Biblio

Redaction of personal, confidential and sensitive information from documents is becoming increasingly important for individuals and organizations. In past years, there have been many well-publicized cases of data leaks from various popular companies. When the data contains sensitive information, these leaks pose a serious threat. To protect and conceal sensitive information, many companies have policies and laws about processing and sanitizing sensitive information in business documents.The traditional approach of manually finding and matching millions of words and then redacting is slow and error-prone. This paper examines different models to automate the identification and redaction of personal and sensitive information contained within the documents using named entity recognition. Sensitive entities example person’s name, bank account details or Aadhaar numbers targeted for redaction, are recognized based on the file’s content, providing users with an interactive approach to redact the documents by changing selected sensitive terms.

Cloud computing has included an essential part of its industry and statistics garage is the main service provided, where a huge amount of data can be stored in a virtual server. Storing data in public platforms may be vulnerable to threats. Consequently, the obligation of secure usage and holistic backup of statistics falls upon the corporation providers. Subsequently, an affordable and compliant mechanism of records auditing that permits groups to audit the facts stored in shared clouds whilst acting quick and trouble- unfastened healing might be a fairly sought-after cloud computing task concept. There is a lot of advantage in growing this domain and there is considerable precedence to follow from the examples of dropbox, google power among others.

The collection of digital information by governments, companies and individuals creates tremendous opportunities for knowledge and information-based decision-making. Driven by mutual benefit and laws and regulations, there is a need for data exchange and publication between all parties. However, data in its original form usually contains sensitive information about individuals and publishing such data would violate personal privacy. Privacy Protection Data Distribution (PPDP) provides methods and tools to release useful information while protecting data privacy. In recent years, PPDP has received extensive attention from the research community, and many solutions have been proposed for different data release scenarios. How to ensure the availability of data under the premise of protecting user privacy is the core problem to be solved in this field. This paper studies the existing achievements of privacy protection data release anonymity technology, focusing on the existing anonymity technology in three aspects of high-dimensional, high-deficiency, and complex relational data, and analyzes and summarizes them.

Cyber resiliency in Cloud computing is one of the most important capability of an enterprise network that provides continues ability to withstand and quick recovery from the adversary conditions. This capability can be measured through cybersecurity risk assessment techniques. However, cybersecurity risk management studies in cloud computing resiliency approaches are deficient. This paper proposes resilient cloud cybersecurity risk assessment tailored specifically to Dropbox with two methods: technical-based solution motivated by a cybersecurity risk assessment of cloud services, and a target personnel-based solution guided by cybersecurity-related survey among employees to identify their knowledge that qualifies them withstand to any cyberattack. The proposed work attempts to identify cloud vulnerabilities, assess threats and detect high risk components, to finally propose appropriate safeguards such as failure predicting and removing, redundancy or load balancing techniques for quick recovery and return to pre-attack state if failure happens.

Recent technological advancement demands organizations to have measures in place to manage their Information Technology (IT) systems. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAF) offer companies an efficient technique to manage their IT systems aligning their business requirements with effective solutions. As a result, experts have developed multiple EAF's such as TOGAF, Zachman, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA to help organizations to achieve their objectives by reducing the costs and complexity. These frameworks however, concentrate mostly on business needs lacking holistic enterprise-wide security practices, which may cause enterprises to be exposed for significant security risks resulting financial loss. This study focuses on evaluating business capabilities in TOGAF, NIST, COBIT, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA, and Zachman, and identify essential security requirements in TOGAF, SABSA and COBIT19 frameworks by comparing their resiliency processes, which helps organization to easily select applicable framework. The study shows that; besides business requirements, EAF need to include precise cybersecurity guidelines aligning EA business strategies. Enterprises now need to focus more on building resilient approach, which is beyond of protection, detection and prevention. Now enterprises should be ready to withstand against the cyber-attacks applying relevant cyber resiliency approach improving the way of dealing with impacts of cybersecurity risks.

Signcryption is a sophisticated cryptographic tool that combines the benefits of digital signature and data encryption in a single step, resulting in reduced computation and storage cost. However, the existing signcryption techniques do not account for a scenario in which a company must escrow an employee's private encryption key so that the corporation does not lose the capacity to decrypt a ciphertext when the employee or user is no longer available. To circumvent the issue of non-repudiation, the private signing key does not need to be escrowed. As a result, this paper presents an implicit certificate-based signcryption technique with private encryption key escrow, which can assist an organization in preventing the loss of private encryption. A certificate, or more broadly, a digital signature, protects users' public encryption and signature keys from man-in-the-middle attacks under our proposed approach.

