Biblio

This article is about the current situation of cybercrime activity in the world. Research was planned to seek the possible protection measures taking into account the last events which might create an appropriate background for increasing of ransomware damages and cybercrime attacks. Nowadays, the most spread types of cybercrimes are fishing, theft of personal or payment data, cryptojacking, cyberespionage and ransomware. The last one is the most dangerous. It has ability to spread quickly and causes damages and sufficient financial loses. The major problem of this ransomware type is unpredictability of its behavior. It could be overcome only after the defined ransom was paid. This conditions created an appropriate background for the activation of cyber criminals’ activity even the organization of cyber gangs – professional, well-organized and well-prepared (tactical) group. So, researches conducted in this field have theoretical and practical value in the scientific sphere of research.

Phishing, ransomware and cryptojacking are the main threats to cyber security in recent years. We consider the stages of phishing attacks, examples of such attacks, specifically, attacks using ransomware, malicious PDF files, and banking trojans. The article describes the specifics of phishing emails. Advices on phishing protection are given.

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

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) [11] draws significant attention as a privacy-preserving way for cloud computing because it allows computation on encrypted messages called ciphertexts. Among numerous FHE schemes [2]–[4], [8], [9], HE for Arithmetic of Approximate Numbers (HEAAN [3]), which is also known as CKKS (Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song), is rapidly gaining popularity [10] as it supports computation on real numbers. A critical shortcoming of HE is the high computational complexity of ciphertext arithmetic, especially, HE multiplication (HE Mul). For example, the execution time for computation on encrypted data (ciphertext) increases from 100s to 10,000s of times compared to that on native, unen-crypted messages. However, a large body of HE acceleration studies, including ones exploiting GPUs and FPGAs, lack a rigorous analysis of computational complexity and data access patterns of HE Mul with large parameter sets on CPUs, the most popular computing platform.

Security patterns are proven solutions to recurring problems in software development. The growing importance of secure software development has introduced diverse research efforts on security patterns that mostly focused on classification schemes, evolution and evaluation of the patterns. Despite a huge mature history of research and popularity among researchers, security patterns have not fully penetrated software development practices. Besides, software security education has not been benefited by these patterns though a commonly stated motivation is the dissemination of expert knowledge and experience. This is because the patterns lack a simple embodiment to help students learn about vulnerable code, and to guide new developers on secure coding. In order to address this problem, we propose to conduct intelligent data mining in the context of software engineering to discover learner-friendly software security patterns. Our proposed model entails knowledge discovery from large scale published real-world vulnerability histories in software applications. We harness association rule mining for frequent pattern discovery to mine easily comprehensible and explainable learner-friendly rules, mainly of the type "flaw implies fix" and "attack type implies flaw", so as to enhance training in secure coding which in turn would augment secure software development. We propose to build a learner-friendly intelligent tutoring system (ITS) based on the newly discovered security patterns and rules explored. We present our proposed model based on association rule mining in secure software development with the goal of building this ITS. Our proposed model and prototype experiments are discussed in this paper along with challenges and ongoing work.

This paper describes the process of developing data visualisations to enhance a commercial software platform for combating insider threat, whose existing UI, while perfectly functional, was limited in its ability to allow analysts to easily spot the patterns and outliers that visualisation naturally reveals. We describe the design and development process, proceeding from initial tasks/requirements gathering, understanding the platform’s data formats, the rationale behind the visualisations’ design, and then refining the prototype through gathering feedback from representative domain experts who are also current users of the software. Through a number of example scenarios, we show that the visualisation can support the identified tasks and aid analysts in discovering and understanding potentially risky insider activity within a large user base.

Discovering vulnerabilities is an information-intensive task that requires a developer to locate the defects in the code that have security implications. The task is difficult due to the growing code complexity and some developer's lack of security expertise. Although tools have been created to ease the difficulty, no single one is sufficient. In practice, developers often use a combination of tools to uncover vulnerabilities. Yet, the basis on which different tools are composed is under explored. In this paper, we examine the composition base by taking advantage of the tool design patterns informed by foraging theory. We follow a design science methodology and carry out a three-step empirical study: mapping 34 foraging-theoretic patterns in a specific vulnerability discovery tool, formulating hypotheses about the value and cost of foraging when considering two composition scenarios, and performing a human-subject study to test the hypotheses. Our work offers insights into guiding developers' tool usage in detecting software vulnerabilities.

