Biblio

Most machine learning-based malware detection systems use various supervised learning methods to classify different instances of software as benign or malicious. This approach provides no information regarding the behavioral characteristics of malware. It also requires a large amount of training data and is prone to labeling difficulties and can reduce accuracy due to redundant training data. Therefore, we propose a malware detection method based on deep learning, which uses malware images and a set of autoencoders to detect malware. The method is to design an autoencoder to learn the functional characteristics of malware, and then to observe the reconstruction error of autoencoder to realize the classification and detection of malware and benign software. The proposed approach achieves 93% accuracy and comparatively better F1-score values while detecting malware and needs little training data when compared with traditional malware detection systems.

In a previous article [1] we proposed a layered framework to support the assessment of the security risks associated with the use of autonomous vehicles in military operations and determine how to manage these risks appropriately. We established consistent terminology and defined the problem space, while exploring the first layer of the framework, namely risks from the mission assurance perspective. In this paper, we develop the second layer of the framework. This layer focuses on the risk assessment of the vehicles themselves and on producing a highlevel security design adequate for the mission defined in the first layer. To support this process, we also define a reference model for autonomous vehicles to use as a common basis for the assessment of risks and the design of the security controls.

With current IoT architectures, once a single device in a network is compromised, it can be used to disrupt the behavior of other devices on the same network. Even though system administrators can secure critical devices in the network using best practices and state-of-the-art technology, a single vulnerable device can undermine the security of the entire network. The goal of this work is to limit the ability of an attacker to exploit a vulnerable device on an IoT network and fabricate deceitful messages to co-opt other devices. The approach is to limit attackers by using device proxies that are used to retransmit and control network communications. We present an architecture that prevents deceitful messages generated by compromised devices from affecting the rest of the network. The design assumes a centralized and trustworthy machine that can observe the behavior of all devices on the network. The central machine collects application layer data, as opposed to low-level network traffic, from each IoT device. The collected data is used to train models that capture the normal behavior of each individual IoT device. The normal behavioral data is then used to monitor the IoT devices and detect anomalous behavior. This paper reports on our experiments using both a binary classifier and a density-based clustering algorithm to model benign IoT device behavior with a realistic test-bed, designed to capture normal behavior in an IoT-monitored environment. Results from the IoT testbed show that both the classifier and the clustering algorithms are promising and encourage the use of application-level data for detecting compromised IoT devices.

In today's world computer communication is used almost everywhere and majority of them are connected to the world's largest network, the Internet. There is danger in using internet due to numerous cyber-attacks which are designed to attack Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of systems connected to the internet. One of the most prominent threats to computer networking is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack. They are designed to attack availability of the systems. Many users and ISPs are targeted and affected regularly by these attacks. Even though new protection technologies are continuously proposed, this immense threat continues to grow rapidly. Most of the DDoS attacks are undetectable because they act as legitimate traffic. This situation can be partially overcome by using Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). There are advanced attacks where there is no proper documented way to detect. In this paper authors present a Machine Learning (ML) based DDoS detection mechanism with improved accuracy and low false positive rates. The proposed approach gives inductions based on signatures previously extracted from samples of network traffic. Authors perform the experiments using four distinct benchmark datasets, four machine learning algorithms to address four of the most harmful DDoS attack vectors. Authors achieved maximum accuracy and compared the results with other applicable machine learning algorithms.

Traffic congestion is a critical problem in urban area. In this study, our objective is the control of traffic lights in an urban environment, in order to avoid traffic jams and optimize vehicle traffic; we aim to minimize the total waiting time. Our system is based on a new paradigm, which is deep reinforcement learning; it can automatically learn all the useful characteristics of traffic data and develop a strategy optimizing adaptive traffic light control. Our system is coupled to a microscopic simulator based on agents (Simulation of Urban MObility - SUMO) providing a synthetic but realistic environment in which the exploration of the results of potential regulatory actions can be carried out.

In this paper, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus of modern vehicles has been proposed. NESLIDS is an anomaly detection algorithm based on the supervised Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture that is designed to counter three critical attack categories: Denial-of-service (DoS), fuzzy, and impersonation attacks. Our research scope included modifying DNN parameters, e.g. number of hidden layer neurons, batch size, and activation functions according to how well it maximized detection accuracy and minimized the false positive rate (FPR) for these attacks. Our methodology consisted of collecting CAN Bus data from online and in real-time, injecting attack data after data collection, preprocessing in Python, training the DNN, and testing the model with different datasets. Results show that the proposed IDS effectively detects all attack types for both types of datasets. NESLIDS outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, scalability, and low false alarm rates.

