Biblio

The main objective of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is to detect various activities in video frames. Video surveillance is an import application for various security reasons, therefore it is essential to classify activities as usual and unusual. This paper implements the deep learning model that has the ability to classify and localize the activities detected using a Single Shot Detector (SSD) algorithm with a bounding box, which is explicitly trained to detect usual and unusual activities for security surveillance applications. Further this model can be deployed in public places to improve safety and security of individuals. The SSD model is designed and trained using transfer learning approach. Performance evaluation metrics are visualised using Tensor Board tool. This paper further discusses the challenges in real-time implementation.

Nowadays, video surveillance cameras are widely used in many smart city applications for ensuring road safety. We can use video data from them to solve such tasks as traffic management, driving control, environmental monitoring, etc. Most of these applications are based on object recognition and tracking algorithms. However, the video image quality is not always meet the requirements of such algorithms due to the influence of different external factors. A variety of adverse weather conditions produce noise on the images, which often makes it difficult to detect objects correctly. Lately, deep learning methods show good results in image processing, including denoising tasks. This work is devoted to the study of using these methods for image quality enhancement in difficult weather conditions such as snow, rain, fog. Different deep learning techniques were evaluated in terms of their impact on the quality of object detection/recognition. Finally, the system for automatic image denoising was developed.

With the rapid development of the Internet, network traffic is becoming more complex and diverse. At the same time, malicious traffic is growing. This seriously threatens the security of networks and information. However, the current DPI (Deep Packet Inspect) engine based on x86 architecture is slow in monitoring speed, which cannot meet the needs. Generally, two factors affect the detection rate: CPU and memory; The efficiency of data packet acquisition, and multi regular expression matching. Under these circumstances, this paper presents an efficient implementation of the DPI engine based on a generic x86 platform. DPDK is used as the platform of network data packets acquisition and processing. Using the multi-queue of the NIC (network interface controller) and the customized symmetric RSS key, the network traffic is divided and reorganized in the form of conversation. The core of traffic identification is hyperscan, which uses a flow pattern to match the packets load of a single conversation efficiently. It greatly reduces memory requirements. The method makes full use of the system resources and takes into account the advantages of high efficiency of hardware implementation. And it has a remarkable improvement in the efficiency of recognition.

Having a clear insight on the protocols carrying traffic is crucial for network applications. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has been a key technique to provide visibility into traffic. DPI has proven effective in various scenarios, and indeed several open source DPI solutions are maintained by the community. Yet, these solutions provide different classifications, and it is hard to establish a common ground truth. Independent works approaching the question of the quality of DPI are already aged and rely on limited datasets. Here, we test if open source DPI solutions can provide useful information in practical scenarios, e.g., supporting security applications. We provide an evaluation of the performance of four open-source DPI solutions, namely nDPI, Libprotoident, Tstat and Zeek. We use datasets covering various traffic scenarios, including operational networks, IoT scenarios and malware. As no ground truth is available, we study the consistency of classification across the solutions, investigating rootcauses of conflicts. Important for on-line security applications, we check whether DPI solutions provide reliable classification with a limited number of packets per flow. All in all, we confirm that DPI solutions still perform satisfactorily for well-known protocols. They however struggle with some P2P traffic and security scenarios (e.g., with malware traffic). All tested solutions reach a final classification after observing few packets with payload, showing adequacy for on-line applications.

with the continuous growing threat of cyber terrorism, the vulnerability of the industrial control systems (ICS) is the most common subject for security researchers now. Attacks on ICS systems keep increasing and their impact leads to human safety issues, equipment damage, system down, unusual output, loss of visibility and control, and various other catastrophic failures. Many of the industrial control systems are relatively insecure with chronic and pervasive vulnerabilities. Modbus-Tcpis one of the widely used communication protocols in the ICS/ Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to transmit signals from instrumentation and control devices to the main controller of the control center. Modbus is a plain text protocol without any built-in security mechanisms, and Modbus is a standard communication protocol, widely used in critical infrastructure applications such as power systems, water, oil & gas, etc.. This paper proposes a passive security solution called Deep-security-scanner (DSS) tailored to Modbus-Tcpcommunication based Industrial control system (ICS). DSS solution detects attacks on Modbus-TcpIcs networks in a passive manner without disturbing the availability requirements of the system.

