Biblio

Drone based applications have progressed significantly in recent years across many industries, including agriculture. This paper proposes a sporadically connected cyber-physical system for assisting winemakers and minimizing the travel time to remote and poorly connected infrastructures. A set of representative diseases and conditions, which will be monitored by land-bound sensors in combination with multispectral images, is identified. To collect accurate data, a trustworthy and secured communication of the drone with the sensors and the base station should be established. We propose to use an Internet of Things framework for establishing a chain of trust by securely onboarding drones, sensors and base station, and providing self-adaptation support for the use case. Furthermore, we perform a security analysis of the use case for identifying potential threats and security controls that should be in place for mitigating them.

We explore a new type of malicious script attacks: the persistent parasite attack. Persistent parasites are stealthy scripts, which persist for a long time in the browser's cache. We show to infect the caches of victims with parasite scripts via TCP injection. Once the cache is infected, we implement methodologies for propagation of the parasites to other popular domains on the victim client as well as to other caches on the network. We show how to design the parasites so that they stay long time in the victim's cache not restricted to the duration of the user's visit to the web site. We develop covert channels for communication between the attacker and the parasites, which allows the attacker to control which scripts are executed and when, and to exfiltrate private information to the attacker, such as cookies and passwords. We then demonstrate how to leverage the parasites to perform sophisticated attacks, and evaluate the attacks against a range of applications and security mechanisms on popular browsers. Finally we provide recommendations for countermeasures.

Users rely on their web browser to provide information about the websites they are visiting, such as the security state of the web page their viewing. Current browsers do not differentiate between the live Web and the past Web. If a user loads an archived web page, known as a memento, they have to rely on user interface (UI) elements within the page itself to inform them that the page they are viewing is not the live Web. Memento-awareness extends beyond recognizing a page that has already been archived. The browser should give users the ability to easily archive live web pages as they are browsing. This report presents a proof-of-concept browser that is memento-aware and is created by extending Google's open-source web browser Chromium.

In the federated learning system, parameter gradients are shared among participants and the central modulator, while the original data never leave their protected source domain. However, the gradient itself might carry enough information for precise inference of the original data. By reporting their parameter gradients to the central server, client datasets are exposed to inference attacks from adversaries. In this paper, we propose a quantitative metric based on mutual information for clients to evaluate the potential risk of information leakage in their gradients. Mutual information has received increasing attention in the machine learning and data mining community over the past few years. However, existing mutual information estimation methods cannot handle high-dimensional variables. In this paper, we propose a novel method to approximate the mutual information between the high-dimensional gradients and batched input data. Experimental results show that the proposed metric reliably reflect the extent of information leakage in federated learning. In addition, using the proposed metric, we investigate the influential factors of risk level. It is proven that, the risk of information leakage is related to the status of the task model, as well as the inherent data distribution.

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models have been widely used in various fields. More recently, styleGAN and styleGAN2 have been developed to synthesize faces that are indistinguishable to the human eyes, which could pose a threat to public security. But latest work has shown that it is possible to identify fakes using powerful CNN networks as classifiers. However, the reliability of these techniques is unknown. Therefore, in this paper we focus on the generation of content-preserving images from fake faces to spoof classifiers. Two GAN-based frameworks are proposed to achieve the goal in the white-box and black-box. For the white-box, a network without up/down sampling is proposed to generate face images to confuse the classifier. In the black-box scenario (where the classifier is unknown), real data is introduced as a guidance for GAN structure to make it adversarial, and a Real Extractor as an auxiliary network to constrain the feature distance between the generated images and the real data to enhance the adversarial capability. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively reduces the detection accuracy of forensic models with good transferability.

Recently, the frequent security incidents of the Internet of things make the wearable IOT health monitoring systems (WIHMS) face serious security threats. Aiming at the security requirements of WIHMS identity authentication, Q. Jiang proposed a lightweight device mutual identity authentication solution in 2019. The scheme has good security performance. However, we find that in Jiang’s scheme, in the authentication phase, the server CS needs at least 3 queries and 1 update of the database operation, which affects the overall performance of the system. For this reason, we propose a new device mutual authentication and key agreement protocol. In our protocol, the authentication server only needs to query the server database twice.

BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is a set of policies that allow employees of an organization to use their own devices for official work purposes. BYOD is an immensely popular concept in the present day due to the many advantages it provides. However, the implementation of BYOD policies entail diverse problems and as a result, the confidentiality of documents can be breached. Furthermore, employees without security awareness and training are highly vulnerable to endpoint attacks, network attacks, and zero-day attacks that lead to a breach of confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA). In this context, this paper proposes a comprehensive solution; ‘BYODENCE’, for the detection and prevention of unauthorized access to organizational documents. BYODENCE is an efficient BYOD solution which can produce competitive results in terms of accuracy and speed.

