Biblio

Open Source Software plays an important role in many software ecosystems. Whether in operating systems, network stacks, or as low-level system drivers, software we encounter daily is permeated with code contributions from open source projects. Decentralized development and open collaboration in open source projects introduce unique challenges: code submissions from unknown entities, limited personpower for commit or dependency reviews, and bringing new contributors up-to-date in projects’ best practices & processes.In 27 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with owners, maintainers, and contributors from a diverse set of open source projects, we investigate their security and trust practices. For this, we explore projects’ behind-the-scene processes, provided guidance & policies, as well as incident handling & encountered challenges. We find that our participants’ projects are highly diverse both in deployed security measures and trust processes, as well as their underlying motivations. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for the open source software ecosystem and how the research community can better support open source projects in trust and security considerations. Overall, we argue for supporting open source projects in ways that consider their individual strengths and limitations, especially in the case of smaller projects with low contributor numbers and limited access to resources.

As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered businesses and their workforces into new scales of remote work, vital security concerns arose surrounding remote access. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) also plays a growing role in the ability of companies to support remote workforces. As more enterprises embrace concepts of zero trust in their network security posture, access control policy management problems become a more significant concern as it relates to BYOD security enforcement. This BYOD security policy must enable work from home, but enterprises have a vested interest in maintaining the security of their assets. Therefore, the BYOD security policy must strike a balance between access, security, and privacy, given the personal device use. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of enabling zero trust in BYOD use cases. We present a BYOD policy specification to enable the zero trust access control known as BYOZ. Accompanying this policy specification, we have designed a network architecture to support enterprise zero trust BYOD use cases through the novel incorporation of continuous authentication & authorization enforcement. We evaluate our architecture through a demo implementation of BYOZ and demonstrate how it can meet the needs of existing enterprise networks using BYOD.

This article discusses a threat and vulnerability analysis model that allows you to fully analyze the requirements related to information security in an organization and document the results of the analysis. The use of this method allows avoiding and preventing unnecessary costs for security measures arising from subjective risk assessment, planning and implementing protection at all stages of the information systems lifecycle, minimizing the time spent by an information security specialist during information system risk assessment procedures by automating this process and reducing the level of errors and professional skills of information security experts. In the initial sections, the common methods of risk analysis and risk assessment software are analyzed and conclusions are drawn based on the results of comparative analysis, calculations are carried out in accordance with the proposed model.

Successful information and communication technology (ICT) may propel administrative procedures forward quickly. In order to achieve efficient usage of TCT in their businesses, ICT strategies and plans should be examined to ensure that they align with the organization's visions and missions. Efficient software and hardware work together to provide relevant data that aids in the improvement of how we do business, learn, communicate, entertain, and work. This exposes them to a risky environment that is prone to both internal and outside threats. The term “security” refers to a level of protection or resistance to damage. Security can also be thought of as a barrier between assets and threats. Important terms must be understood in order to have a comprehensive understanding of security. This research paper discusses key terms, concerns, and challenges related to information systems and security auditing. Exploratory research is utilised in this study to find an explanation for the observed occurrences, problems, or behaviour. The study's findings include a list of various security risks that must be seriously addressed in any Information System and Security Audit.

Audit systems maintain detailed logs of security-related events on enterprise machines to forensically analyze potential incidents. In principle, these logs should be safely stored in a secure location (e.g., network storage) as soon as they are produced, but this incurs prohibitive slowdown to a monitored machine. Hence, existing audit systems protect batched logs asynchronously (e.g., after tens of seconds), but this allows attackers to tamper with unprotected logs.This paper presents HARDLOG, a practical and effective system that employs a novel audit device to provide fine-grained log protection with minimal performance slowdown. HARDLOG implements criticality-aware log protection: it ensures that logs are synchronously protected in the audit device before an infrequent security-critical event is allowed to execute, but logs are asynchronously protected on frequent non-critical events to minimize performance overhead. Importantly, even on non-critical events, HARDLOG ensures bounded-asynchronous protection: it sends log entries to the audit device within a tiny, bounded delay from their creation using well-known real-time techniques. To demonstrate HARDLOG’S effectiveness, we prototyped an audit device using commodity components and implemented a reference audit system for Linux. Our prototype achieves a bounded protection delay of 15 milliseconds at non-critical events alongside undelayed protection at critical events. We also show that, for diverse real-world programs, HARDLOG incurs a geometric mean performance slowdown of only 6.3%, hence it is suitable for many real-world deployment scenarios.

