Biblio

Network security has become an important issue in our work and life. Hackers' attack mode has been upgraded from normal attack to APT( Advanced Persistent Threat, APT) attack. The key of APT attack chain is the penetration and intrusion of active directory, which can not be completely detected via the traditional IDS and antivirus software. Further more, lack of security protection of existing solutions for domain control aggravates this problem. Although researchers have proposed methods for domain attack detection, many of them have not yet been converted into effective market-oriented products. In this paper, we analyzes the common domain intrusion methods, various domain related attack behavior characteristics were extracted from ATT&CK matrix (Advanced tactics, techniques, and common knowledge) for analysis and simulation test. Based on analyzing the log file generated by the attack, the domain attack detection rules are established and input into the analysis engine. Finally, the available domain intrusion detection system is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that the network attack detection method based on the analysis of domain attack behavior can analyze the log file in real time and effectively detect the malicious intrusion behavior of hackers , which could facilitate managers find and eliminate network security threats immediately.

Although OpenFlow-based SDN networks make it easier to design and test new protocols, when you think of clean slate architectures, their use is quite limited because the parameterization of its flows resides primarily in TCP/IP protocols. Besides, despite the many benefits that SDN offers, some aspects have not yet been adequately addressed, such as management plane activities, network startup, and options for connecting the data plane to the control plane. Based on these issues and limitations, this work presents a bootstrap protocol for SDN-based networks, which allows, beyond the network topology discovery, automatic configuration of an inband control plane. The protocol is designed to act only on layer two, in an autonomous, distributed and deterministic way, with low overhead and has the intent to be the basement for the implementation of other management plane related activities. A formal specification of the protocol is provided. In addition, an analytical model was created to preview the number of required messages to establish the control plane. According to this model, the proposed protocol presents less overhead than similar de-facto protocols used to topology discovery in SDN networks.

"Moving fast, and breaking things", instead of "being safe and secure", is the credo of the IT industry. However, if we look at the wide societal impact of IT security incidents in the past years, it seems like it is no longer sustainable. Just like in the case of Equifax, people simply forget updates, just like in the case of Maersk, companies do not use sufficient network segmentation. Security certification does not seem to help with this issue. After all, Equifax was IS027001 compliant.In this paper, we take a look at how we handle and (do not) learn from security incidents in IT security. We do this by comparing IT security incidents to early and later aviation safety. We find interesting parallels to early aviation safety, and outline the governance levers that could make the world of IT more secure, which were already successful in making flying the most secure way of transportation.

Brute-force login attempts are common for every host on the public Internet. While most of them can be discarded as low-threat attacks, targeted attack campaigns often use a dictionary-based brute-force attack to establish a foothold in the network. Therefore, it is important to characterize the attackers' behavior to prioritize defensive measures and react to new threats quickly. In this paper we present a set of metrics that can support threat hunters in characterizing brute-force login attempts. Based on connection metadata, timing information, and the attacker's dictionary these metrics can help to differentiate scans and to find common behavior across distinct IP addresses. We evaluated our novel metrics on a real-world data set of malicious login attempts collected by our honeypot Honeygrove. We highlight interesting metrics, show how clustering can be leveraged to reveal common behavior across IP addresses, and describe how selected metrics help to assess the threat level of attackers. Amongst others, we for example found strong indicators for collusion between ten otherwise unrelated IP addresses confirming that a clustering of the right metrics can help to reveal coordinated attacks.

Wireless technology is widely used today and is growing rapidly. One of the wireless technologies is VANET where the network can communicate with vehicles (V2V) which can prevent accidents on the road. Energy is also a problem in VANET so it needs to be used efficiently. The presence of malicious nodes or nodes can eliminate and disrupt the process of data communication. The routing protocol used in this study is AODV. The purpose of this study is to analyze the comparison of blackhole attack and flooding attack against energy-efficient AODV on VANET. This research uses simulation methods and several supporting programs such as OpenStreetMap, SUMO, NS2, NAM, and AWK to test the AODV routing protocol. Quality of service (QOS) parameters used in this study are throughput, packet loss, and end to end delay. Energy parameters are also used to examine the energy efficiency used. This study uses the number of variations of nodes consisting of 20 nodes, 40 nodes, 60 nodes, and different network conditions, namely normal network conditions, network conditions with black hole attacks, and network conditions with flooding attacks. The results obtained can be concluded that the highest value of throughput when network conditions are normal, the greatest value of packet loss when there is a black hole attack, the highest end to end delay value and the largest remaining energy when there is a flooding attack.