With the paradigm shift to cloud-based operations, reliable and secure access to and transfer of data between differing security domains has never been more essential. A Cross Domain Solution (CDS) is a guarded interface which serves to execute the secure access and/or transfer of data between isolated and/or differing security domains defined by an administrative security policy. Cross domain security requires trustworthiness at the confluence of the hardware and software components which implement a security policy. Security components must be relied upon to defend against widely encompassing threats – consider insider threats and nation state threat actors which can be both onsite and offsite threat actors – to information assurance. Current implementations of CDS systems use suboptimal Trusted Computing Bases (TCB) without any formal verification proofs, confirming the gap between blind trust and trustworthiness. Moreover, most CDSs are exclusively operated by Department of Defense agencies and are not readily available to the commercial sectors, nor are they available for independent security verification. Still, more CDSs are only usable in physically isolated environments such as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities and are inconsistent with the paradigm shift to cloud environments. Our purpose is to address the question of how trustworthiness can be implemented in a remotely deployable CDS that also supports availability and accessibility to all sectors. In this paper, we present a novel CDS system architecture which is the first to use a formally verified TCB. Additionally, our CDS model is the first of its kind to utilize a computation-isolation approach which allows our CDS to be remotely deployable for use in cloud-based solutions.

Construction of immersive architectural wisdom guiding environment based on virtual reality is studied in this paper. Emerging development of the computer smart systems have provided the engineers a novel solution for the platform construction. Network virtualization is currently the most unclear and controversial concept in the industry regarding the definition of virtualization subdivisions. To improve the current study, we use the VR system to implement the platform. The wisdom guiding environment is built through the virtual data modelling and the interactive connections. The platform is implemented through the software. The test on the data analysis accuracy and the interface optimization is conducted.

Recently, most of the processes are being computerized, due to the development of information and communication technology. In proportion to this, cyber-attacks are also increasing, and state-sponsored cyber-attacks are becoming a great threat to the country. These attacks are often composed of stages and proceed step-by-step, so for defense, it is necessary to predict the next action and perform appropriate mitigation. To this end, the paper proposes a mitigation-based performance evaluation method. We developed the new true positive which can have a value between 0 and 1 according to the mitigation. The experiment result and case studies show that the proposed method can effectively measure forecasting results under cyber security defense system.

As the number of Internet of things devices increases, there is a growing importance of securely managing and storing the secret and private keys in these devices. Public-key cryptosystems or symmetric encryption algorithms both use special keys that need to be kept secret from other peers in the network. Additionally, ensuring the integrity of the installed application firmware of these devices is another security problem. In this study, private key storage methods are explained in general. Also, ESP32-S2 device is used for experimental case study for its robust built-in trusted platform module. Secure boot and flash encryption functionalities of ESP32-S2 device, which offers a solution to these security problems, are explained and tested in detail.

Addressing vulnerability propagation has become a major issue in software ecosystems. Existing approaches hold the promise of detecting widespread vulnerabilities but cannot be applied to verify effectively whether propagated vulnerable code still poses threats. We present OCTOPOCS, which uses a reformed Proof-of-Concept (PoC), to verify whether a vulnerability is propagated. Using context-aware taint analysis, OCTOPOCS extracts crash primitives (the parts used in the shared code area between the original vulnerable software and propagated software) from the original PoC. OCTOPOCS then utilizes directed symbolic execution to generate guiding inputs that direct the execution of the propagated software from the entry point to the shared code area. Thereafter, OCTOPOCS creates a new PoC by combining crash primitives and guiding inputs. It finally verifies the propagated vulnerability using the created PoC. We evaluated OCTOPOCS with 15 real-world C and C++ vulnerable software pairs, with results showing that OCTOPOCS successfully verified 14 propagated vulnerabilities.

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

Due to its ability to detect many frequently occurring security vulnerabilities, taint analysis is one of the core static analyses used by many static application security testing (SAST) tools. Previous studies have identified issues that software developers face with SAST tools. This paper reports on our experience in building a configurable taint analysis tool, named SecuCheck, that runs in multiple integrated development environments. SecuCheck is built on top of multiple existing components and comes with a Java-internal domain-specific language fluentTQL for specifying taint-flows, designed for software developers. We evaluate the applicability of SecuCheck in detecting eleven taint-style vulnerabilities in microbench programs and three real-world Java applications with known vulnerabilities. Empirically, we identify factors that impact the runtime of SecuCheck.

