoT, even in the weak local detection capability and fragile network structure regime.
Keywords: Internet of Things; computer network security; game theory; Internet of Things ;IoT; cyber-physical system-oriented networks; fusion-based defense mechanism; game equilibrium; information fusion; Intentional attack; network design; percolation-based connectivity; zero-sum game; Game theory; Games; Internet of Things; Network topology; Resilience; Robustness; Attack and defense; connectivity; cyber-physical system (CPS);machine-to-machine (M2M) communications; network vulnerability; zero-sum game (ID#: 15-4132)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6849970&isnumber=6870505

 

Alegre, F.; Soldi, G.; Evans, N., "Evasion and Obfuscation In Automatic Speaker Verification," Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.749, 753, 4-9 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.2014.6853696 The potential for biometric systems to be manipulated through some form of subversion is well acknowledged. One such approach known as spoofing relates to the provocation of false accepts in authentication applications. Another approach referred to as obfuscation relates to the provocation of missed detections in surveillance applications. While the automatic speaker verification research community is now addressing spoofing and countermeasures, vulnerabilities to obfuscation remain largely unknown. This paper reports the first study. Our work with standard NIST datasets and protocols shows that the equal error rate of a standard GMM-UBM system is increased from 9% to 48% through obfuscation, whereas that of a state-of-the-art i-vector system increases from 3% to 20%. We also present a generalised approach to obfuscation detection which succeeds in detecting almost all attempts to evade detection.
Keywords: biometrics (access control);cryptographic protocols; speaker recognition; surveillance; GMM-UBM system; NIST datasets; authentication applications; automatic speaker verification; biometric systems; i-vector system; obfuscation; protocols; spoofing; surveillance; Authentication; Conferences; Speaker recognition; Speech; Speech processing; Standards; Surveillance; biometrics; evasion; obfuscation; speaker recognition; speaker verification; spoofing; surveillance (ID#: 15-4133)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6853696&isnumber=6853544

 

Hussain, A.; Saqib, N.A.; Qamar, U.; Zia, M.; Mahmood, H., "Protocol-Aware Radio Frequency Jamming In Wi-Fi And Commercial Wireless Networks," Communications and Networks, Journal of, vol. 16, no. 4, pp.397,406, Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JCN.2014.000069 Radio frequency (RF) jamming is a denial of service attack targeted at wireless networks. In resource-hungry scenarios with constant traffic demand, jamming can create connectivity problems and seriously affect communication. Therefore, the vulnerabilities of wireless networks must be studied. In this study, we investigate a particular type of RF jamming that exploits the semantics of physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols. This can be extended to any wireless communication network whose protocol characteristics and operating frequencies are known to the attacker. We propose two efficient jamming techniques: A low-data-rate random jamming and a shot-noise based protocol-aware RF jamming. Both techniques use shot-noise pulses to disrupt ongoing transmission ensuring they are energy efficient, and they significantly reduce the detection probability of the jammer. Further, we derived the tight upper bound on the duration and the number of shot-noise pulses for Wi-Fi, GSM, and WiMax networks. The proposed model takes consider the channel access mechanism employed at the MAC layer, data transmission rate, PHY/MAC layer modulation and channel coding schemes. Moreover, we analyze the effect of different packet sizes on the proposed jamming methodologies. The proposed jamming attack models have been experimentally evaluated for 802.11b networks on an actual testbed environment by transmitting data packets of varying sizes. The achieved results clearly demonstrate a considerable increase in the overall jamming efficiency of the proposed protocol-aware jammer in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy expenditure and detection probabilities over contemporary jamming methods provided in the literature.
Keywords: WiMax; access protocols; cellular radio; channel coding; computer network security; jamming; probability; telecommunication traffic; wireless LAN;802.11b networks; GSM network; MAC layer modulation; PHY layer modulation; Wi-Fi network; WiMax network; channel access mechanism; channel coding schemes; commercial wireless networks; connectivity problems; constant traffic demand; data transmission rate; denial-of-service attack; detection probabilities; detection probability reduction; energy expenditure; jamming attack models; low-data-rate random jamming; medium access control layer protocol; packet delivery ratio; physical layer protocol; protocol-aware radio frequency jamming; shot-noise based protocol-aware RF jamming; shot-noise pulses; GSM; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Jamming; Noise; Radio frequency; WiMAX; Jamming detection; network allocation vector (NAV);protocol-aware jamming; random jamming; shot-noise (ID#: 15-4134)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6896563&isnumber=6896558

 

Nader, P.; Honeine, P.; Beauseroy, P., "l_p-norms in One-Class Classification for Intrusion Detection in SCADA Systems," Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 10, no. 4, pp.2308,2317, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TII.2014.2330796 The massive use of information and communication technologies in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems opens new ways for carrying out cyberattacks against critical infrastructures relying on SCADA networks. The various vulnerabilities in these systems and the heterogeneity of cyberattacks make the task extremely difficult for traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS). Modeling cyberattacks has become nearly impossible and their potential consequences may be very severe. The primary objective of this work is to detect malicious intrusions once they have already bypassed traditional IDS and firewalls. This paper investigates the use of machine learning for intrusion detection in SCADA systems using one-class classification algorithms. Two approaches of one-class classification are investigated: 1) the support vector data description (SVDD); and 2) the kernel principle component analysis. The impact of the considered metric is examined in detail with the study of ${mbi {l_p}}$-norms in radial basis function (RBF) kernels. A heuristic is proposed to find an optimal choice of the bandwidth parameter in these kernels. Tests are conducted on real data with several types of cyberattacks.
Keywords: Intrusion detection; Kernel; Machine learning; Optimization; SCADA systems; ${mbi {l_p}}$ -norms; Intrusion detection; kernel methods; one-class classification; supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems (ID#: 15-4135)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6846360&isnumber=6945918

 

Anjos, A.; Chakka, M.M.; Marcel, S., "Motion-Based Counter-Measures To Photo Attacks In Face Recognition," Biometrics, IET, vol.3, no.3, pp.147, 158, Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1049/iet-bmt.2012.0071 Identity spoofing is a contender for high-security face-recognition applications. With the advent of social media and globalised search, peoples face images and videos are wide-spread on the Internet and can be potentially used to attack biometric systems without previous user consent. Yet, research to counter these threats is just on its infancy - the authors lack public standard databases, protocols to measure spoofing vulnerability and baseline methods to detect these attacks. The contributions of this work to the area are 3-fold: first, the authors a publicly available PHOTO-ATTACK database with associated protocols to measure the effectiveness of counter-measures is introduced. Based on the data available, a study is conducted on current state-of-the-art spoofing detection algorithms based on motion analysis, showing they fail under the light of this new dataset. By last, the authors propose a new technique of counter-measure solely based on foreground/background motion correlation using optical flow that outperforms all other algorithms achieving nearly perfect scoring with an equal-error rate of 1.52% on the available test data. The source code leading to the reported results is made available for the replicability of findings in this study.
Keywords: authorisation; face recognition; image motion analysis; image sequences; background motion correlation; baseline methods; biometric system attack; equal-error rate; face images; face videos; foreground motion correlation; globalised search; high-security face-recognition applications; motion-based photo attack counter-measures; optical flow; public standard databases; publicly available photo-attack database; social media; source code; spooling detection algorithms; spooling vulnerability measurement protocols (ID#: 15-4136)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6887411&isnumber=6887407

 

Erdogmus, N.; Marcel, S., "Spoofing Face Recognition With 3D Masks," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 9, no. 7, pp.1084,1097, July 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2014.2322255 Spoofing is the act of masquerading as a valid user by falsifying data to gain an illegitimate access. Vulnerability of recognition systems to spoofing attacks (presentation attacks) is still an open security issue in biometrics domain and among all biometric traits, face is exposed to the most serious threat, since it is particularly easy to access and reproduce. In this paper, many different types of face spoofing attacks have been examined and various algorithms have been proposed to detect them. Mainly focusing on 2D attacks forged by displaying printed photos or replaying recorded videos on mobile devices, a significant portion of these studies ground their arguments on the flatness of the spoofing material in front of the sensor. However, with the advancements in 3D reconstruction and printing technologies, this assumption can no longer be maintained. In this paper, we aim to inspect the spoofing potential of subject-specific 3D facial masks for different recognition systems and address the detection problem of this more complex attack type. In order to assess the spoofing performance of 3D masks against 2D, 2.5D, and 3D face recognition and to analyze various texture-based countermeasures using both 2D and 2.5D data, a parallel study with comprehensive experiments is performed on two data sets: the Morpho database which is not publicly available and the newly distributed 3D mask attack database.
Keywords: face recognition; image texture; security of data;2.5D face recognition; 2D attacks; 2D face recognition;3D face recognition;3D facial masks;3D mask attack database; 3D reconstruction technology; Morpho database; biometric traits; biometrics domain; face spoofing attacks; presentation attacks; printing technology; spoofing face recognition; texture-based countermeasures; Databases; Face; Face recognition; Materials; Solid modeling; Three-dimensional displays; Videos; Spoofing; face recognition; mask attack; presentation attack (ID#: 15-4137)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6810829&isnumber=6819111

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review), Part 3

 

	Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review) Part 3

 

Vulnerability detection is a topic for which a great deal of research is being done.  In 2014, more than one hundred major research presentations relevant to the Science of Security were made and published.  To facilitate finding articles, we will present these in four parts. In Part 3, we will cite the next 25.