When location-based services (LBS) are delivered, location data should be protected against honest-but-curious LBS providers, them being quasi-identifiers. One of the existing approaches to achieving this goal is location k-anonymity, which leverages the presence of a trusted party, called location trusted service (LTS), playing the role of anonymizer. A drawback of this approach is that the location trusted service is a single point of failure and traces all the users. Moreover, the protection is completely nullified if a global passive adversary is allowed, able to monitor the flow of messages, as the source of the query can be identified despite location k-anonymity. In this paper, we propose a distributed and hierarchical LTS model, overcoming both the above drawbacks. Moreover, position notification is used as cover traffic to hide queries and multicast is minimally adopted to hide responses, to keep k-anonymity also against the global adversary, thus enabling the possibility that LBS are delivered within social networks.

In this paper, an effective Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack response system was proposed. Reference to the NIST Cyber Security Framework (CRF) was made to present the most cost-effective measures. It has developed a system that detects and responds to real-time AM-HIDS (Anti Malware Host Intrusion Detection System) that monitors abnormal change SW of PCs as a prevention of APT. It has proved that the best government-run security measures are possible to provide an excellent cost-effectiveness environment to prevent APT attacks.

In this paper, we present FireBugs for Finding and Repairing Bugs based on security patterns. For the common misuse patterns of cryptography APIs (crypto APIs), we encode common cryptography rules into the pattern representations for bug detection and program repair regarding cryptography rule violations. In the evaluation, we conducted a case study to assess the bug detection capability by applying FireBugs to datasets mined from both open source and commercial projects. Also, we conducted a user study with professional software engineers at Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company to estimate the program repair capability. This evaluation showed that FireBugs can help professional engineers develop various cryptographic requirements in a resilient application.

Smart grids are being continually adopted as a replacement of the traditional power grid systems to ensure safe, efficient, and cost-effective power distribution. The smart grid is a heterogeneous communication network made up of various devices such as smart meters, automation, and emerging technologies interacting with each other. As a result, the smart grid inherits most of the security vulnerabilities of cyber systems, putting the smart grid at risk of cyber-attacks. To secure the communication between smart grid entities, namely the smart meters and the utility, we propose in this paper a communication infrastructure built on top of a blockchain network, specifically Ethereum. All two-way communication between the smart meters and the utility is assumed to be transactions governed by smart contracts. Smart contracts are designed in such a way to ensure that each smart meter is authentic and each smart meter reading is reported securely and privately. We present a simulation of a sample smart grid and report all the costs incurred from building such a grid. The simulations illustrate the feasibility and security of the proposed architecture. They also point to weaknesses that must be addressed, such as scalability and cost.

The need of more secured and environmental energy is becoming a necessity and priority in an environment suffering from serious problems due to technological development. Since the Smart Grid is a promising alternative that supports green energy and enhances a better management of electricity, the security side has became one of the major and critical associated issues in building the communication network in the microgrid.In this paper we will present the Smart Grid Cyber security challenges and propose a distributed algorithm that face one of the biggest problems threatening the smart grid which is fires.

In this century, the demand for energy is increasing daily, and the need for energy resources has become urgent and inevitable. New ways of generating energy, such as renewable resources that depend on many sources, including the sun and wind energy will contribute to the future of humankind largely and effectively. These renewable sources are facing major challenges that cannot be ignored which also require more researches on appropriate solutions . This has led to the emergence of a new type of network user called prosumer, which causes new challenges such as the intermittent nature of renewable. Smart grids have emerged as a solution to integrate these distributed energy sources. It also provides a mechanism to maintain safety and security for power supply networks. The main idea of smart grids is to facilitate local production and consumption By customers and consumers.Distributed ledger technology (DLT) or Block-chain technology has evolved dramatically since 2008 that coincided with the birth of its first application Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency. This innovation led to sparked in the digital revolution, which provides decentralization, security, and democratization of information storage and transfer systems across numerous sectors/industries. Block-chain can be applied for the sake of the durability and safety of energy systems. In this paper, we will propose a new distributed framework that provides protection based on block-chain technology for energy systems to enhance self-defense capability against those cyber-attacks.

In smart cities, data privacy and security issues of Electronic Health Record(EHR) are grabbing importance day by day as cyber attackers have identified the weaknesses of EHR platforms. Besides, health insurance companies interacting with the EHRs play a vital role in covering the whole or a part of the financial risks of a patient. Insurance companies have specific policies for which patients have to pay them. Sometimes the insurance policies can be altered by fraudulent entities. Another problem that patients face in smart cities is when they interact with a health organization, insurance company, or others, they have to prove their identity to each of the organizations/companies separately. Health organizations or insurance companies have to ensure they know with whom they are interacting. To build a platform where a patient's personal information and insurance policy are handled securely, we introduce an application of blockchain to solve the above-mentioned issues. In this paper, we present a solution for the healthcare system that will provide patient privacy and transparency towards the insurance policies incorporating blockchain. Privacy of the patient information will be provided using cryptographic tools.