Recommendation systems, especially collaborative filtering recommenders, are vulnerable to shilling attacks as some profit-driven users may inject fake profiles into the system to alter recommendation outputs. Current shilling attack detection methods are mostly based on feature extraction techniques. The hand-designed features can confine the model to specific domains or datasets while deep learning techniques enable us to derive deeper level features, enhance detection performance, and generalize the solution on various datasets and domains. This paper illustrates the application of two deep learning methods to detect shilling attacks. We conducted experiments on the MovieLens 100K and Netflix Dataset with different levels of attacks and types. Experimental results show that deep learning models can achieve an accuracy of up to 99%.

Modern cryptographic ransomware pose a severe threat to the security of individuals and organizations. Targeted ransomware attacks exhibit refinement in attack vectors owing to the manual reconnaissance performed by the perpetrators for infiltration. The result is an impenetrable lock on multiple hosts within the organization which allows the cybercriminals to demand hefty ransoms. Reliance on prevention strategies is not sufficient and a firm comprehension of implementation details is necessary to develop effective solutions that can thwart ransomware after preventative strategies have failed. Ransomware depend heavily on the abstraction offered by Windows APIs. This paper provides a detailed review of the common API calls in ransomware. We propose four classes of API calls that can be used for profiling and generating effective API call relationships useful in automated detection. Finally, we present counts and visualizations pertaining to API call extraction from real-world ransomware that demonstrate that even advanced variants from different families carry similarities in implementation.

Ransomware acquire the leverage necessary for ransom extraction via encryption of irreplaceable data. Successful encryption requires secure key generation and therefore comprehension of key generation strategies deployed in ransomware is critical for developing effective response and recovery solutions. This paper presents a systematic study of key generation strategies observed in modern ransomware with the goal of facilitating swift identification of cryptographically insecure and operationally nonviable key routines in novel threats. Empirical evidence of the identified strategies is provided in the form of code snippets and disassembly of real-world ransomware. Additionally, the identified strategies are mapped to a timeline based on the actual ransomware samples where these strategies were observed. Finally, a list of 10 questions provides guidance in recognizing the critical intricacies of key generation and deployment in novel ransomware.

Criminals do money laundry to hide the illegitimate sources of money to show as if their money is of a legitimate source. Money laundry has many stages that money flow has to go through to finally look as if it is of a legitimate source, rule-based systems are implemented across different banks to detect structuring which is one technique of the layering stage which sophisticated criminals can evade by unsatisfying the check rules. In this work, graph database and graph data mining are to be used to overcome this limitation, the proposed technique does this by plotting the whole transactional monetary flow of entities doing money transfers between each other as one large graph database and then detecting clusters of entities interacting with each other, afterwards detection of the most influential node (intended destination) which we consider the destination to which huge amounts of money is intended to flow to (criminal`s account) using PageRank algorithm and eventually detecting all members (Smurfs) of participated in the paths leading to that destination, a technique that would be hard to implement using traditional RDBMS in contrary to Graph DB, our results have proven correct detection of clusters as well as the final destination of the monetary flow (criminal`s account).

Big data analytics, in essence, is becoming the revolution of business intelligence around the world. This momentum has given rise to the hype around analytic technologies, including Apache Hadoop. Hadoop was not originally developed with security in mind. Despite the evolving efforts to integrate security in Hadoop through developing new tools (e.g., Apache Sentry and Ranger) and employing traditional mechanisms (e.g., Kerberos and LDAP), they mainly focus on providing encryption and authentication features, albeit with limited authorization support. Existing solutions in the literature extended these evolving efforts. However, they suffer from limitations, hindering them from providing robust authorization that effectively meets the unique requirements of big data environments. Towards covering this gap, this paper proposes a hybrid authority (HBD-Authority) as a formal attribute-based access control model with context support. This model is established on a novel hybrid approach of authorization transparency that pertains to three fundamental properties of accuracy: correctness, security, and completeness. The model leverages streaming data analytics to foster distributed parallel processing capabilities that achieve multifold benefits: a) efficiently managing the security policies and promptly updating the privileges assigned to a high number of users interacting with the analytic services; b) swiftly deciding and enforcing authorization of requests over data characterized by the 5Vs; and c) providing dynamic protection for data which is frequently updated. The implementation details and experimental evaluation of the proposed model are presented, demonstrating its performance efficiency.