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Chou, H.-M.; Hsiao, M.-Y.; Chen, Y.-C.; Yang, K.-H.; Tsao, J.; Lung, C.-L.; Chang, S.-C.; Jone, W.-B.; Chen, T.-F., "Soft-Error-Tolerant Design Methodology for Balancing Performance, Power, and Reliability," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,1, September 2014. doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2014.2348872 Soft error has become an important reliability issue in advanced technologies. To tolerate soft errors, solutions suggested in previous works incur significant performance and power penalties, especially when a design with fault-tolerant structures is overprotected. In this paper, we present a soft-error-tolerant design methodology to tradeoff performance, power, and reliability for different applications. First, four novel detection and correction flip-flop (FF) structures are proposed to provide different levels of tolerance capability against soft errors. Second, architecture-level vulnerability and logic-level susceptibility analyses are employed to identify weak FFs that can easily cause program execution errors. Third, an optimization framework is developed to synthesize the proposed four novel FF structures into weak and highly observable storage bits with the flexibility of trading off performance, power, and reliability. A five-stage pipeline RISC core (UniRISC) is adopted to demonstrate the usefulness of our methodology. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accomplish design goals by balancing performance, power, and reliability. For example, we can not only satisfy the reliability requirement that no more than five errors occur per one billion hours in a design but also reduce up to 87% performance overhead and 91% power overhead when compared with previous works.
Keywords: Clocks; Delays; Estimation; Integrated circuit reliability; Latches; Reliability engineering; Power consumption; reliability; soft error; susceptibility; vulnerability (ID#: 15-4138)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6891393&isnumber=4359553

 

Lodhi, F.K.; Hasan, S.R.; Hasan, O.; Awwad, F., "Low Power Soft Error Tolerant Macro Synchronous Micro Asynchronous (MSMA) Pipeline," VLSI (ISVLSI), 2014 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on, pp. 601, 606, 9-11 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISVLSI.2014.59 Advancement in deep submicron (DSM) technologies led to miniaturization. However, it also increased the vulnerability against some electrical and device non-idealities, including the soft errors. These errors are significant threat to the reliable functionality of digital circuits. Several techniques for the detection and deterrence of soft errors (to improve the reliability) have been proposed, both in synchronous and asynchronous domain. In this paper we propose a low power and soft error tolerant solution for synchronous systems that leverages the asynchronous pipeline within a synchronous framework. We named our technique as macro synchronous micro asynchronous (MSMA) pipeline. We provided a framework along with timing analysis of the MSMA technique. MSMA is implemented using a macro synchronous system and soft error tolerant and low power version of null convention logic (NCL) asynchronous circuit. It is found out that this solution can easily replace the intermediate stages of synchronous and asynchronous pipelines without changing its interface protocol. Such NCL asynchronous circuits can be used as a standard cell in the synchronous ASIC design flow. Power and performance analysis is done using electrical simulations, which shows that this techniques consumes at least 22% less power and 45% less energy delay product (EDP) compared to state-of-the-art solutions.
Keywords: asynchronous circuits; circuit simulation; integrated circuit design; integrated logic circuits; low-power electronics; radiation hardening (electronics); deep submicron technologies; electrical simulations; energy delay product; low power soft error tolerant MSMA pipeline; macrosynchronous microasynchronous; null convention logic asynchronous circuit; synchronous ASIC design flow; Adders; Asynchronous circuits; Delays; Logic gates; Pipelines; Rails; Registers; Low power Aynshronous circuits; NCL pipeline; SE tolerant circuits; Soft Error (ID#: 15-4139)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6903430&isnumber=6903314

 

Chingovska, I.; Anjos, A.R.d.; Marcel, S., "Biometrics Evaluation Under Spoofing Attacks," Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on, vol.9, no.12, pp.2264, 2276, Dec. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2014.2349158 While more accurate and reliable than ever, the trustworthiness of biometric verification systems is compromised by the emergence of spoofing attacks. Responding to this threat, numerous research publications address isolated spoofing detection, resulting in efficient counter-measures for many biometric modes. However, an important, but often overlooked issue regards their engagement into a verification task and how to measure their impact on the verification systems themselves. A novel evaluation framework for verification systems under spoofing attacks, called expected performance and spoofability framework, is the major contribution of this paper. Its purpose is to serve for an objective comparison of different verification systems with regards to their verification performance and vulnerability to spoofing, taking into account the system’s application-dependent susceptibility to spoofing attacks and cost of the errors. The convenience of the proposed open-source framework is demonstrated for the face mode, by comparing the security guarantee of four baseline face verification systems before and after they are secured with antispoofing algorithms.
Keywords: Biological system modeling; Biometrics (access control); Databases; Error analysis; Face; Measurement; Training; Attack; biometric verification;counter-measures;counter-spoofing;disguise;dishonest acts;evaluation; face recognition; forgery; liveness detection; replay; spoofing (ID#: 15-4140)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6879440&isnumber=6953163

 

Rosich, Albert; Voos, Holger; Darouach, Mohamed, "Cyber-Attack Detection Based On Controlled Invariant Sets," Control Conference (ECC), 2014 European, pp. 2176, 2181, 24-27 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECC.2014.6862206 This paper explores a new method for detecting cyber-attacks on a controller. Specifically, the proposed detector is based on invariant sets in order to determine whether an attacker has hijacked the controller and perpetrated a cyber-attack. One particularity of this detection method is that few information about the controller is required. Thus, the detector becomes useful for a large range of control laws and its vulnerability can be reduced by limiting its accessibility. Finally, a simple but significant example is presented in order to show the benefits and the flaws of the proposed methodology.
Keywords: Control systems; Detectors; Optimization; Reachability analysis; Robustness; Safety; Security (ID#: 15-4141)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6862206&isnumber=6862131

 

Rocha, T.S.; Souto, E., "ETSSDetector: A Tool to Automatically Detect Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities," Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2014 IEEE 13th International Symposium on, pp.306,309, 21-23 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/NCA.2014.53 The inappropriate use of features intended to improve usability and interactivity of web applications has resulted in the emergence of various threats, including Cross-Site Scripting(XSS) attacks. In this work, we developed ETSS Detector, a generic and modular web vulnerability scanner that automatically analyzes web applications to find XSS vulnerabilities. ETSS Detector is able to identify and analyze all data entry points of the application and generate specific code injection tests for each one. The results shows that the correct filling of the input fields with only valid information ensures a better effectiveness of the tests, increasing the detection rate of XSS attacks.
Keywords: Internet; interactive systems; security of data; ETSS Detector; Web applications; XSS attacks; cross-site scripting vulnerabilities; interactivity; Browsers; Data mining; Databases; Filling; Qualifications; Security; Testing; Cross-Site Scripting; ETSS Detector; vulnerabilities (ID#: 15-4142)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6924244&isnumber=6924186

 

