Biblio

The development of artificial intelligence will certainly fundamentally change the pattern of human work. With the promotion of top-level strategies, vocational education can only develop sustainably by integrating with science and technology. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that studies the basic theories, methods and techniques of how to apply computer hardware and software to simulate certain intelligent human behaviors. Artificial intelligence applied to vocational education mainly focuses on resource network technology and integrated distributed intelligent system, which organically integrates various different expert systems (ES), management information systems (MIS), intelligent networks, decision support systems (DSS), databases, numerical computing packages and graphics processing programs to solve complex problems. Artificial intelligence will certainly empower vocational education and give rise to a vocational education revolution. In the process of continuous improvement of AI, it is a more practical approach to apply various already mature AI technologies to vocational education practice. Establishing an intelligent vocational education ecology enables traditional education and AI to complement each other's advantages and jointly promote the healthy and sustainable development of vocational education ecology.

Network function virtualization (NFV) simplies the coniguration and management of security services by migrating the network security functions from dedicated hardware devices to software middle-boxes that run on commodity servers. Under the paradigm of NFV, the service function chain (SFC) consisting of a series of ordered virtual network security functions is becoming a mainstream form to carry network security services. Allocating the underlying physical network resources to the demands of SFCs under given constraints over time is known as the SFC deployment problem. It is a crucial issue for infrastructure providers. However, SFC deployment is facing new challenges in trading off between pursuing the objective of a high revenue-to-cost ratio and making decisions in an online manner. In this paper, we investigate the use of reinforcement learning to guide online deployment decisions for SFC requests and propose a Policy network Assisted Monte Carlo Tree search approach named PACT to address the above challenge, aiming to maximize the average revenue-to-cost ratio. PACT combines the strengths of the policy network, which evaluates the placement potential of physical servers, and the Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is able to tackle problems with large state spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our PACT achieves the best performance and is superior to other algorithms by up to 30% and 23.8% on average revenue-to-cost ratio and acceptance rate, respectively.

The ongoing trend of moving data and computation to the cloud is met with concerns regarding privacy and protection of intellectual property. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) must be fully trusted to not tamper with or disclose processed data, hampering adoption of cloud services for many sensitive or critical applications. As a result, CSPs and CPU manufacturers are rushing to find solutions for secure and trustworthy outsourced computation in the Cloud. While enclaves, like Intel SGX, are strongly limited in terms of throughput and size, AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers hardware support for transparently protecting code and data of entire VMs, thus removing the performance, memory and software adaption barriers of enclaves. Through attestation of boot code integrity and means for securely transferring secrets into an encrypted VM, CSPs are effectively removed from the list of trusted entities. There have been several attacks on the security of SEV, by abusing I/O channels to encrypt and decrypt data, or by moving encrypted code blocks at runtime. Yet, none of these attacks have targeted the attestation protocol, the core of the secure computing environment created by SEV. We show that the current attestation mechanism of Zen 1 and Zen 2 architectures has a significant flaw, allowing us to manipulate the loaded code without affecting the attestation outcome. An attacker may abuse this weakness to inject arbitrary code at startup–and thus take control over the entire VM execution, without any indication to the VM’s owner. Our attack primitives allow the attacker to do extensive modifications to the bootloader and the operating system, like injecting spy code or extracting secret data. We present a full end-to-end attack, from the initial exploit to leaking the key of the encrypted disk image during boot, giving the attacker unthrottled access to all of the VM’s persistent data.

Recently, the informatics infrastructure of INRiM Time and Frequency Laboratory has been completely renewed with particular attention to network security and software architecture aspects, with the aims to improve the reliability, robustness and automation of the overall set-up. This upgraded infrastructure has allowed, since January 2020, a fully automated generation and monitoring of the Italian time scale UTC(IT), based on dedicated software developed in-house [1]. We focus in this work on the network and software aspects of our set-up, which enable a robust and reliable automatic time scale generation with continuous monitoring and minimal human intervention.