Today, Linux is one of the main operating systems (OS) used both on desktop computers and various mobile devices. This OS is also widely applied in state and municipal structures, including law enforcement agencies and automated control systems used in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. It's worth noting that the process of replacing the Linux OS with domestic protected OSs that use the Linux kernel has now begun. In this regard, the analysis of threats to information security of the Linux OS is highly relevant. In this article, the authors discuss the security problems of Linux OS associated with unauthorized user privileges increase, as a result of which an attacker can gain full control over the OS. The approaches to differentiating user privileges in Linux are analyzed and their advantages and disadvantages are considered. As an example, the causes of the vulnerability CVE-2018-14665 were identified and measures to eliminate it were proposed.

MIL-STD-1553 is a military standard that defines the specification of a serial communication bus that has been implemented in military and aerospace avionic platforms for over 40 years. MIL-STD-1553 was designed for a high level of fault tolerance while less attention was paid to cyber security issues. Thus, as indicated in recent studies, it is exposed to various threats. In this article, we suggest enhancing the security of MIL-STD-1553 communication buses by integrating a machine learning-based intrusion detection system (IDS); such anIDS will be capable of detecting cyber attacks in real time. The IDS consists of two modules: 1) a remote terminal (RT) authentication module that detects illegitimately connected components and data transfers and 2) a sequence-based anomaly detection module that detects anomalies in the operation of the system. The IDS showed high detection rates for both normal and abnormal behavior when evaluated in a testbed using real 1553 hardware, as well as a very fast and accurate training process using logs from a real system. The RT authentication module managed to authenticate RTs with +0.99 precision and +0.98 recall; and detect illegitimate component (or a legitimate component that impersonates other components) with +0.98 precision and +0.99 recall. The sequence-based anomaly detection module managed to perfectly detect both normal and abnormal behavior. Moreover, the sequencebased anomaly detection module managed to accurately (i.e., zero false positives) model the normal behavior of a real system in a short period of time ( 22 s).

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) is widely used for data storage and, when a computer system is in operation, the DRAM can contain sensitive information such as passwords and cryptographic keys. Therefore, the DRAM is a prime target for hardware-based cryptanalytic attacks. These attacks can be performed in the supply chain to capture default key mechanisms enabling a later cyber attack or predisposition the system to remote effects. Two prominent attack classes against memory are the Cold Boot attack which recovers the data from the DRAM even after a supposed power-down and Rowhammer attack which violates memory integrity by influencing the stored bits to flip. In this paper, we propose an on-chip technique that obfuscates the memory addresses and data and provides a fast detect-response to defend against these hardware-based security attacks on DRAM. We advance the prior hardware security research by making two contributions. First, the key material is detected and erased before the Cold Boot attacker can extract the memory data. Second, our solution is on-chip and does not require nor depend on additional hardware or software which are open to additional supply chain attack vectors. We analyze the efficacy of our scheme through circuit simulation and compare the results to the previous mitigation approaches based on DRAM write operations. Our simulation and analysis results show that purging key information used for address and data randomization can be achieved much faster and with lower power than with typical DRAM write techniques used for sanitizing memory content. We demonstrate through circuit simulation of the key register design a technique that clears key information within 2.4ns which is faster by more than two orders magnitude compared to typical DRAM write operations for 180nm technology, and with a power consumption of 0.15 picoWatts.

There exists a need for sharing user health data, especially with institutes for research purposes, in a secure fashion. This is especially true in the case of a system that includes a third party storage service, such as cloud computing, which limits the control of the data owner. The use of encryption for secure data storage continues to evolve to meet the need for flexible and fine-grained access control. This evolution has led to the development of Attribute Based Encryption (ABE). The use of ABE to ensure the security and privacy of health data has been explored. This paper presents an ABE based framework which allows for the secure outsourcing of the more computationally intensive processes for data decryption to the cloud servers. This reduces the time needed for decryption to occur at the user end and reduces the amount of computational power needed by users to access data.