Digitization has pioneered to drive exceptional changes across all industries in the advancement of analytics, automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). However, new business requirements associated with the efficiency benefits of digitalization are forcing increased connectivity between IT and OT networks, thereby increasing the attack surface and hence the cyber risk. Cyber threats are on the rise and securing industrial networks are challenging with the shortage of human resource in OT field, with more inclination to IT/OT convergence and the attackers deploy various hi-tech methods to intrude the control systems nowadays. We have developed an innovative real-time ICS cyber test kit to obtain the OT industrial network traffic data with various industrial attack vectors. In this paper, we have introduced the industrial datasets generated from ICS test kit, which incorporate the cyber-physical system of industrial operations. These datasets with a normal baseline along with different industrial hacking scenarios are analyzed for research purposes. Metadata is obtained from Deep packet inspection (DPI) of flow properties of network packets. DPI analysis provides more visibility into the contents of OT traffic based on communication protocols. The advancement in technology has led to the utilization of machine learning/artificial intelligence capability in IDS ICS SCADA. The industrial datasets are pre-processed, profiled and the abnormality is analyzed with DPI. The processed metadata is normalized for the easiness of algorithm analysis and modelled with machine learning-based latest deep learning ensemble LSTM algorithms for anomaly detection. The deep learning approach has been used nowadays for enhanced OT IDS performances.

In today's volatile environment, we have never been more reliant on a tightly knit supply chain (SC). Globalisation, mass manufacturing, and specialisation are now hallmarks of our integrated, industrialised world. Decision-makers rely heavily on accurate up-to-the-minute data. Even the tiniest interruption in data flow can have a huge effect on the quality of decision-making and performance. In the full interconnection paradigm, this dependency has inadvertently pushed device connectivity toward an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) approach. This has allowed the provision of 'added value resources' such as SC optimisation for Industry 4.0 (I4.0) or enhanced process controls. While system interconnectivity has increased, Internet of Things (IoT) and I4.0 SC protection measures have lagged behind. The root cause of this disparity is the existing mainstream security practices inherited from industrial networks and linking systems that neglect any specific security capability. This paper introduces the preliminary design of an I4.0 SC architecture that offers a complete protocol break about how exacting security functions could be implemented by isolation, a rigorous access control system, and surveillance to ensure the proposed architecture's end-to-end security to I4.0 SC.

Increasing incidents of cyber attacks and evolution of quantum computing poses challenges to secure existing information and communication technologies infrastructure. In recent years, quantum key distribution (QKD) is being extensively researched, and is widely accepted as a promising technology to realize secure networks. Optical fiber networks carry a huge amount of information, and are widely deployed around the world in the backbone terrestrial, submarine, metro, and access networks. Thus, instead of using separate dark fibers for quantum communication, integration of QKD with the existing classical optical networks has been proposed as a cost-efficient solution, however, this integration introduces new research challenges. In this paper, we do a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art QKD secured optical networks, which is going to shape communication networks in the coming decades. We elucidate the methods and protocols used in QKD secured optical networks, and describe the process of key establishment. Various methods proposed in the literature to address the networking challenges in QKD secured optical networks, specifically, routing, wavelength and time-slot allocation (RWTA), resiliency, trusted repeater node (TRN) placement, QKD for multicast service, and quantum key recycling are described and compared in detail. This survey begins with the introduction to QKD and its advantages over conventional encryption methods. Thereafter, an overview of QKD is given including quantum bits, basic QKD system, QKD schemes and protocol families along with the detailed description of QKD process based on the Bennett and Brassard-84 (BB84) protocol as it is the most widely used QKD protocol in the literature. QKD system are also prone to some specific types of attacks, hence, we describe the types of quantum hacking attacks on the QKD system along with the methods used to prevent them. Subsequently, the process of point-to-point mechanism of QKD over an optical fiber link is described in detail using the BB84 protocol. Different architectures of QKD secured optical networks are described next. Finally, major findings from this comprehensive survey are summarized with highlighting open issues and challenges in QKD secured optical networks.