The semaphore mechanism is an important part of the embedded operating system. Therefore, it is very necessary to ensure its safety. Traditional software testing methods are difficult to ensure 100% coverage of the program. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a formal verfication method which proves the correctness of the program theoretically. This paper proposes a proof framework based on the theorem proof tool Coq: modeling the semaphore mechanism, extracting important properties from the requirement documents, and finally verifying that the semaphore mechanism can meet these properties, which means the correctness of the semaphore mechanism is proved and also illustrates the feasibility of the verification framework proposed in this paper, which lays a foundation for the verification of other modules of operating systems.

In this extended abstract, we outline an approach for security certification of products or services for modern commercial systems that are characterized by agile development, the integration of development and operations, and high dynamics of system features and structures. The proposed scheme rather evaluates the processes applied in development and operations than investigates into the validity of the product properties itself. We argue that the resulting claims are still suitable to increase the confidence in the security of products and services resulting from such processes.

In order to solve the problem of data analysis and application caused by the inefficient integration of hardware and software compatibility of hardware in the Internet of things, this paper proposes and designs a C/S framework communication system based on task driven and multi-user authority. By redefining the relationship between users and hardware and adopting the matching framework for different modules, the system realizes the high concurrent and complex data efficient collaborative processing between software and hardware. Finally, by testing and verifying the functions of the system, the communication system effectively realizes the functions of data processing between software and hardware, and achieves the expected results.

Software developers make mistakes that can lead to failures of a software product. One approach to detect defects is static analysis: examine code without execution. Currently, various source code static analysis tools are widely used to detect defects. However, source code analysis is not enough. The reason for this is the use of third-party binary libraries, the unprovability of the correctness of all compiler optimizations. This paper introduces BinSide : binary static analysis framework for defects detection. It does interprocedural, context-sensitive and flow-sensitive analysis. The framework uses platform independent intermediate representation and provide opportunity to analyze various architectures binaries. The framework includes value analysis, reaching definition, taint analysis, freed memory analysis, constant folding, and constant propagation engines. It provides API (application programming interface) and can be used to develop new analyzers. Additionally, we used the API to develop checkers for classic buffer overflow, format string, command injection, double free and use after free defects detection.

To develop the next generation of Internet of Things, Edge devices and systems which leverage progress in enabling technologies such as 5G, distributed computing and artificial intelligence (AI), several requirements need to be developed and put in place to make the devices smarter. A major requirement for all the above applications is the long-term security and trust computing infrastructure. Trusted Computing requires the introduction inside of the platform of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Traditionally, a TPM was a discrete and dedicated module plugged into the platform to give TPM capabilities. Recently, processors manufacturers started integrating trusted computing features into their processors. A significant drawback of this approach is the need for a permanent modification of the processor microarchitecture. In this context, we suggest an analysis and a design of a software-only TPM for RISC-V processors based on seL4 microkernel and OP-TEE.

The paper describes a methodology for assessing non-functional requirements, such as trust characteristics for applications running on computationally constrained devices in the Internet of Things. The methodology is demonstrated through an example of a microcontroller-based temperature monitoring system. The concepts of trust and trustworthiness for software and devices of the Internet of Things are complex characteristics for describing the correct and secure operation of such systems and include aspects of operational and information security, reliability, resilience and privacy. Machine learning models, which are increasingly often used for such tasks in recent years, are resource-consuming software implementations. The paper proposes to use a logic circuit model to implement the above algorithms as an additional module for computationally constrained devices for checking the trustworthiness of applications running on them. Such a module could be implemented as a hardware, for example, as an FPGA in order to achieve more effectiveness.

Software trustworthiness includes many attributes. Reasonable weight allocation of trustworthy attributes plays a key role in the software trustworthiness measurement. In practical application, attribute weight usually comes from experts' evaluation to attributes and hidden information derived from attributes. Therefore, when the weight of attributes is researched, it is necessary to consider weight from subjective and objective aspects. Firstly, a novel weight allocation method is proposed by combining the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method and the Criteria Importance Though Intercrieria Correlation (CRITIC) method. Secondly, based on the weight allocation method, the trustworthiness measurement models of component-based software are established according to the four combination structures of components. Thirdly, some metric criteria of the model are proved to verify the reasonability. Finally, a case is used to illustrate the practicality of the model.