Nowadays, ubiquitous healthcare monitoring applications are becoming a necessity. In a pervasive smart healthcare system, the user's location information is always transmitted periodically to healthcare providers to increase the quality of the service provided to the user. However, revealing the user's location will affect the user's privacy. This paper presents a novel cloud-based secure location privacy-preserving mobile healthcare framework with decision-making capabilities. A user's vital signs are sensed possibly through a wearable healthcare device and transmitted to a cloud server for securely storing user's data, processing, and decision making. The proposed framework integrates a number of features such as machine learning (ML) for classifying a user's health state, and crowdsensing for collecting information about a person's privacy preferences for possible locations and applying such information to a user who did not set his privacy preferences. In addition to location privacy preservation methods (LPPM) such as obfuscation, perturbation and encryption to protect the location of the user and provide a secure monitoring framework. The proposed framework detects clear emergency cases and quickly decides about sending a help message to a healthcare provider before sending data to the cloud server. To validate the efficiency of the proposed framework, a prototype is developed and tested. The obtained results from the proposed prototype prove its feasibility and utility. Compared to the state of art, the proposed framework offers an adaptive context-based decision for location sharing privacy and controlling the trade-off between location privacy and service utility.

Surveillance systems are widely used in airports, streets, banks, military areas, borders, hospitals, and schools. There are two types of surveillance systems which are real-time systems and offline surveillance systems. Usually, security people track videos on time in monitoring rooms to find out abnormal human activities. Real-time human tracking from videos is very expensive especially in airports, borders, and streets due to the huge number of surveillance cameras. There are a lot of research works have been done for automated surveillance systems. In this paper, we presented a new surveillance system to recognize human activities from several cameras using machine learning algorithms. Sequences of images are collected from cameras using the internet of things technology from indoor or outdoor areas. A feature vector is created for each recognized moving object, then machine learning algorithms are applied to extract moving object activities. The proposed abnormal event detection system gives very promising results which are more than 96% accuracy in Multilayer Perceptron, Iterative Classifier Optimizer, and Random Forest algorithms.

Fog computing is a new distributed computing paradigm that extends the cloud to the network edge. Fog computing aims at improving quality of service, data access, networking, computation and storage. However, the security and privacy issues persist, even if many cloud solutions were proposed. Indeed, Fog computing introduces new challenges in terms of security and privacy, due to its specific features such as mobility, geo-distribution and heterogeneity etc. Blockchain is an emergent concept bringing efficiency in many fields. In this paper, we propose a new access control scheme based on blockchain technology for the fog computing with fault tolerance in the context of the Internet of Things. Blockchain is used to provide secure management authentication and access process to IoT devices. Each network entity authenticates in the blockchain via the wallet, which allows a secure communication in decentralized environment, hence it achieves the security objectives. In addition, we propose to establish a secure connection between the users and the IoT devices, if their attributes satisfy the policy stored in the blockchain by smart contract. We also address the blockchain transparency problem by the encryption of the users attributes both in the policy and in the request. An authorization token is generated if the encrypted attributes are identical. Moreover, our proposition offers higher scalability, availability and fault tolerance in Fog nodes due to the implementation of load balancing through the Min-Min algorithm.

The blockchain is a storage technology and transmission of information, transparent, secure, and operating without central control. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized trust management and cooperation model where data is shared via blockchain and we explore the revenue distribution under different consensus schemes. To reduce the power calculation with respect to the control mechanism, our proposal adopts the possibility of Proof on Trust (PoT) and Proof of proof-of-stake based trust to replace the proof of work (PoW) scheme, to carry out the mining and storage of new data blocks. To detect nodes with malicious behavior to provide false system information, the trust updating algorithm is proposed..

With the growing numbers of security attacks causing more and more serious damages in software systems, security cannot be added as an afterthought in software development. It has to be built in from the early development phases such as requirement and design. The role responsible for designing a software system is termed an “architect”, knowledgeable about the system architecture design, but not always well-trained in security. Moreover, involving other security experts into the system design is not always possible due to time-to-market and budget constraints. To address these challenges, we propose to define an asset-based security assistance in this paper, to help architects design secure systems even if these architects have limited knowledge in security. This assistance helps alert threats, and integrate the security controls over vulnerable parts of system into the architecture model. The central concept enabling this assistance is that of asset. We apply our proposal on a telemonitoring case study to show that automating such an assistance is feasible.

