Biblio

Security is a requirement in society, yet its wide implementation is held back because of high expenses, and barriers to the use of technology. Experimental implementation of security at low cost will only help in promoting the technology at more affordable prices. This paper describes the design of a security system of surveillance using Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO. The design senses the presence of \$a\$ human in a surveillance area and immediately sets off the buzzer and simultaneously starts capturing video of the motion it had detected and stores it in a folder. When the design senses a motion, it immediately sends an SMS to the user. The user of this design can see the live video of the motion it detects using the internet connection from a remote area. Our objective of making a low-cost surveillance area security system has been mostly fulfilled. Although this is a low-cost project, features can be compared with existing commercially available systems.

In the last few years, Cloud computing technology has benefited many organizations that have embraced it as a basis for revamping the IT infrastructure. Cloud computing utilizes Internet capabilities in order to use other computing resources. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most widely used cloud providers that leverages the endless computing capabilities that the cloud technology has to offer. AWS is continuously evolving to offer a variety of services, including but not limited to, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service. Among the other important services offered by AWS is Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) that is a hosted cloud-based video surveillance service. Even though this technology is complex and widely used, some security experts have pointed out that some of its vulnerabilities can be exploited in launching attacks aimed at cloud technologies. In this paper, we present a holistic security analysis of cloud-based video surveillance systems by examining the vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks that these technologies are susceptible to. We illustrate our findings by implementing several of these attacks on a test bed representing an AWS-based video surveillance system. The main contributions of our paper are: (1) we provided a holistic view of the security model of cloud based video surveillance summarizing the underlying threats, vulnerabilities and mitigation techniques (2) we proposed a novel taxonomy of attacks targeting such systems (3) we implemented several related attacks targeting cloud-based video surveillance system based on an AWS test environment and provide some guidelines for attack mitigation. The outcome of the conducted experiments showed that the vulnerabilities of the Internet Protocol (IP) and other protocols granted access to unauthorized VSaaS files. We aim that our proposed work on the security of cloud-based video surveillance systems will serve as a reference for cybersecurity researchers and practitioners who aim to conduct research in this field.

Cloud computing is one of the greatest and authoritative paradigms in computing as it provides access and use of various third-party services at a lower cost. However, there exist various security challenges facing cloud computing especially in the aspect of data privacy and this is more critical when dealing with sensitive personal or organization's data. Cloud service providers encrypt data during transfer from the local hard drive to the cloud server and at the server-side, the only problem is that the encryption key is stored by the service provider meaning they can decrypt your data. This paper discusses how cloud security can be enhanced by using client-side data encryption (pre-internet encryption), this will allow the clients to encrypt data before uploading to the cloud and store the key themselves. This means that data will be rendered to the cloud in an unreadable and secure format that cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons.

With the development of cloud computing, a growing number of users use the cloud to store their sensitive data. To protect privacy, users often encrypt their data before outsourcing. Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables users to retrieve their encrypted data. Most prior SSE schemes did not focus on malicious servers, and users could not confirm the correctness of the search results. Blockchain-based SSE schemes show the potential to solve this problem. However, the expensive nature of storage overhead on the blockchain presents an obstacle to the implementation of these schemes. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain-based searchable symmetric encryption scheme that reduces the space cost in the scheme by improving the data structure of the encrypted index and ensuring efficient data retrieval. Experiment results demonstrate the practicability of our scheme.

Aiming at the problems of imperfect dynamic verification of power grid security and stability control strategy and high test cost, a reliability test method of power grid security control system based on BP neural network and dynamic group simulation is proposed. Firstly, the fault simulation results of real-time digital simulation system (RTDS) software are taken as the data source, and the dynamic test data are obtained with the help of the existing dispatching data network, wireless virtual private network, global positioning system and other communication resources; Secondly, the important test items are selected through the minimum redundancy maximum correlation algorithm, and the test items are used to form a feature set, and then the BP neural network model is used to predict the test results. Finally, the dynamic remote test platform is tested by the dynamic whole group simulation of the security and stability control system. Compared with the traditional test methods, the proposed method reduces the test cost by more than 50%. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively complete the reliability test of power grid security control system based on dynamic group simulation, and reduce the test cost.

In this paper we propose a security and cost aware scheduling heuristic for real-time workflow jobs that process Internet of Things (IoT) data with various security requirements. The environment under study is a four-tier architecture, consisting of IoT, mist, fog and cloud layers. The resources in the mist, fog and cloud tiers are considered to be heterogeneous. The proposed scheduling approach is compared to a baseline strategy, which is security aware, but not cost aware. The performance evaluation of both heuristics is conducted via simulation, under different values of security level probabilities for the initial IoT input data of the entry tasks of the workflow jobs.