Adversarial examples are known as carefully perturbed images fooling image classifiers. We propose a geometric framework to generate adversarial examples in one of the most challenging black-box settings where the adversary can only generate a small number of queries, each of them returning the top-1 label of the classifier. Our framework is based on the observation that the decision boundary of deep networks usually has a small mean curvature in the vicinity of data samples. We propose an effective iterative algorithm to generate query-efficient black-box perturbations with small p norms which is confirmed via experimental evaluations on state-of-the-art natural image classifiers. Moreover, for p=2, we theoretically show that our algorithm actually converges to the minimal perturbation when the curvature of the decision boundary is bounded. We also obtain the optimal distribution of the queries over the iterations of the algorithm. Finally, experimental results confirm that our principled black-box attack algorithm performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms as it generates smaller perturbations with a reduced number of queries.

The use of a very wide windows operating system is undeniably also followed by increasing attacks on the operating system. Universal Serial Bus (USB) is one of the mechanisms used by many people with plug and play functionality that is very easy to use, making data transfers fast and easy compared to other hardware. Some research shows that the Windows operating system has weaknesses so that it is often exploited by using various attacks and malware. There are various methods used to exploit the Windows operating system, one of them by using a USB device. By using a USB device, a criminal can plant a backdoor reverse shell to exploit the victim's computer just by connecting the USB device to the victim's computer without being noticed. This research was conducted by planting a reverse shell backdoor through a USB device to exploit the victim's device, especially the webcam and microphone device on the target computer. From 35 experiments that have been carried out, it was found that 83% of spying attacks using USB devices on the Windows operating system were successfully carried out.

This paper argues about a new conceptual modeling language for the White-Box (WB) security analysis. In the WB security domain, an attacker may have access to the inner structure of an application or even the entire binary code. It becomes pretty easy for attackers to inspect, reverse engineer, and tamper the application with the information they steal. The basis of this paper is the 14 patterns developed by a leading provider of software protection technologies and solutions. We provide a part of a new modeling language named i-WBS (White-Box Security) to describe problems of WB security better. The essence of White-Box security problem is code security. We made the new modeling language focus on code more than ever before. In this way, developers who are not security experts can easily understand what they need to really protect.

It is now possible to synthesize highly realistic images of people who do not exist. Such content has, for example, been implicated in the creation of fraudulent socialmedia profiles responsible for dis-information campaigns. Significant efforts are, therefore, being deployed to detect synthetically-generated content. One popular forensic approach trains a neural network to distinguish real from synthetic content.We show that such forensic classifiers are vulnerable to a range of attacks that reduce the classifier to near- 0% accuracy. We develop five attack case studies on a state- of-the-art classifier that achieves an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.95 on almost all existing image generators, when only trained on one generator. With full access to the classifier, we can flip the lowest bit of each pixel in an image to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.0005; perturb 1% of the image area to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.08; or add a single noise pattern in the synthesizer's latent space to reduce the classifier's AUC to 0.17. We also develop a black-box attack that, with no access to the target classifier, reduces the AUC to 0.22. These attacks reveal significant vulnerabilities of certain image-forensic classifiers.

Information Flow Control (IFC) is a collection of techniques for ensuring a no-write-down no-read-up style security policy known as noninterference. Traditional methods for both static (e.g. type systems) and dynamic (e.g. runtime monitors) IFC suffer from untenable numbers of false alarms on real-world programs. Secure Multi-Execution (SME) promises to provide secure information flow control without modifying the behaviour of already secure programs, a property commonly referred to as transparency. Implementations of SME exist for the web in the form of the FlowFox browser and as plug-ins to several programming languages. Furthermore, SME can in theory work in a black-box manner, meaning that it can be programming language agnostic, making it perfect for securing legacy or third-party systems. As such SME, and its variants like Multiple Facets (MF) and Faceted Secure Multi-Execution (FSME), appear to be a family of panaceas for the security engineer. The question is, how come, given all these advantages, that these techniques are not ubiquitous in practice? The answer lies, partially, in the issue of runtime and memory overhead. SME and its variants are prohibitively expensive to deploy in many non-trivial situations. The natural question is why is this the case? On the surface, the reason is simple. The techniques in the SME family all rely on the idea of multi-execution, running all or parts of a program multiple times to achieve noninterference. Naturally, this causes some overhead. However, the predominant thinking in the IFC community has been that these overheads can be overcome. In this paper we argue that there are fundamental reasons to expect this not to be the case and prove two key theorems: (1) All transparent enforcement is polynomial time equivalent to multi-execution. (2) All black-box enforcement takes time exponential in the number of principals in the security lattice. Our methods also allow us to answer, in the affirmative, an open question about the possibility of secure and transparent enforcement of a security condition known as Termination Insensitive Noninterference.

