Biblio

Encryption is essential for protecting sensitive data, especially images, against unauthorized access and exploitation. The goal of this work is to develop a more secure image encryption technique for image-based communication. The approach uses particle swarm optimization, chaotic map and magic square to offer an ideal encryption effect. This work introduces a novel encryption algorithm based on magic square. The image is first broken down into single-byte blocks, which are then replaced with the value of the magic square. The encrypted images are then utilized as particles and a starting assembly for the PSO optimization process. The correlation coefficient applied to neighboring pixels is used to define the ideal encrypted image as a fitness function. The results of the experiments reveal that the proposed approach can effectively encrypt images with various secret keys and has a decent encryption effect. As a result of the proposed work improves the public key method's security while simultaneously increasing memory economy.

In recent years, research has focused on exploiting the inherent physical (PHY) characteristics of wireless channels to discriminate between different spatially separated network terminals, mitigating the significant costs of signature-based techniques. In this paper, the legitimacy of the corresponding terminal is firstly verified at the protocol stack’s upper layers, and then the re-authentication process is performed at the PHY-layer. In the latter, a unique PHY-layer signature is created for each transmission based on the spatially and temporally correlated channel attributes within the coherence time interval. As part of the verification process, the PHY-layer signature can be used as a message authentication code to prove the packet’s authenticity. Extensive simulation has shown the capability of the proposed scheme to support high detection probability at small signal-to-noise ratios. In addition, security evaluation is conducted against passive and active attacks. Computation and communication comparisons are performed to demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides superior performance compared to conventional cryptographic approaches.

Plaintext transmission is the major way of communication in the existing security and stability control (SSC) system of power grid. Such type of communication is easy to be invaded, camouflaged and hijacked by a third party, leading to a serious threat to the safe and stable operation of power system. Focusing on the communication security in SSC system, the authors use asymmetric encryption algorithm to encrypt communication messages, to generate random numbers through random noise of electrical quantities, and then use them to generate key pairs needed for encryption, at the same time put forward a set of key management mechanism for engineering application. In addition, the field engineering test is performed to verify that the proposed encryption method and management mechanism can effectively improve the communication in SSC system while ensuring the high-speed and reliable communication.

Random numbers are essential for communications security, as they are widely employed as secret keys and other critical parameters of cryptographic algorithms. The Linux random number generator (LRNG) is the most popular open-source software-based random number generator (RNG). The security of LRNG is influenced by the overall design, especially the quality of entropy sources. Therefore, it is necessary to assess and quantify the quality of the entropy sources which contribute the main randomness to RNGs. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the quality of entropy sources in LRNG with Linux kernel 5.6, and provide the following two findings. We first analyze two important entropy sources: jiffies and cycles, and propose a method to predict jiffies by cycles with high accuracy. The results indicate that, the jiffies can be correctly predicted thus contain almost no entropy in the condition of knowing cycles. The other important finding is the failure of interrupt cycles during system boot. The lower bits of cycles caused by interrupts contain little entropy, which is contrary to our traditional cognition that lower bits have more entropy. We believe these findings are of great significance to improve the efficiency and security of the RNG design on software platforms.

At present, the security protection of distribution automation system is faced with complex and diverse operating environment, and the main use of public network may bring greater security risks, there are still some deficiencies. According to the actual situation of distribution automation of China Southern Power Grid, this paper designs multiple protection technology, carries out encryption distribution terminal research, and realizes end-to-end longitudinal security protection of distribution automation system, which is effectively improving the anti-attack ability of distribution terminal.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the rapid pace of the use of communication technology and infiltration of technical systems in a digital world. In terms of power systems generation and operation, a reliable solution for substation automation and smart grid communication is the IEC 61850 standard. It has a robust modelling structure for monitoring, protection, and control and management systems in substations and across the grid. Modern communication technologies are destined for internet use for remote monitoring, settings, and data recovery. However, the communication network is exposed to cyber threats and evident risks in security defense of automated power systems. To tackle these vulnerabilities, the IEC 62351 standard aims to improve security in handling the communication and data transfers in power system automation. This paper discusses the different security measures in communication, information and cyber security solutions in power systems. To further illustrate the novel communication and security schemes of digital substations, a case study using the Victoria University Zone Substation (VUZS) simulator for cybersecurity assessment has been instigated.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have strong capabilities of memories, feature identifications and automatic analyses, solving various complex problems. However, DNN classifiers have obvious fragility that adding several unnoticeable perturbations to the original examples will lead to the errors in the classifier identification. In the field of communications, the adversarial examples will greatly reduce the accuracy of the signal identification, causing great information security risks. Considering the adversarial examples pose a serious threat to the security of the DNN models, studying their generation mechanisms and testing their attack effects are critical to ensuring the information security of the communication networks. This paper will study the generation of the adversarial examples and the influences of the adversarial examples on the accuracy of the DNN-based communication signal identification. Meanwhile, this paper will study the influences of the adversarial examples under the white-box models and black-box models, and explore the adversarial attack influences of the factors such as perturbation levels and iterative steps. The insights of this study would be helpful for ensuring the security of information networks and designing robust DNN communication networks.

