Biblio

In this paper we solve the problem of neural network technology development for e-mail messages classification. We analyze basic methods of spam filtering such as a sender IP-address analysis, spam messages repeats detection and the Bayesian filtering according to words. We offer the neural network technology for solving this problem because the neural networks are universal approximators and effective in addressing the problems of classification. Also, we offer the scheme of this technology for e-mail messages “spam”/“not spam” classification. The creation of effective neural network model of spam filtering is performed within the databases knowledge discovery technology. For this training set is formed, the neural network model is trained, its value and classifying ability are estimated. The experimental studies have shown that a developed artificial neural network model is adequate and it can be effectively used for the e-mail messages classification. Thus, in this paper we have shown the possibility of the effective neural network model use for the e-mail messages filtration and have shown a scheme of artificial neural network model use as a part of the e-mail spam filtering intellectual system.

This paper describes the technology of neural network application to solve the problem of information security incidents forecasting. We describe the general problem of analyzing and predicting time series in a graphical and mathematical setting. To solve this problem, it is proposed to use a neural network model. To solve the task of forecasting a time series of information security incidents, data are generated and described on the basis of which the neural network is trained. We offer a neural network structure, train the neural network, estimate it's adequacy and forecasting ability. We show the possibility of effective use of a neural network model as a part of an intelligent forecasting system.

This study aims to enhance the security of Moodle system environment during the Execution of online exams, Taking into consideration the most common problems facing online exams and working to solve them. This was handled by improving the security performance of Moodle Quiz tool, which is one of the most important tools in the learning Management system as general and in Moodle system as well. In this paper we include two enhancement aspects: The first aspect is solving the problem of losing the answers during sudden short disconnection of the network because of the server crash or any other reasons, the second aspect is Increasing the level of confidentiality of e-Quiz by preventing accessing the Quiz from more than one computer or browser at the same time. In order to verify the efficiency of the new quiz tool features, the upgraded tool have been tested using an experimental test Moodle site.

The H2020 European research project GHOST - Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control - aims to deploy a highly effective security framework for IoT smart home residents through a novel reference architecture for user-centric cyber security in smart homes providing an unobtrusive and user-comprehensible solution. The aforementioned security framework leads to a transparent cyber security environment by increasing the effectiveness of the existing cyber security services and enhancing system's self-defence through disruptive software-enabled network security solutions. In this paper, GHOST security framework for IoT-based smart homes is presented. It is aiming to address the security challenges posed by several types of attacks, such as network, device and software. The effective design of the overall multi-layered architecture is analysed, with particular emphasis given to the integration aspects through dynamic and re-configurable solutions and the features provided by each one of the architectural layers. Additionally, real-life trials and the associated use cases are described showcasing the competences and potential of the proposed framework.

The growth of the internet has brought along positive gains such as the emergence of a highly interconnected world. However, on the flip side, there has been a growing concern on how secure distributed systems can be built effectively and tested for security vulnerabilities prior to deployment. Developing a secure software product calls for a deep technical understanding of some complex issues with regards to the software and its operating environment, as well as embracing a systematic approach of analyzing the software. This paper proposes a method for identifying software security vulnerabilities from software requirement specifications written in Structured Object-oriented Formal Language (SOFL). Our proposed methodology leverages on the concept of providing an early focus on security by identifying potential security vulnerabilities at the requirement analysis and verification phase of the software development life cycle.

Mutriku wave farm is the first commercial plant all around the world. Since July 2011 it has been continuously selling electricity to the grid. It operates with the OWC technology and has 14 operating Wells-type turbines. In the plant there is a SCADA data recording system that collects the most important parameters of the turbines; among them, the pressure in the inlet chamber, the position of the security valve (from fully open to fully closed) and the generated power in the last 5 minutes. There is also an electricity meter which provides information about the amount of electric energy sold to the grid. The 2014 winter (January, February and March), and especially the first fortnight of February, was a stormy winter with rough sea state conditions. This was reflected both in the performance of the turbines (high pressure values, up to 9234.2 Pa; low opening degrees of the security valve, down to 49.4°; and high power generation of about 7681.6 W, all these data being average values) and in the calculated capacity factor (CF = 0.265 in winter and CF = 0.294 in February 2014). This capacity factor is a good tool for the comparison of different WEC technologies or different locations and shows an important seasonal behavior.

