Biblio

In Production System Engineering (PSE), domain experts aim at effectively and efficiently analyzing and mitigating information security risks to product and process qualities for manufacturing. However, traditional security standards do not connect security analysis to the value stream of the production system nor to production quality requirements. This paper aims at facilitating security analysis for production quality already in the design phase of PSE. In this paper, we (i) identify the connection between security and production quality, and (ii) introduce the Production Security Network (PSN) to efficiently derive reusable security requirements and design patterns for PSE. We evaluate the PSN with threat scenarios in a feasibility study. The study results indicate that the PSN satisfies the requirements for systematic security analysis. The design patterns provide a good foundation for improving the communication of domain experts by connecting security and quality concerns.

In the information era, knowledge is becoming increasingly significant for all industries, especially criminal investigation that deeply relies on intelligence and strategies. Therefore, there is an urgent need for effective management and utilization of criminal investigation knowledge. As an important branch of knowledge engineering, the expert system can simulate the thinking pattern of an expert, proposing strategies and solutions based on the knowledge stored in the knowledge base. A crucial step in building the expert system is to construct the knowledge base, which determines the function and capability of the expert system. This paper establishes a practical knowledge base for criminal investigation, combining the technologies of cloud computing with traditional method of manual entry to acquire and process knowledge. The knowledge base covers data information and expert knowledge with detailed classification of rules and cases, providing answers through comparison and reasoning. The knowledge becomes more accurate and reliable after repeated inspection and verification by human experts.

The smooth operation of metering equipment is inseparable from the monitoring and analysis of equipment alarm events by automated metering systems. With the generation of big data in power metering and the increasing demand for information security of metering systems in the power industry, how to use big data and protect data security at the same time has become a hot research field. In this paper, we propose a hybrid expert model based on federated learning to deal with the problem of alarm information analysis and identification. The hybrid expert system can divide the metering warning problem into multiple sub-problems for processing, which greatly improves the recognition and prediction accuracy. The experimental results show that our model has high accuracy in judging and identifying equipment faults.

While the existence of many security elements in software can be measured (e.g., vulnerabilities, security controls, or privacy controls), it is challenging to measure their relative security impact. In the physical world we can often measure the impact of individual elements to a system. However, in cyber security we often lack ground truth (i.e., the ability to directly measure significance). In this work we propose to solve this by leveraging human expert opinion to provide ground truth. Experts are iteratively asked to compare pairs of security elements to determine their relative significance. On the back end our knowledge encoding tool performs a form of binary insertion sort on a set of security elements using each expert as an oracle for the element comparisons. The tool not only sorts the elements (note that equality may be permitted), but it also records the strength or degree of each relationship. The output is a directed acyclic ‘constraint’ graph that provides a total ordering among the sets of equivalent elements. Multiple constraint graphs are then unified together to form a single graph that is used to generate a scoring or prioritization system.For our empirical study, we apply this domain-agnostic measurement approach to generate scoring/prioritization systems in the areas of vulnerability scoring, privacy control prioritization, and cyber security control evaluation.

Data Protection and Consenting Communication Mechanisms (DPCCMs) enable users to express their privacy decisions and manage their online consent. Thus, they can become a crucial means of protecting individuals' online privacy and agency, thereby replacing the current problematic practices such as “consent dialogues”. Based on an in-depth analysis of different DPCCMs, we propose an interdisciplinary set of factors that can be used for a comparison of such mechanisms. Moreover, we use the results from a qualitative expert study to identify some of the main multidisciplinary challenges that DPCCMs should address to become widely adopted data privacy mechanisms. We leverage both the factors and the challenges to compare two current open specifications, i.e. the Advanced Data Protection Control (ADPC) and the Global Privacy Control (GPC), and discuss future work.

Cloud computing is becoming a demanding technology due to its flexibility, sensibility and remote accessibility. Apart from these applications of cloud computing, privacy and security are two terms that pose a circumstantial discussion. Various authors have argued on this topic that cloud computing is more secure than other data sharing and storing methods. The conventional data storing system is a computer system or smartphone storage. The argument debate also states that cloud computing is vulnerable to enormous types of attacks which make it a more concerning technology. This current study has also tried to draw the circumstantial and controversial debate on the security and privacy system of cloud computing. Primary research has been conducted with 65 cloud computing experts to understand whether a cloud computing security technique is highly secure or not. An online survey has been conducted with them where they provided their opinions based on the security and privacy system of cloud computing. Findings showed that no particular technology is available which can provide maximum security. Although the respondents agreed that blockchain is a more secure cloud computing technology; however, the blockchain also has certain threats which need to be addressed. The study has found essential encryption systems that can be integrated to strengthen security; however, continuous improvement is required.

