Biblio

Internet of Things devices have spread to near ubiquity this decade. All around us now lies an invisible mesh of communication from devices embedded in seemingly everything. Inevitably some of that communication flying around our heads will contain data that must be protected or otherwise shielded from tampering. The responsibility to protect this sensitive information from malicious actors as it travels through the air then falls upon the standards used to communicate this data. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of these standards, the aim of this paper is to put its security standards to test. By attempting to exploit its vulnerabilities we can see how secure this standard really is. In this paper, we present steps for analyzing the security of BLE devices using open-source hardware and software.

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a rapidly developing technique for information collection from the users of mobile devices. This technique deals with participants' personal information such as their identities and locations, thus raising significant security and privacy concerns. Accordingly, anonymous authentication schemes have been widely considered for preserving participants' privacy in MCS. However, mobile devices are easy to lose and vulnerable to device capture attacks, which enables an attacker to extract the private authentication key of a mobile application and to further invade the user's privacy by linking sensed data with the user's identity. To address this issue, we have devised a special anonymous authentication scheme where the authentication request algorithm can be obfuscated into an unintelligible form and thus the authentication key is not explicitly used. This scheme not only achieves authenticity and unlinkability for participants, but also resists impersonation, replay, denial-of-service, man-in-the-middle, collusion, and insider attacks. The scheme's obfuscation algorithm is the first obfuscator for anonymous authentication, and it satisfies the average-case secure virtual black-box property. The scheme also supports batch verification of authentication requests for improving efficiency. Performance evaluations on a workstation and smart phones have indicated that our scheme works efficiently on various devices.

Accountable authority identity-based encryption (A-IBE), as an attractive way to guarantee the user privacy security, enables a malicious private key generator (PKG) to be traced if it generates and re-distributes a user private key. Particularly, an A-IBE scheme achieves full black-box security if it can further trace a decoder box and is secure against a malicious PKG who can access the user decryption results. In PKC'11, Sahai and Seyalioglu presented a generic construction for full black-box A-IBE from a primitive called dummy identity-based encryption, which is a hybrid between IBE and attribute-based encryption (ABE). However, as the complexity of ABE, their construction is inefficient and the size of private keys and ciphertexts in their instantiation is linear in the length of user identity. In this paper, we present a new efficient generic construction for full black-box A-IBE from a new primitive called token-based identity-based encryption (TB-IBE), without using ABE. We first formalize the definition and security model for TB-IBE. Subsequently, we show that a TB-IBE scheme satisfying some properties can be converted to a full black-box A-IBE scheme, which is as efficient as the underlying TB-IBE scheme in terms of computational complexity and parameter sizes. Finally, we give an instantiation with the computational complexity as O(1) and the constant size master key pair, private keys, and ciphertexts.

Generating adversarial samples is gathering much attention as an intuitive approach to evaluate the robustness of learning models. Extensive recent works have demonstrated that numerous advanced image classifiers are defenseless to adversarial perturbations in the white-box setting. However, the white-box setting assumes attackers to have prior knowledge of model parameters, which are generally inaccessible in real world cases. In this paper, we concentrate on the hard-label black-box setting where attackers can only pose queries to probe the model parameters responsible for classifying different images. Therefore, the issue is converted into minimizing non-continuous function. A black-box approach is proposed to address both massive queries and the non-continuous step function problem by applying a combination of a linear fine-grained search, Fibonacci search, and a zeroth order optimization algorithm. However, the input dimension of a image is so high that the estimation of gradient is noisy. Hence, we adopt a zeroth-order optimization method in high dimensions. The approach converts calculation of gradient into a linear regression model and extracts dimensions that are more significant. Experimental results illustrate that our approach can relatively reduce the amount of queries and effectively accelerate convergence of the optimization method.

Bitcoin is the leading example of a blockchain application that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without the need for a trusted intermediary. This paper considers possible attacks related to the decentralized network architecture of Bitcoin. We perform a data driven study of Bitcoin and present possible attacks based on spatial and temporal characteristics of its network. Towards that, we revisit the prior work, dedicated to the study of centralization of Bitcoin nodes over the Internet, through a fine-grained analysis of network distribution, and highlight the increasing centralization of the Bitcoin network over time. As a result, we show that Bitcoin is vulnerable to spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal, and logical partitioning attacks with an increased attack feasibility due to network dynamics. We verify our observations by simulating attack scenarios and the implications of each attack on the Bitcoin . We conclude with suggested countermeasures.