This paper is a systemization of knowledge of autonomic cybersecurity. Disruptive technologies, such as IoT, AI and autonomous systems, are becoming more prevalent and often have little or no cybersecurity protections. This lack of security is contributing to the expanding cybersecurity attack surface. The autonomic computing initiative was started to address the complexity of administering complex computing systems by making them self-managing. Autonomic systems contain attributes to address cyberattacks, such as self-protecting and self-healing that can secure new technologies. There has been a number of research projects on autonomic cybersecurity, with different approaches and target technologies, many of them disruptive. This paper reviews autonomic computing, analyzes research on autonomic cybersecurity, and provides a systemization of knowledge of the research. The paper concludes with identification of gaps in autonomic cybersecurity for future research.

Integrated Gradients as an attribution method for deep neural network models offers simple implementability. However, it suffers from noisiness of explanations which affects the ease of interpretability. The SmoothGrad technique is proposed to solve the noisiness issue and smoothen the attribution maps of any gradient-based attribution method. In this paper, we present SmoothTaylor as a novel theoretical concept bridging Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad, from the Taylor's theorem perspective. We apply the methods to the image classification problem, using the ILSVRC2012 ImageNet object recognition dataset, and a couple of pretrained image models to generate attribution maps. These attribution maps are empirically evaluated using quantitative measures for sensitivity and noise level. We further propose adaptive noising to optimize for the noise scale hyperparameter value. From our experiments, we find that the SmoothTaylor approach together with adaptive noising is able to generate better quality saliency maps with lesser noise and higher sensitivity to the relevant points in the input space as compared to Integrated Gradients.

Driven by the development of Internet and information technology, cloud computing has been widely recognized and accepted by the public. However, with the occurrence of more and more information leakage, cloud security has also become one of the core problem of cloud computing. As one of the resolve methods of it, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) by embedding access policy into ciphertext can make data owner to decide which attributes can access ciphertext. It achieves ensuring data confidentiality with realizing fine-grained access control. However, the traditional access policy has some limitations. Compared with other access policies, the circuit-based access policy ABE supports more flexible access control to encrypted data. But there are still many challenges in the existing circuit-based access policy ABE, such as privacy leakage and low efficiency. Motivated by the above, a new circuit-based access policy ABE is proposed. By converting the multi output OR gates in monotonic circuit, the backtracking attacks in circuit access structure is avoided. In order to overcome the low efficiency issued by circuit conversion, outsourcing computing is adopted to Encryption/Decryption algorithms, which makes the computing overhead for data owners and users be decreased and achieve constant level. Security analysis shows that the scheme is secure under the decision bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption. Numerical results show the proposed scheme has a higher computation efficiency than the other circuit-based schemes.

Nowadays, many data owners choose to outsource their data to public cloud servers while allowing authorized users to retrieve them. To protect data confidentiality from an untrusted cloud, many studies on searchable encryption (SE) are proposed for privacy-preserving search over encrypted data. However, most of the existing SE schemes only focus on the single-owner model. Users need to search one-by-one among data owners to retrieve relevant results even if data are from the same cloud server, which inevitably incurs unnecessary bandwidth and computation cost to users. Thus, how to enable efficient authorized search over multi-owner datasets remains to be fully explored. In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving search scheme for the multi-owner and multi-user model. Our proposed scheme has two main advantages: 1) We achieve an attribute-based keyword search for multi-owner model, where users can only search datasets from specific authorized owners. 2) Each data owner can enforce its own fine-grained access policy for users while an authorized user only needs to generate one trapdoor (i.e., encrypted search keyword) to search over multi-owner encrypted data. Through rigorous security analysis and performance evaluation, we demonstrate that our scheme is secure and feasible.

Lattice-based Attribute-based encryption is a well-known cryptographic mechanism that can resist quantum attacks and has the ability of fine-grained access control, and it has a wide range of application scenarios in current Internet of Thing (IoT) era. However, lack of efficiency and existing the problem of large ciphertext expansion rate are the main disadvantages impede the applications of this mechanism. Thus, we propose an efficient and practical ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme from lattices in the paper. In this scheme, to make the secret key reusable, we adjust access tree and propose a basic access tree structure, which can be converted from disjunctive normal form, and combine it with a light post-quantum scheme of Kyber. In addition, the compression method and plaintext expansion method are introduced to optimize the scheme. Our CP-ABE scheme is secure against chosen plaintext attack under the hardness of module learning with errors problem. We implement our scheme and compare it with three recent related schemes in terms of security, function and communication cost. Experiments and comparisons show that our CP-ABE scheme has advantages in high encryption efficiency, small matrix dimension, small key sizes, and low ciphertext expansion rate, which has some merit in practice.

