Biblio
When a robot breaks a person's trust by making a mistake or failing, continued interaction will depend heavily on how the robot repairs the trust that was broken. Prior work in psychology has demonstrated that both the trust violation framing and the trust repair strategy influence how effectively trust can be restored. We investigate trust repair between a human and a robot in the context of a competitive game, where a robot tries to restore a human's trust after a broken promise, using either a competence or integrity trust violation framing and either an apology or denial trust repair strategy. Results from a 2×2 between-subjects study ( n=82) show that participants interacting with a robot employing the integrity trust violation framing and the denial trust repair strategy are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral retaliation toward the robot. In the Dyadic Trust Scale survey, an interaction between trust violation framing and trust repair strategy was observed. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering both trust violation framing and trust repair strategy choice when designing robots to repair trust. We also discuss the influence of human-to-robot promises and ethical considerations when framing and repairing trust between a human and robot.
Large-scale failures in communication networks due to natural disasters or malicious attacks can severely affect critical communications and threaten lives of people in the affected area. In the absence of a proper communication infrastructure, rescue operation becomes extremely difficult. Progressive and timely network recovery is, therefore, a key to minimizing losses and facilitating rescue missions. To this end, we focus on network recovery assuming partial and uncertain knowledge of the failure locations. We proposed a progressive multi-stage recovery approach that uses the incomplete knowledge of failure to find a feasible recovery schedule. Next, we focused on failure recovery of multiple interconnected networks. In particular, we focused on the interaction between a power grid and a communication network. Then, we focused on network monitoring techniques that can be used for diagnosing the performance of individual links for localizing soft failures (e.g. highly congested links) in a communication network. We studied the optimal selection of the monitoring paths to balance identifiability and probing cost. Finally, we addressed, a minimum disruptive routing framework in software defined networks. Extensive experimental and simulation results show that our proposed recovery approaches have a lower disruption cost compared to the state-of-the-art while we can configure our choice of trade-off between the identifiability, execution time, the repair/probing cost, congestion and the demand loss.
The paper describes modification of the ATA (Attack Tree Analysis) technique for assessment of instrumentation and control systems (ICS) dependability (reliability, availability and cyber security) called AvTA (Availability Tree Analysis). The techniques FMEA, FMECA and IMECA applied to carry out preliminary semi-formal and criticality oriented analysis before AvTA based assessment are described. AvTA models combine reliability and cyber security subtrees considering probabilities of ICS recovery in case of hardware (physical) and software (design) failures and attacks on components casing failures. Successful recovery events (SREs) avoid corresponding failures in tree using OR gates if probabilities of SRE for assumed time are more than required. Case for dependability AvTA based assessment (model, availability function and technology of decision-making for choice of component and system parameters) for smart building ICS (Building Automation Systems, BAS) is discussed.
As an information hinge of various trades and professions in the era of big data, cloud data center bears the responsibility to provide uninterrupted service. To cope with the impact of failure and interruption during the operation on the Quality of Service (QoS), it is important to guarantee the resilience of cloud data center. Thus, different resilience actions are conducted in its life circle, that is, resilience strategy. In order to measure the effect of resilience strategy on the system resilience, this paper propose a new approach to model and evaluate the resilience strategy for cloud data center focusing on its core part of service providing-IT architecture. A comprehensive resilience metric based on resilience loss is put forward considering the characteristic of cloud data center. Furthermore, mapping model between system resilience and resilience strategy is built up. Then, based on a hierarchical colored generalized stochastic petri net (HCGSPN) model depicting the procedure of the system processing the service requests, simulation is conducted to evaluate the resilience strategy through the metric calculation. With a case study of a company's cloud data center, the applicability and correctness of the approach is demonstrated.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is often used in web applications to restrict operations and protect security sensitive information and resources. Web applications regularly undergo maintenance and evolution and their security may be affected by source code changes between releases. To prevent security regression and vulnerabilities, developers have to take re-validation actions before deploying new releases. This may become a significant undertaking, especially when quick and repeated releases are sought. We define protection-impacting changes as those changed statements during evolution that alter privilege protection of some code. We propose an automated method that identifies protection-impacting changes within all changed statements between two versions. The proposed approach compares statically computed security protection models and repository information corresponding to different releases of a system to identify protection-impacting changes. Results of experiments present the occurrence of protection-impacting changes over 210 release pairs of WordPress, a PHP content management web application. First, we show that only 41% of the release pairs present protection-impacting changes. Second, for these affected release pairs, protection-impacting changes can be identified and represent a median of 47.00 lines of code, that is 27.41% of the total changed lines of code. Over all investigated releases in WordPress, protection-impacting changes amounted to 10.89% of changed lines of code. Conversely, an average of about 89% of changed source code have no impact on RBAC security and thus need no re-validation nor investigation. The proposed method reduces the amount of candidate causes of protection changes that developers need to investigate. This information could help developers re-validate application security, identify causes of negative security changes, and perform repairs in a more effective way.