In this work different Meta-heuristic Techniques have been endeavored for addressing the Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) and Optimal Power Flow (OPF)problem for minimizing the total fuel cost of the system. Here four meta-heuristics i.e. Genetic Algorithm (GA), Big Bang-Big Crunch Algorithm (BBBC), Shuffled Frog Leap Algorithm (SFLA) and Jaya Algorithms (JA) have been discussed. The problem was simulated on IEEE 30 bus standard test system under MATLAB environment. The simulation results show that JA outperforms GA, SFLA, and BBBC in terms of overall cost and computational time.

Cyber attacks keep states, companies and individuals at bay, draining precious resources including time, money, and reputation. Attackers thereby seem to have a first mover advantage leading to a dynamic defender attacker game. Automated approaches taking advantage of Cyber Threat Intelligence on past attacks bear the potential to empower security professionals and hence increase cyber security. Consistently, there has been a lot of research on automated approaches in cyber risk management including works on predictive attack algorithms and threat hunting. Combining data on countermeasures from “MITRE Detection, Denial, and Disruption Framework Empowering Network Defense” and adversarial data from “MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge” this work aims at developing methods that enable highly precise and efficient automatic incident response. We introduce Attack Incident Responder, a methodology working with simple heuristics to find the most efficient sets of counter-measures for hypothesized attacks. By doing so, the work contributes to narrowing the attackers first mover advantage. Experimental results are promising high average precisions in predicting effiective defenses when using the methodology. In addition, we compare the proposed defense measures against a static set of defensive techniques offering robust security against observed attacks. Furthermore, we combine the approach of automated incidence response to an approach for threat hunting enabling full automation of security operation centers. By this means, we define a threshold in the precision of attack hypothesis generation that must be met for predictive defense algorithms to outperform the baseline. The calculated threshold can be used to evaluate attack hypothesis generation algorithms. The presented methodology for automated incident response may be a valuable support for information security professionals. Last, the work elaborates on the combination of static base defense with adaptive incidence response for generating a bio-inspired artificial immune system for computerized networks.

DDoS is a major issue in network security and a threat to service providers that renders a service inaccessible for a period of time. The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has developed rapidly. Nevertheless, it is proven that security on these devices is frequently disregarded. Many detection methods exist and are mostly focused on Machine Learning. However, the best method has not been defined yet. The aim of this paper is to find the optimal volumetric DDoS attack detection method by first comparing different existing machine learning methods, and second, by building an adaptive lightweight heuristics model relying on few traffic attributes and simple DDoS detection rules. With this new simple model, our goal is to decrease the classification time. Finally, we compare machine learning methods with our adaptive new heuristics method which shows promising results both on the accuracy and performance levels.

Port knocking provides an added layer of security on top of the existing security systems of a network. A predefined port knocking sequence is used to open the ports, which are closed by the firewall by default. The server determines the valid request if the knocking sequence is correct and opens the desired port. However, this sequence poses a security threat due to its static nature. This paper presents the port knock sequence-based communication protocol in the Software Defined network (SDN). It provides better management by separating the control plane and data plane. At the same time, it causes a communication overhead between the switches and the controller. To avoid this overhead, we are using the port knocking concept in the data plane without any involvement of the SDN controller. This study proposes three port knock sequence-based protocols (static, partial dynamic, and dynamic) in the data plane. To test the protocol in SDN environment, the P4 implementation of the underlying model is done in the BMV2 (behavioral model version 2) virtual switch. To check the security of the protocols, an informal security analysis is performed, which shows that the proposed protocols are secured to be implemented in the SDN data plane.

The Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA) presents a blueprint for building safe and real-time constrained distributed systems, based on a set of orthogonal concepts that make extensive use of the availability of a globally consistent notion of time and a priori knowledge of events. Although the TTA tolerates arbitrary failures of any of its nodes by architectural means (active node replication, a membership service, and bus guardians), the design of these means considers only accidental faults. However, distributed safety- and real-time critical systems have been emerging into more open and interconnected systems, operating autonomously for prolonged times and interfacing with other possibly non-real-time systems. Therefore, the existence of vulnerabilities that adversaries may exploit to compromise system safety cannot be ruled out. In this paper, we discuss potential targeted attacks capable of bypassing TTA's fault-tolerance mechanisms and demonstrate how two well-known recovery techniques - proactive and reactive rejuvenation - can be incorporated into TTA to reduce the window of vulnerability for attacks without introducing extensive and costly changes.

