Biblio

Fuzzing has been widely adopted as an effective techniques to detect vulnerabilities in softwares. However, existing fuzzers suffer from the problems of generating excessive test inputs that either cannot pass input validation or are ineffective in exploring unvisited regions in the program under test (PUT). To tackle these problems, we propose a greybox fuzzer called MuFuzzer based on AFL, which incorporates two heuristics that optimize seed selection and automatically extract input formatting information from the PUT to increase the chance of generating valid test inputs, respectively. In particular, the first heuristic collects the branch coverage and execution information during a fuzz session, and utilizes such information to guide fuzzing tools in selecting seeds that are fast to execute, small in size, and more importantly, more likely to explore new behaviors of the PUT for subsequent fuzzing activities. The second heuristic automatically identifies string comparison operations that the PUT uses for input validation, and establishes a dictionary with string constants from these operations to help fuzzers generate test inputs that have higher chances to pass input validation. We have evaluated the performance of MuFuzzer, in terms of code coverage and bug detection, using a set of realistic programs and the LAVA-M test bench. Experiment results demonstrate that MuFuzzer is able to achieve higher code coverage and better or comparative bug detection performance than state-of-the-art fuzzers.

The pervasiveness of personalized collaborative recommender systems has shown the powerful capability in a wide range of E-commerce services such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc. However, fundamental vulnerabilities of collaborative recommender systems leave space for malicious users to affect the recommendation results as the attackers desire. A vast majority of existing detection methods assume certain properties of malicious attacks are given in advance. In reality, improving the detection performance is usually constrained due to the challenging issues: (a) various types of malicious attacks coexist, (b) limited representations of malicious attack behaviors, and (c) practical evidences for exploring and spotting anomalies on real-world data are scarce. In this paper, we investigate a unified detection framework in an eye for an eye manner without being bothered by the details of the attacks. Firstly, co-visitation and co-rating graphs are constructed using association rules. Then, attribute representations of nodes are empirically developed from the perspectives of linkage pattern, structure-based property and inherent association of nodes. Finally, both attribute information and connective coherence of graph are combined in order to infer suspicious nodes. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed detection approach compared with competing benchmarks. Additionally, abnormality forensics metrics including distribution of rating intention, time aggregation of suspicious ratings, degree distributions before as well as after removing suspicious nodes and time series analysis of historical ratings, are provided so as to discover interesting findings such as suspicious nodes (items or ratings) on real-world data.

This paper examines multiple machine learning models to find the model that best indicates anomalous activity in an industrial control system that is under a software-based attack. The researched machine learning models are Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine, Artificial Neural Network, and Recurrent Neural Network classifiers built-in Python and tested against the HIL-based Augmented ICS dataset. Although the results showed that Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine, Artificial Neural Network, and Long Short-Term Memory classification models have great potential for anomaly detection in industrial control systems, we found that Random Forest with tuned hyperparameters slightly outperformed the other models.

Ciphertext policy Attribute-based encryption (CPABE) plays an increasingly important role in the field of fine-grained access control for cloud storage. However, The exiting solution can not balance the issue of user identity tracking and user revocation. In this paper, we propose a CP-ABE scheme that supports association revocation and traceability. This scheme uses identity directory technology to realize single user revocation and associated user revocation, and the ciphertext re-encryption technology guarantees the forward security of revocation without updating the private key. In addition, we can accurately trace the identity of the user according to the decryption private key and effectively solve the problem of key abuse. This scheme is proved to be safe and traceable under the standard model, and can effectively control the computational and storage costs while maintaining functional advantages. It is suitable for the practical scenarios of tracking audit and user revocation.

Nowadays, the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) emphasize the need for the security of network-connected devices. Additionally, there are two types of services in IoT devices that are easily exploited by attackers, weak authentication services (e.g., SSH/Telnet) and exploited services using command injection. Based on this observation, we propose IoTCMal, a hybrid IoT honeypot framework for capturing more comprehensive malicious samples aiming at IoT devices. The key novelty of IoTC-MAL is three-fold: (i) it provides a high-interactive component with common vulnerable service in real IoT device by utilizing traffic forwarding technique; (ii) it also contains a low-interactive component with Telnet/SSH service by running in virtual environment. (iii) Distinct from traditional low-interactive IoT honeypots[1], which only analyze family categories of malicious samples, IoTCMal primarily focuses on homology analysis of malicious samples. We deployed IoTCMal on 36 VPS1 instances distributed in 13 cities of 6 countries. By analyzing the malware binaries captured from IoTCMal, we discover 8 malware families controlled by at least 11 groups of attackers, which mainly launched DDoS attacks and digital currency mining. Among them, about 60% of the captured malicious samples ran in ARM or MIPs architectures, which are widely used in IoT devices.