This paper describes a Cyber Threat, Vulnerability and Defense Modeling and Simulation tool kit used for evaluation of systems and networks to improve cyber resiliency. This capability is used to help increase the resiliency of networks at various stages of their lifecycle, from initial design and architecture through the operation of deployed systems and networks. Resiliency of computer systems and networks to cyber threats is facilitated by the modeling of agile and resilient defenses versus threats and running multiple simulations evaluated against resiliency metrics. This helps network designers, cyber analysts and Security Operations Center personnel to perform trades using what-if scenarios to select resiliency capabilities and optimally design and configure cyber resiliency capabilities for their systems and networks.

As the world becomes more dependent on connected cyber-physical systems, the cybersecurity workforce must adapt to meet these growing needs. The authors present the notion of a cyber-resiliency workforce to prepare the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Modern power systems depend on cyber-physical systems to link physical devices and control technologies. A major concern in the implementation of smart power networks is to minimize the risk of data privacy violation (e.g., by adversaries using data poisoning and inference attacks). In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving framework to achieve both privacy and security in smart power networks. The framework includes two main modules: a two-level privacy module and an anomaly detection module. In the two-level privacy module, an enhanced-proof-of-work-technique-based blockchain is designed to verify data integrity and mitigate data poisoning attacks, and a variational autoencoder is simultaneously applied for transforming data into an encoded format for preventing inference attacks. In the anomaly detection module, a long short-term memory deep learning technique is used for training and validating the outputs of the two-level privacy module using two public datasets. The results highlight that the proposed framework can efficiently protect data of smart power networks and discover abnormal behaviors, in comparison to several state-of-the-art techniques.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) underpin global critical infrastructure, including power, water, gas systems and smart grids. CPS, as a technology platform, is unique as a target for Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), given the potentially high impact of a successful breach. Additionally, CPSs are targets as they produce significant amounts of heterogeneous data from the multitude of devices and networks included in their architecture. It is, therefore, essential to develop efficient privacy-preserving techniques for safeguarding system data from cyber attacks. This paper introduces a comprehensive review of the current privacy-preserving techniques for protecting CPS systems and their data from cyber attacks. Concepts of Privacy preservation and CPSs are discussed, demonstrating CPSs' components and the way these systems could be exploited by either cyber and physical hacking scenarios. Then, classification of privacy preservation according to the way they would be protected, including perturbation, authentication, machine learning (ML), cryptography and blockchain, are explained to illustrate how they would be employed for data privacy preservation. Finally, we show existing challenges, solutions and future research directions of privacy preservation in CPSs.

Protecting Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs) is highly important for preserving sensitive information and detecting cyber threats. Developing a robust privacy-preserving anomaly detection method requires physical and network data about the systems, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), for protecting original data and recognising cyber-attacks. In this paper, a new privacy-preserving anomaly detection framework, so-called PPAD-CPS, is proposed for protecting confidential information and discovering malicious observations in power systems and their network traffic. The framework involves two main modules. First, a data pre-processing module is suggested for filtering and transforming original data into a new format that achieves the target of privacy preservation. Second, an anomaly detection module is suggested using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Kalman Filter (KF) for precisely estimating the posterior probabilities of legitimate and anomalous events. The performance of the PPAD-CPS framework is assessed using two public datasets, namely the Power System and UNSW-NB15 dataset. The experimental results show that the framework is more effective than four recent techniques for obtaining high privacy levels. Moreover, the framework outperforms seven peer anomaly detection techniques in terms of detection rate, false positive rate, and computational time.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) is an integration of computation with physical systems and physical processes. It is widely used in energy, health and other industrial areas. Modeling and simulation is of the greatest challenges in CPS research. Modelica has a great potentiality in the modeling and simulation of CPS. We analyze the characteristics and requirements of CPS modeling, and also the features of Modelica in the paper. In respect of information model, physical model and model interface, this paper introduces a unified modeling method for CPS, based on Modelica. The method provides a reliable foundation for the design, analysis and verification of CPS.