Whatever one public cloud, private cloud or a mixed cloud, the users lack of effective security quantifiable evaluation methods to grasp the security situation of its own information infrastructure on the whole. This paper provides a quantifiable security evaluation system for different clouds that can be accessed by consistent API. The evaluation system includes security scanning engine, security recovery engine, security quantifiable evaluation model, visual display module and etc. The security evaluation model composes of a set of evaluation elements corresponding different fields, such as computing, storage, network, maintenance, application security and etc. Each element is assigned a three tuple on vulnerabilities, score and repair method. The system adopts ``One vote vetoed'' mechanism for one field to count its score and adds up the summary as the total score, and to create one security view. We implement the quantifiable evaluation for different cloud users based on our G-Cloud platform. It shows the dynamic security scanning score for one or multiple clouds with visual graphs and guided users to modify configuration, improve operation and repair vulnerabilities, so as to improve the security of their cloud resources.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are widely used to monitor and control physical environments. An efficient energy management system is needed to be able to deploy these networks in lossy environments while maintaining reliable communication. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy networks is a routing protocol designed to properly manage energy without compromising reliability. This protocol has currently been implemented in Contiki OS, TinyOS, and OMNeT++ Castalia. But these applications also simulate all operation mechanics of a specified hardware model instead of just simulating the protocol only, thus adding unnecessary overhead and slowing down simulations on RPL. In light of this, we have implemented a working ns-3 implementation of RPL with support for multiple RPL instances with the use of a global repair mechanism. The behavior and output of our simulator was compared to Cooja for verification, and the results are similar with a minor difference in rank computation.
Information security policies are not easy to create unless organizations explicitly recognize the various steps required in the development process of an information security policy, especially in institutions of higher education that use enormous amounts of IT. An improper development process or a copied security policy content from another organization might also fail to execute an effective job. The execution could be aimed at addressing an issue such as the non-compliance to applicable rules and regulations even if the replicated policy is properly developed, referenced, cited in laws or regulations and interpreted correctly. A generic framework was proposed to improve and establish the development process of security policies in institutions of higher education. The content analysis and cross-case analysis methods were used in this study in order to gain a thorough understanding of the information security policy development process in institutions of higher education.
Establishing trust relationships between routing nodes represents a vital security requirement to establish reliable routing processes that exclude infected or selfish nodes. In this paper, we propose a new security scheme for the Internet of things and mainly for the RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks) called: Metric-based RPL Trustworthiness Scheme (MRTS). The primary aim is to enhance RPL security and deal with the trust inference problem. MRTS addresses trust issue during the construction and maintenance of routing paths from each node to the BR (Border Router). To handle this issue, we extend DIO (DODAG Information Object) message by introducing a new trust-based metric ERNT (Extended RPL Node Trustworthiness) and a new Objective Function TOF (Trust Objective Function). In fact, ERNT represents the trust values for each node within the network, and TOF demonstrates how ERNT is mapped to path cost. In MRTS all nodes collaborate to calculate ERNT by taking into account nodes' behavior including selfishness, energy, and honesty components. We implemented our scheme by extending the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm. Evaluation results demonstrated that the new scheme improves the security of RPL.
Vulnerability analysis is important procedure for a cyber security evaluation process. There are two types of vulnerability analysis, which is an interview for the facility manager and a vulnerability scanning with a software tool. It is difficult to use the vulnerability scanning tool on an operating nuclear plant control system because of the possibility of giving adverse effects to the system. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a method of cyber security vulnerability test using the DPPS and PMAS test-bed. Based on functions of the test-bed, possible threats and vulnerabilities in terms of cyber security were analyzed. Attack trees and test scenarios could be established with the consideration of attack vectors. It is expected that this method can be helpful to implement adequate security controls and verify whether the security controls make adverse impact to the inherent functions of the systems.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is extensively used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its ability to transmit IPv6 packet with low bandwidth and limited resources. 6LoWPAN has several operations in each layer. Most existing security challenges are focused on the network layer, which is represented by its routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL). RPL components include WSN nodes that have constrained resources. Therefore, the exposure of RPL to various attacks may lead to network damage. A sinkhole attack is a routing attack that could affect the network topology. This paper aims to investigate the existing detection mechanisms used in detecting sinkhole attack on RPL-based networks. This work categorizes and presents each mechanism according to certain aspects. Then, their advantages and drawbacks with regard to resource consumption and false positive rate are discussed and compared.
In the multi-robot applications, the maintained and desired network may be destroyed by failed robots. The existing self-healing algorithms only handle with the case of single robot failure, however, multiple robot failures may cause several challenges, such as disconnected network and conflicts among repair paths. This paper presents a distributed self-healing algorithm based on 2-hop neighbor infomation to resolve the problems caused by multiple robot failures. Simulations and experiment show that the proposed algorithm manages to restore connectivity of the mobile robot network and improves the synchronization of the network globally, which validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in resolving multiple robot failures.