In modern high-performance computing (HPC) systems, network congestion is an important factor that contributes to performance degradation. However, how network congestion impacts application performance is not fully understood. As Aries network, a recent HPC network architecture featuring a dragonfly topology, is equipped with network counters measuring packet transmission statistics on each router, these network metrics can potentially be utilized to understand network performance. In this work, by experiments on a large HPC system, we quantify the impact of network congestion on various applications' performance in terms of execution time, and we correlate application performance with network metrics. Our results demonstrate diverse impacts of network congestion: while applications with intensive MPI operations (such as HACC and MILC) suffer from more than 40% extension in their execution times under network congestion, applications with less intensive MPI operations (such as Graph500 and HPCG) are mostly not affected. We also demonstrate that a stall-to-flit ratio metric derived from Aries network counters is positively correlated with performance degradation and, thus, this metric can serve as an indicator of network congestion in HPC systems.

Approximate nearest neighbour search (ANNS) in high dimensional space is a fundamental problem in many applications, such as multimedia database, computer vision and information retrieval. Among many solutions, data-sensitive hashing-based methods are effective to this problem, yet few of them are designed for external storage scenarios and hence do not optimized for I/O efficiency during the query processing. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-sensitive indexing and query processing framework for ANNS with an emphasis on optimizing the I/O efficiency, especially, the sequential I/Os. The proposed index consists of several lists of point IDs, ordered by values that are obtained by learned hashing (i.e., mapping) functions on each corresponding data point. The functions are learned from the data and approximately preserve the order in the high-dimensional space. We consider two instantiations of the functions (linear and non-linear), both learned from the data with novel objective functions. We also develop an I/O efficient ANNS framework based on the index. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that our proposed methods with learned index structure perform much better than the state-of-the-art external memory-based ANNS methods in terms of I/O efficiency and accuracy.

Homomorphic encryption enables computation on encrypted data while maintaining secrecy. This leads to an important open question whether quantum computation can be delegated and verified in a non-interactive manner or not. In this paper, we affirmatively answer this question by constructing the quantum homomorphic encryption scheme with quantum obfuscation. It takes advantage of the interchangeability of the unitary operator, and exchanges the evaluation operator and the encryption operator by means of equivalent multiplication to complete homomorphic encryption. The correctness of the proposed scheme is proved theoretically. The evaluator does not know the decryption key and does not require a regular interaction with a user. Because of key transmission after quantum obfuscation, the encrypting party and the decrypting party can be different users. The output state has the property of complete mixture, which guarantees the scheme security. Moreover, the security level of the quantum homomorphic encryption scheme depends on quantum obfuscation and encryption operators.

This study proposes a machine learning method based on stream homomorphic encryption computing for improving security and reducing computational time. A case study of mobile positioning based on k nearest neighbors ( kNN) is selected to evaluate the proposed method. The results showed the proposed method can save computational resources than others.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a widely adopted wireless communication technology in the Internet of Things (IoT). BLE offers secure communication through a set of pairing strategies. However, these pairing strategies are obsolete in the context of IoT. The security of BLE based devices relies on physical security, but a BLE enabled IoT device may be deployed in a public environment without physical security. Attackers who can physically access a BLE-based device will be able to pair with it and may control it thereafter. Therefore, manufacturers may implement extra authentication mechanisms at the application layer to address this issue. In this paper, we design and implement a BLE Security Scan (BLESS) framework to identify those BLE apps that do not implement encryption or authentication at the application layer. Taint analysis is used to track if BLE apps use nonces and cryptographic keys, which are critical to cryptographic protocols. We scan 1073 BLE apps and find that 93% of them are not secure. To mitigate this problem, we propose and implement an application-level defense with a low-cost \$0.55 crypto co-processor using public key cryptography.

