Biblio

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has found applications in different domains, including wired- and wireless networks. The SDN controller has a global view of the network topology, which is vulnerable to topology poisoning attacks, e.g., link fabrication and host-location hijacking. The adversaries can leverage these attacks to monitor the flows or drop them. However, current defence systems such as TopoGuard and TopoGuard+ can detect such attacks. In this paper, we introduce the Link Latency Attack (LLA) that can successfully bypass the systems' defence mechanisms above. In LLA, the adversary can add a fake link into the network and corrupt the controller's view from the network topology. This can be accomplished by compromising the end hosts without the need to attack the SDN-enabled switches. We develop a Machine Learning-based Link Guard (MLLG) system to provide the required defence for LLA. We test the performance of our system using an emulated network on Mininet, and the obtained results show an accuracy of 98.22% in detecting the attack. Interestingly, MLLG improves 16% the accuracy of TopoGuard+.

Information leakage estimation for practical wiretap codes is a challenging task for which existing solutions are either too complex or suboptimal, and don't scale for large blocklengths. In this paper we present a new method, based on a modified version of the successive cancellation decoder in order to compute the information leakage for the wiretap polar code which improves upon existing methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. Results are presented for classical binary-input symmetric channels alike the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC), the Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC) and Binary Input Additive White Gaussian Noise channel (BI-AWGN).

This paper studies the secure decentralized Pliable Index CODing (PICOD) problem, where the security constraint forbids users to decode more than one message while the decentralized setting imposes that there is no central transmitter in the system, and thus transmissions occur only among users. A converse bound from the Authors' previous work showed a factor of three difference in optimal code-length between the centralized and the decentralized versions of the problem, under the constraint of linear encoding. This paper first lists all linearly infeasible cases, that is, problems where no linear code can simultaneously achieve both correctness/decodability and security. Then, it proposes linear coding schemes for the remaining cases and shows that their code-length is to within an additive constant gap from the converse bound.

Existing compression coding technologies are investigated using a statistical approach. The fundamental strategies used in the process of statistical coding of video information data are analyzed. Factors that have a significant impact on the reliability and efficiency of video delivery in the process of statistical coding are analyzed. A model for estimating the impact of errors in the process of reconstruction of uneven code structures on the quality of recoverable video images is being developed.The influence of errors that occur in data transmission channels on the reliability of the reconstructed video image is investigated.

Interleave division multiple access (IDMA) is a multiple-access scheme and it is expected to improve frequency efficiency. Meanwhile, the damage caused by cyberattacks is increasing yearly. To solve this problem, we propose a method of applying radio-wave encryption to IDMA based on chaos modulation to realize physical layer security and the channel coding effect. We show that the proposed scheme ensures physical layer security and obtains channel coding gain by numerical simulations.

This paper presents a design concept of an innovative CAPTCHA that can filter the color-vision–recognition states of different users. It can simultaneously verify the real-human-user identity, differentiate between the color-vision needs, and decide the content to be presented automatically.

CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart is a technique to distinguish between humans and computers by generating and evaluating tests that can be passed by humans but not computer bots. However, captchas are not foolproof, and they can be bypassed which raises security concerns. Hence, sites over the internet remain open to such vulnerabilities. This research paper identifies the vulnerabilities found in some of the commonly used captcha schemes by cracking them using Deep Learning techniques. It also aims to provide solutions to safeguard against these vulnerabilities and provides recommendations for the generation of secure captchas.

Bitcoin has received a lot of attention from investors, researchers, regulators, and the media. It is a known fact that the Bitcoin price usually fluctuates greatly. However, not enough scientific research has been done on these fluctuations. In this study, long short-term memory (LSTM) modeling from Recurrent Neural Networks, which is one of the deep learning methods, was applied on Bitcoin values. As a result of this application, anomaly detection was carried out in the values from the data set. With the LSTM network, a time-dependent representation of Bitcoin price can be captured, and anomalies can be selected. The factors that play a role in the formation of the model to be applied in the detection of anomalies with the experimental results were evaluated.