Nowadays, IoT networks and devices exist in our everyday life, capturing and carrying unlimited data. However, increasing penetration of connected systems and devices implies rising threats for cybersecurity with IoT systems suffering from network attacks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning take advantage of huge volumes of IoT network logs to enhance their cybersecurity in IoT. However, these data are often desired to remain private. Federated Learning (FL) provides a potential solution which enables collaborative training of attack detection model among a set of federated nodes, while preserving privacy as data remain local and are never disclosed or processed on central servers. While FL is resilient and resolves, up to a point, data governance and ownership issues, it does not guarantee security and privacy by design. Adversaries could interfere with the communication process, expose network vulnerabilities, and manipulate the training process, thus affecting the performance of the trained model. In this paper, we present a federated learning model which can successfully detect network attacks in IoT systems. Moreover, we evaluate its performance under various settings of differential privacy as a privacy preserving technique and configurations of the participating nodes. We prove that the proposed model protects the privacy without actually compromising performance. Our model realizes a limited performance impact of only ∼ 7% less testing accuracy compared to the baseline while simultaneously guaranteeing security and applicability.

The integration of the Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) and fog computing benefits from cooperative computing and analysis of environmental data while avoiding network congestion and latency. However, when private data is shared across fog nodes or the cloud, there exist privacy issues that limit the effectiveness of IoV systems, putting drivers' safety at risk. To address this problem, we propose a framework called PPIoV, which is based on Federated Learning (FL) and Blockchain technologies to preserve the privacy of vehicles in IoV.Typical machine learning methods are not well suited for distributed and highly dynamic systems like IoV since they train on data with local features. Therefore, we use FL to train the global model while preserving privacy. Also, our approach is built on a scheme that evaluates the reliability of vehicles participating in the FL training process. Moreover, PPIoV is built on blockchain to establish trust across multiple communication nodes. For example, when the local learned model updates from the vehicles and fog nodes are communicated with the cloud to update the global learned model, all transactions take place on the blockchain. The outcome of our experimental study shows that the proposed method improves the global model's accuracy as a result of allowing reputed vehicles to update the global model.

This paper focuses on the system on wireless sensor networks. The system is linear and the time of the system is discrete as well as variable, which named discrete-time linear time-varying systems (DLTVS). DLTVS are vulnerable to network attacks when exchanging information between sensors in the network, as well as putting their security at risk. A DLTVS with privacy-preserving is designed for this purpose. A set-membership estimator is designed by adding privacy noise obeying the Laplace distribution to state at the initial moment. Simultaneously, the differential privacy of the system is analyzed. On this basis, the real state of the system and the existence form of the estimator for the desired distribution are analyzed. Finally, simulation examples are given, which prove that the model after adding differential privacy can obtain accurate estimates and ensure the security of the system state.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence are two technologies that, when combined, have the ability to help each other realize their full potential. Blockchains can guarantee the accessibility and consistent admittance to integrity safeguarded big data indexes from numerous areas, allowing AI systems to learn more effectively and thoroughly. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to offer new consensus processes, and hence new methods of engaging with Blockchains. When it comes to sensitive data, such as corporate, healthcare, and financial data, various security and privacy problems arise that must be properly evaluated. Interaction with Blockchains is vulnerable to data credibility checks, transactional data leakages, data protection rules compliance, on-chain data privacy, and malicious smart contracts. To solve these issues, new security and privacy-preserving technologies are being developed. AI-based blockchain data processing, either based on AI or used to defend AI-based blockchain data processing, is emerging to simplify the integration of these two cutting-edge technologies.

With 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 (48% of the human population), almost 3 billion images are shared daily. At the same time, a consistent evolution of smartphone cameras has led to a photography explosion with 85% of all new pictures being captured using smartphones. However, lately, there has been an increased discussion of privacy concerns when a person being photographed is unaware of the picture being taken or has reservations about the same being shared. These privacy violations are amplified for people with disabilities, who may find it challenging to raise dissent even if they are aware. Such unauthorized image captures may also be misused to gain sympathy by third-party organizations, leading to a privacy breach. Privacy for people with disabilities has so far received comparatively less attention from the AI community. This motivates us to work towards a solution to generate privacy-conscious cues for raising awareness in smartphone users of any sensitivity in their viewfinder content. To this end, we introduce PrivPAS (A real time Privacy-Preserving AI System) a novel framework to identify sensitive content. Additionally, we curate and annotate a dataset to identify and localize accessibility markers and classify whether an image is sensitive to a featured subject with a disability. We demonstrate that the proposed lightweight architecture, with a memory footprint of a mere 8.49MB, achieves a high mAP of 89.52% on resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, our pipeline, trained on face anonymized data. achieves an F1-score of 73.1%.