In order to improve the continuity of cryptographic services and ensure the quality of services in the cloud environment, a dynamic migration framework of cryptographic service virtual machines based on the network shared storage system is proposed. Based on the study of the security threats in the migration process, a dynamic migration attack model is established, and the security requirement of dynamic migration is analyzed. It designs and implements the dynamic security migration management software, which includes a dynamic migration security enhancement module based on the Libvirt API, role-based access control policy, and transmission channel protection module. A cryptographic service virtual machine migration environment is built, and the designed management software and security mechanism are verified and tested. The experimental results show that the method proposed in the paper can effectively improve the security of cryptographic service virtual machine migration.

Broadcasting applications such as video surveillance systems are using High Definition (HD) videos. The use of high-resolution videos increases significantly the data volume of video coding standards such as High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Advanced Video Coding (AVC), which increases the challenge for storing, processing, encrypting, and transmitting these data over different communication channels. Video compression standards use state-of-the-art techniques to compress raw video sequences more efficiently, such techniques require high computational complexity and memory utilization. With the emergent of using HEVC and video surveillance systems, many security risks arise such as man-in-the-middle attacks, and unauthorized disclosure. Such risks can be mitigated by encrypting the traffic of HEVC. The most widely used encryption algorithm is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Most of the computational complexity in AES hardware-implemented is due to S-box or sub-byte operation and that because it needs many resources and it is a non-linear structure. The proposed AES S-box ROM design considers the latest HEVC used for homeland security video surveillance systems. This paper presents different designs for VHDL efficient ROM implementation of AES S-box using IP core generator, ROM components, and using Functions, which are all supported by Xilinx. IP core generator has Block Memory Generator (BMG) component in its library. S-box IP core ROM is implemented using Single port block memory. The S-box lookup table has been used to fill the ROM using the .coe file format provided during the initialization of the IP core ROM. The width is set to 8-bit to address the 256 values while the depth is set to 8-bit which represents the data filed in the ROM. The whole design is synthesized using Xilinx ISE Design Suite 14.7 software, while Modelism (version10.4a) is used for the simulation process. The proposed IP core ROM design has shown better memory utilization compared to non-IP core ROM design, which is more suitable for memory-intensive applications. The proposed design is suitable for implementation using the FPGA ROM design. Hardware complexity, frequency, memory utilization, and delay are presented in this paper.

It is not possible to speak about a complete security system without also taking into account the video surveillance system (CCTV). The reason is that CCTV systems offer the most spectacular results both in the security of goods and people and in the field of customer relations, marketing, traffic monitoring and the list can go on. With the development of the software industry the applicability of CCTV systems has greatly increased, largely due to image processing applications. The present paper, which is the continuation of an article already presented at an international conference, aims to shape the electrical characteristics of a common video surveillance system. The proposed method will be validated in two different programming environments.

Vulnerability detection identifies defects in various commercial software. Because most vulnerability detection methods are based on the source code, they are not useful if the source code is unavailable. In this paper, we propose a binary vulnerability detection method and use our tool named BVD that extracts binary features with the help of an intermediate language and then detects the vulnerabilities using an embedding model. Sufficiently robust features allow the binaries compiled in cross-architecture to be compared. Consequently, a similarity evaluation provides more accurate results.

Vision systems, i.e., systems that enable the detection and tracking of objects in images, have gained substantial importance over the past decades. They are used in quality assurance applications, e.g., for finding surface defects in products during manufacturing, surveillance, but also automated driving, requiring reliable behavior. Interestingly, there is only little work on quality assurance and especially testing of vision systems in general. In this paper, we contribute to the area of testing vision software, and present a framework for the automated generation of tests for systems based on vision and image recognition with the focus on easy usage, uniform usability and expandability. The framework makes use of existing libraries for modifying the original images and to obtain similarities between the original and modified images. We show how such a framework can be used for testing a particular industrial application on identifying defects on riblet surfaces and present preliminary results from the image classification domain.

Emerging non-volatile memory technology enables non-volatile main memory (NVMM) that can provide larger capacity and better energy-saving opportunities than DRAMs. However, its non-volatility raises security concerns, where the data in NVMMs can be taken if the memory is stolen. Memory encryption protects the data by limiting it always stays encrypted outside the processor boundary. However, the decryption latency before the data being used by the processor brings new performance burdens. Unlike DRAM-based main memory, such performance overhead worsens on the NVMM due to the slow latency. In this paper, we will introduce optimizations that can be used to re-design the encryption scheme. In our tests, our two new designs, 3-level split counter mode encryption and 8-block split counter mode encryption, improved performance by 26% and 30% at maximum and by 8% and 9% on average from the original encryption scheme, split counter encryption.