Mobile healthcare (mHealth) application and technologies have promised their cost-effectiveness to enhance healthcare quality, particularly in rural areas. However, the increased security incidents and leakage of patient data raise the concerns to address security risks and privacy issues of mhealth applications urgently. While recent mobile health applications that rely on password-based authentication cannot withstand password guessing and cracking attacks, several countermeasures such as One-Time Password (OTP), grid-based password, and biometric authentication have recently been implemented to protect mobile health applications. These countermeasures, however, can be thwarted by brute force attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and persistent malware attacks. This paper proposed grid-based honey encryption by hybridising honey encryption with grid-based authentication. Compared to recent honey encryption limited in the hardening password attacks process, the proposed grid-based honey encryption can be further employed against shoulder surfing, smudge and replay attacks. Instead of rejecting access as a recent security defence mechanism in mobile healthcare applications, the proposed Grid-based Honey Encryption creates an indistinct counterfeit patient's record closely resembling the real patients' records in light of each off-base speculation legitimate password.

Industry 4.0 is now much more than just a buzzword. However, with the advancement of automation through digitization and softwarization of dedicated hardware, applications are also becoming more susceptible to random hardware errors in the calculation. This cyber-physical demonstrator uses a robotic application to show the effects that even single bit flips can have in the real world due to hardware errors. Using the graphical user interface including the human machine interface, the audience can generate hardware errors in the form of bit flips and see their effects live on the robot. In this paper we will be showing a new technology, the SIListra Safety Transformer (SST), that makes it possible to detect those kind of random hardware errors, which can subsequently make safety-critical applications more reliable.

Today's global network is filled with attackers both live and automated seeking to identify and compromise vulnerable devices, with initial scanning and attack activity occurring within minutes or even seconds of being connected to the Internet. To better understand these events, honeypots can be deployed to monitor and log activity by simulating actual Internet facing services such as SSH, Telnet, HTTP, or FTP, and malicious activity can be logged as attempts are made to compromise them. In this study six multi-service honeypots are deployed in locations around the globe to collect and catalog traffic over a period of several months between March and December, 2020. Analysis is performed on various characteristics including source and destination IP addresses and port numbers, usernames and passwords utilized, commands executed, and types of files downloaded. In addition, Cowrie log data is restructured to observe individual attacker sessions, study command sequences, and monitor tunneling activity. This data is then correlated across honeypots to compare attack and traffic patterns with the goal of learning more about the tactics being employed. By gathering data gathered from geographically separate zones over a long period of time a greater understanding can be developed regarding attacker intent and methodology, can aid in the development of effective approaches to identifying malicious behavior and attack sources, and can serve as a cyber-threat intelligence feed.

This paper proposes a configurable architecture of butterfly unit (BU) supporting number theoretic transform (NTT) and inverse NTT (INTT) accelerators in the ring learning with error based homomorphic encryption. The proposed architecture is fully pipelined and carefully optimized the critical path delay. To compare with related works, several BU designs of different bit-size specific primes are synthesized and successfully placed-and-routed on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU102 FPGA platform. Implementation results show that the proposed BU designs achieve 3× acceleration with more efficient resource utilization compared with previous works. Thus, the proposed BU architecture is worthwhile to develop NTTINTT accelerators in advanced homomorphic encryption systems.

This paper proposes an efficient face template protection system based on homomorphic encryption. By developing a message packing method suitable for the calculation of the squared Euclidean distance, the proposed system computes the squared Euclidean distance between facial features by a single homomorphic multiplication. Our experimental results show the transaction time of the proposed system is about 14 times faster than that of the existing face template protection system based on homomorphic encryption presented in BIOSIG2020.

Payment systems are a critical component of everyday life in our society. While in many situations payments are still slow, opaque, siloed, expensive or even fail, users expect them to be fast, transparent, cheap, reliable and global. Recent technologies such as distributed ledgers create opportunities for near-real-time, cheaper and more transparent payments. However, in order to achieve a global payment system, payments should be possible not only within one ledger, but also across different ledgers and geographies.In this paper we propose Secure Payments with Overlay Networks (SPON), a service that enables global payments across multiple ledgers by combining the transaction exchange provided by the Interledger protocol with an intrusion-tolerant overlay of relay nodes to achieve (1) improved payment latency, (2) fault-tolerance to benign failures such as node failures and network partitions, and (3) resilience to BGP hijacking attacks. We discuss the design goals and present an implementation based on the Interledger protocol and Spines overlay network. We analyze the resilience of SPON and demonstrate through experimental evaluation that it is able to improve payment latency, recover from path outages, withstand network partition attacks, and disseminate payments fairly across multiple ledgers. We also show how SPON can be deployed to make the communication between different ledgers resilient to BGP hijacking attacks.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is in charge of the route exchange at the Internet scale. Anomalies in BGP can have several causes (mis-configuration, outage and attacks). These anomalies are classified into large or small scale anomalies. Machine learning models are used to analyze and detect anomalies from the complex data extracted from BGP behavior. Two types of data representation can be used inside the machine learning models: a graph representation of the network (graph features) or a statistical computation on the data (statistical features). In this paper, we evaluate and compare the accuracy of machine learning models using graph features and statistical features on both large and small scale BGP anomalies. We show that statistical features have better accuracy for large scale anomalies, and graph features increase the detection accuracy by 15% for small scale anomalies and are well suited for BGP small scale anomaly detection.