Safety- and security-critical developers have long recognized the importance of applying a high degree of scrutiny to a system’s (or subsystem’s) I/O messages. However, lack of care in the development of message-handling components can lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in the attack surface. On the DARPA Cyber-Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) program, we have focused our research effort on identifying cyber vulnerabilities early in system development, in particular at the Architecture development phase, and then automatically synthesizing components that mitigate against the identified vulnerabilities from high-level specifications. This approach is highly compatible with the goals of the LangSec community. Advances in formal methods have allowed us to produce hardware/software implementations that are both performant and guaranteed correct. With these tools, we can synthesize high-assurance “building blocks” that can be composed automatically with high confidence to create trustworthy systems, using a method we call Security-Enhancing Architectural Transformations. Our synthesis-focused approach provides a higherleverage insertion point for formal methods than is possible with post facto analytic methods, as the formal methods tools directly contribute to the implementation of the system, without requiring developers to become formal methods experts. Our techniques encompass Systems, Hardware, and Software Development, as well as Hardware/Software Co-Design/CoAssurance. We illustrate our method and tools with an example that implements security-improving transformations on system architectures expressed using the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). We show how message-handling components can be synthesized from high-level regular or context-free language specifications, as well as a novel specification language for self-describing messages called Contiguity Types, and verified to meet arithmetic constraints extracted from the AADL model. Finally, we guarantee that the intent of the message processing logic is accurately reflected in the application binary code through the use of the verified CakeML compiler, in the case of software, or the Restricted Algorithmic C toolchain with ACL2-based formal verification, in the case of hardware/software co-design.

The course of operating system's labs usually fall behind the state of art technology. In this paper, we propose a Software Diversity-Assisted Defense (SDAD) lab based on software diversity, mainly targeting for students majoring in cyber security and computer science. This lab is consisted of multiple modules and covers most of the important concepts and principles in operating systems. Thus, the knowledge learned from the theoretical course will be deepened with the lab. For students majoring in cyber security, they can learn this new software diversity-based defense technology and understand how an exploit works from the attacker's side. The experiment is also quite stretchable, which can fit all level students.

WebAssembly is an Increasingly popular lightweight binary instruction format, which can be efficiently embedded and sandboxed. Languages like C, C++, Rust, Go, and many others can be compiled into WebAssembly. This paper describes Twine, a WebAssembly trusted runtime designed to execute unmodified, language-independent applications. We leverage Intel SGX to build the runtime environment without dealing with language-specific, complex APIs. While SGX hardware provides secure execution within the processor, Twine provides a secure, sandboxed software runtime nested within an SGX enclave, featuring a WebAssembly system interface (WASI) for compatibility with unmodified WebAssembly applications. We evaluate Twine with a large set of general-purpose benchmarks and real-world applications. In particular, we used Twine to implement a secure, trusted version of SQLite, a well-known full-fledged embeddable database. We believe that such a trusted database would be a reasonable component to build many larger application services. Our evaluation shows that SQLite can be fully executed inside an SGX enclave via WebAssembly and existing system interface, with similar average performance overheads. We estimate that the performance penalties measured are largely compensated by the additional security guarantees and its full compatibility with standard WebAssembly. An indepth analysis of our results indicates that performance can be greatly improved by modifying some of the underlying libraries. We describe and implement one such modification in the paper, showing up to 4.1 × speedup. Twine is open-source, available at GitHub along with instructions to reproduce our experiments.

