Biblio

OpenSSL is an open source library that implements the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), a security protocol used by the TCP/IP layer. All cryptographic systems require random number generation for many reasons, such as cryptographic key generation and protocol challenge/response, OpenSSL is also the same. OpenSSL can be run on a variety of operating systems. especially when generating random numbers on Unix-like operating systems, it can use /dev /(u)random [6], as a seed to add randomness. In this paper, we analyze the process provided by OpenSSL when random number generation is required. We also provide considerations for application developers and OpenSSL users to use /dev/urandom and real-time clock (nanoseconds of timespec structure) as a seed to generate cryptographic random numbers in the Unix family.

Tremendous amounts of data are generated daily. Accordingly, unstructured text data that is distributed through news, blogs, and social media has gained much attention from many researchers as this data contains abundant information about various consumers' opinions. However, as the usefulness of text data is increasing, attempts to gain profits by distorting text data maliciously or non-maliciously are also increasing. In this sense, various types of spam detection techniques have been studied to prevent the side effects of spamming. The most representative studies include e-mail spam detection, web spam detection, and opinion spam detection. "Spam" is recognized on the basis of three characteristics and actions: (1) if a certain user is recognized as a spammer, then all content created by that user should be recognized as spam; (2) if certain content is exposed to other users (regardless of the users' intention), then content is recognized as spam; and (3) any content that contains malicious or non-malicious false information is recognized as spam. Many studies have been performed to solve type (1) and type (2) spamming by analyzing various metadata, such as user networks and spam words. In the case of type (3), however, relatively few studies have been conducted because it is difficult to determine the veracity of a certain word or information. In this study, we regard a hashtag that is irrelevant to the content of a blog post as spam and devise a methodology to detect such spam hashtags.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has been bringing serious security concerns on banks, finance incorporation, public institutions, and data centers. Also, the emerging wave of Internet of Things (IoT) raises new concerns on the smart devices. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have provided a new paradigm for network security. In this paper, we propose a new method to efficiently prevent DDoS attacks, based on a SDN/NFV framework. To resolve the problem that normal packets are blocked due to the inspection on suspicious packets, we developed a threshold-based method that provides a client with an efficient, fast DDoS attack mitigation. In addition, we use open source code to develop the security functions in order to implement our solution for SDN-based network security functions. The source code is based on NETCONF protocol [1] and YANG Data Model [2].

In PMIPv6-based network, mobile nodes can be made smaller and lighter because the network nodes perform the mobility management-related functions on behalf of the mobile nodes. One of the protocols, Fast Handovers for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) [1] was studied by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Since FPMIPv6 adopts the entities and the concepts of Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), it reduces the packet loss. The conventional scheme has been proposed to cooperate with an Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructure for authentication of a mobile node in PMIPv6. Despite the fact that this approach resulted in the best efficiency, without beginning secured signaling messages, The PMIPv6 is vulnerable to various security threats and it does not support global mobility. In this paper, the authors analyzed the Kang-Park & ESS-FH scheme, and proposed an Enhanced Security scheme for FPMIPv6 (ESS-FP). Based on the CGA method and the public key Cryptography, ESS-FP provides a strong key exchange and key independence in addition to improving the weaknesses of FPMIPv6 and its handover latency was analyzed and compared with that of the Kang-Park scheme & ESS-FH.
 

Recent advancements of spatial audio technologies to enhance human’s emotional and immersive experiences are gathering attention. Many studies are clarifying the neural mechanisms of acoustic spatial perception; however, they are limited to the evaluation of mechanisms using basic sound stimuli. Therefore, it remains challenging to evaluate the experience of actual music contents and to verify the effects of higher-order neurophysiological responses including a sense of immersive and realistic experience. To investigate the effects of spatial audio experience, we verified the psychophysiological responses of immersive spatial audio experience using sound field synthesis (SFS) technology. Specifically, we evaluated alpha power as the central nervous system activity, heart rate/heart rate variability and skin conductance as the autonomic nervous system activity during an acoustic experience of an actual music content by comparing stereo and SFS conditions. As a result, statistically significant differences (p \textbackslashtextless 0.05) were detected in the changes in alpha wave power, high frequency wave power of heart rate variability (HF), and skin conductance level (SCL) among the conditions. The results of the SFS condition showed enhanced the changes in alpha power in the frontal and parietal regions, suggesting enhancement of emotional experience. The results of the SFS condition also suggested that close objects are grouped and perceived on the basis of the spatial proximity of sounds in the presence of multiple sound sources. It is demonstrating that the potential use of SFS technology can enhance emotional and immersive experiences by spatial acoustic expression.