The increasing publication of large amounts of data, theoretically anonymous, can lead to a number of attacks on the privacy of people. The publication of sensitive data without exposing the data owners is generally not part of the software developers concerns. The regulations for the data privacy-preserving create an appropriate scenario to focus on privacy from the perspective of the use or data exploration that takes place in an organization. The increasing number of sanctions for privacy violations motivates the systematic comparison of three known machine learning algorithms in order to measure the usefulness of the data privacy preserving. The scope of the evaluation is extended by comparing them with a known privacy preservation metric. Different parameter scenarios and privacy levels are used. The use of publicly available implementations, the presentation of the methodology, explanation of the experiments and the analysis allow providing a framework of work on the problem of the preservation of privacy. Problems are shown in the measurement of the usefulness of the data and its relationship with the privacy preserving. The findings motivate the need to create optimized metrics on the privacy preferences of the owners of the data since the risks of predicting sensitive attributes by means of machine learning techniques are not usually eliminated. In addition, it is shown that there may be a hundred percent, but it cannot be measured. As well as ensuring adequate performance of machine learning models that are of interest to the organization that data publisher.

The need for data exchange and storage is currently increasing. The increased need for data exchange and storage also increases the need for data exchange devices and media. One of the most commonly used media exchanges and data storage is the USB Flash Drive. USB Flash Drive are widely used because they are easy to carry and have a fairly large storage. Unfortunately, this increased need is not directly proportional to an increase in awareness of device security, both for USB flash drive devices and computer devices that are used as primary storage devices. This research shows the threats that can arise from the use of USB Flash Drive devices. The threat that is used in this research is the fork bomb implemented on an Arduino Pro Micro device that is converted to a USB Flash drive. The purpose of the Fork Bomb is to damage the memory performance of the affected devices. As a result, memory performance to execute the process will slow down. The use of a USB Flash drive as an attack vector with the fork bomb method causes users to not be able to access the operating system that was attacked. The results obtained indicate that the USB Flash Drive can be used as a medium of Fork Bomb attack on the Windows operating system.

Currently, video surveillance systems play an important role in ensuring the safety of citizens, their property, etc., which greatly contributes to the reduction of crime. Due to the high intrinsic value and/or high efficiency of their use for the prevention and detection of crimes, they themselves often become the objects of illegal actions (theft, damage). The main purpose of video surveillance systems is to provide continuous visual monitoring of the situation at a particular facility or territory, as well as event registration. The breakdown of the camera is detected by the loss of signal in the control center. However, the absence of a signal for reasons other than these can also be caused by an accident on the power line, a communication channel break, software or hardware breakdown of the camera itself. In this regard, there is a problem of determining the exact cause of the lack of signal and, consequently, the need for a rapid response to it. The paper proposes an approach of video surveillance arrangement according to their main functional purpose, as well as their ability to monitor each other. Based on this approach, a mathematical model of the choice of locations and conditions of location of video surveillance equipment from a set of potentially acceptable as a problem of nonlinear Boolean programming is developed. This model maximizes the functionality of the video surveillance system, taking into account the importance of areas and objects of surveillance with restrictions on the number of video surveillance of each type, the nature of the terrain and existing buildings. An algorithm for solving this problem is proposed.

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) implements an ecosystem where a panoply of interconnected devices collect data from physical environments and supply them to processing services, on top of which cloud-based applications are built and provided to mobile end users. The undebatable advantages of smart IoT systems clash with the need of a secure and trustworthy environment. In this paper, we propose a service-based methodology based on blockchain and smart contracts for trustworthy evidence collection at the basis of a trustworthy IoT assurance evaluation. The methodology balances the provided level of trustworthiness and its performance, and is experimentally evaluated using Hyperledger fabric blockchain.

Many blockchain transactions require blockchain-external data sources to provide data. Oracle systems have been proposed as a link between blockchains and blockchain-external resources. However, these Oracle systems vary greatly in assumptions and applicability and each system addresses the challenge of data on-chaining partly. We argue that Data On-chaining must be done in a trustworthy manner and, as a first contribution, define a set of key requirements for Trustworthy Data On-chaining. Further, we provide an in-depth assessment and comparison of state-of-the-art Oracle systems with regards to these requirements. This differentiation pinpoints the need for a uniform understanding of and directions for future research on Trustworthy Data On-chaining.

Physical-layer security (PLS) has raised the attention of the research community in recent years, particularly for Internet of things (IoT) applications. Despite the use of classical cryptography, PLS provides security at physical layer, regardless of the computational power owned by the attacker. The investigations on PLS are numerous in the literature, but one main issue seems to be kept apart: how to measure the benefit that PLS can bring to cryptography? This paper tries to answer this question with an initial performance analysis of PLS in conjunction with typical cryptography of wireless communication protocols. Our results indicate that PLS can help cryptography to harden the attacker job in real operative scenario: PLS can increase the detection errors at the attacker's receiver, leading to inability to recover the cipher key, even if the plaintext is known.