Modern consumer electronic devices often provide intelligence services with deep neural networks. We have started migrating the computing locations of intelligence services from cloud servers (traditional AI systems) to the corresponding devices (on-device AI systems). On-device AI systems generally have the advantages of preserving privacy, removing network latency, and saving cloud costs. With the emergence of on-device AI systems having relatively low computing power, the inconsistent and varying hardware resources and capabilities pose difficulties. Authors' affiliation has started applying a stream pipeline framework, NNStreamer, for on-device AI systems, saving developmental costs and hardware resources and improving performance. We want to expand the types of devices and applications with on-device AI services products of both the affiliation and second/third parties. We also want to make each AI service atomic, re-deployable, and shared among connected devices of arbitrary vendors; we now have yet another requirement introduced as it always has been. The new requirement of “among-device AI” includes connectivity between AI pipelines so that they may share computing resources and hardware capabilities across a wide range of devices regardless of vendors and manufacturers. We propose extensions of the stream pipeline framework, NNStreamer, for on-device AI so that NNStreamer may provide among-device AI capability. This work is a Linux Foundation (LF AI & Data) open source project accepting contributions from the general public.

This paper proposes a novel approach for privacy preserving face recognition aimed to formally define a trade-off optimization criterion between data privacy and algorithm accuracy. In our methodology, real world face images are anonymized with Gaussian blurring for privacy preservation. The anonymized images are processed for face detection, face alignment, face representation, and face verification. The proposed methodology has been validated with a set of experiments on a well known dataset and three face recognition classifiers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to correctly verify face images with different levels of privacy and results accuracy, and to maximize privacy with the least negative impact on face detection and face verification accuracy.

We introduce AdaMix, an adaptive differentially private algorithm for training deep neural network classifiers using both private and public image data. While pre-training language models on large public datasets has enabled strong differential privacy (DP) guarantees with minor loss of accuracy, a similar practice yields punishing trade-offs in vision tasks. A few-shot or even zero-shot learning baseline that ignores private data can outperform fine-tuning on a large private dataset. AdaMix incorporates few-shot training, or cross-modal zero-shot learning, on public data prior to private fine-tuning, to improve the trade-off. AdaMix reduces the error increase from the non-private upper bound from the 167–311% of the baseline, on average across 6 datasets, to 68-92% depending on the desired privacy level selected by the user. AdaMix tackles the trade-off arising in visual classification, whereby the most privacy sensitive data, corresponding to isolated points in representation space, are also critical for high classification accuracy. In addition, AdaMix comes with strong theoretical privacy guarantees and convergence analysis.

Many organizations process and store classified data within their computer networks. Owing to the value of data that they hold; such organizations are more vulnerable to targets from adversaries. Accordingly, the sensitive organizations resort to an ‘air-gap’ approach on their networks, to ensure better protection. However, despite the physical and logical isolation, the attackers have successfully manifested their capabilities by compromising such networks; examples of Stuxnet and Agent.btz in view. Such attacks were possible due to the successful manipulation of human beings. It has been observed that to build up such attacks, persistent reconnaissance of the employees, and their data collection often forms the first step. With the rapid integration of social media into our daily lives, the prospects for data-seekers through that platform are higher. The inherent risks and vulnerabilities of social networking sites/apps have cultivated a rich environment for foreign adversaries to cherry-pick personal information and carry out successful profiling of employees assigned with sensitive appointments. With further targeted social engineering techniques against the identified employees and their families, attackers extract more and more relevant data to make an intelligent picture. Finally, all the information is fused to design their further sophisticated attacks against the air-gapped facility for data pilferage. In this regard, the success of the adversaries in harvesting the personal information of the victims largely depends upon the common errors committed by legitimate users while on duty, in transit, and after their retreat. Such errors would keep on repeating unless these are aligned with their underlying human behaviors and weaknesses, and the requisite mitigation framework is worked out.