Artificial intelligence has been widely used in industries such as smart manufacturing, medical care and home furnishings. Among them, the value of the application in communication security is very important. This paper makes a further exploration of the artificial intelligence technology and its application, and gives a detailed analysis of its development, standardization and the application.

In this work, communication secrecy in cooperative and multi-hop wireless communications for various radio frequencies are examined. Attenuation lines and ranges of both detection and ultimate secrecy regions were calculated for cooperative communication channel and multi-hop channel with various number of hops. From results, frequency ranges with the highest potential to apply bandwidth saving method known as frequency reuse were determined and compared to point-to-point channel. Frequencies with the highest attenuation were derived and their ranges of both detection and ultimate secrecy are calculated. Point-to-point, cooperative and multi-hop channels were compared in terms of ultimate secrecy ranges. Multi-hop channel measurements were made with different number of hops and the relation between the number of hops and communication security is examined. Ultimate secrecy ranges were calculated up to 1 Terahertz and found to be less than 13 meters between 550-565 GHz frequency range. Therefore, for short-range wireless communication systems such as indoor and in-device communication systems (board-to-board or chip-to-chip communications), it is shown that various bands in the Terahertz band can be used to reuse the same frequency in different locations to obtain high security and high bandwidth.

Real-Time Ethernet has become the major communication technology for modern automation and industrial control systems. On the one hand, this trend increases the need for an automation-friendly security solution, as such networks can no longer be considered sufficiently isolated. On the other hand, it shows that, despite diverging requirements, the domain of Operational Technology (OT) can derive advantage from high-volume technology of the Information Technology (IT) domain. Based on these two sides of the same coin, we study the challenges and prospects of approaches to communication security in real-time Ethernet automation systems. In order to capitalize the expertise aggregated in decades of research and development, we put a special focus on the reuse of well-established security technology from the IT domain. We argue that enhancing such technology to become automation-friendly is likely to result in more robust and secure designs than greenfield designs. Because of its widespread deployment and the (to this date) nonexistence of a consistent security architecture, we use PROFINET as a showcase of our considerations. Security requirements for this technology are defined and different well-known solutions are examined according their suitability for PROFINET. Based on these findings, we elaborate the necessary adaptions for the deployment on PROFINET.

The evolution of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigm has recently attracted a lot of researchers and industries. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) is the networking model that lies at the heart of this technology. It enables the vehicles to exchange relevant information concerning road conditions and safety. However, ensuring communication security has been and still is one of the main challenges to vehicles' interconnection. To secure the interconnected vehicular system, many cryptography techniques, communication protocols, and certification and reputation-based security approaches were proposed. Nonetheless, some limitations are still present, preventing the practical implementation of such approaches. In this paper, we first define a set of locally-perceived behavioral reputation parameters that enable a distributed evaluation of vehicles' reputation. Then, we integrate these parameters into the design of a reputation management system to exclude malicious or faulty vehicles from the IoV network. Our system can help in the prevention of several attacks on the VANET environment such as Sybil and Denial of Service attacks, and can be implemented in a fully decentralized fashion.

As the technology is growing rapidly, the development of systems and software are becoming more complex. For this reason, the security of software and web applications become more vulnerable. In the last two decades, the use of internet application and security hacking activities are on top of the glance. The organizations are having the biggest challenge that how to secure their web applications from the rapidly increasing cyber threats because the organization can't compromise the security of their sensitive information. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing techniques may help organizations to find security loopholes. The weakness can be the asset for the attacker if the organizations are not aware of this. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing helps an organization to cover the security loopholes and determine their security arrangements are working as per defined policies or not. To cover the tracks and mitigate the threats it is necessary to install security patches. This paper includes the survey on the current vulnerabilities, determination of those vulnerabilities, the methodology used for determination, tools used to determine the vulnerabilities to secure the organizations from cyber threat.

Securing wireless communication is significant for privacy and confidentiality of sensing data in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). However, due to broadcast nature of radio channels, disseminating sensory data is vulnerable to eavesdropping and message modification. Generating secret keys by extracting the shared randomness in a wireless fading channel is a promising way to improve the communication security. In this poster, we present a novel secret key generation protocol for securing real-time data dissemination in CPS, where the sensor nodes cooperatively generate a shared key by estimating the quantized fading channel randomness. A 2-hop wireless sensor network testbed is built and preliminary experimental results show that the quantization intervals and distance between the nodes lead to a secret bit mismatch.