Jeyapaul, R.; Fei Hong; Rhisheekesan, A.; Shrivastava, A.; Kyoungwoo Lee, "UnSync-CMP: Multicore CMP Architecture for Energy-Efficient Soft-Error Reliability," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol.25, no.1, pp. 254, 263, Jan. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.14 Reducing device dimensions, increasing transistor densities, and smaller timing windows, expose the vulnerability of processors to soft errors induced by charge carrying particles. Since these factors are only consequences of the inevitable advancement in processor technology, the industry has been forced to improve reliability on general purpose chip multiprocessors (CMPs). With the availability of increased hardware resources, redundancy-based techniques are the most promising methods to eradicate soft-error failures in CMP systems. In this work, we propose a novel customizable and redundant CMP architecture (UnSync) that utilizes hardware-based detection mechanisms (most of which are readily available in the processor), to reduce overheads during error-free executions. In the presence of errors (which are infrequent), the always forward execution enabled recovery mechanism provides for resilience in the system. The inherent nature of our architecture framework supports customization of the redundancy, and thereby provides means to achieve possible performance-reliability tradeoffs in many-core systems. We provide a redundancy-based soft-error resilient CMP architecture for both write-through and write-back cache configurations. We design a detailed RTL model of our UnSync architecture and perform hardware synthesis to compare the hardware (power/area) overheads incurred. We compare the same with those of the Reunion technique, a state-of-the-art redundant multicore architecture. We also perform cycle-accurate simulations over a wide range of SPEC2000, and MiBench benchmarks to evaluate the performance efficiency achieved over that of the Reunion architecture. Experimental results show that, our UnSync architecture reduces power consumption by 34.5 percent and improves performance by up to 20 percent with 13.3 percent less area overhead, when compared to the Reunion architecture for the same level of reliability achieved.
Keywords: cache storage; computer architecture; multiprocessing systems; performance evaluation; CMPs; MiBench benchmark; SPEC2000 benchmark; UnSync architecture; UnSync-CMP; architecture framework; charge carrying particles; cycle-accurate simulations; device dimension reduction; energy-efficient soft-error reliability; error-free executions; forward execution enabled recovery mechanism; general purpose chip multiprocessors ;hardware resources; hardware synthesis; hardware-based detection mechanisms; many-core systems; multicore CMP architecture; performance evaluation; performance-reliability tradeoffs; processor technology; redundancy-based soft-error resilient CMP architecture; redundancy-based techniques; redundant CMP architecture; reunion architecture; soft errors; soft-error failures; timing windows; transistor densities; write-back cache configuration; write-through cache configuration; Hardware; Instruction sets; Multicore processing; Redundancy; CMP; Multicore architecture; power efficiency; reliability; soft error (ID#: 15-4143)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6410312&isnumber=6674937

 

Kebande, V.R.; Venter, H.S., "A Cognitive Approach For Botnet Detection Using Artificial Immune System In The Cloud," Cyber Security, Cyber Warfare and Digital Forensic (CyberSec), 2014 Third International Conference on,pp.52,57, April 29 2014-May 1 2014. doi: 10.1109/CyberSec.2014.6913971 The advent of cloud computing has given a provision for both good and malicious opportunities. Virtualization itself as a component of Cloud computing, has provided users with an immediate way of accessing limitless resource infrastructures. Botnets have evolved to be the most dangerous group of remote-operated zombie computers given the open cloud environment. They happen to be the dark side of computing due to the ability to run illegal activities through remote installations, attacks and propagations through exploiting vulnerabilities. The problem that this paper addresses is that botnet technology is advancing each day and detection in the cloud is becoming hard. In this paper, therefore, the authors' presents an approach for detecting an infection of a robot network in the cloud environment. The authors proposed a detection mechanism using Artificial Immune System (AIS). The results show that this research is significant.
Keywords: artificial immune systems; cloud computing; invasive software; virtualisation; AIS; artificial immune system; botnet detection; cloud computing; cognitive approach; directed graph network; resource infrastructure access; virtualization; Cloud computing; Computers; Detectors; Immune system; Monitoring; Pattern matching; Artificial immune system; Botnet; Cloud; Detection; Negative selection (ID#: 15-4144)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6913971&isnumber=6913961

 

Gabrielsson, Bjorn; Fors, Karina; Eliardsson, Patrik; Alexandersson, Mikael; Stenumgaard, Peter, "A Portable System For Autonomous Detection And Classification Of Electromagnetic Interference In The GPS Band," Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC Europe), 2014 International Symposium on, pp.152,157, 1-4 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/EMCEurope.2014.6930894 The rapidly increasing use of wireless technology in critical systems has led to an increased vulnerability to radio interference. Radio interference is produced both naturally of all electronic systems but also through illegal jammers currently sold at low cost via the Internet. To continuously monitor the radio noise environment in critical systems are becoming increasingly important and in this paper an example of how low cost commercially available off-the-shelf equipment can be adapted to cost effectively implement a qualified detection and classification of radio noise environment at societal critical infrastructure.
Keywords: Electromagnetic compatibility; Electromagnetic interference; Global Positioning System; Receivers; Signal to noise ratio; GNSS; detection; intentional EMI; interference; jamming; safety; security (ID#: 15-4145)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6930894&isnumber=6930855

 

Lounis, O.; Bouhouita Guermeche, S.E.; Saoudi, L.; Benaicha, S.E., "A New Algorithm For Detecting SQL Injection Attack In Web Application," Science and Information Conference (SAI), 2014, pp.589,594, 27-29 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SAI.2014.6918246 Nowadays, the security of applications and Web servers is a new trend that finds its need on the Web. The number of vulnerabilities identified in this type of applications is constantly increasing especially SQL injection attack. It is therefore necessary to regularly audit Web applications to verify the presence of exploitable vulnerabilities. Web vulnerability scanner WASAPY is one of the audit tool, it uses an algorithm which bases on a classification techniques of pages obtained by sending HTTP requests especially formatted. We propose in this paper a new algorithm which was built in a vision to improve rather to supplement the logic followed in modeling WASAPY tool. The tool was supplemented by a new class reflecting the legitimate appearance or referential, therefore, the detection mechanism was solidly built on a statistic in a fairly clear mathematical framework described by a simple geometric representation or interpretation.
Keywords: Internet; SQL; auditing; classification; hypermedia; security of data; HTTP requests; SQL injection attack detection; WASAPY; Web application; Web server security; Web vulnerability scanner; audit tool; geometric representation; page classification technique; Couplings; Navigation; Safety; Security; Syntactics; Vectors; Web pages; SQL injection attack; Web Application; Web vulnerabilities; scanner Web; security (ID#: 15-4146)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6918246&isnumber=6918164

 

Zhong, Hongye; Xiao, Jitian, "Design for Integrated Wifi Defence Strategy In Mordern Enterprise Context," Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2014 5th IEEE International Conference on, pp.748,753, 27-29 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICSESS.2014.6933675 WiFi has been adopted into enterprise production environment in larger scale, yet the flexibility of WiFi network also exposes more vulnerability to current security defense systems and introduces greater challenges to network security for modern enterprises. In wireless world, there are many dead corners that traditional firewall and intrusion detection system cannot cover. Modern enterprises are calling for more efficient defense approaches to guarantee the safety of the information on their wireless network. Upon probing to the weaknesses of current enterprise WiFi security, this paper proposes a defense strategy with the capacities of intelligent planning and integrated reactions to remedy the weaknesses of conventional enterprise security mechanism of WiFi network. A security defense system is designed to monitor WiFi security on Physical Layer, Data-link Layer and Internet Layer of the enterprise WiFi network, and provide attack defense mechanism to minimize the damage to enterprises when their WiFi network is under attack.
Keywords: Communication system security; Firewalls (computing); IEEE 802.11 Standards; Sensors; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks; Enterprise Network; Security; WiFi; Wireless Network (ID#: 15-4147)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6933675&isnumber=6933501

 

Jiang, Rong; Lu, Rongxing; Wang, Ye; Luo, Jun; Shen, Changxiang; Shen, Xuemin Sherman, "Energy-theft Detection Issues For Advanced Metering Infrastructure In Smart Grid," Tsinghua Science and Technology, vol. 19, no. 2, pp.105, 120, April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TST.2014.6787363 With the proliferation of smart grid research, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has become the first ubiquitous and fixed computing platform. However, due to the unique characteristics of AMI, such as complex network structure, resource-constrained smart meter, and privacy-sensitive data, it is an especially challenging issue to make AMI secure. Energy theft is one of the most important concerns related to the smart grid implementation. It is estimated that utility companies lose more than $25 billion every year due to energy theft around the world. To address this challenge, in this paper, we discuss the background of AMI and identify major security requirements that AMI should meet. Specifically, an attack tree based threat model is first presented to illustrate the energy-theft behaviors in AMI. Then, we summarize the current AMI energy-theft detection schemes into three categories, i.e., classification-based, state estimation-based, and game theory-based ones, and make extensive comparisons and discussions on them. In order to provide a deep understanding of security vulnerabilities and solutions in AMI and shed light on future research directions, we also explore some open challenges and potential solutions for energy-theft detection.
Keywords: Companies; Electricity; Power system reliability; Reliability; Security; Smart grids; Wide area networks; Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI); energy-theft detection; security; smart grid (ID#: 15-4148)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6787363&isnumber=6787360

 