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

This paper proposes a cybersecurity maturity model to assess the capabilities of medical organizations to identify their level of maturity, prioritizing privacy and personal data protection. There are problems such as data breaches, the lack of security measures in health information, and the poor capacity of organizations to handle cybersecurity threats that generate concern in the health sector as they seek to mitigate risks in cyberspace. The proposal, based upon C2M2 (Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model), incorporates practices and controls which allow organizations to identify security gaps generated through cyberattacks on sensitive health patient data. This model seeks to integrate the best practices related to privacy and protection of personal data in the Peruvian legal framework through the Administrative Directive No. 294-MINSA and the personal data protection Act No. 29733. The model consists of 3 evaluation phases. 1. Assessment planning; 2. Execution of the evaluation; 3. Implementation of improvements. The model was validated and tested in a public sector medical organization in Lima, Peru. The preliminary results showed that the organization is at Level 1 with 14% of compliance with established controls, 34% in risk, threat and vulnerability management practices and 19% in supply chain management. These the 3 highest percentages of the 10 evaluated domains.

Smart cities are a wide range of projects made to facilitate the problems of everyday life and ensure security. Our interest focuses only on the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) that takes care of the transportation issues using the Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) paradigm as its base. VANETs are a promising technology for autonomous driving that provides many benefits to the user conveniences to improve road safety and driving comfort. VANET is a promising technology for autonomous driving that provides many benefits to the user's conveniences by improving road safety and driving comfort. The problem with such rapid development is the continuously increasing digital threats. Among all these threats, we will target the Sybil attack since it has been proved to be one of the most dangerous attacks in VANETs. It allows the attacker to generate multiple forged identities to disseminate numerous false messages, disrupt safety-related services, or misuse the systems. In addition, Machine Learning (ML) is showing a significant influence on classification problems, thus we propose a behavior-based classification algorithm that is tested on the provided VeReMi dataset coupled with various machine learning techniques for comparison. The simulation results prove the ability of our proposed mechanism to detect the Sybil attack in VANETs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is advancing technology by creating smart surroundings that make it easier for humans to do their work. This technological advancement not only improves human life and expands economic opportunities, but also allows intruders or attackers to discover and exploit numerous methods in order to circumvent the security of IoT networks. Hence, security and privacy are the key concerns to the IoT networks. It is vital to protect computer and IoT networks from many sorts of anomalies and attacks. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) collect and employ large amounts of data with irrelevant and inappropriate attributes to train machine learning models, resulting in long detection times and a high rate of misclassification. This research presents an advance approach for the design of IDS for IoT networks based on the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (PSO) for feature selection and the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) model for PSO fitness function. The classifier utilized in the intrusion detection process is Random Forest (RF). The IoTID20 is being utilized to evaluate the efficacy and robustness of our suggested strategy. The proposed system attains the following level of accuracy on the IoTID20 dataset for different levels of classification: Binary classification 98 %, multiclass classification 83 %. The results indicate that the proposed framework effectively detects cyber threats and improves the security of IoT networks.

Classification problems have been part of numerous real-life applications in fields of security, medicine, agriculture, and more. Due to the wide range of applications, there is a constant need for more accurate and efficient methods. Besides more efficient and better classification algorithms, the optimal feature set is a significant factor for better classification accuracy. In general, more features can better describe instances, but besides showing differences between instances of different classes, it can also capture many similarities that lead to wrong classification. Determining the optimal feature set can be considered a hard optimization problem for which different metaheuristics, like swarm intelligence algorithms can be used. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of hybridized swarm intelligence (SI) algorithm for feature selection problem. To test the quality of the proposed method, classification was done by k-means algorithm and it was tested on 17 benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. The results are compared to similar approaches from the literature where SI algorithms were used for feature selection, which proves the quality of the proposed hybridized SI method. The proposed method achieved better classification accuracy for 16 datasets. Higher classification accuracy was achieved while simultaneously reducing the number of used features.

The rapid growth of number of devices that are connected to internet of things (IoT) networks, increases the severity of security problems that need to be solved in order to provide safe environment for network data exchange. The discovery of new vulnerabilities is everyday challenge for security experts and many novel methods for detection and prevention of intrusions are being developed for dealing with this issue. To overcome these shortcomings, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in development of advanced intrusion detection systems (IDS). This allows such system to adapt to emerging threats, react in real-time and adjust its behavior based on previous experiences. On the other hand, the traffic classification task becomes more difficult because of the large amount of data generated by network systems and high processing demands. For this reason, feature selection (FS) process is applied to reduce data complexity by removing less relevant data for the active classification task and therefore improving algorithm's accuracy. In this work, hybrid version of recently proposed sand cat swarm optimizer algorithm is proposed for feature selection with the goal of increasing performance of extreme learning machine classifier. The performance improvements are demonstrated by validating the proposed method on two well-known datasets - UNSW-NB15 and CICIDS-2017, and comparing the results with those reported for other cutting-edge algorithms that are dealing with the same problems and work in a similar configuration.