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new systems and protocols. We have developed an experimental network construction tool called LiONv1 (Lightweight On-Demand Networking, ver.1). LiONv1 satisfies the following four requirements: programmer-friendly configuration file based on Infrastructure as Code, multiple virtualization technologies for virtual nodes, physical topology conscious virtual node placement, and L3 protocol agnostic virtual networks. None of existing experimental network environments satisfy all the four requirements. In this paper, we develop LiONv2 which satisfies three more requirements: diversity of available network devices, Internet-scale deployment, and disaggregation of network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 employs NETCONF and YANG to achieve diversity of available network devices and Internet-scale deployment. LiONv2 also defines two YANG models which disaggregate network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 is implemented in Go and C languages with public libraries for Go. Measurement results show that construction time of a virtual network is irrelevant to the number of virtual nodes if a single virtual node is created per physical node.

The rapid development of the Industry 4.0 initiative highlights the problems of Cyber-security of Industrial Computer Systems and, following global trends in Cyber Defense, the implementation of Artificial Intelligence instruments. The authors, having certain achievement in the implementation of Artificial Intelligence tools in Cyber Protection of Information Systems and, more precisely, creating and successfully experimenting with a hybrid model of Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS), decided to study and experiment with the possibility of applying a similar model to Industrial Control Systems. This raises the question: can the experience of applying Artificial Intelligence methods in Information Systems, where this development went beyond the experimental phase and has entered into the real implementation phase, be useful for experimenting with these methods in Industrial Systems.

Secret-related carrier intelligent management and control system uses the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to solve the transformation of secret-related carrier management and control from manual operation to automatic detection, precise monitoring, and intelligent decision-making, and use technical means to resolve security risks. However, the coexistence of multiple heterogeneous networks will lead to various network security problems in the secret carrier intelligent management and control. Aiming at the actual requirements of the intelligent management and control of secret-related carriers, this paper proposes a system structure including device domain, network domain, platform domain and user domain, and conducts a detailed system security analysis, and introduces intelligent agent technology, and proposes a distributed system. The hierarchical system structure of the secret-related carrier intelligent management and control security protection model has good robustness and portability.

Our proposal aims to help solving a trust problem between licensors and licensees that occurs during the active life of license agreements. We particularly focus on licensing of proprietary intellectual property (IP) that is embedded in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services (e.g. patented technologies). To achieve this we propose to encode the logic of license agreements into smart licenses (SL). We define a SL as a `digital twin' of a licensing contract, i.e. one or more smart contracts that represent the full or relevant parts of a licensing agreement in machine readable and executable code. As SL are self enforcing, the royalty computation and execution of payments can be fully automated in a tamper free and trustworthy way. This of course, requires to employ a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Such an Automated Licensing Payment System (ALPS) can thus automate an established business process and solve a longstanding trust issue in licensing markets. It renders traditional costly audits obsolete, lowers entry barriers for those who want to participate in licensing markets, and enables novel business models too complex with traditional approaches.

Digital forensics is concerned with identifying, reporting and responding to security breaches. It is about how to acquire, analyze and report digital evidence and using the technical skills, discovering the traces of Cyber Crime. The field of digital forensics is in high demand due to the constant threats of data breaches and information hacks. Digital Forensics is utilized in the identification and elimination of crimes in any controversy where evidence is preserved in online space. This is the use of specialized techniques for retrieval, authentication and electronic data analysis. Computer forensics deals with the identification, preservation, analysis, documentation and presentation of digital evidence. The paper has analyzed the present-day trends that includes IoT forensics, cloud forensics, network forensics and social media forensics. Recent researches have shown a wide range of threats and cyber-attacks, which requires forensic investigators and forensics scientists to simplify the digital world. Hence, all our research gives a clear view of digital forensics which could be of a great help in forensic investigation. In this research paper we have discussed about the need and way to preserve the digital evidence, so that it is not compromised at any point in time and an unalter evidence can be presented before the court of law.