The insurance business plays a quite significant role in people's lives, but in the process of claim settlement, there are still various frauds such that the insurance companies' refusal to compensate or customers' malicious fraud to obtain compensation. Therefore, it is very important to ensure fair and just claims. In this paper, by combining the blockchain technology and the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption system, we build a scheme for secure storage and update for insurance records under the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage environment in the insurance system. In this scheme, we use the fog node to outsource encryption of insurance records to improve the efficiency of the staff; In addition, we store encrypted insurance records on IPFS to ensure the security of the storage platform and avoid the single point failure of the centralized mechanism. In addition, we use the immutability of the blockchain to achieve the non-repudiation of both insurance companies and the client. The security proof shows that the proposed scheme can achieve selective security against selected keyword attacks. Our scheme is efficient and feasible under performance analysis and real data set experiments.

Businesses were moving during the past decades to-ward full digital models, which made companies face new threats and cyberattacks affecting their services and, consequently, their profits. To avoid negative impacts, companies' investments in cybersecurity are increasing considerably. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) operate on small budgets, minimal technical expertise, and few personnel to address cybersecurity threats. In order to address such challenges, it is essential to promote novel approaches that can intuitively present cybersecurity-related technical information.This paper introduces SecBot, a cybersecurity-driven conversational agent (i.e., chatbot) for the support of cybersecurity planning and management. SecBot applies concepts of neural networks and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to interact and extract information from a conversation. SecBot can (a) identify cyberattacks based on related symptoms, (b) indicate solutions and configurations according to business demands, and (c) provide insightful information for the decision on cybersecurity investments and risks. A formal description had been developed to describe states, transitions, a language, and a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementation. A case study and a performance evaluation were conducted to provide evidence of the proposed solution's feasibility and accuracy.

The recommender system is an important application in big data analytics because accurate recommendation items or high-valued suggestions can bring high profit to both commercial companies and customers. To make precise recommendations, a recommender system often needs large and fine-grained data for training. In the current big data era, data often exist in the form of isolated islands, and it is difficult to integrate the data scattered due to privacy security concerns. Moreover, privacy laws and regulations make it harder to share data. Therefore, designing a privacy-preserving recommender system is of paramount importance. Existing privacy-preserving recommender system models mainly adapt cryptography approaches to achieve privacy preservation. However, cryptography approaches have heavy overhead when performing encryption and decryption operations and they lack a good level of flexibility. In this paper, we propose a Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) based approach for federated recommender system. Our proposed efficient and scalable federated recommender system can make full use of multiple source data from different data owners while guaranteeing preservation of privacy of contributing parties. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets show that our approach can achieve both high time efficiency and accuracy under small privacy budgets.

This paper puts forward a formalized method of emergency plan based on ontology, sums up the main concepts such as system, event, rule, measure, constraint and resource, and analyzes the logical relationship among concepts. A digital intelligent emergency plan storage scheme based on relational database model is proposed. In this paper, full-text search, data search and knowledge search are comprehensively used to adapt to the information needs and characteristics of different users' query plans. Finally, an example of emergency plan made by a power supply company is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

Privacy is one of the biggest concerns of the coming decade, ranking third among concerns of consumers. Data breaches and leaks are constantly in the news with companies like Facebook and Amazon being outed for their excessive data collection. With companies and governmental agencies tracking and monitoring individuals to a great degree, there are concerns that contemporary technologies that feed into these systems can be misused or misappropriated further. Frameworks currently in place fail to address many of these consumer's concerns and even the legal framework could use further elaboration to better control the way data is handled. In this paper, We address the current industrial standards, frameworks, and concerns of one of the biggest technology trends right now, the Augmented Reality. The expected prevalence of augmented reality applications necessitates a deeper study not only of their security but the expected challenges of users using such applications as well.

Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a comprehensive empirical study on the security risks of global banking apps to provide useful insights and improve the security of banking apps. Since data-related weaknesses in banking apps are critical and may directly cause serious financial loss, this paper first revisits the state-of-the-art available tools and finds that they have limited capability in identifying data-related security weaknesses of banking apps. To complement the capability of existing tools in data-related weakness detection, we propose a three-phase automated security risk assessment system, named Ausera, which leverages static program analysis techniques and sensitive keyword identification. By leveraging Ausera, we collect 2,157 weaknesses in 693 real-world banking apps across 83 countries, which we use as a basis to conduct a comprehensive empirical study from different aspects, such as global distribution and weakness evolution during version updates. We find that apps owned by subsidiary banks are always less secure than or equivalent to those owned by parent banks. In addition, we also track the patching of weaknesses and receive much positive feedback from banking entities so as to improve the security of banking apps in practice. We further find that weaknesses derived from outdated versions of banking apps or third-party libraries are highly prone to being exploited by attackers. To date, we highlight that 21 banks have confirmed the weaknesses we reported (including 126 weaknesses in total). We also exchange insights with 7 banks, such as HSBC in UK and OCBC in Singapore, via in-person or online meetings to help them improve their apps. We hope that the insights developed in this paper will inform the communities about the gaps among multiple stakeholders, including banks, academic researchers, and third-party security companies.