This paper emphasizes the implementation of a conditioning circuit specific for an inductive or capacitive sensor. There are some inductive sensors, such as the proximity sensor, for which the inductance is dependent with the distance, or capacitive sensors strongly dependent with the humidity, distance, etc. This category of sensors is suitable for AC domain excitation from the measurement procedure point of view. Taking into consideration the fabrication technology, the measured physical quantity is being encoded as frequency or amplitude. To generate a sinusoidal signal with constant frequency and amplitude, the Colpitts or Hartley oscillators can be used [1], [2]. But the novelty of this paper is a different approach which reveals a microcontroller-based technology where the LC circuit works in an oscillating regime even though there is an underdamped oscillation behavior. For the oscillations’ occurrence, there will be a periodical energy injection using a driving source. One of the main advantages of the mentioned circuit is the small component number. The central unit of the embedded system will fulfil two functions: maintains the oscillating regime and measures the amplitude or frequency of the output signal. In this way, the built embedded system will be robust and easy to use due to its software configuration capabilities. As a plus, such a system can measure additional sensors used in environment parameters’ compensating procedure.

This paper presents the results of a multifaceted study of the behavior of a novel hydrokinetic energy harvester that utilizes vertical oscillations. Unlike traditional rotating turbines used in hydrokinetic energy, this particular device utilizes the fluid structure interactions of vortex-induced-vibration and gallop. Due to the unique characteristics of this vertical motion, a thorough examination of the proposed system was conducted via a three-pronged approach of simulation, emulation, and field testing. Using a permanent magnet synchronous generator as the electrical power generation source, an electrical power conversion system was simulated, emulated, and tested to achieve appropriate power smoothing for use in microgrid systems present in many Alaskan rural locations.

This position paper presents and illustrates the concept of security requirements as code – a novel approach to security requirements specification. The aspiration to minimize code duplication and maximize its reuse has always been driving the evolution of software development approaches. Object-Oriented programming (OOP) takes these approaches to the state in which the resulting code conceptually maps to the problem that the code is supposed to solve. People nowadays start learning to program in the primary school. On the other hand, requirements engineers still heavily rely on natural language based techniques to specify requirements. The key idea of this paper is: artifacts produced by the requirements process should be treated as input to the regular object-oriented analysis. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is the presentation of the major concepts for the security requirements as the code method that is illustrated with a real industry example from the VeriDevOps project.

With the rapid development of the electric power Internet-of-Things (power IoT) technology and the widespread use of general-purpose software, hardware and network facilities, the power IoT has become more and more open, which makes the traditional power system face new cyber security threats. In order to find the vulnerable device nodes and attack links in the power IoT system, this paper studies a set of attack path calculation methods and vulnerability node discovery algorithms, which can construct a power IoT attack simulation program based on the value of equipment assets and information attributes. What’s more, this paper has carried on the example analysis and verification on the improved IEEE RBTS Bus 2 system. Based on the above research plan, this paper finally developed a set of power IoT attack simulation tool based on distribution electronic stations, which can well find the vulnerable devices in the system.

Different security issues are a common problem for open source packages archived to and delivered through software ecosystems. These often manifest themselves as software weaknesses that may lead to concrete software vulnerabilities. This paper examines various security issues in Python packages with static analysis. The dataset is based on a snapshot of all packages stored to the Python Package Index (PyPI). In total, over 197 thousand packages and over 749 thousand security issues are covered. Even under the constraints imposed by static analysis, (a) the results indicate prevalence of security issues; at least one issue is present for about 46% of the Python packages. In terms of the issue types, (b) exception handling and different code injections have been the most common issues. The subprocess module stands out in this regard. Reflecting the generally small size of the packages, (c) software size metrics do not predict well the amount of issues revealed through static analysis. With these results and the accompanying discussion, the paper contributes to the field of large-scale empirical studies for better understanding security problems in software ecosystems.

This demo paper presents the technical details and usage scenarios of μSE: a mutation-based tool for evaluating security-focused static analysis tools for Android. Mutation testing is generally used by software practitioners to assess the robustness of a given test-suite. However, we leverage this technique to systematically evaluate static analysis tools and uncover and document soundness issues.μSE's analysis has found 25 previously undocumented flaws in static data leak detection tools for Android.μSE offers four mutation schemes, namely Reachability, Complex-reachability, TaintSink, and ScopeSink, which determine the locations of seeded mutants. Furthermore, the user can extend μSE by customizing the API calls targeted by the mutation analysis.μSE is also practical, as it makes use of filtering techniques based on compilation and execution criteria that reduces the number of ineffective mutations.