Data privacy is a key concern for smart contracts handling sensitive data. The existing work zkay addresses this concern by allowing developers without cryptographic expertise to enforce data privacy. However, while zkay avoids fundamental limitations of other private smart contract systems, it cannot express key applications that involve operations on foreign data.We present ZeeStar, a language and compiler allowing non-experts to instantiate private smart contracts and supporting operations on foreign data. The ZeeStar language allows developers to ergonomically specify privacy constraints using zkay’s privacy annotations. The ZeeStar compiler then provably realizes these constraints by combining non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and additively homomorphic encryption.We implemented ZeeStar for the public blockchain Ethereum. We demonstrated its expressiveness by encoding 12 example contracts, including oblivious transfer and a private payment system like Zether. ZeeStar is practical: it prepares transactions for our contracts in at most 54.7s, at an average cost of 339k gas.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully employed in industries for decades, beginning with the invention of expert systems in the 1960s and continuing through the present ubiquity of deep learning. Data-driven AI solutions have grown increasingly common as a means of supporting ever-more complicated industrial processes owing to the accessibility of affordable computer and storage infrastructure. Despite recent optimism, implementing AI to smart industrial applications still offers major difficulties. The present paper gives an executive summary of AI methodologies with an emphasis on deep learning before detailing unresolved issues in AI safety, data privacy, and data quality — all of which are necessary for completely automated commercial AI systems.

With the advent of ease of access to the internet and an increase in digital literacy among citizens, digitization of the banking sector has throttled. Countries are now aiming for a cashless society. The introduction of a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in April 2016 is a game-changer for cashless models. UPI payment model is currently considered the world’s most advanced payment system, and we see many countries adopting this cashless payment mode. With the increase in its popularity, there arises the increased need to strengthen the security posture of the payment solution. In this work, we explore the privacy challenges in the existing data flow of UPI models and propose approaches to preserve the privacy of customers using the Unified Payments Interface.

With the ubiquitous advancement in smart medical devices and systems, the potential of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) network is evolving in modern healthcare systems. The medical professionals (doctors, nurses, or medical experts) can access vitals and sensitive physiological information about the patients and provide proper treatment to improve the quality of life through the RPM network. However, the wireless nature of communication in the RPM network makes it challenging to design an efficient mechanism for secure communication. Many authentication schemes have been proposed in recent years to ensure the security of the RPM network. Pseudonym, digital signature, and Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocols are used for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to develop secure authorization and privacy-preserving communication. However, traditional authentication protocols face overhead challenges due to maintaining a large set of key-pairs or pseudonyms results on the hospital cloud server. In this research work, we identify this research gap and propose a novel secure and efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme using cuckoo filters for the RPM network. The use of cuckoo filters in our proposed scheme provides an efficient way for mutual anonymous authentication and a secret shared key establishment process between medical professionals and patients. Moreover, we identify the misbehaving sensor nodes using a correlation-based anomaly detection model to establish secure communication. The security analysis and formal security validation using SPAN and AVISPA tools show the robustness of our proposed scheme against message modification attacks, replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Software vulnerabilities are closely monitored by the security community to timely address the security and privacy issues in software systems. Before a vulnerability is published by vulnerability management systems, it needs to be characterized to highlight its unique attributes, including affected software products and versions, to help security professionals prioritize their patches. Associating product names and versions with disclosed vulnerabilities may require a labor-intensive process that may delay their publication and fix, and thereby give attackers more time to exploit them. This work proposes a machine learning method to extract software product names and versions from unstructured CVE descriptions automatically. It uses Word2Vec and Char2Vec models to create context-aware features from CVE descriptions and uses these features to train a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model using bidirectional Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Based on the attributes of the product names and versions in previously published CVE descriptions, we created a set of Expert System (ES) rules to refine the predictions of the NER model and improve the performance of the developed method. Experiment results on real-life CVE examples indicate that using the trained NER model and the set of ES rules, software names and versions in unstructured CVE descriptions could be identified with F-Measure values above 0.95.

Developers of mobile applications rely on the trust of their customers. On the one hand the requirement exists to create feature-rich and secure apps, which adhere to privacy standards to not deliberately disclose user information. On the other hand the development process must be streamlined to reduce costs. Here third-party libraries come into play. Inclusion of many, possibly nested libraries pose security risks, app-creators are often not aware of. This paper presents a way to combine free open-source tools to support developers in checking their application that it does not induce security issues by using third-party libraries. The tools FlowDroid, Frida, and mitm-proxy are used in combination in a simple and viable way to perform checks to identify privacy leaks of third-party apps. Our proposed setup and configuration empowers average app developers to preserve user privacy without being dedicated security experts and without expensive external advice.