There are some registry agreements that may be appropriate for the Internet of Things (IoT), including Bitcoin, Hyperledger Fabric and IOTA. This article presents quickly and examines them in terms of the progress of Internet applications. Block-dependent IoT applications can consolidate the chain's rationale (smart contracts) and front-end, portable or front-end web applications. We present three possible designs for BC IoT front-end applications. They vary depending on the Bitcoin block chain customer (neighborhood gadget, remote server) and the key location needed to manage active exchanges. The vital requirements of these projects, which use Bitcoin to organize constructive exchanges, are the volumes of information, the area and time of the complete block and block block, and the entry of the Bitcoin store. The implications of these surveys show that it is unlikely that a full Bitcoin distributor will continue to operate reliably with a mandatory IoT gadget. Then, designing with remote Bitcoin customers is, in all respects, a suitable methodology in which there are two minor alternatives and vary in key storage / management. Similarly, we recommend using the design with a unique match between the IoT gadget and the remote blockchain client to reduce system activity and improve security. We hope you also have the ability to operate with versatile verses with low control and low productivity. Our review eliminates the contradictions between synthesis methodologies, but the final choice for a particular registration agreement and the original technique completely depends on the proposed use case.

Authentication is a process that provides access control of any type of computing applications by inspecting the user's identification with the database of authorized users. Passwords play the vital role in authentication mechanism to ensure the privacy of the information and avert from the illicit access. Password based authentication mechanism suffers from many password attacks such as shoulder surfing, brute forcing and dictionary attacks that crack the password of authentication schema by the adversary. Key Stroke technique, Click Pattern technique, Graphichical Password technique and Authentication panel are the several authentication techniques used to resist the password attacks in the literature. This research study critically reviews the types of password attacks and proposes a matrix based secure authentication mechanism which includes three phases namely, User generation phase, Matrix generation phase and Authentication phase to resist the existing password attacks. The performance measure of the proposed method investigates the results in terms existing password attacks and shows the good resistance to password attacks in any type of computing applications.

The development of the internet and the web makes human activities more practical, comfortable, and inexpensive. So that the use of the internet and websites is increasing in various ways. Public networks make the security of websites vulnerable to attack. This research proposes a Honeypot for server security against attackers who want to steal data by carrying out a brute force attack. In this research, Honeypot is integrated on the server to protect the server by creating a shadow server. This server is responsible for tricking the attacker into not being able to enter the original server. Brute force attacks tested using Medusa tools. With the application of Honeypot on the server, it is proven that the server can be secured from the attacker. Even the log of activities carried out by the attacker in the shadow server is stored in the Kippo log activities.

Password data in a system usually stored in hash. Various human-caused negligence and system vulnerability can make those data fall in the hand of those who isn't entitled to or even those who have malicious purpose. Attacks which could be done on the hashed password data using GPGPU-based machine are for example: brute-force, dictionary, mask-attack, and word-list. This research explains about effectivity of brute-force and dictionary attack which done on SHA-l hashed password using GPGPU-based machine. Result is showing that brute-force effectively crack more password which has lower set of character, with over 11% of 7 or less characters passwords vs mere 3 % in the dictionary attack counterpart. Whereas dictionary attack is more effective on cracking password which has unsecure character pattern with 5,053 passwords vs 491 on best brute-force attack scenario. Usage of combined attack method (brute-force + dictionary) gives more balanced approach in terms of cracking whether the password is long or secure patterned string.

One of the most important strength features of crypto-system's is the key space. As a result, whenever the system has more key space, it will be more resistant to attack. The weakest type of attack on the key space is Brute Force attack, which tests all the keys on the ciphertext in order to get the plaintext. But there are several strategies that can be considered by the attacker and cryptographer related to the selection of the right key with the lowest cost (time). Game theory is a mathematical theory that draws the best strategies for most problems. This research propose a new evaluation method which is employing game theory to draw best strategies for both players (cryptographer & attacker).