In this work we present a novel technique for physical layer security in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In the proposed architecture, each IoT node generates a phase-modulated random key/data and transmits it to a master node in the presence of an eavesdropper, referred to as Eve. The master node, simultaneously, broadcasts a high power signal using an omni-directional antenna, which is received as interference by Eve. This interference masks the generated key by the IoT node and will result in a higher bit-error rate in the data received by Eve. The two legitimate intended nodes communicate in a full-duplex manner and, consequently, subtract their transmitted signals, as a known reference, from the received signal (self-interference cancellation). We compare our proposed method with a conventional approach to physical layer security based on directional antennas. In particular, we show, using theoretical and measurement results, that our proposed approach provides significantly better security measures, in terms bit error rate (BER) at Eve's location. Also, it is proven that in our novel system, the possible eavesdropping region, defined by the region with BER \textbackslashtextless; 10-1, is always smaller than the reliable communication region with BER \textbackslashtextless; 10-3.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which acts as an application protocol that works on top of the IP protocol. This paper focuses on distinct Bitcoin security features, including security services, mechanisms, and algorithms. Further, we propose a well-defined security functional architecture to minimize security risks. The security features and requirements of Bitcoin have been structured in layers.

Technological advancements have made smartphones to provide wide range of applications that enable users to perform many of their tasks easily and conveniently, anytime and anywhere. For this reason, many users are tend to store their private data in their smart phones. Since conventional methods for security of smartphones, such as passwords, personal identification numbers, and pattern locks are prone to many attacks, this research paper proposes a novel method for authenticating smartphone users based on performing seven different daily physical activity as behavioral biometrics, using smartphone embedded sensor data. This authentication scheme builds a machine learning model which recognizes users by performing those daily activities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Accountability is a recent paradigm in security protocol design which aims to eliminate traditional trust assumptions on parties and hold them accountable for their misbehavior. It is meant to establish trust in the first place and to recognize and react if this trust is violated. In this work, we discuss a protocol-agnostic definition of accountability: a protocol provides accountability (w.r.t. some security property) if it can identify all misbehaving parties, where misbehavior is defined as a deviation from the protocol that causes a security violation. We provide a mechanized method for the verification of accountability and demonstrate its use for verification and attack finding on various examples from the accountability and causality literature, including Certificate Transparency and Krollˆ\textbackslashtextbackslashprimes Accountable Algorithms protocol. We reach a high degree of automation by expressing accountability in terms of a set of trace properties and show their soundness and completeness.

Cloud Computing is the most suitable environment for the collaboration of multiple organizations via its multi-tenancy architecture. However, due to the distributed management of policies within these collaborations, they may contain several anomalies, such as conflicts and redundancies, which may lead to both safety and availability problems. On the other hand, current cloud computing solutions do not offer verification tools to manage access control policies. In this paper, we propose a cloud policy verification service (CPVS), that facilitates to users the management of there own security policies within Openstack cloud environment. Specifically, the proposed cloud service offers a policy verification approach to dynamically choose the adequate policy using Aspect-Oriented Finite State Machines (AO-FSM), where pointcuts and advices are used to adopt Domain-Specific Language (DSL) state machine artifacts. The pointcuts define states' patterns representing anomalies (e.g., conflicts) that may occur in a security policy, while the advices define the actions applied at the selected pointcuts to remove the anomalies. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, we provide time and space complexities. The approach was implemented as middleware service within Openstack cloud environment. The implementation results show that the middleware can detect and resolve different policy anomalies in an efficient manner.

We present a scalable dynamic analysis framework that allows for the automatic evaluation of the privacy behaviors of Android apps. We use our system to analyze mobile apps’ compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), one of the few stringent privacy laws in the U.S. Based on our automated analysis of 5,855 of the most popular free children’s apps, we found that a majority are potentially in violation of COPPA, mainly due to their use of thirdparty SDKs. While many of these SDKs offer configuration options to respect COPPA by disabling tracking and behavioral advertising, our data suggest that a majority of apps either do not make use of these options or incorrectly propagate them across mediation SDKs. Worse, we observed that 19% of children’s apps collect identifiers or other personally identifiable information (PII) via SDKs whose terms of service outright prohibit their use in child-directed apps. Finally, we show that efforts by Google to limit tracking through the use of a resettable advertising ID have had little success: of the 3,454 apps that share the resettable ID with advertisers, 66% transmit other, non-resettable, persistent identifiers as well, negating any intended privacy-preserving properties of the advertising ID.