Online gaming is one of the most successful applications having a large number of players interacting in an online persistent virtual world through the Internet. However, some cheating players gain improper advantages over normal players by using illegal automated plugins which has brought huge harm to game health and player enjoyment. Game industries have been devoting much efforts on cheating detection with multiview data sources and achieved great accuracy improvements by applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. However, generating explanations for cheating detection from multiple views still remains a challenging task. To respond to the different purposes of explainability in AI models from different audience profiles, we propose the EMGCD, the first explainable multi-view game cheating detection framework driven by explainable AI (XAI). It combines cheating explainers to cheating classifiers from different views to generate individual, local and global explanations which contributes to the evidence generation, reason generation, model debugging and model compression. The EMGCD has been implemented and deployed in multiple game productions in NetEase Games, achieving remarkable and trustworthy performance. Our framework can also easily generalize to other types of related tasks in online games, such as explainable recommender systems, explainable churn prediction, etc.

Augmented reality (AR) has been identified as a key technology to enhance worker utility in the context of increasing automation of repeatable procedures. AR can achieve this by assisting the user in performing complex and frequently changing procedures. Crucial to the success of procedure assistance AR applications is user acceptability, which can be measured by user quality of experience (QoE). An active research topic in QoE is the identification of implicit metrics that can be used to continuously infer user QoE during a multimedia experience. A user's QoE is linked to their affective state. Affective state is reflected in facial expressions. Emotions shown in micro facial expressions resemble those expressed in normal expressions but are distinguished from them by their brief duration. The novelty of this work lies in the evaluation of micro facial expressions as a continuous QoE metric by means of correlation analysis to the more traditional and accepted post-experience self-reporting. In this work, an optimal Rubik's Cube solver AR application was used as a proof of concept for complex procedure assistance. This was compared with a paper-based procedure assistance control. QoE expressed by affect in normal and micro facial expressions was evaluated through correlation analysis with post-experience reports. The results show that the AR application yielded higher task success rates and shorter task durations. Micro facial expressions reflecting disgust correlated moderately to the questionnaire responses for instruction disinterest in the AR application.

Distributed banking platforms and services forgo centralized banks to process financial transactions. For example, M-Pesa provides distributed banking service in the developing regions so that the people without a bank account can deposit, withdraw, or transfer money. The current distributed banking systems lack the transparency in monitoring and tracking of distributed banking transactions and thus do not support auditing of distributed banking transactions for accountability. To address this issue, this paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed banking (BDB) scheme, which uses blockchain technology to leverage its built-in properties to record and track immutable transactions. BDB supports distributed financial transaction processing but is significantly different from cryptocurrencies in its design properties, simplicity, and computational efficiency. We implement a prototype of BDB using smart contract and conduct experiments to show BDB's effectiveness and performance. We further compare our prototype with the Ethereum cryptocurrency to highlight the fundamental differences and demonstrate the BDB's superior computational efficiency.

Nearest neighbor search, a classic way of identifying similar data, can be applied to various areas, including database, machine learning, natural language processing, software engineering, etc. Secure nearest neighbor search aims to find nearest neighbors to a given query point over encrypted data without accessing data in plaintext. It provides privacy protection to datasets when nearest neighbor queries need to be operated by an untrusted party (e.g., a public server). While different solutions have been proposed to support nearest neighbor queries on encrypted data, these existing solutions still encounter critical drawbacks either in efficiency or privacy. In light of the limitations in the current literature, we propose a novel approximate nearest neighbor search solution, referred to as Sparser, by leveraging a combination of space-filling curves, perturbation, and Order-Preserving Encryption. The advantages of Sparser are twofold, strengthening privacy and improving efficiency. Specifically, Sparser pre-processes plaintext data with space-filling curves and perturbation, such that data is sparse, which mitigates leakage abuse attacks and renders stronger privacy. In addition to privacy enhancement, Sparser can efficiently find approximate nearest neighbors over encrypted data with logarithmic time. Through extensive experiments over real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Sparser can achieve strong privacy protection under leakage abuse attacks and minimize search time.