Rahimi, A.; Cesarini, D.; Marongiu, A.; Gupta, R.K.; Benini, L., "Improving Resilience to Timing Errors by Exposing Variability Effects to Software in Tightly-Coupled Processor Clusters," Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems, IEEE Journal on, vol.4, no.2, pp.216,229, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/JETCAS.2014.2315883 Manufacturing and environmental variations cause timing errors in microelectronic processors that are typically avoided by ultra-conservative multi-corner design margins or corrected by error detection and recovery mechanisms at the circuit-level. In contrast, we present here runtime software support for cost-effective countermeasures against hardware timing failures during system operation. We propose a variability-aware OpenMP (VOMP) programming environment, suitable for tightly-coupled shared memory processor clusters, that relies upon modeling across the hardware/software interface. VOMP is implemented as an extension to the OpenMP v3.0 programming model that covers various parallel constructs, including task, sections, and for. Using the notion of work-unit vulnerability (WUV) proposed here, we capture timing errors caused by circuit-level variability as high-level software knowledge. WUV consists of descriptive metadata to characterize the impact of variability on different work-unit types running on various cores. As such, WUV provides a useful abstraction of hardware variability to efficiently allocate a given work-unit to a suitable core for execution. VOMP enables hardware/software collaboration with online variability monitors in hardware and runtime scheduling in software. The hardware provides online per-core characterization of WUV metadata. This metadata is made available by carefully placing key data structures in a shared L1 memory and is used by VOMP schedulers. Our results show that VOMP greatly reduces the cost of timing error recovery compared to the baseline schedulers of OpenMP, yielding speedup of 3%-36% for tasks, and 26%-49% for sections. Further, VOMP reaches energy saving of 2%-46% and 15%-50% for tasks, and sections, respectively.
Keywords: meta data; parallel programming; scheduling; shared memory systems; timing circuits; circuit level variability; error detection; hardware timing failures; high level software knowledge; microelectronic processors; online variability monitors; recovery mechanisms; tightly coupled processor clusters; timing errors; variability aware OpenMP programming environment; variability effects; work unit vulnerability; Hardware; Integrated circuit interconnections; Robustness; Runtime; Software; Synchronization; Cross-layer variability management; OpenMP; processor clusters; recovery; robust system design; scheduling; timing errors; variations (ID#: 15-4149)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6802431&isnumber=6827986

 

Barrere, M.; Badonnel, R.; Festor, O., "Vulnerability Assessment in Autonomic Networks and Services: A Survey," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol.16, no.2, pp.988, 1004, Second Quarter 2014. doi: 10.1109/SURV.2013.082713.00154 Autonomic networks and services are exposed to a large variety of security risks. The vulnerability management process plays a crucial role for ensuring their safe configurations and preventing security attacks. We focus in this survey on the assessment of vulnerabilities in autonomic environments. In particular, we analyze current methods and techniques contributing to the discovery, the description and the detection of these vulnerabilities. We also point out important challenges that should be faced in order to fully integrate this process into the autonomic management plane.
Keywords: computer network security; fault tolerant computing; autonomic management plane; autonomic networks; autonomic services; security attacks; security risks; vulnerability assessment; vulnerability management process; Autonomic systems; Business; Complexity theory; Computers; Monitoring; Security; Vulnerability assessment; autonomic computing; computer security; vulnerability management (ID#: 15-4150)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6587997&isnumber=6811383

 

Szott, S., "Selfish Insider Attacks In IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol.52, no.6, pp.227, 233, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6829968 The IEEE 802.11s amendment for wireless mesh networks does not provide incentives for stations to cooperate and is particularly vulnerable to selfish insider attacks in which a legitimate network participant hopes to increase its QoS at the expense of others. In this tutorial we describe various attacks that can be executed against 802.11s networks and also analyze existing attacks and identify new ones. We also discuss possible countermeasures and detection methods and attempt to quantify the threat of the attacks to determine which of the 802.11s vulnerabilities need to be secured with the highest priority.
Keywords: telecommunication security; wireless LAN; wireless mesh networks; IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks; selfish insider attacks; Ad hoc networks; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Logic gates; Protocols; Quality of service; Routing; Wireless mesh networks (ID#: 15-4151)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6829968&isnumber=6829933

 

Kaur, R.; Singh, M., "A Survey on Zero-Day Polymorphic Worm Detection Techniques," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE , vol.16, no.3, pp.1520,1549, Third Quarter 2014. doi: 10.1109/SURV.2014.022714.00160 Zero-day polymorphic worms pose a serious threat to the Internet security. With their ability to rapidly propagate, these worms increasingly threaten the Internet hosts and services. Not only can they exploit unknown vulnerabilities but can also change their own representations on each new infection or can encrypt their payloads using a different key per infection. They have many variations in the signatures of the same worm thus, making their fingerprinting very difficult. Therefore, signature-based defenses and traditional security layers miss these stealthy and persistent threats. This paper provides a detailed survey to outline the research efforts in relation to detection of modern zero-day malware in form of zero-day polymorphic worms.
Keywords: Internet; invasive software; Internet security; fingerprinting; key per infection; payload encryption; security layers; signature-based defenses; zero-day malware; zero-day polymorphic worm detection techniques; Grippers; Internet; Malware; Monitoring; Payloads; Vectors; Detection Systems; Polymorphic worms; Signature Generation; Zero-day attacks; Zero-day malware (ID#: 15-4152)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6766917&isnumber=6880447

 

Sundhari, A; Bevish Jinila, Y., "A novel approach to detect Sybil attacks in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks," Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), 2014 International Conference on, pp.1,5, 13-14 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ECS.2014.6892622 Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks(VANETs) are vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to road side infrastructure networks which make this possible by providing support to numerous applications aimed towards improving safety and driving experience on the road such as traffic control, accident avoidance, and a variety of other applications. The two major concerns in VANETs are Security and privacy. VANETs are subject to attacks due to their vulnerabilities; one of the most compromising attacks is called Sybil nodes attack (a malicious vehicle pretends to be multiple other vehicles). Reported data from a Sybil attacker will appear to arrive from a large number of distinct vehicles, and hence will be credible. This paper proposes a light-weight and scalable framework to detect Sybil attacks. Importantly, The detection of Sybil attacks done in distributed manner that does not require any vehicle in the network to disclose its identity; hence privacy is preserved at all times.
Keywords: IEEE Xplore; Portable document format; Certified Authority(CA); Coarse-grained hash; Fine-grained hash; Introduction (Heading 1); Sybil Attack; VANET (ID#: 15-4153)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6892622&isnumber=6892507

 

Tehranipoor, Mohammad; Knapp, Charles, "T1A: Opportunities and Challenges for Secure Hardware and Verifying Trust in Integrated Circuits," System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC), 2014 27th IEEE International, pp. xxxiii, xxxiv, 2-5 Sept. 2014. doi: 10.1109/SOCC.2014.6948881 The migration from a vertical to horizontal business model has made it easier to introduce many vulnerabilities to electronic component design and supply chain. In the first part of this tutorial, we discuss the major issues that must be addressed including securing hardware, verifying trustworthiness of integrated circuits, unique key generation, side-channel attacks and more. In the latter two parts of this tutorial, we will place more emphasis on detection and prevention of hardware Trojans and counterfeit electronic parts and discuss how test can help. In this tutorial, we will cover (i) An introduction to hardware security and trust (physically unclonable functions, true random number generation, hardware Trojans, counterfeit ICs, sidechannel attacks, supply chain vulnerabilities, etc.), (ii) Background and motivation for hardware Trojan and counterfeit prevention/detection; (iii) Taxonomies related to both topics; (iv) Existing solutions; (v) Open test challenges; (vi) Design for security and trust, (vii) New and unified solutions to address these challenges.
Keywords: integrated circuits; invasive software; electronic component design; hardware Trojan detection; hardware Trojan prevention; hardware security; horizontal business model; integrated circuits; key generation; side-channel attacks; supply chain; trustworthiness verification; vertical business model; Engineering profession (ID#: 15-4154)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6948881&isnumber=6948870

 

Corbett, C.; Uher, J.; Cook, J.; Dalton, A., "Countering Intelligent Jamming with Full Protocol Stack Agility," Security & Privacy, IEEE, vol.12, no.2, pp.44,50, Mar.-Apr. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MSP.2013.136 Intelligent jamming (IJ) attacks go beyond applying brute-force power at the physical link, exploiting vulnerabilities specific to protocols or configurations. IJ attackers who can gain a foothold into a network by understanding and exploiting vulnerabilities can operate with a much lower chance of detection and a greater impact on the network. For example, one IJ technique exploits media access control (MAC) layer packet structure to selectively jam packets originating from or destined to a specific user. This project aims to create a moving target in the network protocol stack to mitigate IJ attacks. It introduces protocol agility at all layers of the stack to make such protocol-driven attacks infeasible.
Keywords: access protocols; computer network security; jamming; IJ attacks; IJ technique ;MAC layer packet structure; brute-force power; intelligent jamming; media access control layer packet structure; network protocol stack; physical link; protocol agility; protocol stack agility; protocol-driven attacks; Computer crime; Computer security; Jamming; Protocols; Software architecture; Target tracking; Wireless communication; MTD;SDN; SDR; intelligent jamming; moving-target defense; security; software-defined networking; software-defined radio (ID#: 15-4155)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6673503&isnumber=6798534

 