This work reviews various methods which improve the effective coupling coefficient ( k2eff) of non-bulk acoustic wave (BAW) aluminum nitride (AlN) based RF MEMS resonators, mainly focusing on the innovative structural design of the resonators. k2eff is the key parameter for a resonator in communication applications because it measures the achievable fractional bandwidth of the filter constructed. The resonator's configuration, dimension, material stack and the fabrication process will all have impact on its k2eff. In this paper, the authors will review the efforts in improving the k2eff of piezoelectric MEMS resonators from research community in the past 15 years, mainly from the following three approaches: coupling lateral wave with vertical wave, exciting two-dimensional (2-D) lateral wave, as well as coupling 2-D lateral wave with vertical wave. The material will be limited to AlN family, which is proven to be manageable for manufacturing. The authors will also try to make recommendations to the effectiveness of various approaches and the path forward.

This paper proposes an infrared sensor human target locating system for the Internet of Things. In this design, the wireless sensor network is designed and developed to detect human targets by using 6LoWPAN protocol and pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensors. Based on the detection data acquired by multiple sensor nodes, K-means++ clustering algorithm combined with cost function is applied to complete human target location in a 10m×10m detection area. The experimental results indicate the human locating system works well and the user can view the location information on the terminal devices.

Neural style transfer has drawn broad attention in recent years. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is thus not generalizable to new styles. We here attempt to separate the representations for styles and contents, and propose a generalized style transfer network consisting of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and content encoder are used to extract the style and content factors from the style reference images and content reference images, respectively. The mixer employs a bilinear model to integrate the above two factors and finally feeds it into a decoder to generate images with target style and content. To separate the style features and content features, we leverage the conditional dependence of styles and contents given an image. During training, the encoder network learns to extract styles and contents from two sets of reference images in limited size, one with shared style and the other with shared content. This learning framework allows simultaneous style transfer among multiple styles and can be deemed as a special 'multi-task' learning scenario. The encoders are expected to capture the underlying features for different styles and contents which is generalizable to new styles and contents. For validation, we applied the proposed algorithm to the Chinese Typeface transfer problem. Extensive experiment results on character generation have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

We consider the scenario where a cloud service provider (CSP) operates multiple geo-distributed datacenters to provide Internet-scale service. Our objective is to minimize the total electricity and bandwidth cost by jointly optimizing electricity procurement from wholesale markets and geographical load balancing (GLB), i.e., dynamically routing workloads to locations with cheaper electricity. Under the ideal setting where exact values of market prices and workloads are given, this problem reduces to a simple linear programming and is easy to solve. However, under the realistic setting where only distributions of these variables are available, the problem unfolds into a non-convex infinite-dimensional one and is challenging to solve. One of our main contributions is to develop an algorithm that is proven to solve the challenging problem optimally, by exploring the full design space of strategic bidding. Trace-driven evaluations corroborate our theoretical results, demonstrate fast convergence of our algorithm, and show that it can reduce the cost for the CSP by up to 20% as compared with baseline alternatives. This paper highlights the intriguing role of uncertainty in workloads and market prices, measured by their variances. While uncertainty in workloads deteriorates the cost-saving performance of joint electricity procurement and GLB, counter-intuitively, uncertainty in market prices can be exploited to achieve a cost reduction even larger than the setting without price uncertainty.

In the paper, our research of abnormal bus data analysis of intelligent and connected vehicle aims to detect the abnormal data rapidly and accurately generated by the hackers who send malicious commands to attack vehicles through three patterns, including remote non-contact, short-range non-contact and contact. The research routine is as follows: Take the bus data of 10 different brands of intelligent and connected vehicles through the real vehicle experiments as the research foundation, set up the optimized neural network, collect 1000 sets of the normal bus data of 15 kinds of driving scenarios and the other 300 groups covering the abnormal bus data generated by attacking the three systems which are most common in the intelligent and connected vehicles as the training set. In the end after repeated amendments, with 0.5 seconds per detection, the intrusion detection system has been attained in which for the controlling system the abnormal bus data is detected at the accuracy rate of 96% and the normal data is detected at the accuracy rate of 90%, for the body system the abnormal one is 87% and the normal one is 80%, for the entertainment system the abnormal one is 80% and the normal one is 65%.