With the development of wireless networks, the security of wireless systems is becoming more and more important. In this paper, a novel double layers constellations is proposed to protect the polarization modulation information from being acquired by the eavesdropper. Based on the double layers constellations, a constellations' optimization algorithm for achieving high power-efficiency is proposed. Based on this algorithm, 4,8,16-order double-layer constellations are designed. We use Monte Carlo simulation to test the security performance and symbol error rate performance of this constellations. The results show that the double layers constellations can effectively ensure communication security and the SER performance has superiority over the classic symmetrical constellations.

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are one of the main building blocks for securing communications over the Internet. Currently, PKIs are under the control of centralized authorities, which is problematic as evidenced by numerous incidents where they have been compromised. The distributed, fault tolerant log of transactions provided by blockchains and more recently, smart contract platforms, constitutes a powerful tool for the decentralization of PKIs. To verify the validity of identity records, blockchain-based identity systems store on chain either all identity records, or, a small (or even constant) sized amount of data for verifying identity records stored off chain. However, as most of these systems have never been implemented, there is little information regarding the practical implications of each design's tradeoffs. In this work, we first implement and evaluate the only provably secure, smart contract based PKI of Patsonakis et al. on top of Ethereum. This construction incurs constant-sized storage at the expense of computational complexity. To explore this tradeoff, we propose and implement a second construction which, eliminates the need for trusted setup, preserves the security properties of Patsonakis et al. and, as illustrated through our evaluation, is the only version with constant-sized state that can be deployed on the live chain of Ethereum. Furthermore, we compare these two systems with the simple approach of most prior works, e.g., the Ethereum Name Service, where all identity records are stored on the smart contract's state, to illustrate several shortcomings of Ethereum and its cost model. We propose several modifications for fine tuning the model, which would be useful to be considered for any smart contract platform like Ethereum so that it reaches its full potential to support arbitrary distributed applications.

Smart Grids require extensive communication to enable safe and stable energy supply in the age of decentralized and dynamic energy production and consumption. To protect the communication in this critical infrastructure, public authorities mandate smart meter gateways (SMGWs) to be in control of the communication security. To this end, the SMGW intercepts all inbound and outbound communication of its premise, e.g., a factory or smart home, and forwards it on secure channels that the SMGW established itself. However, using the SMGW as proxy, local devices can neither review the security of these remote connections established by the SMGW nor enforce higher security guarantees than established by the all in one configuration of the SMGW which does not allow for use case-specific security settings. We present mechanisms that enable local devices to regain this insight and control over the full connection, i.e., up to the final receiver, while retaining the SMGW's ability to ensure a suitable security level. Our evaluation shows modest computation and transmission overheads for this increased security in the critical smart grid infrastructure.

With the unprecedented prevalence of mobile network applications, cryptographic protocols, such as the Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), are widely used in mobile network applications for communication security. The proven methods for encrypted video stream classification or encrypted protocol detection are unsuitable for the SSL/TLS traffic. Consequently, application-level traffic classification based networking and security services are facing severe challenges in effectiveness. Existing encrypted traffic classification methods exhibit unsatisfying accuracy for applications with similar state characteristics. In this paper, we propose a multiple-attribute-based encrypted traffic classification system named Multi-Attribute Associated Fingerprints (MAAF). We develop MAAF based on the two key insights that the DNS traces generated during the application runtime contain classification guidance information and that the handshake certificates in the encrypted flows can provide classification clues. Apart from the exploitation of key insights, MAAF employs the context of the encrypted traffic to overcome the attribute-lacking problem during the classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that MAAF achieves 98.69% accuracy on the real-world traceset that consists of 16 applications, supports the early prediction, and is robust to the scale of the training traceset. Besides, MAAF is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

As a result of increasing the interest in developing the communication systems that use public channels for transmitting information, many channel problems are raised up. Among these problems, the important one should be addressed is the information security. This paper presents a proposed communication system with high security uses two encryption levels based on chaotic systems. The first level is chaotic scrambling, while the second one is chaotic masking. This configuration increases the information security since the key space becomes too large. The MATLAB simulation results showed that the Segmental Spectral Signal to Noise Ratio (SSSNR) of the first level (chaotic scrambling) is reduced by -5.195 dB comparing to time domain scrambling. Furthermore, in the second level (chaotic masking), the SSSNR is reduced by -20.679 dB. It is also showed that when the two levels are combined, the overall reduction obtained is -21.755 dB.