This paper presents an anomalous IP address detection algorithm for network traffic logs. It is based on word embedding techniques derived from natural language processing to extract the representative features of IP addresses. However, the features extracted from vanilla word embeddings are not always compatible with machine learning-based anomaly detection algorithms. Therefore, we developed an algorithm that enables the extraction of more compatible features of IP addresses for anomaly detection than conventional methods. The proposed algorithm optimizes the objective functions of word embedding-based feature extraction and anomaly detection, simultaneously. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm outperformed conventional approaches; it improved the detection performance from 0.876 to 0.990 in the area under the curve criterion in a task of detecting the IP addresses of attackers from network traffic logs.

The number of organizations adopting the Data Warehouse (DW) technology along with data analytics in order to improve the effectiveness of their decision-making processes is permanently increasing. Despite the efforts invested, the DW design remains a great challenge research domain. More accurately, the design quality of the DW depends on several aspects; among them, the requirement-gathering phase is a critical and complex task. In this context, we propose a Natural language (NL) NL-template based design approach, which is twofold; firstly, it facilitates the involvement of decision-makers in the early step of the DW design; indeed, using NL is a good and natural means to encourage the decision-makers to express their requirements as query-like English sentences. Secondly, our approach aims to generate a DW multidimensional schema from a set of gathered requirements (as OLAP: On-Line-Analytical-Processing queries, written according to the NL suggested templates). This approach articulates around: (i) two NL-templates for specifying multidimensional components, and (ii) a set of five heuristic rules for extracting the multidimensional concepts from requirements. Really, we are developing a software prototype that accepts the decision-makers' requirements then automatically identifies the multidimensional components of the DW model.

Network policies govern the use of an institution's networks, and are usually written in a high-level human-readable natural language. Normally these policies are enforced by low-level, technically detailed network configurations. The translation from network policies into network configurations is a tedious, manual and error-prone process. To address this issue, we propose a new intermediate language called POlicy LANguage for Campus Operations (POLANCO), which is a human-readable network policy definition language intended to approximate natural language. Because POLANCO is a high-level language, the translation from natural language policies to POLANCO is straightforward. Despite being a high-level human readable language, POLANCO can be used to express network policies in a technically precise way so that policies written in POLANCO can be automatically translated into a set of software defined networking (SDN) rules and actions that enforce the policies. Moreover, POLANCO is capable of incorporating information about the current network state, reacting to changes in the network and adjusting SDN rules to ensure network policies continue to be enforced correctly. We present policy examples found on various public university websites and show how they can be written as simplified human-readable statements using POLANCO and how they can be automatically translated into SDN rules that correctly enforce these policies.

In modern grid systems which is a typical cyber-physical System (CPS), information space and physical space are closely related. Once the communication link is interrupted, it will make a great damage to the power system. If the service path is too concentrated, the risk will be greatly increased. In order to solve this problem, this paper constructs a route planning algorithm that combines node load pressure, link load balance and service delay risk. At present, the existing intelligent algorithms are easy to fall into the local optimal value, so we chooses the deep reinforcement learning algorithm (DRL). Firstly, we build a risk assessment model. The node risk assessment index is established by using the node load pressure, and then the link risk assessment index is established by using the average service communication delay and link balance degree. The route planning problem is then solved by a route planning algorithm based on DRL. Finally, experiments are carried out in a simulation scenario of a power grid system. The results show that our method can find a lower risk path than the original Dijkstra algorithm and the Constraint-Dijkstra algorithm.

Monitoring for security and well-being in highly populated areas is a critical issue for city administrators, policy makers and urban planners. As an essential part of many dynamic and critical data-driven tasks, situational awareness (SAW) provides decision-makers a deeper insight of the meaning of urban surveillance. Thus, surveillance measures are increasingly needed. However, traditional surveillance platforms are not scalable when more cameras are added to the network. In this work, a smart surveillance as an edge service has been proposed. To accomplish the object detection, identification, and tracking tasks at the edge-fog layers, two novel lightweight algorithms are proposed for detection and tracking respectively. A prototype has been built to validate the feasibility of the idea, and the test results are very encouraging.