Data on software vulnerabilities, products and exploits is typically collected from multiple non-structured sources. Valuable information, e.g., on which products are affected by which exploits, is conveyed by matching data from those sources, i.e., through their relations. In this paper, we leverage this simple albeit unexplored observation to introduce a statistical relational learning (SRL) approach for the analysis of vulnerabilities, products and exploits. In particular, we focus on the problem of determining the existence of an exploit for a given product, given information about the relations between products and vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities and exploits, focusing on Industrial Control Systems (ICS), the National Vulnerability Database and ExploitDB. Using RDN-Boost, we were able to reach an AUC ROC of 0.83 and an AUC PR of 0.69 for the problem at hand. To reach that performance, we indicate that it is instrumental to include textual features, e.g., extracted from the description of vulnerabilities, as well as structured information, e.g., about product categories. In addition, using interpretable relational regression trees we report simple rules that shed insight on factors impacting the weaponization of ICS products.

This article describes the process of synchronizing the generation of random sequences by a quantum random number generator (QRNG) that can be used as secret keys for known cryptographic transformations. The subject of the research is a method for synchronizing the generation of random QRNG sequences based on L1 (C/A) signals of the global positioning system (GPS) using control correcting information received from control correcting stations.

In Indonesia, there have been many certificates forgery happened. The lack of security system for the certificate and the difficulty in verification process toward the authenticity certificate become the main factor of the certificate forgery cases happen. The aim of this research is to improve the security system such digital signature and QR code to authenticate the authenticity certificate and to facilitate the user in verify their certificate and also to minimize the certificate forgery cases. The aim of this research is to improve the security system such digital signature and QR code to authenticate the authenticity certificate and to facilitate the user in verify their certificate and also to minimize the certificate forgery cases. The application is built in web system to facilitate the user to access it everywhere and any time. This research uses Research and Development method for problem analysis and to develop application using Software Development Life Cycle method with waterfall approach. Black box testing is chosen as testing method for each function in this system. The result of this research is creatcate application that’s designed to support the publishing and the verification of the electronic authenticity certificate by online. There are two main schemes in system: the scheme in making e-certificate and the scheme of verification QR Code. There is the electronic professional certificate application by applying digital signature and QR Code. It can publish e-certificate that can prevent from criminal action such certificate forgery, that’s showed in implementation and can be proven in test.

Quick response (QR) codes are currently used ubiq-uitously. Their interaction protocol design is initially unsecured. It forces users to scan QR codes, which makes it harder to differentiate a genuine code from a malicious one. Intruders can change the original QR code and make it fake, which can lead to phishing websites that collect sensitive data. The interaction model can be improved and made more secure by adding some modifications to the backend side of the application. This paper addresses the vulnerabilities of QR codes and recommends improvements in security design. Furthermore, two state-of-the-art algorithms, Digital Signature (DS) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDS), are analytically compared to determine their strengths in QR code security.

This research presented a digital watermarking scheme using multi-level authentication for protecting QR code images in order to provide security and authenticity. This research focuses on the improved digital watermarking scheme for QR code security that can protect the confidentiality of the information stored in QR code images from the public. Information modification, malicious attack, and copyright violation may occur due to weak security and disclosure pattern of QR code. Digital watermarking can be a solution to reduce QR code imitation and increase QR code security and authenticity. The objectives of this research are to provide QR code image authentication and security, tamper localization, and recovery scheme on QR code images. This research proposed digital watermarking for QR code images based on multi-level authentication with Least Significant Bit (LSB) and SHA-256 hash function. The embedding and extracting watermark utilized region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI) in the spatial domain for improving the depth and width of QR code application in the anti-counterfeiting field. The experiments tested the reversibility and robustness of the proposed scheme after a tempered watermarked QR code image. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides multi-level security, withstands tampered attacks and it provided high imperceptibility of QR code image.