Biggio, B.; Fumera, G.; Roli, F., "Security Evaluation of Pattern Classifiers under Attack," Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 26, no. 4, pp.984, 996, April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2013.57 Pattern classification systems are commonly used in adversarial applications, like biometric authentication, network intrusion detection, and spam filtering, in which data can be purposely manipulated by humans to undermine their operation. As this adversarial scenario is not taken into account by classical design methods, pattern classification systems may exhibit vulnerabilities, whose exploitation may severely affect their performance, and consequently limit their practical utility. Extending pattern classification theory and design methods to adversarial settings is thus a novel and very relevant research direction, which has not yet been pursued in a systematic way. In this paper, we address one of the main open issues: evaluating at design phase the security of pattern classifiers, namely, the performance degradation under potential attacks they may incur during operation. We propose a framework for empirical evaluation of classifier security that formalizes and generalizes the main ideas proposed in the literature, and give examples of its use in three real applications. Reported results show that security evaluation can provide a more complete understanding of the classifier's behavior in adversarial environments, and lead to better design choices.
Keywords: biometrics (access control);pattern classification; security of data; adversarial environments; biometric authentication; classical design methods; design phase; network intrusion detection; pattern classification systems; pattern classification theory; pattern classifiers; security evaluation; spam filtering; Algorithm design and analysis; Analytical models; Data models; Performance evaluation; Security; Testing; Training; Pattern classification; adversarial classification; performance evaluation; robustness evaluation; security evaluation (ID#: 15-4156)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6494573&isnumber=6777369

 

Sandeep Kumar, E.; Kusuma, S.M.; Vijaya Kumar, B.P., "An Intelligent Defense Mechanism For Security In Wireless Sensor Networks," Communications and Signal Processing (ICCSP), 2014 International Conference on, pp.275,279, 3-5 April 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICCSP.2014.6949844 Wireless sensor networks are associated with risk due to the threats of security vulnerabilities. In this context, we have proposed an Intruder Detection System (IDS) that uses sophisticated data fusion technique, which incorporates game theoretic modeling for the interaction between an attacker node and a victim sensor node, with neural networks as a decision making tool and a timer as an attack monitor. The combined effect of all these aspects of IDS makes a robust combat against the packets attempting to hack the critical information residing in the node. To our knowledge, this is a novel work, which combines game theory and artificial neural networks for defending against intruder attack. The obtained simulation results prove to be convincing with respect to the defense mechanism and its security concern.
Keywords: Artificial neural networks; Computer hacking; Game theory; Games; Knowledge engineering; Robustness; data fusion; game theory; intruder detection system; neural networks (ID#: 15-4157)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6949844&isnumber=6949766

 

Ramdas, A.; Saeed, S.M.; Sinanoglu, O., "Slack Removal For Enhanced Reliability And Trust," Design & Technology of Integrated Systems In Nanoscale Era (DTIS), 2014 9th IEEE International Conference On, pp.1,4, 6-8 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/DTIS.2014.6850660 Timing slacks possibly lead to reliability issues and/or security vulnerabilities, as they may hide small delay defects and malicious circuitries injected during fabrication, namely, hardware Trojans. While possibly harmless immediately after production, small delay defects may trigger reliability problems as the part is being used in field, presenting a significant threat for mission-critical applications. Hardware Trojans remain dormant while the part is tested and validated, but then get activated to launch an attack when the chip is deployed in security-critical applications. In this paper, we take a deeper look into these problems and their underlying reasons, and propose a design technique to maximize the detection of small delay defects as well as the hardware Trojans. The proposed technique eliminates all slacks by judiciously inserting delay units in a small set of locations in the circuit, thereby rendering a simple set of transition fault patterns quite effective in catching parts with small delay defects or Trojans. Experimental results also justify the efficacy of the proposed technique in improving the quality of test while retaining the pattern count and care bit density intact.
Keywords: design for testability; integrated circuit reliability; logic circuits; logic testing; security of data; care bit density intact; delay defect detection; delay defects; delay unit insertion; design technique ;fabrication; hardware Trojans; malicious circuitries; mission-critical application; pattern count; reliability enhancement; security vulnerabilities; security-critical application; slack removal; test quality; timing slacks; transition fault patterns; trust enhancement; Circuit faults; Delays; Hardware; Logic gates ;Testing; Trojan horses; Wires; At-speed Testing; Hardware Trojan; Slacks; Small Delay Defects (ID#: 15-4158)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6850660&isnumber=6850634

 

Adhikari, Uttam; Morris, Thomas H.; Pan, Shengyi, "A Cyber-Physical Power System Test Bed For Intrusion Detection Systems," PES General Meeting | Conference & Exposition, 2014 IEEE, pp.1,5, 27-31 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/PESGM.2014.6939262 The rapid advancement of technology used in operation, monitoring, and control introduces several threats against power system. Cyber-physical power system vulnerabilities are increasing and the consequences of attack can be catastrophic. Understanding power system phenomena and attacks is vital to identifying and detecting such events. Researchers require a suitable power system test bed that can provide a platform for simulation of power system events and attacks. An essential part of such a test bed is the ability to provide software and hardware interaction to mimic real world scenarios. This paper presents a test bed for the development of an intrusion detection system (IDS) for power systems. The test bed consists of a power system modeled on a real time digital simulator (RTDS), a data collection and processing engine, and a MATLAB/RSCAD parameter calculation engine. This test bed provides a platform for hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation, power system attacks, and generates data sets required by cyber security researchers. Coordinated distance protection and overcurrent protection schemes are implemented on the IEEE 9 bus system and a 3-generator 4 bus system [11]. Fault, contingency and cyber-attack scenarios have been developed for both power systems. Selected relevant simulation results are presented.
Keywords: Circuit faults; Generators; Phasor measurement units; Power system stability; Power transmission lines; Relays; IDS; attacks; contingencies; data; faults; power system; test bed (ID#: 15-4159)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6939262&isnumber=6938773

 

Patil, R.; Tahiliani, M.P., "Detecting Packet Modification Attack By Misbehaving Router," Networks & Soft Computing (ICNSC), 2014 First International Conference on, pp.113,118, 19-20 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CNSC.2014.6906649 The next generation Internet supports dynamic deployment of different protocols and heterogeneous applications. To support this, routers in next generation computer networks use general purpose programmable packet processors. The customization of routers introduces increased vulnerabilities and attacks that allow potential attackers to compromise the router. Since network routers play a key role in todays network data transport, they became an interesting targets for attackers. An attacker can mount different attacks like denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle by intelligently dropping, modifying or diverting packets arriving at a compromised router. In this paper, we considered the problem of detecting packet modification attack which is performed by an attacker through misbehaving router. Since it is necessary to differentiate malicious packet modification from regular packet modification, detecting such an attack is challenging task. We proposed a controller-based packet modification misbehavior detection technique that excellently detects malicious packet modification by using a hash-based comparison of incoming and outgoing packets of the router. Experiments were carried out using Mininet Simulator and based on the results obtained, we observe that our proposed technique unambiguously detects the malicious packet modification.
Keywords: Internet; computer network security; cryptographic protocols; routing protocols; Internet supports; Mininet simulator; computer networks; controller-based packet modification misbehavior detection technique; denial of service attacks; diverting packets; dropping packets; hash-based comparison; heterogeneous applications; malicious packet modification; man-in-the-middle; misbehaving router; modifying packets; network data transport; network routers; packet modification attack detection; programmable packet processors; protocols applications; regular packet modification; IP networks; Monitoring; Network topology; Routing protocols; Software; Switches (ID#: 15-4160)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906649&isnumber=6906636

 

Al-Dalky, R.; Abduljaleel, O.; Salah, K.; Otrok, H.; Al-Qutayri, M., "A Modbus traffic generator for evaluating the security of SCADA systems," Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP), 2014 9th International Symposium on, pp.809,814, 23-25 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/CSNDSP.2014.6923938 Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to monitor and control several industrial functions such as: oil & gas, electricity, water, nuclear fusion, etc. Recently, the Internet connectivity to SCADA systems introduced new vulnerabilities to these systems and made it a target for immense amount of attacks. In the literature, several solutions have been developed to secure SCADA systems; however; the literature is lacking work directed at the development of tools to evaluate the effectiveness of such solutions. An essential requirement of such tools is the generation of normal and malicious SCADA traffic. In this paper, we present an automated tool to generate a malicious SCADA traffic to be used to evaluate such systems. We consider the traffic generation of the popular SCADA Modbus protocol. The characteristics of the generated traffic are derived from Snort network intrusion detection system (NIDS) Modbus rules. The tool uses Scapy to generate packets based on the extracted traffic features. We present the testing results for our tool. The tool is used to read a Snort rule file that contains Modbus rules to extract the required traffic features.
Keywords: SCADA systems; computer network security; protocols; Modbus traffic generator; NIDS Modbus rules; SCADA Modbus protocol; SCADA systems security evaluation; Scapy; Snort network intrusion detection system; malicious SCADA traffic; supervisory control and data acquisition system; Feature extraction; IP networks; Payloads; Ports (Computers); Protocols; Receivers; SCADA systems; Modbus; Network security; SCADA System; Scapy; Snort (ID#: 15-4161)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6923938&isnumber=6923783

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Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to news@scienceofsecurity.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.

Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review), Part 4

 

	Vulnerability Detection (2014 Year in Review) Part 4

 

Vulnerability detection is a topic for which a great deal of research is being done.  In 2014, more than one hundred major research presentations relevant to the Science of Security were made and published.  To facilitate finding articles, we will present these in four parts. In Part 4, we will cite the next 25.

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Bhunia, S.; Hsiao, M.S.; Banga, M.; Narasimhan, S., "Hardware Trojan Attacks: Threat Analysis and Countermeasures," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 102, no.8, pp.1229, 1247, Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2014.2334493 Security of a computer system has been traditionally related to the security of the software or the information being processed. The underlying hardware used for information processing has been considered trusted. The emergence of hardware Trojan attacks violates this root of trust. These attacks, in the form of malicious modifications of electronic hardware at different stages of its life cycle, pose major security concerns in the electronics industry. An adversary can mount such an attack with an objective to cause operational failure or to leak secret information from inside a chip-e.g., the key in a cryptographic chip, during field operation. Global economic trend that encourages increased reliance on untrusted entities in the hardware design and fabrication process is rapidly enhancing the vulnerability to such attacks. In this paper, we analyze the threat of hardware Trojan attacks; present attack models, types, and scenarios; discuss different forms of protection approaches, both proactive and reactive; and describe emerging attack modes, defenses, and future research pathways.
Keywords: electronics industry; invasive software; computer system security; electronic hardware malicious modifications; electronics industry; global economic trend; hardware Trojan attack; information processing; proactive protection approach; reactive protection approach; threat analysis; Circuit faults; Computer security; Fabrication; Hardware ;Integrated circuit modeling; Integrated circuits; Trojan horses; Hardware intellectual property (IP) trust; Trojan detection; Trojan taxonomy; Trojan tolerance; hardware Trojan attacks; hardware obfuscation; self-referencing; side-channel analysis (ID#: 15-4162)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6856140&isnumber=6860340

 

Zheng Wang; Paul, G.; Chattopadhyay, A., "Processor Design with Asymmetric Reliability," VLSI (ISVLSI), 2014 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on, pp.565, 570, 9-11 July 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISVLSI.2014.63 Continuous shrinking of device size has introduced reliability as a new design challenge for embedded processors. Error mitigation techniques trade off reliability for other design metrics such as performance and power consumption. State-of-the-art fault-tolerant designs involve cross-layer error management, which lead to an over-protected system. To address the overhead issue, asymmetric reliability utilizes unequal protection levels for different system components based on various criticality requirements. In this paper, We propose a versatile asymmetric error detection/correction framework based on instruction-level vulnerability analysis. Inspired from information-theoretic view of processor as a noisy network, asymmetric error correction coding schemes are designed and exploited to efficiently trade off reliability for other performance constraints. Multiple novel asymmetric fault-tolerant design techniques are proposed, which are evaluated through a range of experiments.
Keywords: error detection codes; fault tolerance; integrated circuit reliability; asymmetric error correction coding schemes; asymmetric fault-tolerant design techniques; asymmetric reliability; instruction-level vulnerability analysis; noisy network; processor design; versatile asymmetric error detection/correction framework; Decoding; Encoding; Error correction codes; Reliability engineering; Runtime; VLIW; Asymmetric Reliability; High-level Processor Design; Reliability Exploration (ID#: 15-4163)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6903424&isnumber=6903314

 

Rahbari, H.; Krunz, M.; Lazos, L., "Security Vulnerability And Countermeasures Of Frequency Offset Correction In 802.11a Systems," INFOCOM, 2014 Proceedings IEEE, pp.1015,1023, April 27 2014-May 2 2014.  doi: 10.1109/INFOCOM.2014.6848031 Frequency offset (FO) is an inherent feature of wireless communications. It results from differences in the operating frequency of different radio oscillators. Failure to compensate for the FO may lead to a decoding failure, particularly in OFDM systems. IEEE 802.11a/g systems use a globally known preamble to deal with this issue. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can exploit the structure and publicity of 802.11a's frame preamble to launch a low-power reactive jamming attack against the FO estimation mechanism. In this attack, the adversary will need to quickly detect a PHY frame and subsequently distort the FO estimation mechanism, irrespective of the channel conditions. By employing a fast frame detection technique, and optimizing the energy and structure of the jamming signal, we show the feasibility of such an attack. Furthermore, we propose some mitigation techniques and evaluate one of them through simulations and USRP testbed experimentation.
Keywords: OFDM modulation; jamming; radiofrequency oscillators; software radio; telecommunication security; telecommunication standards; wireless LAN; wireless channels; FO correction; FO estimation mechanism; IEEE 802.11a/g systems; OFDM systems; PHY frame; USRP testbed experimentation; channel conditions; countermeasures; decoding failure; fast frame detection technique; frequency offset correction; jamming signal; low-power reactive jamming attack; radio oscillators; security vulnerability; wireless communications; Channel estimation; Estimation; Jamming; Noise; OFDM; Receivers; Timing (ID#: 15-4164)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6848031&isnumber=6847911

 

Mahajan, R.; Singh, M.; Miglani, S., "ADS: Protecting NTFS from Hacking," Recent Advances and Innovations in Engineering (ICRAIE), 2014, pp.1, 4, 9-11 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/ICRAIE.2014.6909325 Alternate Data Streams is one of the possible ways to hide data in NTFS file system in Windows. It was introduced to make Windows NTFS compatible with HFS file system of Macintosh. This paper explains what exactly alternate data streams are, their requirement and their functionality. It also explains whether alternate data streams is a feature or a vulnerability of NTFS file system. It explains how hacker can utilize this functionality of NTFS to hide malicious codes in victim's machine so as to compromise it. All possible ways of hiding data and techniques for detecting and removing ADS are also explained. It mainly focuses on criminals who use various data hiding techniques in order to hide their data from the forensic analysts. Finally its main focus is on explaining an ADS Tool that is a graphical tool which enables user to create, start, detect and delete ADS.  
Keywords: computer crime; data encapsulation; digital forensics ;storage management; ADS tool; HFS file system; Macintosh; NTFS file system; Windows NTFS; alternate data streams; data hiding techniques; forensic analyst; graphical tool; hacking; malicious codes; File systems; Streaming media; Alternate Data Streams; HFS; NTFS; creation; deletion; detection (ID#: 15-4165)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6909325&isnumber=6909103

 

Bartolini, N.; Bongiovanni, G.; La Porta, T.F.; Silvestri, S., "On the Vulnerabilities of the Virtual Force Approach to Mobile Sensor Deployment," Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 13, no. 11, pp.2592, 2605, Nov. 2014. doi: 10.1109/TMC.2014.2308209 The virtual force approach is at the basis of many solutions proposed for deploying mobile sensors. In this paper we study the vulnerabilities of this approach. We show that by compromising a few mobile sensors, an attacker can influence the movement of other sensors and prevent the achievement of the network coverage goals. We introduce an attack, called opportunistic movement, and give an analytical study of its efficacy. We show that in a typical scenario this attack can reduce coverage by more than 50 percent, by only compromising a 7 percent of the nodes. We propose two algorithms to counteract the above mentioned attack, DRM and SecureVF. DRM is a light-weight algorithm which randomly repositions sensors from overcrowded areas. SecureVF requires a more complex coordination among sensors but, unlike DRM, it enables detection and identification of malicious sensors. We investigate the performance of DRM and SecureVF through simulations. We show that DRM can significantly reduce the effects of the attack, at the expense of an increase in the energy consumption due to additional movements. By contrast, SecureVF completely neutralizes the attack and allows the achievement of the coverage goals of the network even in the presence of localization inaccuracies.
Keywords: mobile radio; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; DRM; SecureVF; energy consumption; light-weight algorithm; mobile sensor deployment; network coverage goal; opportunistic movement; virtual force approach; Analytical models; Bills of materials; Force; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Radio frequency; Security; Mobile sensors; self-deployment; virtual force approach (ID#: 15-4166)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6748037&isnumber=6913596

 