Nowadays database outsourcing has become business owners' preferred option and they are benefiting from its flexibility, reliability, and low cost. However, because database service providers cannot always be fully trusted and data owners will no longer have a direct control over their own data, how to make the outsourced data secure becomes a hot research topic. From the data integrity protection aspect, the client wants to make sure the data returned is correct, complete, and up-to-date. Previous research work in literature put more efforts on data correctness, while data completeness is still a challenging problem to solve. There are some existing works that tried to protect the completeness of data. Unfortunately, these solutions were considered not fully solving the problem because of their high communication or computation overhead. The implementations and limitations of existing works will be further discussed in this paper. From the data confidentiality protection aspect, order-preserving encryption (OPE) is a widely used encryption scheme in protecting data confidentiality. It allows the client to perform range queries and some other operations such as GROUP BY and ORDER BY over the OPE encrypted data. Therefore, it is worthy to develop a solution that allows user to verify the query completeness for an OPE encrypted database so that both data confidentiality and completeness are both protected. Inspired by this motivation, we propose a new data completeness protecting scheme by inserting fake tuples into databases. Both the real and fake tuples are OPE encrypted and thus the cloud server cannot distinguish among them. While our new scheme is much more efficient than all existing approaches, the level of security protection remains the same.

Since radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been used in various scenarios such as supply chain, access control system and credit card, tremendous efforts have been made to improve the authentication between tags and readers to prevent potential attacks. Though effective in certain circumstances, these existing methods usually require a server to maintain a database of identity related information for every tag, which makes the system vulnerable to the SQL injection attack and not suitable for distributed environment. To address these problems, we now propose a novel blockchain-based mutual authentication security protocol. In this new scheme, there is no need for the trusted third parties to provide security and privacy for the system. Authentication is executed as an unmodifiable transaction based on blockchain rather than database, which applies to distributed RFID systems with high security demand and relatively low real-time requirement. Analysis shows that our protocol is logically correct and can prevent multiple attacks.

Transactive energy systems (TES) are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems that distribution system operators face due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and rapid growth in scalability of managing active distribution system (ADS). On the one hand, these changes pose a decentralized power system control problem, requiring strategic control to maintain reliability and resiliency for the community and for the utility. On the other hand, they require robust financial markets while allowing participation from diverse prosumers. To support the computing and flexibility requirements of TES while preserving privacy and security, distributed software platforms are required. In this paper, we enable the study and analysis of security concerns by developing Transactive Energy Security Simulation Testbed (TESST), a TES testbed for simulating various cyber attacks. In this work, the testbed is used for TES simulation with centralized clearing market, highlighting weaknesses in a centralized system. Additionally, we present a blockchain enabled decentralized market solution supported by distributed computing for TES, which on one hand can alleviate some of the problems that we identify, but on the other hand, may introduce newer issues. Future study of these differing paradigms is necessary and will continue as we develop our security simulation testbed.

Integrated cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as the smart grid, are becoming the underpinning technology for major industries. A major concern regarding such systems are the seemingly unexpected large scale failures, which are often attributed to a small initial shock getting escalated due to intricate dependencies within and across the individual counterparts of the system. In this paper, we develop a novel interdependent system model to capture this phenomenon, also known as cascading failures. Our framework consists of two networks that have inherently different characteristics governing their intra-dependency: i) a cyber-network where a node is deemed to be functional as long as it belongs to the largest connected (i.e., giant) component; and ii) a physical network where nodes are given an initial flow and a capacity, and failure of a node results with redistribution of its flow to the remaining nodes, upon which further failures might take place due to overloading. Furthermore, it is assumed that these two networks are inter-dependent. For simplicity, we consider a one-to-one interdependency model where every node in the cyber-network is dependent upon and supports a single node in the physical network, and vice versa. We provide a thorough analysis of the dynamics of cascading failures in this interdependent system initiated with a random attack. The system robustness is quantified as the surviving fraction of nodes at the end of cascading failures, and is derived in terms of all network parameters involved. Analytic results are supported through an extensive numerical study. Among other things, these results demonstrate the ability of our model to capture the unexpected nature of large-scale failures, and provide insights on improving system robustness.

Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by various of heterogeneous devices that facing numerous threats, which makes modeling security situation of IoT still a certain challenge. This paper defines a Stochastic Colored Petri Net (SCPN) for IoT-based smart environment and then proposes a Game model for security situational awareness. All possible attack paths are computed by the SCPN, and antagonistic behavior of both attackers and defenders are taken into consideration dynamically according to Game Theory (GT). Experiments on two typical attack scenarios in smart home environment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The proposed model can form a macroscopic trend curve of the security situation. Analysis of the results shows the capabilities of the proposed model in finding vulnerable devices and potential attack paths, and even facilitating the choice of defense strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use Game Theory in the IoT-based SCPN to establish a security situational awareness model for a complex smart environment.

The recently developed deep belief network (DBN) has been shown to be an effective methodology for solving time series forecasting problems. However, the performance of DBN is seriously depended on the reasonable setting of hyperparameters. At present, random search, grid search and Bayesian optimization are the most common methods of hyperparameters optimization. As an alternative, a state-of-the-art derivative-free optimizer-negative correlation search (NCS) is adopted in this paper to decide the sizes of DBN and learning rates during the training processes. A comparative analysis is performed between the proposed method and other popular techniques in the time series forecasting experiment based on two types of time series datasets. Experiment results statistically affirm the efficiency of the proposed model to obtain better prediction results compared with conventional neural network models.

The behavior of modern power systems is becoming more stochastic and dynamic, due to the increased penetration of variable generation, demand response, new power market structure, extreme weather conditions, contingencies, and unexpected events. It is critically important to predict potential system operational issues so that grid planners and operators can take preventive actions to mitigate the impact, e.g., lack of operational reserves. In this paper, an innovative software tool is presented to assist power grid operators in a balancing authority in predicting the grid stress level over the next operating day. It periodically collects necessary information from public domain such as weather forecasts, electricity demand, and automatically estimates the stress levels on a daily basis. Advanced Neural Network and regression tree algorithms are developed as the prediction engines to achieve this goal. The tool has been tested on a few key balancing authorities and successfully predicted the growing system peak load and increased stress levels under extreme heat waves.

This paper proposed an advanced round modification fault analysis (RMFA) at the theoretical level on AEGIS-128, which is one of seven finalists in CAESAR competition. First, we clarify our assumptions and simplifications on the attack model, focusing on the encryption security. Then, we emphasize the difficulty of applying vanilla RMFA to AEGIS-128 in the practical case. Finally we demonstrate our advanced fault analysis on AEGIS-128 using machine-solver based algebraic techniques. Our enhancement can be used to conquer the practical scenario which is difficult for vanilla RMFA. Simulation results show that when the fault is injected to the initialization phase and the number of rounds is reduced to one, two samples of injections can extract the whole 128 key bits within less than two hours. This work can also be extended to other versions such as AEGIS-256.

Smart Grid (SG) technology has been developing for years, which facilitates users with portable access to power through being applied in numerous application scenarios, one of which is the electric vehicle charging. In order to ensure the security of the charging process, users need authenticating with the smart meter for the subsequent communication. Although there are many researches in this field, few of which have endeavored to protect the anonymity and the untraceability of users during the authentication. Further, some studies consider the problem of user anonymity, but they are non-light-weight protocols, even some can not assure any fairness in key agreement. In this paper, we first points out that existing authentication schemes for Smart Grid are neither lack of critical security nor short of important property such as untraceability, then we propose a new two-factor lightweight user authentication scheme based on password and biometric. The authentication process of the proposed scheme includes four message exchanges among the user mobile, smart meter and the cloud server, and then a security one-time session key is generated for the followed communication process. Moreover, the scheme has some new features, such as the protection of the user's anonymity and untraceability. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme can resist various well-known attacks and the performance analysis shows that compared to other three schemes, our scheme is more lightweight, secure and efficient.

Attack graph approach is a common tool for the analysis of network security. However, analysis of attack graphs could be complicated and difficult depending on the attack graph size. This paper presents an approximate analysis approach for attack graphs based on Q-learning. First, we employ multi-host multi-stage vulnerability analysis (MulVAL) to generate an attack graph for a given network topology. Then we refine the attack graph and generate a simplified graph called a transition graph. Next, we use a Q-learning model to find possible attack routes that an attacker could use to compromise the security of the network. Finally, we evaluate the approach by applying it to a typical IT network scenario with specific services, network configurations, and vulnerabilities.