This study focuses on identifying the factors contributing to a sense of personal responsibility that could improve understanding of insecure cybersecurity behavior and guide research toward more effective messaging targeting non-adopting populations. Towards that, we ran a 2(account type) x2(usage scenario) x2(message type) between-group study with 237 United States adult participants on Amazon MTurk, and investigated how the non-adopting population allocates blame, and under what circumstances they blame the end user among the parties who hold responsibility: the software companies holding data, the attackers exposing data, and others. We find users primarily hold service providers accountable for breaches but they feel the same companies should not enforce stronger security policies on users. Results indicate that people do hold end users accountable for their behavior in the event of a breach, especially when the users' behavior affects others. Implications of our findings in risk communication is discussed in the paper.

Cybersecurity is a major issue today. It is predicted that cybercrime will cost the world \$6 trillion annually by 2021. It is important to make logins secure as well as to make advances in security in order to catch cybercriminals. This paper will design and create a device that will use Fuzzy logic to identify a person by the rhythm and frequency of their typing. The device will take data from a user from a normal password entry session. This data will be used to make a Fuzzy system that will be able to identify the user by their typing speed. An application of this project could be used to make a more secure log-in system for a user. The log-in system would not only check that the correct password was entered but also that the rhythm of how the password was typed matched the user. Another application of this system could be used to help catch cybercriminals. A cybercriminal may have a certain rhythm at which they type at and this could be used like a fingerprint to help officials locate cybercriminals.

Throughout the life cycle of any technical project, the enterprise needs to assess the risks associated with its development, commissioning, operation and decommissioning. This article defines the task of researching risks in relation to the operation of a data storage subsystem in the cloud infrastructure of a geographically distributed company and the tools that are required for this. Analysts point out that, compared to 2018, in 2019 there were 3.5 times more cases of confidential information leaks from storages on unprotected (freely accessible due to incorrect configuration) servers in cloud services. The total number of compromised personal data and payment information records increased 5.4 times compared to 2018 and amounted to more than 8.35 billion records. Moreover, the share of leaks of payment information has decreased, but the percentage of leaks of personal data has grown and accounts for almost 90% of all leaks from cloud storage. On average, each unsecured service identified resulted in 33.7 million personal data records being leaked. Leaks are mainly related to misconfiguration of services and stored resources, as well as human factors. These impacts can be minimized by improving the skills of cloud storage administrators and regularly auditing storage. Despite its seeming insecurity, the cloud is a reliable way of storing data. At the same time, leaks are still occurring. According to Kaspersky Lab, every tenth (11%) data leak from the cloud became possible due to the actions of the provider, while a third of all cyber incidents in the cloud (31% in Russia and 33% in the world) were due to gullibility company employees caught up in social engineering techniques. Minimizing the risks associated with the storage of personal data is one of the main tasks when operating a company's cloud infrastructure.

Zero Trust Model ensures each node is responsible for the approval of the transaction before it gets committed. The data owners can track their data while it’s shared amongst the various data custodians ensuring data security. The consensus algorithm enables the users to trust the network as malicious nodes fail to get approval from all nodes, thereby causing the transaction to be aborted. The use case chosen to demonstrate the proposed consensus algorithm is the college placement system. The algorithm has been extended to implement a diversified, decentralized, automated placement system, wherein the data owner i.e. the student, maintains an immutable certificate vault and the student’s data has been validated by a verifier network i.e. the academic department and placement department. The data transfer from student to companies is recorded as transactions in the distributed ledger or blockchain allowing the data to be tracked by the student.

This work represents an interdisciplinary effort to proactively identify insider threats, using natural language processing and personality profiles. Profiles were developed for the relevant insider threat types using the five-factor model of personality and were used in a proof-of-concept detection system. The system employs a third-party cloud service that uses natural language processing to analyze personality profiles based on personal content. In the end, an assessment was made over the feasibility of the system using a public dataset.

In this New Age where information has an indispensable value for companies and data mining technologies are growing in the area of Information Technology, privacy remains a sensitive issue in the approach to the exploitation of the large volume of data generated and processed by companies. The way data is collected, handled and destined is not yet clearly defined and has been the subject of constant debate by several areas of activity. This literature review gives an overview of privacy in the era of Business Analytics and Big Data in different timelines, the opportunities and challenges faced, aiming to broaden discussions on a subject that deserves extreme attention and aims to show that, despite measures for data protection have been created, there is still a need to discuss the subject among the different parties involved in the process to achieve a positive ideal for both users and companies.