Logical locking is the most popular countermeasure against the hardware attacks like intellectual property (IP) piracy, Trojan insertion and illegal integrated circuit (IC) overproduction. The functionality of the design is locked by the added logics into the design. Thus, the design is accessible only to the authorized users by applying the valid keys. However, extracting the secret key of the logically locked design have become an extensive effort and it is commonly known as key guessing attacks. Thus, the main objective of the proposed technique is to build a secured hardware against attacks like Brute force attack, Hill climbing attack and path sensitization attacks. Furthermore, the gates with low observability are chosen for encryption, this is to obtain an optimal output corruption of 50% Hamming distance with minimal design overhead and implementation complexity. The experimental results are validated on ISCAS'85 benchmark circuits, with a highly secured locking mechanism.

An information system is only as secure as its weakest point. In many information systems that remains to be the human factor, despite continuous attempts to educate the users about the importance of password security and enforcing password creation policies on them. Furthermore, not only do the average users' password creation and management habits remain more or less the same, but the password cracking tools, and more importantly, the computer hardware, keep improving as well. In this study, we performed a broad targeted attack combining several well-established cracking techniques, such as brute-force, dictionary, and hybrid attacks, on the passwords used by the students of a Slovenian university to access the online grading system. Our goal was to demonstrate how easy it is to crack most of the user-created passwords using simple and predictable patterns. To identify differences between them, we performed an analysis of the cracked and uncracked passwords and measured their strength. The results have shown that even a single low to mid-range modern GPU can crack over 95% of passwords in just few days, while a more dedicated system can crack all but the strongest 0.5% of them.

The concept of a decoy process is a new development of defensive deception beyond traditional honeypots. Decoy processes can be exceptionally effective in detecting malware, directly upon contact or by redirecting malware to decoy I/O. A key requirement is that they resemble their real counterparts very closely to withstand adversarial probes by threat actors. To be usable, decoy processes need to consume only a small fraction of the resources consumed by their real counterparts. Our contribution in this paper is twofold. We attack the resource utilization consistency of decoy processes provided by a neural network with a heatmap training mechanism, which we find to be insufficiently trained. We then devise machine learning over control flow graphs that improves the heatmap training mechanism. A neural network retrained by our work shows higher accuracy and defeats our attacks without a significant increase in its own resource utilization.

This work proposes a scheme to detect, isolate and mitigate malicious disruption of electro-mechanical processes in legacy PLCs where each PLC works as a finite state machine (FSM) and goes through predefined states depending on the control flow of the programs and input-output mechanism. The scheme generates a group-signature for a particular state combining the signature shares from each of these PLCs using \$(k,\textbackslashtextbackslash l)\$-threshold signature scheme.If some of them are affected by the malicious code, signature can be verified by k out of l uncorrupted PLCs and can be used to detect the corrupted PLCs and the compromised state. We use OpenPLC software to simulate Legacy PLC system on Raspberry Pi and show İ/O\$ pin configuration attack on digital and pulse width modulation (PWM) pins. We describe the protocol using a small prototype of five instances of legacy PLCs simultaneously running on OpenPLC software. We show that when our proposed protocol is deployed, the aforementioned attacks get successfully detected and the controller takes corrective measures. This work has been developed as a part of the problem statement given in the Cyber Security Awareness Week-2017 competition.

Living in the age of digital transformation, companies and individuals are moving to public and private clouds to store and retrieve information, hence the need to store and retrieve data is exponentially increasing. Existing storage technologies such as DAS are facing a big challenge to deal with these huge amount of data. Hence, newer technologies should be adopted. Storage Area Network (SAN) is a distributed storage technology that aggregates data from several private nodes into a centralized secure place. Looking at SAN from a security perspective, clearly physical security over multiple geographical remote locations is not adequate to ensure a full security solution. A SAN security framework needs to be developed and designed. This work investigates how SAN protocols work (FC, ISCSI, FCOE). It also investigates about other storages technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) including different metrics such as: IOPS (input output per second), Throughput, Bandwidths, latency, cashing technologies. This research work is focusing on the security vulnerabilities in SAN listing different attacks in SAN protocols and compare it to other such as NAS and DAS. Another aspect of this work is to highlight performance factors in SAN in order to find a way to improve the performance focusing security solutions aimed to enhance the security level in SAN.