In IoT scenarios, computational and communication costs on the user side are important problems. In most expressive ABE schemes, there is a linear relationship between the access structure size and the number of heavy pairing operations that are used in the decryption process. This property limits the application of ABE. We propose an expressive CP-ABE with the constant number of pairings in the decryption process. The simulation shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient in encryption and decryption processes. In addition, we use the outsourcing method in decryption to get better performance on the user side. The main burden of decryption computations is done by the cloud without revealing any information about the plaintext. We introduce a new revocation method. In this method, the users' communication channels aren't used during the revocation process. These features significantly reduce the computational and communication costs on the user side that makes the proposed scheme suitable for applications such as IoT. The proposed scheme is selectively CPA-secure in the standard model.

Industry 4.0 connectivity requires ensuring end-to-end (E2E) security for industrial data. This requirement is critical when retrieving data from the OT network. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) guarantees E2E security by encrypting data according to a policy and generating user keys according to attributes. To use this encryption scheme in manufacturing environments, policies must be updatable. This paper proposes a Multi-Layered Policy Key Encapsulation Method for CP-ABE that allows flexible policy update and revocation without modifying the original CP-ABE scheme.

This paper proposes a method of encrypting data stored in the blockchain network by applying ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and symmetric key algorithm. This method protects the confidentiality and privacy of data that is not protected in blockchain networks, and stores data in a more efficient way than before. The proposed model has the same characteristics of CP-ABE and has a faster processing speed than when only CP-ABE is used.

Authorship attribution, an NLP problem where anonymous text is matched to its author, has important, cross-disciplinary applications, particularly those concerning cyber-defense. Our research examines the degree of sensitivity that attention-based models have to adversarial perturbations. We ask, what is the minimal amount of change necessary to maximally confuse a transformer model? In our investigation we examine a balanced subset of emails from the Enron email dataset, calculating the performance of our model before and after email signatures have been perturbed. Results show that the model's performance changed significantly in the absence of a signature, indicating the importance of email signatures in email authorship detection. Furthermore, we show that these models rely on signatures for shorter emails much more than for longer emails. We also indicate that additional research is necessary to investigate stylometric features and adversarial training to further improve classification model robustness.

In this study, a novel decentralized authentication model is proposed for establishing a secure communications structure in VoIP applications. The proposed scheme considers a distributed architecture called the blockchain. With this scheme, we highlight the multimedia data is more resistant to some of the potential attacks according to the centralized architecture. Our scheme presents the overall system authentication architecture, and it is suitable for mutual authentication in terms of privacy and anonymity. We construct an ECC-based model in the encryption infrastructure because our structure is time-constrained during communications. This study differs from prior work in that blockchain platforms with ECC-Based Biometric Signature. We generate a biometric key for creating a unique ID value with ECC to verify the caller and device authentication together in blockchain. We validated the proposed model by comparing with the existing method in VoIP application used centralized architecture.

The security and privacy concerns along with the amount of data that is required to be processed on regular basis has pushed processing to the edge of the computing systems. Deploying advanced Neural Networks (NN), such as deep neural networks (DNNs) and spiking neural networks (SNNs), that offer state-of-the-art results on resource-constrained edge devices is challenging due to the stringent memory and power/energy constraints. Moreover, these systems are required to maintain correct functionality under diverse security and reliability threats. This paper first discusses existing approaches to address energy efficiency, reliability, and security issues at different system layers, i.e., hardware (HW) and software (SW). Afterward, we discuss how to further improve the performance (latency) and the energy efficiency of Edge AI systems through HW/SW-level optimizations, such as pruning, quantization, and approximation. To address reliability threats (like permanent and transient faults), we highlight cost-effective mitigation techniques, like fault-aware training and mapping. Moreover, we briefly discuss effective detection and protection techniques to address security threats (like model and data corruption). Towards the end, we discuss how these techniques can be combined in an integrated cross-layer framework for realizing robust and energy-efficient Edge AI systems.