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.

Publicly available blacklists are popular tools to capture and spread information about misbehaving entities on the Internet. In some cases, their straight-forward utilization leads to many false positives. In this work, we propose a system that combines blacklists with network flow data while introducing automated evaluation techniques to avoid reporting unreliable alerts. The core of the system is formed by an Adaptive Filter together with an Evaluator module. The assessment of the system was performed on data obtained from a national backbone network. The results show the contribution of such a system to the reduction of unreliable alerts.

Wearable devices, such as implantable medical devices and smart wearables, are becoming increasingly popular with applications that vary from casual activity monitoring to critical medical uses. Unsurprisingly, numerous security vulnerabilities have been found in this class of devices. Yet, research on physical measurement-based authentication and key distribution assumes that body-worn devices are benign and uncompromised. Tiek is a novel authentication and key distribution protocol which addresses this issue. We utilize two sources of randomness to perform device authentication and key distribution simultaneously but through separate means. This creates a two-tier authorization scheme that enables devices to join the network while protecting them from each other. We describe Tiek and analyze its security.

The main goal of introducing an identity-based cryptosystem and certificateless cryptosystem was avoiding certificates' management costs. In turn, the goal of introducing a certificate-based cryptosystem was to solve the certificate revocation problem. In this paper, we propose a new digital Implicit and Explicit Certificates-Based Hess's Signature (IE-CBHS) scheme that combines the features of a standard public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificate-based cryptosystem. Our IE-CBHS scheme is an efficient certificates-based signature. The security analysis proves that the scheme is secure against two game attacks in the random oracle model. The security is closely related to the difficulty of solving the computational Diffie–Hellman and discrete logarithm problems. The IE-CBHS scheme, when compared with other signature schemes, has similar efficiency and is both more flexible and more useful in practice. It is possible to revoke the explicit certificate and use that fact during digital signature verification. Thus, our scheme is useful in applications where typical mechanisms of standard PKI are used. One of many important security features is resistance to denial of signature verification attack. Also, it is impossible for a trusted authority to recreate a partial private key, even with cooperation with the signer.

High-speed IP address lookup is essential to achieve wire-speed packet forwarding in Internet routers. Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) technology has been adopted to solve the IP address lookup problem because of its ability to perform fast parallel matching. However, the applicability of TCAMs presents difficulties due to cost and power dissipation issues. Various algorithms and hardware architectures have been proposed to perform the IP address lookup using ordinary memories such as SRAMs or DRAMs without using TCAMs. Among the algorithms, we focus on two efficient algorithms providing high-speed IP address lookup: parallel multiple-hashing (PMH) algorithm and binary search on level algorithm. This paper shows how effectively an on-chip Bloom filter can improve those algorithms. A performance evaluation using actual backbone routing data with 15,000-220,000 prefixes shows that by adding a Bloom filter, the complicated hardware for parallel access is removed without search performance penalty in parallel-multiple hashing algorithm. Search speed has been improved by 30-40 percent by adding a Bloom filter in binary search on level algorithm.
 

This paper has conducted analyzing the accident case of data spill to study policy issues for ICT security from a social science perspective focusing on risk. The results from case analysis are as follows. First, ICT risk can be categorized 'severe, strong, intensive and individual' from the level of both probability and impact. Second, strategy of risk management can be designated 'avoid, transfer, mitigate, accept' by understanding their own culture type of relative group such as 'hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and individualism'. Third, personal data has contained characteristics of big data such like 'volume, velocity, variety' for each risk situation. Therefore, government needs to establish a standing organization responsible for ICT risk policy and management in a new big data era. And the policy for ICT risk management needs to balance in considering 'technology, norms, laws, and market' in big data era.
 