With the development of the Internet of Things, embedded devices have become increasingly frequent in people's daily use. However, with the influx of a huge amount of heterogeneous embedded devices, its security has become an important issue. To face with such problems, remote attestation is undoubtedly a suitable security technology. Nevertheless, traditional remote attestation is limited to verifying the performance of devices as large and heterogeneous devices enter daily life. Therefore, this paper proposes a many-to-one swarm attestation and recovery scheme. Besides, the reputation mechanism and Merkel tree measurement method are introduced to reduce the attestation and recovery time of the scheme, and greatly reducing the energy consumption.

In a collaboration with the Georgia Peanut Commission’s Education Center and museum in Georgia, USA, we developed an augmented reality app to guide visitors through the museum and offer immersive educational information about the artifacts, exhibits, and artwork displayed therein. Notably, our augmented reality system applies the First Order Motion Model for Image Animation to several portraits of individuals influential to the Georgia peanut industry to provide immersive animated narration and monologue regarding their contributions to the peanut industry. [4]

With the rapid development of the Internet and communication technologies, efficient management of cyberspace, safe monitoring and protection of various network assets can effectively improve the overall level of network security protection. Accurate, effective and comprehensive network asset detection is the prerequisite for effective network asset management, and it is also the basis for security monitoring and analysis. This paper proposed an artificial intelligence algorithm based scheme which accurately identify the website icon and help to determine the ownership of network assets. Through experiments based on data set collected from real network, the result demonstrate that the proposed scheme has higher accuracy and lower false alarm rate, and can effectively reduce the training cost.

Aiming at the disadvantages of traditional methods such as low penetration path generation efficiency and low attack type recognition accuracy, an optimal penetration path generation algorithm based on the knowledge map power WEB system unknown attack is proposed. First, establish a minimum penetration path test model. And use the model to test the unknown attack of the penetration path under the power WEB system. Then, the ontology of the knowledge graph is designed. Finally, the design of the optimal penetration path generation algorithm based on the knowledge graph is completed. Experimental results show that the algorithm improves the efficiency of optimal penetration path generation, overcomes the shortcomings of traditional methods that can only describe known attacks, and can effectively guarantee the security of power WEB systems.

The cipher-text homomorphism encryption algorithm (homomorphic encryption) are used for the cloud safe and to solve the integrity, availability and controllability of information. For homomorphic encryption, we, by Topsnut-gpw technique, design: degree-sequence homomorphisms and their inverses, degree-sequence homomorphic chain, graph-set homomorphism, colored degree-sequence matrices and every-zero Cds-matrix groups, degree-coinciding degree-sequence lattice, degree-joining degree-sequence lattice, as well as degree-sequence lattice homomorphism, since number-based strings made by Topsnut-gpws of topological coding are irreversible, and Topsnut-gpws can realize: one public-key corresponds two or more privatekeys, and more public-key correspond one or more private-keys for asymmetric encryption algorithm.

To deal with the increasingly serious threat of industrial information malicious code, the simulations and characteristics of the domestic security and controllable operating system and office software were implemented in the virtual sandbox environment based on virtualization technology in this study. Firstly, the serialization detection scheme based on the convolution neural network algorithm was improved. Then, the API sequence was modeled and analyzed by the improved convolution neural network algorithm to excavate more local related information of variant sequences. Finally the variant detection of malicious code was realized. Results showed that this improved method had higher efficiency and accuracy for a large number of malicious code detection, and could be applied to the malicious code detection in security and controllable operating system.

To understand the future trend of network security, the field of network security began to introduce the concept of NSSA(Network Security Situation Awareness). This paper implements the situation assessment model by using game theory algorithms to calculate the situation value of attack and defense behavior. After analyzing the ant colony algorithm and the RBF neural network, the defects of the RBF neural network are improved through the advantages of the ant colony algorithm, and the situation prediction model based on the ant colony-RBF neural network is realized. Finally, the model was verified experimentally.