This paper proposes a double-layer message security scheme that is implemented in two stages. First, the secret data is encrypted using the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key. Second, least significant bit (LSB) embedding is carried out, by hiding the secret message into an image of an information matrix. A number of performance evaluation metrics are discussed and computed for the proposed scheme. The obtained results are compared to other schemes in literature and show the superiority of the proposed scheme.

Mitigating the effect of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in wired/wireless networks is a problem of extreme importance. The present paper investigates this problem and proposes a secure AQM to encounter the effects of DDoS attacks on queue's router. The employed method relies on modelling the TCP/AQM system subjected to different DoS attack rate where the resulting closed-loop system is expressed as new Markovian Jump Linear System (MJLS). Sufficient delay-dependent conditions which guarantee the syntheses of a stabilizing control for the closed-loop system with a guaranteed cost J* are derived. Finally, a numerical example is displayed.

In this paper, we propose a novel PHY layer security technique in radio frequency identification (RFID) backscatter communications system. In order to protect the RFID tag information confidentiality from the eavesdroppers attacks, the proposed technique deploys beam steering (BS) using a one dimensional (1-D) antenna array in the tag side in addition to noise injection from the reader side. The performance analysis and simulation results show that the new technique outperforms the already-existing noise injection security technique and overcomes its design limitations.

The traditional electricity distribution system is rapidly shifting from the passive infrastructure to a more active infrastructure, giving rise to a smart grid. In this project an active electricity distribution network and its components have been studied. A 14-node SCADA-based active distribution network model has been proposed for managing this emerging network infrastructure to ensure reliability and protection of the network The proposed model was developed using matlab /simulink software and the fuzzy logic toolbox. Surge arresters and circuit breakers were modelled and deployed in the network at different locations for protection and isolation of fault conditions. From the reliability analysis of the proposed model, the failure rate and outage hours were reduced due to better response of the system to power fluctuations and fault conditions.

Information systems are becoming more and more complex and closely linked. These systems are encountering an enormous amount of nefarious traffic while ensuring real - time connectivity. Therefore, a defense method needs to be in place. One of the commonly used tools for network security is intrusion detection systems (IDS). An IDS tries to identify fraudulent activity using predetermined signatures or pre-established user misbehavior while monitoring incoming traffic. Intrusion detection systems based on signature and behavior cannot detect new attacks and fall when small behavior deviations occur. Many researchers have proposed various approaches to intrusion detection using machine learning techniques as a new and promising tool to remedy this problem. In this paper, the authors present a combination of two machine learning methods, unsupervised clustering followed by a supervised classification framework as a Fast, highly scalable and precise packets classification system. This model's performance is assessed on the new proposed dataset by the Canadian Institute for Cyber security and the University of New Brunswick (CICIDS2017). The overall process was fast, showing high accuracy classification results.

Privacy has become a critical topic in the engineering of electric systems. This work proposes an approach for smart-grid-specific privacy requirements engineering by extending previous general privacy requirements engineering frameworks. The proposed extension goes one step further by focusing on privacy in the smart grid. An alignment of smart grid privacy requirements, dependability issues and privacy requirements engineering methods is presented. Starting from this alignment a Threat Tree Analysis is performed to obtain a first set of generic, high level privacy requirements. This set is formulated mostly on the data instead of the information level and provides the basis for further project-specific refinement.

The smart grid changes the way energy is produced and distributed. In addition both, energy and information is exchanged bidirectionally among participating parties. Therefore heterogeneous systems have to cooperate effectively in order to achieve a common high-level use case, such as smart metering for billing or demand response for load curtailment. Furthermore, a substantial amount of personal data is often needed for achieving that goal. Capturing and processing personal data in the smart grid increases customer concerns about privacy and in addition, certain statutory and operational requirements regarding privacy aware data processing and storage have to be met. An increase of privacy constraints, however, often limits the operational capabilities of the system. In this paper, we present an approach that automates the process of finding an optimal balance between privacy requirements and operational requirements in a smart grid use case and application scenario. This is achieved by formally describing use cases in an abstract model and by finding an algorithm that determines the optimum balance by forward mapping privacy and operational impacts. For this optimal balancing algorithm both, a numeric approximation and - if feasible - an analytic assessment are presented and investigated. The system is evaluated by applying the tool to a real-world use case from the University of Southern California (USC) microgrid.