Cyber physical system (CPS) Critical infrastructures (CIs) like the power and energy systems are increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks. Mitigating cyber risks in CIs is one of the key objectives of the design and maintenance of these systems. These CPS CIs commonly use legacy devices for remote monitoring and control where complete upgrades are uneconomical and infeasible. Therefore, risk assessment plays an important role in systematically enumerating and selectively securing vulnerable or high-risk assets through optimal investments in the cybersecurity of the CPS CIs. In this paper, we propose a CPS CI security framework and software tool, CySec Game, to be used by the CI industry and academic researchers to assess cyber risks and to optimally allocate cybersecurity investments to mitigate the risks. This framework uses attack tree, attack-defense tree, and game theory algorithms to identify high-risk targets and suggest optimal investments to mitigate the identified risks. We evaluate the efficacy of the framework using the tool by implementing a smart grid case study that shows accurate analysis and feasible implementation of the framework and the tool in this CPS CI environment.

Recently, with the development of the cloud environment, users can store their data or share it with other users. However, various security threats can occur in data sharing systems in the cloud environment. To solve this, data sharing systems and access control methods using the CP-ABE method are being studied, but the following problems may occur. First, in an outsourcing server that supports computation, it is not possible to prove that the computed result is a properly computed result when performing the partial decryption process of the ciphertext. Therefore, the user needs to verify the message obtained by performing the decryption process, and verify that the data is uploaded by the data owner through verification. As another problem, because the data owner encrypts data with attribute-based encryption, the number of attributes included in the access structure increases. This increases the size of the ciphertext, which can waste space in cloud storage. Therefore, a ciphertext of a constant size must be output regardless of the number of attributes when generating the ciphertext. In this paper, we proposes a CP-ABE based data sharing system that provides signature-based verifiable outsourcing. It aims at a system that allows multiple users to share data safely and efficiently in a cloud environment by satisfying verifiable outsourcing and constant-sized ciphertext output among various security requirements required by CP-ABE.

GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded program which provides a virtual laboratory for networking and distributed systems research and education. It is well suited for exploring networks at a scale, thereby promoting innovations in network science, security, services and applications. GENI allows researchers obtain compute resources from locations around the United States, connect compute resources using 100G Internet2 L2 service, install custom software or even custom operating systems on these compute resources, control how network switches in their experiment handle traffic flows, and run their own L3 and above protocols. GENI architecture incorporates cloud federation. With the federation, cloud resources can be federated and/or community of clouds can be formed. The heart of federation is user identity and an ability to “advertise” cloud resources into community including compute, storage, and networking. GENI administrators can carve out what resources are available to the community and hence a portion of GENI resources are reserved for internal consumption. GENI architecture also provides “stitching” of compute and storage resources researchers request. This provides L2 network domain over Internet2's 100G network. And researchers can run their Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers on the provisioned L2 network domain for a complete control of networking traffic. This capability is useful for large science data transfer (bypassing security devices for high throughput). Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research institute in the state of North Carolina, has developed ORCA (Open Resource Control Architecture), a GENI control framework. ORCA is a distributed resource orchestration system to serve science experiments. ORCA provides compute resources as virtual machines and as well as baremetals. ORCA based GENI ra- k was designed to serve both High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) type of computes. Although, GENI is primarily used in various universities and research entities today, GENI architecture can be leveraged in the commercial, aerospace and government settings. This paper will go over the architecture of GENI and discuss the GENI architecture for scientific computing experiments.

With the advent of massive machine type of communications, security protection becomes more important than ever. Efforts have been made to impose security protection capability to physical-layer signal design, so called physical-layer security (PLS). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of PLS schemes for a multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems with space-time block coding (STBC) under imperfect channel estimation. Three PLS schemes for STBC schemes are modeled and their bit error rate (BER) performances are evaluated under various channel estimation error environments, and their performance characteristics are analyzed.

Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchain platforms, provides financial transactions like payments and auctions through smart contracts. Due to the immense interest in smart contracts in academia, the research community of smart contract security has made a significant improvement recently. Researchers have reported various security vulnerabilities in smart contracts, and developed static analysis tools and verification frameworks to detect them. However, it is unclear whether such great efforts from academia has indeed enhanced the security of smart contracts in reality. To understand the security level of smart contracts in the wild, we empirically studied 55,046 real-world Ethereum smart contracts written in Solidity, the most popular programming language used by Ethereum smart contract developers. We first examined how many well-known vulnerabilities the Solidity compiler has patched, and how frequently the Solidity team publishes compiler releases. Unfortunately, we observed that many known vulnerabilities are not yet patched, and some patches are not even sufficient to avoid their target vulnerabilities. Subsequently, we investigated whether smart contract developers use the most recent compiler with vulnerabilities patched. We reported that developers of more than 98% of real-world Solidity contracts still use older compilers without vulnerability patches, and more than 25% of the contracts are potentially vulnerable due to the missing security patches. To understand actual impacts of the missing patches, we manually investigated potentially vulnerable contracts that are detected by our static analyzer and identified common mistakes by Solidity developers, which may cause serious security issues such as financial loss. We detected hundreds of vulnerable contracts and about one fourth of the vulnerable contracts are used by thousands of people. We recommend the Solidity team to make patches that resolve known vulnerabilities correctly, and developers to use the latest Solidity compiler to avoid missing security patches.

Access Control Policies (ACPs) evolve. Understanding the trends and evolution patterns of ACPs could provide guidance about the reliability and maintenance of ACPs. Our research goal is to help policy authors improve the quality of ACP evolution based on the understanding of trends and evolution patterns in ACPs We performed an empirical study by analyzing the ACP changes over time for two systems: Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), and an open-source virtual computing platform (VCL). We measured trends in terms of the number of policy lines and lines of code (LOC), respectively. We observed evolution patterns. For example, an evolution pattern st1 → st2 says that st1 (e.g., "read") evolves into st2 (e.g., "read" and "write"). This pattern indicates that policy authors add "write" permission in addition to existing "read" permission. We found that some of evolution patterns appear to occur more frequently.

The data transmitted from the wearable device commonly includes sensitive data. So, application service using the data collected from the unauthorized wearable devices can cause serious problems. Also, it is important to authenticate any wearable device and then, protect the transmitted data between the wearable devices and the application server. In this paper, we propose an authentication protocol, which is designed by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake protocol combined with a mobile authentication proxy. By using the proposed authentication protocol, we can authenticate the wearable device. And we can secure data transmission since session key is shared between the wearable device and the application server. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol is secure even when the mobile authentication proxy is unreliable.

Volumetric DDoS attacks continue to inflict serious damage. Many proposed defenses for mitigating such attacks assume that a monitoring system has already detected the attack. However, many proposed DDoS monitoring systems do not focus on efficiently analyzing high volume network traffic to provide important characterizations of the attack in real-time to downstream traffic filtering systems. We propose a scalable real-time framework for an effective volumetric DDoS monitoring system that leverages modern big data technologies for streaming analytics of high volume network traffic to accurately detect and characterize attacks.

Data fusion, as a means to improve aircraft and air traffic safety, is a recent focus of some researchers and system developers. Increases in data volume and processing needs necessitate more powerful hardware and more flexible software architectures to satisfy these needs. Such improvements in processed data also mean the overall system becomes more complex and correspondingly, resulting in a potentially significantly larger cyber-attack space. Today's multicore processors are one means of satisfying the increased computational needs of data fusion-based systems. When coupled with a real-time operating system (RTOS) capable of flexible core and application scheduling, large cabinets of (power hungry) single-core processors may be avoided. The functional and assurance capabilities of such an RTOS can be critical elements in providing application isolation, constrained data flows, and restricted hardware access (including covert channel prevention) necessary to reduce the overall cyber-attack space. This paper examines fundamental considerations of a multiple independent levels of security (MILS) architecture when supported by a multicore-based real-time operating system. The paper draws upon assurance activities and functional properties associated with a previous Common Criteria evaluation assurance level (EAL) 6+ / High-Robustness Separation Kernel certification effort and contrast those with activities performed as part of a MILS multicore related project. The paper discusses key characteristics and functional capabilities necessary to achieve overall system security and safety. The paper defines architectural considerations essential for scheduling applications on a multicore processor to reduce security risks. For civil aircraft systems, the paper discusses the applicability of the security assurance and architecture configurations to system providers looking to increase their resilience to cyber threats.