This paper presents an overhead analysis of the use of digital signature mechanisms in the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for three classes of constrained-device. Because the resources provided by constrained-devices are very limited, the purpose of this overhead analysis is to help find out the advantages and disadvantages of each class of constrained-devices after a security mechanism has been applied, namely by applying a digital signature mechanism. The objective of using this digital signature mechanism is for providing integrity, that if the payload sent and received in its destination is still original and not changed during the transmission process. The overhead analysis aspects performed are including analyzing decryption time, signature verification performance, message delivery time, memory and flash usage in the three classes of constrained-device. Based on the overhead analysis result, it can be seen that for decryption time and signature verification performance, the Class-2 device is the fastest one. For message delivery time, the smallest time needed for receiving the payload is Class-l device. For memory usage, the Class-2 device is providing the biggest available memory and flash.

Supervisor synthesis enables the design of supervisory controllers for large cyber-physical systems, with high guarantees for functionality and safety. The complexity of the synthesis problem, however, increases exponentially with the number of system components in the cyber-physical system and the number of models of this system, often resulting in lengthy or even unsolvable synthesis procedures. In this paper, a new method is proposed for reducing the model of the system before synthesis to decrease the required computational time and effort. The method consists of three steps for model reduction, that are mainly based on symmetry in dependency graphs of the system. Dependency graphs visualize the components in the system and the relations between these components. The proposed method is applied in a case study on the design of a supervisory controller for a road tunnel. In this case study, the model reduction steps are described, and results are shown on the effectiveness of model reduction in terms of model size and synthesis time.

With self-driving cars making their way on to our roads, we ask not what it would take for them to gain acceptance among consumers, but what impact they may have on other drivers. How they will be perceived and whether they will be trusted will likely have a major effect on traffic flow and vehicular safety. This work first undertakes an exploratory factor analysis to validate a trust scale for human-robot interaction and shows how previously validated metrics and general trust theory support a more complete model of trust that has increased applicability in the driving domain. We experimentally test this expanded model in the context of human-automation interaction during simulated driving, revealing how using these dimensions uncovers significant biases within human-robot trust that may have particularly deleterious effects when it comes to sharing our future roads with automated vehicles.

Embodiment of actions and tasks has typically been analyzed from the robot's perspective where the robot's embodiment helps develop and maintain trust. However, we ask a similar question looking at the interaction from the human perspective. Embodied cognition has been shown in the cognitive science literature to produce increased social empathy and cooperation. To understand how human embodiment can help develop and increase trust in human-robot interactions, we created conducted a study where participants were tasked with memorizing greek letters associated with dance motions with the help of a humanoid robot. Participants either performed the dance motion or utilized a touch screen during the interaction. The results showed that participants' trust in the robot increased at a higher rate during human embodiment of motions as opposed to utilizing a touch screen device.

Style transfer produces a transferred image which is a rendering of a content image in the manner of a style image. We seek to understand how to improve style transfer.To do so requires quantitative evaluation procedures, but current evaluation is qualitative, mostly involving user studies. We describe a novel quantitative evaluation procedure. Our procedure relies on two statistics: the Effectiveness (E) statistic measures the extent that a given style has been transferred to the target, and the Coherence (C) statistic measures the extent to which the original image's content is preserved. Our statistics are calibrated to human preference: targets with larger values of E and C will reliably be preferred by human subjects in comparisons of style and content, respectively.We use these statistics to investigate relative performance of a number of Neural Style Transfer (NST) methods, revealing a number of intriguing properties. Admissible methods lie on a Pareto frontier (i.e. improving E reduces C, or vice versa). Three methods are admissible: Universal style transfer produces very good C but weak E; modifying the optimization used for Gatys' loss produces a method with strong E and strong C; and a modified cross-layer method has slightly better E at strong cost in C. While the histogram loss improves the E statistics of Gatys' method, it does not make the method admissible. Surprisingly, style weights have relatively little effect in improving EC scores, and most variability in transfer is explained by the style itself (meaning experimenters can be misguided by selecting styles). Our GitHub Link is available1.

In cyber threat information sharing, secure transfer and protecting privacy are very important. In this paper we solve these issues by suggesting a platform based on private permissioned Blockchain, which provides us with access control as well. The platform is called Anon-ISAC and is built on the Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) zero-knowledge proof scheme. It makes use of permissioned Blockchain as a way to keep identity anonymous. Organizations can share their information on incidents or other artifacts among trusted parties, while they keep their identity hidden. This will save them from unwanted consequences of exposure of sensitive security information.