Ghosh, S.; Basak, A.; Bhunia, S., "How Secure Are Printed Circuit Boards Against Trojan Attacks?" Design & Test, IEEE, vol.32, no.2, pp.7,16, April 2015 doi: 10.1109/MDAT.2014.2347918 Malicious modification of a design in a foundry or design house, referred to as hardware Trojan attacks, are intended to act as a spy or terrorist-on-chip. While these attacks have emerged as major security concerns for Integrated Circuits (ICs), in this paper, we demonstrate similar vulnerabilities at higher level, in particular for Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). We note that increasing complexity of modern PCBs and growing reliance on third party entities make Trojan attacks in PCBs highly feasible. We introduce possible attack models and demonstrate instances for hardware Trojan insertion in fabricated PCBs that can either cause malfunction or leak secret information. Our investigation reveals that traditional PCB test methodologies can often be ineffective in detecting these Trojans. We also explore possible protection approaches against such attacks including a Reverse Engineering-based detection approach and a low-overhead preventive design solution.
Keywords: Fabrication; Hardware; Integrated circuits; Pins; Resistance; Testing; Trojan horses (ID#: 15-4167)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6878437&isnumber=6461917

 

Vuković, O.; Dán, G., "Security of Fully Distributed Power System State Estimation: Detection and Mitigation of Data Integrity Attacks," Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on, vol. 32, no.7, pp.1500,1508, July 2014. doi: 10.1109/JSAC.2014.2332106 State estimation (SE) plays an essential role in the monitoring and supervision of power systems. In today's power systems, SE is typically done in a centralized or in a hierarchical way, but as power systems will be increasingly interconnected in the future smart grid, distributed SE will become an important alternative to centralized and hierarchical solutions. As the future smart grid may rely on distributed SE, it is essential to understand the potential vulnerabilities that distributed SE may have. In this paper, we show that an attacker that compromises the communication infrastructure of a single control center in an interconnected power system can successfully perform a denial-of-service attack against state-of-the-art distributed SE, and consequently, it can blind the system operators of every region. As a solution to mitigate such a denial-of-service attack, we propose a fully distributed algorithm for attack detection. Furthermore, we propose a fully distributed algorithm that identifies the most likely attack location based on the individual regions' beliefs about the attack location, isolates the identified region, and then reruns the distributed SE. We validate the proposed algorithms on the IEEE 118 bus benchmark power system.
Keywords: {computer network security; data integrity; distributed algorithms; power system interconnection; power system security; power system state estimation; IEEE 118 bus benchmark power system; attack detection; attack location; communication infrastructure; control center; data integrity attacks; denial-of-service attack; distributed SE; fully distributed algorithm; fully distributed power system state estimation; future smart grid; interconnected power system; Convergence; Power measurement; Power system stability; Security; State estimation; Vectors; Distributed power system state estimation; data integrity attacks; detection; false data injection; mitigation; security (ID#: 15-4168)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6840318&isnumber=6879523

 

Raghavendra, R.; Busch, C., "Robust 2D/3D Face Mask Presentation Attack Detection Scheme By Exploring Multiple Features And Comparison Score Level Fusion," Information Fusion (FUSION), 2014 17th International Conference on, pp.1, 7, 7-10 July 2014. The face mask presentation attack introduces a greater threat to the face recognition system. With the evolving technology in generating both 2D and 3D masks in a more sophisticated, realistic and cost effective manner encloses the face recognition system to more challenging vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a novel Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) scheme that explores both global (i.e. face) and local (i.e. periocular or eye) region to accurately identify the presence of both 2D and 3D face masks. The proposed PAD algorithm is based on both Binarized Statistical Image Features (BSIF) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) that can capture a prominent micro-texture features. The linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is then trained independently on these two features that are applied on both local and global region to obtain the comparison scores. We then combine these scores using the weighted sum rule before making the decision about a normal (or real or live) or an artefact (or spoof) face. Extensive experiments are carried out on two publicly available databases for 2D and 3D face masks namely: CASIA face spoof database and 3DMAD shows the efficacy of the proposed scheme when compared with well-established state-of-the-art techniques.
Keywords: biometrics (access control);face recognition; feature extraction; image texture; learning (artificial intelligence);support vector machines;2D face mask;3D face mask;3DMAD;BSIF;CASIA face spoof database; LBP; SVM; binarized statistical image features; comparison score level fusion; face biometrics; face recognition system; linear support vector machine; local binary patterns; presentation attack detection; Databases; Face; Face recognition; Feature extraction; Image resolution; Support vector machines; Three-dimensional displays; Biometrics; Counter measure; Security; face mask attack (ID#: 15-4169)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6916069&isnumber=6915967

 

Yang, Y.; McLaughlin, K.; Sezer, S.; Littler, T.; Im, E.G.; Pranggono, B.; Wang, H.F., "Multiattribute SCADA-Specific Intrusion Detection System for Power Networks," Power Delivery, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 29, no. 3, pp.1092, 1102, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPWRD.2014.2300099 The increased interconnectivity and complexity of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in power system networks has exposed the systems to a multitude of potential vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a novel approach for a next-generation SCADA-specific intrusion detection system (IDS). The proposed system analyzes multiple attributes in order to provide a comprehensive solution that is able to mitigate varied cyber-attack threats. The multiattribute IDS comprises a heterogeneous white list and behavior-based concept in order to make SCADA cybersystems more secure. This paper also proposes a multilayer cyber-security framework based on IDS for protecting SCADA cybersecurity in smart grids without compromising the availability of normal data. In addition, this paper presents a SCADA-specific cybersecurity testbed to investigate simulated attacks, which has been used in this paper to validate the proposed approach.
Keywords: SCADA systems; power system security; security of data; smart power grids; IDS; SCADA cybersystems; behavior-based concept; cyber-attack threats; heterogeneous white list; multiattribute SCADA-specific intrusion detection system; multilayer cyber-security framework; power system networks; smart grids ;supervisory control and data acquisition systems; Computer security; Current measurement; Detectors; Intrusion detection; Protocols; SCADA systems; Cybersecurity; intrusion detection; smart grid; supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) (ID#: 15-4170)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6737311&isnumber=6819482

 

Kaur, R.; Singh, M., "Efficient Hybrid Technique For Detecting Zero-Day Polymorphic Worms," Advance Computing Conference (IACC), 2014 IEEE International, pp. 95, 100, 21-22 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/IAdCC.2014.6779301 This paper presents an efficient technique for detecting zero-day polymorphic worms with almost zero false positives. Zero-day polymorphic worms not only exploit unknown vulnerabilities but also change their own representations on each new infection or encrypt their payloads using a different key per infection. Thus, there are many variations in the signatures for the same worm, making fingerprinting very difficult. With their ability to rapidly propagate, these worms increasingly threaten the Internet hosts and services. If these zero-day worms are not detected and contained at right time, they can potentially disable the Internet or can wreak serious havoc. So the detection of Zero-day polymorphic worms is of paramount importance.
Keywords: Internet; cryptography; digital signatures; invasive software; Internet hosts; encryption; fingerprinting; hybrid technique; signatures; unknown vulnerabilities; zero false positives; zero-day polymorphic worm detection; Algorithm design and analysis; Grippers; Internet; Malware; Payloads; Registers; Sensors; Zero-day attack; hybrid system; intrusion detection; polymorphic worm (ID#: 15-4171)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6779301&isnumber=6779283

 

Ying-dar Lin; Chia-Yin Lee; Yu-Sung Wu; Pei-Hsiu Ho; Fu-yu Wang; Yi-Lang Tsai, "Active versus Passive Malware Collection," Computer, vol.47, no.4, pp.59,65, Apr. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MC.2013.226 An exploration of active and passive malware honeypots reveals that the two systems yield vastly different malware collections and that peer-to-peer file sharing is an important, but often overlooked, malware source.
Keywords: invasive software; peer-to-peer computing; active malware collection; active malware honeypots; passive malware collection; passive malware honeypots; peer-to-peer file sharing; Databases; Malware; Peer-to-peer computing; Telecommunication traffic; Trojan horses; Virtual machining; honeypots; malware collection and detection; network security; network vulnerability (ID#: 15-4172)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6544525&isnumber=6798540

 

Shuai, Shao; Guowei, Dong; Tao, Guo; Tianchang, Yang; Chenjie, Shi, "Modelling Analysis and Auto-detection of Cryptographic Misuse in Android Applications," Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on, pp. 75, 80, 24-27 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/DASC.2014.22 Cryptographic misuse affects a sizeable portion of Android applications. However, there is only an empirical study that has been made about this problem. In this paper, we perform a systematic analysis on the cryptographic misuse, build the cryptographic misuse vulnerability model and implement a prototype tool Crypto Misuse Analyser (CMA). The CMA can perform static analysis on Android apps and select the branches that invoke the cryptographic API. Then it runs the app following the target branch and records the cryptographic API calls. At last, the CMA identifies the cryptographic API misuse vulnerabilities from the records based on the pre-defined model. We also analyze dozens of Android apps with the help of CMA and find that more than a half of apps are affected by such vulnerabilities.
Keywords: Analytical models; Androids; Encryption; Humanoid robots; Runtime; Android; Cryptographic Misuse; Modelling Analysis; Vulnerability (ID#: 15-4173)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6945307&isnumber=6945641