For over 50 years, the password has been a frequently used, yet relatively ineffective security mechanism for user authentication. The ubiquitous smartphone is a compact suite of sensors, computation, and network connectivity that corporations are beginning to embrace under BYOD (bring your own device). In this paper, we hypothesize that each of us has a unique “walking signature” that a smartphone can recognize and use to provide passive, continuous authentication. This paper describes the exploratory data analysis of a small, cross-sectional, empirical study of users' walking signatures as observed by a smartphone. We then describe an identity management system that could use a walking signature as a means to passively and continuously authenticate a user and manage complex passwords to improve security.

Embedded systems in physically insecure environments are subject to additional security risk via capture by an adversary. A captured microchip device can be reverse engineered to recover internal buffer data that would otherwise be inaccessible through standard IO mechanisms. We consider an adversary who has sufficient ability to gain all internal bits and logic from a device at the time of capture as an unsolved threat. In this paper we present a novel sensing architecture that enhances embedded system security by randomly encoding sensed values. We randomly encode data at the time of sensing to minimize the amount of plaintext data present on a device in buffer memory. We encode using techniques that are unintelligible to an adversary even with full internal bit knowledge. The encoding is decipherable by a trusted home server, and we have provided an architecture to perform this decoding. Our experimental results show the proposed architecture meets timing requirements needed to perform communications with a satellite utilizing short-burst data, such as in remote sensing telemetry and tracking applications.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are utilized extensively in critical power grid infrastructures. Modern SCADA systems have been proven to be susceptible to cyber-security attacks and require improved security primitives in order to prevent unwanted influence from an adversarial party. One section of weakness in the SCADA system is the integrity of field level sensors providing essential data for control decisions at a master station. In this paper we propose a lightweight hardware scheme providing inferred authentication for SCADA sensors by combining an analog to digital converter and a permutation generator as a single integrated circuit. Through this method we encode critical sensor data at the time of sensing, so that unencoded data is never stored in memory, increasing the difficulty of software attacks. We show through experimentation how our design stops both software and hardware false data injection attacks occurring at the field level of SCADA systems.

One of the most important information in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the location of each sensor node. This kind of information is very attractive to attackers for real position exposure of nodes making the whole network vulnerable to different kinds of attacks. According to WSNs privacy, there are two types of threats affect the network: Contextual and Content privacy. In this work, we study contextual privacy, where an eavesdropper tries to find the location of the source or sink node. We propose a Multi-Sinks Cluster-Based Location Privacy Protection (MSCLP) scheme in WSNs that divides the WSN into clusters, each cluster managed by one cluster head (CH). Each CH sends random fake packets in a loop then sends the real packet to the neighbor's CHs using a dynamic routing method to confuse the attacker from tracing back the real packet to reveal the actual location of the source node, we are taking in our consideration two important metrics: the energy consumption, and the delay.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the new promise towards an easily configured and remotely controlled network. Based on Centralized control, SDN technology has proved its positive impact on the world of network communications from different aspects. Security in SDN, as in traditional networks, is an essential feature that every communication system should possess. In this paper, we propose an SDN security design approach, which strikes a good balance between network performance and security features. We show how such an approach can be used to prevent DDoS attacks targeting either the controller or the different hosts in the network, and how to trace back the source of the attack. The solution lies in introducing a third plane, the security plane, in addition to the data plane, which is responsible for forwarding data packets between SDN switches, and parallel to the control plane, which is responsible for rule and data exchange between the switches and the SDN controller. The security plane is designed to exchange security-related data between a third party agent on the switch and a third party software module alongside the controller. Our evaluation shows the capability of the proposed system to enforce different levels of real-time user-defined security with low overhead and minimal configuration.