Power communication network is an important infrastructure of power system. For a large number of widely distributed business terminals and communication terminals. The data protection is related to the safe and stable operation of the whole power grid. How to solve the problem that lots of nodes need a large number of keys and avoid the situation that these nodes cannot exchange information safely because of the lack of keys. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposed a segmentation and combination technology based on quantum key to extend the limited key. The basic idea was to obtain a division scheme according to different conditions, and divide a key into several different sub-keys, and then combine these key segments to generate new keys and distribute them to different terminals in the system. Sufficient keys were beneficial to key updating, and could effectively enhance the ability of communication system to resist damage and intrusion. Through the analysis and calculation, the validity of this method in the use of limited quantum keys to achieve the business data secure transmission of a large number of terminal was further verified.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a broadcast communications network invented by Robert Bosch GmbH in 1986. CAN is the standard communication network found in automobiles, industry equipment, and many space applications. To be used in these environments, CAN is designed for efficiency and reliability, rather than security. This research paper closely examines the security risks within the CAN protocol and proposes a feasible solution. In this research, we investigate the problems with implementing certain security features in the CAN protocol, such as message authentication and protections against replay and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We identify the restrictions of the CAN bus, and we demonstrate how our proposed implementation meets these restrictions. Many previously proposed solutions lack security, feasibility, and/or efficiency; however, a solution must not drastically hinder the real-time operation speed of the network. The solution proposed in this research is tested with a simulative CAN environment. This paper proposes an alteration to the standard CAN bus nodes and the CAN protocol to better protect automobiles and other CAN-related systems from attacks.

This article presents introduction to HTTP Security Headers - new security topic in communication over Internet. It is emphasized that HTTPS protocol and SSL/TLS certificates alone do not offer sufficient level of security for communication among people and devices. In the world of web applications and Internet of Things (IoT), it is vital to bring communication security at higher level, what could be realised via few simple steps. HTTP Response Headers used for different purposes in the past are now the effective way how to propagate security policies from servers to clients (from web servers to web browsers). First improvement is enforcing HTTPS protocol for communication everywhere it is possible and promote this protocol as first and only option for secure connection over the Internet. It is emphasized that HTTP protocol for communication is not suitable anymore.

We address secure resource allocation for an OFDMA cooperative cognitive radio network (CRN) with energy harvesting (EH) capability. In the network, one primary user (PU) cooperates with several untrusted secondary users (SUs) with one SU transmitter and several SU receivers, where the SU transmitter and all SU receivers may overhear the PU transmitter's information while all SU receivers may eavesdrop on each other's signals. We consider the scenario when SUs are wireless devices with small physical sizes; therefore to improve system performance we suppose that SUs are equipped with co-located orthogonally dual-polarized antennas (ODPAs). With ODPAs, on one hand, the SU transmitter can first harvest energy from radio frequency (RF) signals emitted by the PU transmitter, and then utilize the harvested energy to simultaneously serve the PU and all SU receivers. On the other hand, by exploiting polarization-based signal processing techniques, both the PU's and SUs' physical-layer security can be enhanced. In particular, to ensure the PU's communication security, the PU receiver also sends jamming signals to degrade the reception performance of SUs, and meanwhile the jamming signals can also become new sources of energy powering the SU transmitter. For the considered scenario, we investigate the joint allocation of subcarriers, powers, and power splitting ratios to maximize the total secrecy rate of all SUs while ensuring the PU's minimum secrecy rate requirement. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our resource allocation scheme through numerical analyses.

A fresh look at the way secure communications is currently being done has been undertaken as a consequence of the large hacking's that have taken place recently. A plausible option maybe a return to the future via Morse code using how a quantum bit (Qubit) reacts when entangled to suggest a cypher. This quantum cyphers uses multiple properties of unique entities that have many random radicals which makes hacking more difficult that traditional 'Rivest-Shamir-Adleman' (RSA), 'Digital Signature Algorithm' (DSA) or 'Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm' (ECDSA). Additional security is likely by Backchannelling (slipstreaming) Quantum Morse code (Q-Morse) keys composed of living and non-living entities. This means Blockchain ledger history (forwards-backwards) is audited during an active session. Verification keys are Backchannelling (slipstreaming) during the session (e.g. train driver must incrementally activate a switch otherwise the train stops) using predicted-expected sender-receiver properties as well as their past history of disconformities to random radicals encountered. In summary, Quantum Morse code (Q-Morse) plausibly is the enabler to additional security by Backchannelling (slipstreaming) during a communications session.

Key management is the core to ensure the communication security of wireless sensor network. How to establish efficient key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a challenging problem for the constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of the sensor nodes. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks with symmetric key cryptography. Recent researches have shown that using asymmetric key cryptography in heterogeneous sensor networks (HSN) can improve network performance, such as connectivity, resilience, etc. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of symmetric key cryptography and asymmetric key cryptography, the paper propose an efficient and hybrid key management method for heterogeneous wireless sensor network, cluster heads and base stations use public key encryption method based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), while using symmetric encryption method between adjacent nodes in the cluster. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed key management method can provide better security, prefect scalability and connectivity with saving on storage space.