Machine learning methods are growing in relevance for biometrics and personal information processing in domains such as forensics, e-health, recruitment, and e-learning. In these domains, white-box (human-readable) explanations of systems built on machine learning methods can become crucial. Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a subfield of symbolic AI aimed to automatically learn declarative theories about the process of data. Learning from Interpretation Transition (LFIT) is an ILP technique that can learn a propositional logic theory equivalent to a given blackbox system (under certain conditions). The present work takes a first step to a general methodology to incorporate accurate declarative explanations to classic machine learning by checking the viability of LFIT in a specific AI application scenario: fair recruitment based on an automatic tool generated with machine learning methods for ranking Curricula Vitae that incorporates soft biometric information (gender and ethnicity). We show the expressiveness of LFIT for this specific problem and propose a scheme that can be applicable to other domains.

With the rapid development and application of emerging information technology, the traditional network security architecture is more and more difficult to support flexible dynamic and a wider range of business data access requirements. Zero trust technology can truly realize the aggregation of security and business by building an end-to-end dynamic new boundary based on identity, which puts forward a new direction for the upgrade and evolution of enterprise network security architecture. This paper mainly includes access control and identity authentication management functions. The goal of access control system is to ensure that legitimate and secure users can use the system normally, and then protect the security of enterprise network and server. The functions of the access control system include identifying the user's identity (legitimacy), evaluating the security characteristics (Security) of the user's machine, and taking corresponding response strategies.

In order to guarantee the normal operation of the power Internet of things devices, the zero-trust idea was used for studying the security protection strategies of devices from four aspects: user authentication, equipment trust, application integrity and flow baselines. Firstly, device trust is constructed based on device portrait; then, verification of device application integrity based on MD5 message digest algorithm to achieve device application trustworthiness. Next, the terminal network traffic baselines are mined from OpenFlow, a southbound protocol in SDN. Finally, according to the dynamic user trust degree attribute access control model, the comprehensive user trust degree was obtained by weighting the direct trust degree. It obtained from user authentication and the trust degree of user access to terminal communication traffic. And according to the comprehensive trust degree, users are assigned the minimum authority to access the terminal to realize the security protection of the terminal. According to the comprehensive trust degree, the minimum permissions for users to access the terminal were assigned to achieve the security protection of the terminal. The research shows that the zero-trust mechanism is applied to the terminal security protection of power Internet of Things, which can improve the reliability of the safe operation of terminal equipment.

With the rise of the cloud computing and services, the network environments tend to be more complex and enormous. Security control becomes more and more hard due to the frequent and various access and requests. There are a few techniques to solve the problem which developed separately in the recent years. Network Micro-Segmentation provides the system the ability to keep different parts separated. Zero Trust Model ensures the network is access to trusted users and business by applying the policy that verify and authenticate everything. With the combination of Segmentation and Zero Trust Model, a system will obtain the ability to control the access to organizations' or industrial valuable assets. To implement the cooperation, the paper designs a strategy named light verification to help the process to be painless for the cost of inspection. The strategy was found to be effective from the perspective of the technical management, security and usability.

Nowadays, we have witnessed the early progress on learning the association between voice and face automatically, which brings a new wave of studies to the computer vision community. However, most of the prior arts along this line (a) merely adopt local information to perform modality alignment and (b) ignore the diversity of learning difficulty across different subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to jointly address the above-mentioned issues. Targeting at (a), we propose a two-level modality alignment loss where both global and local information are considered. Compared with the existing methods, we introduce a global loss into the modality alignment process. The global component of the loss is driven by the identity classification. Theoretically, we show that minimizing the loss could maximize the distance between embeddings across different identities while minimizing the distance between embeddings belonging to the same identity, in a global sense (instead of a mini-batch). Targeting at (b), we propose a dynamic reweighting scheme to better explore the hard but valuable identities while filtering out the unlearnable identities. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in multiple settings, including voice-face matching, verification and retrieval.

Particle filtering is an indispensable method for non-Gaussian state estimation, but it has some problems, such as particle degradation and requiring a large number of particles to ensure accuracy. Biota intelligence algorithms led by Cuckoo (CS) and Firefly (FA) have achieved certain results after introducing particle filtering, respectively. This paper respectively in the two kinds of bionic algorithm convergence factor and adaptive step length and random mobile innovation, seized the cuckoo algorithm (CS) in the construction of the initial value and the firefly algorithm (FA) in the iteration convergence advantages, using the improved after the update mechanism of cuckoo algorithm optimizing the initial population, and will be updated after optimization way of firefly algorithm combined with particle filter. Experimental results show that this method can ensure the diversity of particles and greatly reduce the number of particles needed for prediction while improving the filtering accuracy.