The problem of privacy protection of trajectory data has received increasing attention in recent years with the significant grow in the volume of users that contribute trajectory data with rich user information. This creates serious privacy concerns as exposing an individual's privacy information may result in attacks threatening the user's safety. In this demonstration we present TP$^\textrm3$ a novel practical framework for supporting trajectory privacy preservation in Mobile Cloud Environments (MCEs). In TP$^\textrm3$, non-expert users submit their trajectories and the system is responsible to determine their privacy exposure before sharing them to data analysts in return for various benefits, e.g. better recommendations. TP$^\textrm3$ makes a number of contributions: (a) It evaluates the privacy exposure of the users utilizing various privacy operations, (b) it is latency-efficient as it implements the privacy operations as serverless functions which can scale automatically to serve an increasing number of users with low latency, and (c) it is practical and cost-efficient as it exploits the serverless model to adapt to the demands of the users with low operational costs for the service provider. Finally, TP$^\textrm3$'s Web-UI provides insights to the service provider regarding the performance and the respective revenue from the service usage, while enabling the user to submit the trajectories with recommended preferences of privacy.

The development of marine environment monitoring equipment has been improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Numerous types of marine environment monitoring equipment have mushroomed with a wide range of high-performance capabilities. However, the existing data recording software cannot meet the demands of real-time and comprehensive data recording in view of the growing data types and the exponential data growth rate generated by various types of marine environment monitoring equipment. Based on the above-mentioned conundrum, this paper proposes a multi-source heterogeneous marine environmental data acquisition and storage method, which can record and replay multi-source heterogeneous data based upon the needs of real-time and accurate performance and also possess good compatibility and expandability.

MCI patients can be benefited from cognitive training programs to improve their cognitive capabilities or delay the decline of cognition. This paper evaluated three types of commonly seen categories of cognitive training programs (non-computerized / traditional cognitive training (TCT), computerized cognitive training (CCT), and virtual/augmented reality cognitive training (VR/AR CT)) based on six aspects: stimulation strength, user-friendliness, expandability, customizability/personalization, convenience, and motivation/atmosphere. In addition, recent applications of each type of CT were offered. Finally, a conclusion in which no single CT outperformed the others was derived, and the most applicable scenario of each type of CT was also provided.

Modular wireless power distribution systems will be commonly used in next generation factories to supply industrial production equipment, in particular automated guided vehicles. This requires the development of a flexible and standardized communication system in between individual Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) modules and production equipment. Therefore, we first derive the requirements for such a system in order to incorporate them in a generic communication concept. This concept focuses on the zero configuration and user-friendly expandability of the system, in which the communication unit is integrated in each WPT module. The paper describes the communication concept and discusses the advantages and disadvantages. The work concludes with an outlook on the practical implementation in a research project.

Under the background of rapid development of campus informatization, the information management of college students' innovative activities is slightly outdated, and the operation of the traditional innovative activity record system has gradually become rigid. In response to this situation, this paper proposes a B/S architecture-based information management system for college students' innovative activities based on the current situation that the network and computers are widely used, which is designed for the roles of relevant managers of students on campus, such as class teachers, teachers and counselors, and has developed various functions to meet the needs of such users as class teachers, including user The system is designed to meet the needs of classroom teachers, classroom teachers and tutors. In order to meet the requirements of generality, expandability and ease of development, the overall architecture of the system is based on the javaEE platform, with JSP technology as the main development technology.

Any Big Data scenario eventually reaches scalability concerns for several factors, often storage or computing power related. Modern solutions have been proven to be effective in multiple domains and have automated many aspects of the Big Data pipeline. In this paper, we aim to present a solution for deploying event-based automated data processing tools for low code environments that aim to minimize the need for user input and can effectively handle common data processing jobs, as an alternative to distributed solutions which require language specific libraries and code. Our architecture uses a combination of a network exposed service with a cluster of “Data Workers” that handle data processing jobs effectively without requiring manual input from the user. This system proves to be effective at handling most data processing scenarios and allows for easy expandability by following simple patterns when declaring any additional jobs.

Multi-active bridge (MAB) converter has played an important role in the power conversion of renewable-based smart grids, electrical vehicles, and more/all electrical aircraft. However, the increase of MAB submodules greatly complicates the control architecture. In this regard, the conventional centralized control strategies, which rely on a single controller to process all the information, will be limited by the computation burden. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a decentralized power management strategy for MAB converter. The switching frequencies of MAB submodules are adaptively regulated based on the submodule local information. Through this effort, flexible electrical power routing can be realized without communications among submodules. The proposed methodology not only relieves the computation burden of MAB control system, but also improves its modularity, flexibility, and expandability. Finally, the experiment results of a three-module MAB converter are presented for verification.