 

Farzan, F.; Jafari, M.A.; Wei, D.; Lu, Y., "Cyber-Related Risk Assessment And Critical Asset Identification In Power Grids," Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT), 2014 IEEE PES, pp.1,5, 19-22 Feb. 2014. doi: 10.1109/ISGT.2014.6816371 This paper proposes a methodology to assess cyber-related risks and to identify critical assets both at power grid and substation levels. The methodology is based on a two-pass engine model. The first pass engine is developed to identify the most critical substation(s) in a power grid. A mixture of Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and (N-1) contingent analysis is used to calculate risks. The second pass engine is developed to identify risky assets within a substation and improve the vulnerability of a substation against the intrusion and malicious acts of cyber hackers. The risk methodology uniquely combines asset reliability, vulnerability and costs of attack into a risk index. A methodology is also presented to improve the overall security of a substation by optimally placing security agent(s) on the automation system.
Keywords: {analytic hierarchy process; power grids; power system reliability; power system security; risk analysis; substation automation; AHP;N-1 contingent analysis; analytical hierarchy process; asset reliability; automation system; cost vulnerability; critical asset identification; critical substation identification; cyber hackers; cyber related risk assessment; intrusion detection; malicious; optimal placing security; power grid; risk index; risk methodology; second pass engine; substation level; substation vulnerability; two-pass engine model; Automation; Indexes; Modeling; Power grids; Reliability; Security; Substations; cyber security; cyber vulnerability; electrical power grids; risk assessment; substation (ID#: 15-4174)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6816371&isnumber=6816367

 

Myalapalli, V.K.; Chakravarthy, A.S.N., "A Unified Model For Cherishing Privacy In Database System An Approach To Overhaul Vulnerabilities," Networks & Soft Computing (ICNSC), 2014 First International Conference on, pp. 263, 266, 19-20 Aug. 2014. doi: 10.1109/CNSC.2014.6906658 Privacy is the most anticipated aspect in many perspectives especially with sensitive data and the database is being targeted incessantly for vulnerability. The database must be persistently monitored for ensuring comprehensive security. The proposed model is intended to cherish the database privacy by thwarting intrusions and inferences. The Database Static protection and Intrusion Tolerance Subsystem proposed in the architecture bolster this practice. This paper enunciates Privacy Cherished Database architecture model and how it achieves security under sundry circumstances.
Keywords: data privacy; database management systems; security of data; database static protection; database system privacy; inference thwarting; Intrusion thwarting; intrusion tolerance subsystem; privacy cherished database architecture model; security; Decision support systems; Handheld computers; Database Security; Database Security Configurations; Inference Detection; Intrusion detection; security policy (ID#: 15-4175)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6906658&isnumber=6906636

 

Shaw, A.L.; Bordbar, B.; Saxon, J.; Harrison, K.; Dalton, C.I., "Forensic Virtual Machines: Dynamic Defence in the Cloud via Introspection," Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp.303, 310, 11-14 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/IC2E.2014.59 The Cloud attempts to provide its users with automatically scalable platforms to host many applications and operating systems. To allow for quick deployment, they are often homogenised to a few images, restricting the variations used within the Cloud. An exploitable vulnerability stored within an image means that each instance will suffer from it and as a result, an attacker can be sure of a high pay-off for their time. This makes the Cloud a prime target for malicious activities. There is a clear requirement to develop an automated and computationally-inexpensive method of discovering malicious behaviour as soon as it starts, such that remedial action can be adopted before substantial damage is caused. In this paper we propose the use of Mini-OS, a virtualised operating system that uses minimal resources on the Xen virtualisation platform, for analysing the memory space of other guest virtual machines. These detectors, which we call Forensic Virtual Machines (FVMs), are lightweight such that they are inherently computationally cheap to run. Such a small footprint allows the physical host to run numerous instances to find symptoms of malicious behaviour whilst potentially limiting attack vectors. We describe our experience of developing FVMs and how they can be used to complement existing methods to combat malware. We also evaluate them in terms of performance and the resources that they require.
Keywords: cloud computing; digital forensics; invasive software; operating systems (computers); virtual machines; virtualisation; FVM; Mini-OS virtualised operating system; Xen virtualisation platform; cloud defence; forensic virtual machines; guest virtual machines; image vulnerability; malicious activities; malicious behaviour discovery; malware; Forensics; Kernel; Libraries; Malware; Monitoring; Virtual machining; Xen; cloud computing; forensics; introspection; intrusion detection; monitoring; security; virtual machine; virtualization (ID#: 15-4176)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6903487&isnumber=6903436

 

Kumar, E.S.; Kusuma, S.M.; Kumar, B.P.V., "A random key distribution based Artificial Immune System for Security In Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks," Electrical, Electronics and Computer Science (SCEECS), 2014 IEEE Students' Conference on, pp.1,7, 1-2 March 2014. doi: 10.1109/SCEECS.2014.6804506 Wireless sensor networks are associated with risk due to the threats of security vulnerabilities. In this context, we propose a scheme, which uses random key distribution based Artificial Immune System (AIS) for detecting spoofing attacks. The prospective method is for clustered sensor networks and as an example, the algorithm is executed on LEACH protocol. The simulation results prove that the design is energy efficient than the other widely used cryptographic methods while providing robust security in the network.
Keywords: artificial immune systems; cryptographic protocols; telecommunication security; wireless sensor networks; AIS; LEACH protocol; clustered wireless sensor network security; cryptographic methods; energy efficient design; random key distribution based artificial immune system; security vulnerability; spoofing attack detection; Algorithm design and analysis; Equations; Immune system; Mathematical model; Protocols; Security; Wireless sensor networks; Artificial Immune System; LEACH protocol; clustered sensor networks; cryptography (ID#: 15-4177)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6804506&isnumber=6804412

 

Stoian, I.; Ignat, S.; Capatina, D.; Ghiran, O., "Security and Intrusion Detection On Critical SCADA Systems For Water Management," Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics, 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1, 6, 22-24 May 2014. doi: 10.1109/AQTR.2014.6857919 SCADA systems are broadly employed in supervising and controlling industrial areas comprising manufacturing industries, traffic control, power plants, integrated water management systems (distribution, treatment and sewage). The security of SCADA systems represents a significant subject on account of the critical function that these systems perform in offering vital utility services. In nowadays industrial systems ubiquitous access to Internet enhance the vulnerabilities of SCADA systems, for the reason that this allows a remote attacker to obtain control of, or produce interruption to the network critical functions. The attacks affect the network control plane and /or the data plane. Critical infrastructures, requiring uninterrupted operation, maintenance, and protection, have need of robust and secured control SCADA systems. The paper intends to depicts the critical architectural constituents of these systems, detect vulnerabilities and possible threats, and illustrate protection techniques that may be set up in order to reduce attacks involving situation awareness solutions.
Keywords: SCADA systems; control engineering computing; public utilities; security of data; water resources; Internet; architectural constituents; critical SCADA systems; critical infrastructures; data plane; industrial areas; intrusion detection ;network control plane; network critical functions; protection techniques; remote attacker; security; situation awareness solutions; ubiquitous access; vital utility services; water management; Monitoring; Protocols; Reservoirs; SCADA systems; Servers; Trojan horses; Cyber Security; Intrusion Detection; SCADA security; computer and network vulnerability assessment; process control systems (ID#: 15-4177)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6857919&isnumber=6857810

 

Hui Guan; Hakeem, H.; Hongji Yang, "Reverse Engineering Web Applications for Security Mechanism Enhancement," Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2014 IEEE 38th International, pp.492,497, 21-25 July 2014.doi: 10.1109/COMPSACW.2014.82 This paper focuses on reverse engineering web application for security mechanisms detection in the current design and thereby presents a security evaluation method for web application taking consideration of potential threats, security features provided by the detected security mechanisms and user's security objectives. Based on our previous work on risk assessment for web applications, evaluation of current security implementation is conducted combining core security structure detection and security knowledge checklist matching. Reverse engineering techniques have been used to extract system models from source code based on which security relevant artefacts are identified and matched with built security artefacts base. The paper describes the general structure of the proposed method.
Keywords: Internet; reverse engineering; security of data; core security structure detection; reverse engineering Web applications; risk assessment; security evaluation method; security knowledge checklist matching; security mechanism detection; security mechanism enhancement; source code; user security objectives; Access control; Authentication; Encryption; Reverse engineering; Software; reverse engineering; risk assessment; security evaluation; security mechanism; vulnerability (ID#: 15-4178)
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6903178&isnumber=6903069

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