The transmission of various facilities and services via the network is known as cloud computing. They involve data storage, data centers, networks, internet, and software applications, among other systems and features. Cryptography is a technique in which plain text is converted into cipher-text to preserve information security. It basically consists of encryption and decryption. The level of safety is determined by the category of encryption and decryption technique employed. The key plays an important part in the encryption method. If the key is leaked, anyone can intrude into the data and there is no use of this encryption. When the data is lost and the server fails to deliver it to the user, then it is to be recovered from any of the backup server using a recovery technique. The main objective is to develop an advanced method to increase the scope for data protection in cloud. Elliptic Curve Cryptography is a relatively new approach in the area of cryptography. The degree of security provides higher as compared to other Cryptographic techniques. The raw data and it’s accompanying as CII characters are combined and sent into the Elliptic Curve Cryptography as a source. This method eliminates the need for the transmitter and recipient to have a similar search database. Finally, a plain text is converted into cipher-text using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The results are oat aimed by implementing a C program for Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Encryption, decryption and recovery using suitable algorithms are done.

Binary Edwards curves (BEC) over finite fields can be used as an additive cyclic elliptic curve group to enable elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), where the most time consuming is scalar multiplication. This operation is computed by means of the group operation, either point addition or point doubling. The most notorious property of these curves is that their group operation is complete, which mitigates the need to verify for special cases. Different formulae for the group operation in BECs have been reported in the literature. Of particular interest are those designed to work with the differential properties of the Montgomery ladder, which offer constant time computation of the scalar multiplication as well as reduced field operations count. In this work, we review and compare the complexity of BEC differential addition and doubling in terms of field operations. We also provide software implementations of scalar multiplications which employ these formulae under a fair scenario. Our work provides insights on the advantages of using BECs in ECC. Our study of the different formulae for group addition in BEC also showcases the advantages and limitations of the different design strategies employed in each case.

Cloud security includes the strategies which works together to guard data and infrastructure with a set of policies, procedures, controls and technologies. These security events are arranged to protect cloud data, support supervisory obedience and protect customers' privacy as well as setting endorsement rules for individual users and devices. The partition-based handling and encryption mechanism which provide fine-grained admittance control and protected data sharing to the data users in cloud computing. Graph partition problems fall under the category of NP-hard problems. Resolutions to these problems are generally imitative using heuristics and approximation algorithms. Partition problems strategy is used in bi-criteria approximation or resource augmentation approaches with a common extension of hyper graphs, which can address the storage hierarchy.

Traffic classification is fundamental to network operators to manage the network better. L7 classification and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) using regular expressions are vital components to provide application-aware traffic classification. Nevertheless, there are open challenges yet, such as programmability and performance combined with security. In this paper, we introduce eBPFlow, a fast application layer packet classifier in hardware. eBPFlow allows packet classification with DPI on packet headers and payloads in runtime. It enables programming of regular expressions (RegEx) and security protocols using eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter). We built eBPFlow on NetFPGA SUME 40 Gbps and created several application classifiers. The tests were performed in a physical testbed. Our results show that eBPFlow supports packet classification on the application layer with line rate. It only consumes 22 W.

With tons of efforts spent on its mitigation, Cross-site scripting (XSS) remains one of the most prevalent security threats on the internet. Decades of exploitation and remediation demonstrated that code inspection and testing alone does not eliminate XSS vulnerabilities in complex web applications with a high degree of confidence. This paper introduces Google's secure-by-design engineering paradigm that effectively prevents DOM-based XSS vulnerabilities in large-scale web development. Our approach, named API hardening, enforces a series of company-wide secure coding practices. We provide a set of secure APIs to replace native DOM APIs that are prone to XSS vulnerabilities. Through a combination of type contracts and appropriate validation and escaping, the secure APIs ensure that applications based thereon are free of XSS vulnerabilities. We deploy a simple yet capable compile-time checker to guarantee that developers exclusively use our hardened APIs to interact with the DOM. We make various of efforts to scale this approach to tens of thousands of engineers without significant productivity impact. By offering rigorous tooling and consultant support, we help developers adopt the secure coding practices as seamlessly as possible. We present empirical results showing how API hardening has helped reduce the occurrences of XSS vulnerabilities in Google's enormous code base over the course of two-year deployment.