In this work, we use a subjective approach to compute cyber resilience metrics for industrial control systems. We utilize the extended form of the R4 resilience framework and span the metrics over physical, technical, and organizational domains of resilience. We develop a qualitative cyber resilience assessment tool using the framework and a subjective questionnaire method. We make sure the questionnaires are realistic, balanced, and pertinent to ICS by involving subject matter experts into the process and following security guidelines and standards practices. We provide detail mathematical explanation of the resilience computation procedure. We discuss several usages of the qualitative tool by generating simulation results. We provide a system architecture of the simulation engine and the validation of the tool. We think the qualitative simulation tool would give useful insights for industrial control systems' overall resilience assessment and security analysis.

The fast advancement in the last two decades proposed a new challenge in security. In addition, the methods used to secure information are drawing more attention and under intense investigation by researchers around the globe. However, securing data is a very hard task, due to the escalation of threat levels. Several technologies and techniques developed and used to secure data throughout communication or by direct access to the information as an example encryption techniques and authentication techniques. A most recent development methods used to enhance security is by using human biometric characteristics such as thumb, hand, eye, cornea, and DNA; to enforce the security of a system toward higher level, human DNA is a promising field and human biometric characteristics can enhance the security of any system using biometric features for authentication. Furthermore, the proposed methods does not fulfil or present the ultimate solution toward tightening the system security. However, one of the proposed solutions enroll a technique to encrypt the biometric characteristic using a well-known cryptosystem technique. In this paper, an overview presented on the benefits of incorporating a human DNA based security systems and the overall effect on how such systems enhance the security of a system. In addition, an algorithm is proposed for practical application and the implementation discussed briefly.

Today, data is all around us, every device that has computation power is generating the data and we can assume that in today's world there is about 2 quintillion bytes of data is been generating every day. as data increase in the database of the world servers so as the risk of data leak where we are talking about unlimited confidential data that is available online but as humans are developing their data online so as its security, today we've got hundreds of way to secure out data but not all are very successful or compatible there the big question arises that how to secure our data to hide our all the confidential information online, in other words one's all life work can be found online which is on risk of leak. all that says is today we have cloud above all of our data centers that stores all the information so that one can access anything from anywhere. in this paper we are introducing a new multimodal biometric system that is possible for the future smartphones to be supported where one can upload, download or modify the files using cloud without worrying about the unauthorized access of any third person as this security authentication uses combination of multiple security system available today that are not easy to breach such as DNA encryption which mostly is based on AES cipher here in this paper there we have designed triple layer of security.

Management of flow of all kinds of objects including human beings signifies their real time monitoring. This paper outlines the advantages accrued out of biometrics integration with Smartcards. It showcases the identity authentication employed through different biometric techniques. Biometric key considerations influencing the essence of this technology in Smartcards have been discussed briefly in this paper. With better accuracy and highly reliable support system this technology finds itself today in widespread deployment. However, there are still some concerns with human interfaces along with important factors in implementations of biometrics with smartcards which have been highlighted in this article. This paper also examines the privacy concerns of users in addressing their apprehensions to protect their confidentiality through biometric encryption and proposes DNA technology as a best possible biometric solution. However, due to inherent limitations of its processing time and an instant requirement of authentication, it has been suggested in the proposed modal to use it with combination of one or more suitable biometric technologies. An instant access has been proposed to the user with limited rights by using biometric technology other than the DNA as a primary source of authentication. DNA has been proposed as secondary source of authentication where only after due sample comparison full access rights to the user will be granted. This paper also aims in highlighting the number of advantages offered by the integration of biometrics with smartcards. It also discusses the need to tackle existing challenges due to restrictions in processing of different biometric technologies by defining certain specific future scopes for improvements in existing biometric technologies mainly against the time taken by it for sample comparisons.

Security and confidentiality of big data stored in the cloud are important concerns for many organizations to adopt cloud services. One common approach to address the concerns is client-side encryption where data is encrypted on the client machine before being stored in the cloud. Having encrypted data in the cloud, however, limits the ability of data clustering, which is a crucial part of many data analytics applications, such as search systems. To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we present an approach named ClustCrypt for efficient topic-based clustering of encrypted unstructured big data in the cloud. ClustCrypt dynamically estimates the optimal number of clusters based on the statistical characteristics of encrypted data. It also provides clustering approach for encrypted data. We deploy ClustCrypt within the context of a secure cloud-based semantic search system (S3BD). Experimental results obtained from evaluating ClustCrypt on three datasets demonstrate on average 60% improvement on clusters' coherency. ClustCrypt also decreases the search-time overhead by up to 78% and increases the accuracy of search results by up to 35%.