The widespread adoption of DEP has made most modern attacks follow the same general steps: Attackers try to construct code-reuse attacks by using vulnerable indirect branch instructions in shared objects after successful exploits on memory vulnerabilities. In response to code-reuse attacks, researchers have proposed a large number of defenses. However, most of them require access to source code and/or specific hardware features. These limitations hinder the deployment of these defenses much.In this paper, we propose an address-based code-reuse attack mitigation for shared objects at the binary-level. We emphasize that the execution of indirect branch instruction must follow several principles we propose. More specifically, we first reconstruct function boundaries at the program’s dynamic-linking stage by combining shared object’s dynamic symbols with binary-level instruction analysis. We then leverage static instrumentation to hook vulnerable indirect branch instructions to a novel target address computation and validation routine. At runtime, AddrArmor will protect against code-reuse attacks based on the computed target address.Our experimental results show that AddrArmor provides a strong line of defense against code reuse attacks, and has an acceptable performance overhead of about 6.74% on average using SPEC CPU 2006.

The reuse of libraries in software development has become prevalent for improving development efficiency and software quality. However, security vulnerabilities of reused libraries propagated through software project dependency pose a severe security threat, but they have not yet been well studied. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of project dependencies with respect to security vulnerabilities. We developed PDGraph, an innovative approach for analyzing publicly known security vulnerabilities among numerous project dependencies, which provides a new perspective for assessing security risks in the wild. As a large-scale software collection in dependency, we find 337,415 projects and 1,385,338 dependency relations. In particular, PDGraph generates a project dependency graph, where each node is a project, and each edge indicates a dependency relationship. We conducted experiments to validate the efficacy of PDGraph and characterized its features for security analysis. We revealed that 1,014 projects have publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, and more than 67,806 projects are directly dependent on them. Among these, 42,441 projects still manifest 67,581 insecure dependency relationships, indicating that they are built on vulnerable versions of reused libraries even though their vulnerabilities are publicly known. During our eight-month observation period, only 1,266 insecure edges were fixed, and corresponding vulnerable libraries were updated to secure versions. Furthermore, we uncovered four underlying dependency risks that can significantly reduce the difficulty of compromising systems. We conducted a quantitative analysis of dependency risks on the PDGraph.

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.

While a huge number of IoT devices are connecting to the cyber physical systems, the demand for security of these devices are increasing. Due to the demand, world-wide competition for lightweight cryptography oriented towards small devices have been held. Although tamper resistance against illegal attacks were evaluated in the competition, there is no evaluation for embedded malicious circuits such as hardware Trojan.To achieve security evaluation for embedded malicious circuits, this study proposes an implementation method of hardware Trojan for Elephant which is one of the finalists in the competition. And also, the implementation overhead of hardware Trojans and the security risk of hardware Trojan are evaluated.

Mutation-based taint inference (MTI) is a novel technique for taint analysis. Compared with traditional techniques that track propagations of taint tags, MTI infers a variable is tainted if its values change due to input mutations, which is lightweight and conceptually sound. However, there are 3 challenges to its efficiency and scalability: (1) it cannot efficiently record variable values to monitor their changes; (2) it consumes a large amount of memory monitoring variable values, especially on complex programs; and (3) its excessive memory overhead leads to a low hit ratio of CPU cache, which slows down the speed of taint inference. This paper presents an efficient and scalable solution named HashMTI. We first explain the above challenges based on 4 observations. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a hash record scheme to efficiently monitor changes in variable values and significantly reduce the memory overhead. The scheme is based on our specially selected and optimized hash functions that possess 3 crucial properties. Moreover, we propose the DoubleMutation strategy, which applies additional mutations to mitigate the limitation of the hash record and detect more taint information. We implemented a prototype of HashMTI and evaluated it on 18 real-world programs and 4 LAVA-M programs. Compared with the baseline OrigMTI, HashMTI significantly reduces the overhead while having similar accuracy. It achieves a speedup of 2.5X to 23.5X and consumes little memory which is on average 70.4 times less than that of OrigMTI.