Radio-frequency (RF) sensing is a key technology for designing intelligent and secure wireless networks with high spectral efficiency and environment-aware adaptation capabilities. However, existing sensing techniques can extract only limited information from RF signals or assume that the RF signals are generated by certain known protocols. As a result, their applications are limited if proprietary protocols or encryption methods are adopted, or in environments subject to errors such as unintended interference. To address this challenge, we study protocol-agnostic cross-layer sensing to extract high-layer protocol information from raw RF samples without any a priori knowledge of the protocols. First, we present a framework for protocol-agnostic sensing for over-the-air (OTA) RF signals, by taking packet boundary recognition (PBR) as an example. The framework consists of three major components: OTA Signal Generator, Agnostic RF Sink, and Ground Truth Generator. Then, we develop a software-defined testbed using USRP SDRs, with eleven benchmark statistical algorithms implemented in the Agnostic RF Sink, including Kullback-Leibler divergence and cross-power spectral density, among others. Finally, we test the effectiveness of these statistical algorithms in PBR on OTA RF samples, considering a wide variety of transmission parameters, including modulation type, transmission distance, and packet length. It is found that none of these benchmark statistical algorithms can achieve consistently high PBR rate, and new algorithms are required particularly in next-generation low-latency wireless systems.

The latest security methods are based on biometric features. The electrocardiogram is increasingly used in such systems because it provides biometric features that are difficult to falsify. This paper aims to study the use of the electrocardiogram together with the Convolutional Neural Networks, in order to identify the subjects based on the ECG signal and to improve the security. In this study, we used the Fantasia database, available on the PhysioNet platform, which contains 40 ECG recordings. The ECG signal is pre-processed, and then spectrograms are generated for each ECG signal. Spectrograms are applied to the input of several architectures of Convolutional Neural Networks like Inception-v3, Xception, MobileNet and NasNetLarge. An analysis of performance metrics reveals that the subject identification method based on ECG signal and CNNs provides remarkable results. The best accuracy value is 99.5% and is obtained for Inception-v3.

Aimming at the severe security threat faced by information transmission in wireless communication, the artificial interference in physical layer security technology was considered, and the influence of artificial interference signal style on system information transmission security was analyzed by simulation, which provided technical accumulation for the design of wireless security transmission system based on artificial interference.

A sensor network is wireless with tiny nodes and widely used in various applications. To track the event and collect the data from a remote area or a hostile area sensor network is used. A WSN collects wirelessly connected tiny sensors with minimal resources like the battery, computation power, and memory. When a sensor collects data, it must be transferred to the control center through the gateway (Sink), and it must be transferred safely. For secure transfer of data in the network, the routing protocol must be safe and can use the cryptography method for authentication and confidentiality. An essential issue in WSN structure is the key management. WSN relies on the strength of the communicating devices, battery power, and sensor nodes to communicate in the wireless environment over a limited region. Due to energy and memory limitations, the construction of a fully functional network needs to be well arranged. Several techniques are available in the current literature for such key management techniques. Among the distribution of key over the network, sharing private and public keys is the most important. Network security is not an easy problem because of its limited resources, and these networks are deployed in unattended areas where they work without any human intervention. These networks are used to monitor buildings and airports, so security is always a major issue for these networks. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic key management scheme for the clustered sensor network that also supports the addition of a new node in the network later. Keys are dynamically generated and securely distributed to communication parties with the help of a cluster head. We verify the immunity of the scheme against various attacks like replay attack and node captured attacker. A simulation study was also done on energy consumption for key setup and refreshed the keys. Security analysis of scheme shows batter resiliency against node capture attack.

The total number of photovoltaic power producing facilities whose FIT-based ten-year contract expires by 2023 is expected to reach approximately 1.65 million in Japan. If the number of renewable electricity-producing/consuming facilities reached two million, an enormous number of transactions would be invoked beyond blockchain's scalability.We propose mutually cooperative two novel methods to simultaneously solve scalability, data size, and privacy problems in blockchain-based trading platforms for renewable energy environmental value. One is a management scheme of electricity production resources (EPRs) using an extended UTXO token. The other is a data aggregation scheme that aggregates a significant number of smart meter records with evidentiality using zero-knowledge proof (ZKP).