We propose a new approach to creating a subject-oriented distributed computing environment. Such an environment is used to support decision-making in solving relevant problems of ensuring energy systems resilience. The proposed approach is based on the idea of advancing and integrating the following important capabilities in supercomputer engineering: continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of the system and applied software, high-performance computing in heterogeneous environments, multi-agent intelligent computation planning and resource allocation, big data processing and geo-information servicing for subject information, including weakly structured data, and decision-making support. This combination of capabilities and their advancing are unique to the subject domain under consideration, which is related to combinatorial studying critical objects of energy systems. Evaluation of decision-making alternatives is carrying out through applying combinatorial modeling and multi-criteria selection rules. The Orlando Tools framework is used as the basis for an integrated software environment. It implements a flexible modular approach to the development of scientific applications (distributed applied software packages).

Microgrids are a promising alternative to the traditional distribution systems due to their highly desirable features, such as, reliability, resiliency, and efficiency. This paper covers the design, simulation, and economic analysis of a theoretically designed modern, mixed-use commercial and residential building on a feeder in Charleston, SC, USA. The designed system is simulated in PSCAD/EMTDC. The system combines a natural gas CHP turbine and generator block set, solar photovoltaics (PV), and a battery energy storage system (BESS). It is planned to provide power through a DC lighting bus and an AC to several different commercial load profiles as well as 40 apartments of varying sizes. Additionally, a comprehensive economic analysis is completed with available or estimated pricing to prove the feasibility of such a project.

FPGAs are becoming a common sight in cloud environments and new usage paradigms, such as FPGA-as-a-Service, have emerged. This development poses a challenge to traditional FPGA security models, as these are assuming trust between the user and the hardware owner. Currently, the user cannot keep bitstream nor data protected from the hardware owner in an FPGA-as-a-service setting. This paper proposes a security model where the chip manufacturer takes the role of root-of-trust to remedy these security problems. We suggest that the chip manufacturer creates a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), used for user bitstream protection and data encryption, on each device. The chip manufacturer, rather than the hardware owner, also controls certain security-related peripherals. This allows the user to take control over a predefined part of the programmable logic and set up a protected enclave area. Hence, all user data can be provided in encrypted form and only be revealed inside the enclave area. In addition, our model enables secure and concurrent multi-tenant usage of remote FPGAs. To also consider the needs of the hardware owner, our solution includes bitstream certification and affirming that uploaded bitstreams have been vetted against maliciousness.

As the worldwide demand for cybersecurity-trained professionals continues to grow, the need to understand and define what cybersecurity education really means at the college or university level. Given the relative infancy of these efforts to define undergraduate cybersecurity programs, the panelists will present different perspectives on how such programs can be structured. They will then engage with the audience to explore additional viewpoints on cybersecurity, and work toward a shared understanding of undergraduate cybersecurity programs.

We consider a wireless communication system that consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and an adversary. The transmitter transmits signals with different modulation types, while the receiver classifies its received signals to modulation types using a deep learning-based classifier. In the meantime, the adversary makes over-the-air transmissions that are received as superimposed with the transmitter's signals to fool the classifier at the receiver into making errors. While this evasion attack has received growing interest recently, the channel effects from the adversary to the receiver have been ignored so far such that the previous attack mechanisms cannot be applied under realistic channel effects. In this paper, we present how to launch a realistic evasion attack by considering channels from the adversary to the receiver. Our results show that modulation classification is vulnerable to an adversarial attack over a wireless channel that is modeled as Rayleigh fading with path loss and shadowing. We present various adversarial attacks with respect to availability of information about channel, transmitter input, and classifier architecture. First, we present two types of adversarial attacks, namely a targeted attack (with minimum power) and non-targeted attack that aims to change the classification to a target label or to any other label other than the true label, respectively. Both are white-box attacks that are transmitter input-specific and use channel information. Then we introduce an algorithm to generate adversarial attacks using limited channel information where the adversary only knows the channel distribution. Finally, we present a black-box universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) attack where the adversary has limited knowledge about both channel and transmitter input. By accounting for different levels of information availability, we show the vulnerability of modulation classifier to over-the-air adversarial attacks.