This paper reports on the advanced assembly technology for small chip size of Fan-out WLP(FO-WLP) using high expansion tape. In a preceding paper, we reported that we have developed new tape expansion machine which can expand tape in four directions individually. Using this expansion machine device, we have developed high expansion tape which can get enough chip distance after expansion. Our expansion technology provides both high throughput and high placement accuracy. These previous studies have been evaluated using 3 mm x 3 mm chips assuming an actual FO-WLP device. Since our process can be handled by wafer size, smaller chip size improves throughput than larger chip size. In this study, we evaluate with 0.6 mm x 0.3 mm chip size and investigate tape characteristics required for small chip size expansion. By optimizing adhesive thickness and composition of adhesive, we succeed in developing high expansion tape for small chip size with good expandability and no adhesive residue on the expanded chip. We indicate that our proposal process is also effective for small chip size of FO-WLP.

Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, the implementation of energy storage systems (ESSs) is crucial for the reliable operation of microgrids. This paper proposes a peer-to-peer distributed secondary control scheme for accurate voltage restoration of distributed ESS units in a DC microgrid. The presented control framework only requires local and neighboring information to function. Besides, the ESSs communicate with each other through a sparse network in a discrete fashion compared to existing approaches based on continuous data exchange. This feature ensures reliability, expandability, and flexibility of the proposed strategy for a more practical realization of distributed control paradigm. A simulation case study is presented using MATLAB/Simulink to illustrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Various approaches of microgrid operation have been proposed, albeit with noticeable issues such as power-sharing, control of frequency and voltage excursions, applicability on different grids, etc. This paper proposes a goal function-based, decentralized control that addresses the mentioned problems and secures the microgrid stability by constraining the frequency and node deviations across the grid while simultaneously supporting the desired active power exchange between prosumer nodes. The control algorithm is independent of network topology and enables arbitrary node connection, i.e. seamless microgrid expandability. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, simulation results are presented and discussed.

The paper introduces and develops the new concept of current-mode multifunctional circuit, a computational structure that is able to implement, using the same functional core, a multitude of circuit functions: amplifying, squaring, square-rooting, multiplying, exponentiation or generation of any continuous mathematical function. As a single core computes a large number of circuit functions, the original approach of analog signal processing from the perspective of multifunctional structures presents the important advantages of a much smaller power consumption and design costs per implemented function comparing with classical designs. The current-mode operation, associated with the original concrete implementation of the proposed structure increase the accuracy of computed functions and the frequency behaviour of the designed circuit. Additionally, the temperature-caused errors are almost removed by specific design techniques. It will be also shown a new method for third-order approximating the exponential function using an original approximation function. A generalization of this method will represent the functional basis for realizing an improved accuracy function synthesizer circuit with a simple implementation in CMOS technology. The proposed circuits are compatible with low-power low voltage operations.

We discuss the performance of a new quantumsafe multivariate digital signature scheme proposed recently, called the Multivariate Polynomial Public Key Digital Signature (MPPK DS) scheme. Leveraging MPPK KEM or key exchange mechanism, the MPPK DS scheme is established using modular exponentiation with a randomly chosen secret base from a prime field. The security of the MPPK DS algorithm largely benefits from a generalized safe prime associated with the said field and the Euler totient function. We can achieve NIST security levels I, III, and V over a 64-bit prime field, with relatively small public key sizes of 128 bytes, 192 bytes, and 256 bytes for security levels I, III, and V, respectively. The signature sizes are 80 bytes for level I, 120 bytes for level III, and 160 bytes for level V. The MPPK DS scheme offers probabilistic procedures for signing and verification. That is, for each given signing message, a signer can randomly pick a base integer to be used for modular exponentiation with a private key, and a verifier can verify the signature with the digital message, based on the verification relationship, using any randomly selected noise variables. The verification process can be repeated as many times as the verifier wishes for different noise values, however, for a true honest signature, the verification will always pass. This probabilistic feature largely restricts an adversary to perform spoofing attacks. In this paper, we conduct some performance analyses by implementing MPPK DS in Java. We compare its performance with benchmark performances of NIST PQC Round 3 finalists: Rainbow, Dilithium, and Falcon. Overall, the MPPK DS scheme demonstrates equivalent or better performance, and much smaller public key, as well as signature sizes, compared to the three NIST PQC Round 3 finalists.

With the increasing awareness of privacy protection and data security, people’s concerns over the confidentiality of sensitive data still limit the application of distributed artificial intelligence. In fact, a new encryption form, called homomorphic encryption(HE), has achieved a balance between security and operability. In particular, one of the HE schemes named Paillier has been adopted to protect data privacy in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the massive computation of modular multiplication in Paillier greatly affects the speed of encryption and decryption. In this paper, we propose a fast CRT-Paillier scheme to accelerate its decryption process. We first introduce the Montgomery algorithm to the CRT-Paillier to improve the process of the modular exponentiation, and then compute the modular exponentiation in parallel by using OpenMP. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme has greatly heightened its decryption speed while preserving the same security level. Especially, when the key length is 4096-bit, its speed of decryption is about 148 times faster than CRT-Paillier.