The heart of research pumps for analyzing risks in today's competitive business environment where big, massive computations are performed on interconnected devices pervasively. Advanced computing environments i.e. Cloud, big data and Internet of things are taken under consideration for finding and analyzing business risks developed from evolutionary, interoperable and digital devices communications with massive volume of data generated. Various risks in advanced computational environment have been identified in this research and are provided with risks mitigation strategies. We have also focused on how risk management affects these environments and how that effect can be mitigated for software and business quality improvement.

The transition from high school to university is an exciting time for students including many new challenges. Particularly in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the university dropout rate may reach up to 40%. The studies of physics rely on many abstract concepts and quantities that are not directly visible like energy or heat. We developed a mixed reality application for education, which augments the thermal conduction of metal by overlaying a representation of temperature as false-color visualization directly onto the object. This real-time augmentation avoids attention split and overcomes the perception gap by amplifying the human eye. Augmented and Virtual Reality environments allow students to perform experiments that were impossible to conduct for security or financial reasons. With the application, we try to foster a deeper understanding of the learning material and higher engagement during the studies.

Augmented reality is changing the way its users see the world. Smart augmented-reality glasses, with high resolution Optical Head Mounted display, supplements views of the real-world using video, audio, or graphics projected in front of user's eye. The area of Smart Glasses and heads-up display devices is not a new one, however in the last few years, it has seen an extensive growth in various fields including education. Our work takes advantage of a student's ability to adapt to new enabling technologies to investigate improvements teaching techniques in STEM areas and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency in teaching the new course content. In this paper, we propose to focus on the application of Smart Augmented-Reality Glasses in cybersecurity education to attract and retain students in STEM. In addition, creative ways to learn cybersecurity education via Smart Glasses will be explored using a Discovery Learning approach. This mode of delivery will allow students to interact with cybersecurity theories in an innovative, interactive and effective way, enhancing their overall live experience and experimental learning. With the help of collected data and in-depth analysis of existing smart glasses, the ongoing work will lay the groundwork for developing augmented reality applications that will enhance the learning experiences of students. Ultimately, research conducted with the glasses and applications may help to identify the unique skillsets of cybersecurity analysts, learning gaps and learning solutions.

The task of attack attribution, i.e., identifying the entity responsible for an attack, is complicated and usually requires the involvement of an experienced security expert. Prior attempts to automate attack attribution apply various machine learning techniques on features extracted from the malware's code and behavior in order to identify other similar malware whose authors are known. However, the same malware can be reused by multiple actors, and the actor who performed an attack using a malware might differ from the malware's author. Moreover, information collected during an incident may contain many clues about the identity of the attacker in addition to the malware used. In this paper, we propose a method of attack attribution based on textual analysis of threat intelligence reports, using state of the art algorithms and models from the fields of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). We have developed a new text representation algorithm which captures the context of the words and requires minimal feature engineering. Our approach relies on vector space representation of incident reports derived from a small collection of labeled reports and a large corpus of general security literature. Both datasets have been made available to the research community. Experimental results show that the proposed representation can attribute attacks more accurately than the baselines' representations. In addition, we show how the proposed approach can be used to identify novel previously unseen threat actors and identify similarities between known threat actors.

Intentionally deceptive content presented under the guise of legitimate journalism is a worldwide information accuracy and integrity problem that affects opinion forming, decision making, and voting patterns. Most so-called `fake news' is initially distributed over social media conduits like Facebook and Twitter and later finds its way onto mainstream media platforms such as traditional television and radio news. The fake news stories that are initially seeded over social media platforms share key linguistic characteristics such as making excessive use of unsubstantiated hyperbole and non-attributed quoted content. In this paper, the results of a fake news identification study that documents the performance of a fake news classifier are presented. The Textblob, Natural Language, and SciPy Toolkits were used to develop a novel fake news detector that uses quoted attribution in a Bayesian machine learning system as a key feature to estimate the likelihood that a news article is fake. The resultant process precision is 63.333% effective at assessing the likelihood that an article with quotes is fake. This process is called influence mining and this novel technique is presented as a method that can be used to enable fake news and even propaganda detection. In this paper, the research process, technical analysis, technical linguistics work, and classifier performance and results are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the current system will evolve into an influence mining system.