The signcryption technique was first proposed by Y. Zheng, where two cryptographic operations digital signature and message encryption are made combinedly. We cryptanalyze the technique and observe that the signature and encryption become vulnerable if the forged public keys are used. This paper proposes an improvement using modified DSS (Digital Signature Standard) version of ElGamal signature and DHP (Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol), and shows that the vulnerabilities in both the signature and encryption methods used in Zheng's signcryption are circumvented. DHP is used for session symmetric key establishment and it is combined with the signature in such a way that the vulnerabilities of DHP can be avoided. The security and performance analysis of our signcryption technique are provided and found that our scheme is secure and designed using minimum possible operations with comparable computation cost of Zheng's scheme.

Video analytics has many applications in traffic control, security monitoring, action/event analysis, etc. With the adoption of deep neural networks, the accuracy of video analytics in video streams has been greatly improved. However, deep neural networks for performing video analytics are compute-intensive. In order to reduce processing time, many systems switch to the lower frame rate or resolution. State-of-the-art switching approaches adjust configurations by profiling video clips on a large configuration space. Multiple configurations are tested periodically and the cheapest one with a desired accuracy is adopted. In this paper, we propose a method that adapts the configuration by analyzing past video analytics results instead of profiling candidate configurations. Our method adopts a lower/higher resolution or frame rate when objects move slow/fast. We train a model that automatically selects the best configuration. We evaluate our method with two real-world video analytics applications: traffic tracking and pose estimation. Compared to the periodic profiling method, our method achieves 3%-12% higher accuracy with the same resource cost and 8-17x faster with comparable accuracy.

In IoT scenarios, computational and communication costs on the user side are important problems. In most expressive ABE schemes, there is a linear relationship between the access structure size and the number of heavy pairing operations that are used in the decryption process. This property limits the application of ABE. We propose an expressive CP-ABE with the constant number of pairings in the decryption process. The simulation shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient in encryption and decryption processes. In addition, we use the outsourcing method in decryption to get better performance on the user side. The main burden of decryption computations is done by the cloud without revealing any information about the plaintext. We introduce a new revocation method. In this method, the users' communication channels aren't used during the revocation process. These features significantly reduce the computational and communication costs on the user side that makes the proposed scheme suitable for applications such as IoT. The proposed scheme is selectively CPA-secure in the standard model.

As the public cloud becomes one of the leading ways in data sharing nowadays, data confidentiality and user privacy are increasingly critical. Partially policy-hidden ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) can effectively protect data confidentiality while reducing privacy leakage by hiding part of the access structure. However, it cannot satisfy the need of data sharing in the public cloud with complex users and large amounts of data, both in terms of less expressive access structures and limited granularity of policy hiding. Moreover, the verification of access right to shared data and correctness of decryption are ignored or conducted by an untrusted third party, and the prime-order groups are seldom considered in the expressive policy-hidden schemes. This paper proposes a fully policy-hidden CP-ABE scheme constructed on LSSS access structure and prime-order groups for public cloud data sharing. To help users decrypt, HVE with a ``convert step'' is applied, which is more compatible with CP-ABE. Meanwhile, decentralized credible verification of access right to shared data and correctness of decryption based on blockchain are also provided. We prove the security of our scheme rigorously and compare the scheme with others comprehensively. The results show that our scheme performs better.

In the era of big data, more and more users store data in the cloud. Massive amounts of data have brought huge storage costs to cloud storage providers, and data deduplication technology has emerged. In order to protect the confidentiality of user data, user data should be encrypted and stored in the cloud. Therefore, deduplication of encrypted data has become a research hotspot. Cloud storage provides users with data sharing services, and the sharing of encrypted data is another research hotspot. The combination of encrypted data deduplication and sharing will inevitably become a future trend. The current better-performing updateable block-level message-locked encryption (UMLE) deduplication scheme does not support data sharing, and the performance of the encrypted data de-duplication scheme that introduces data sharing is not as good as that of UMLE. This paper introduces the ciphertext policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) system sharing mechanism on the basis of UMLE, applies the CP-ABE method to encrypt the master key generated by UMLE, to achieve secure and efficient data deduplication and sharing. In this paper, we propose a permission verification method based on bilinear mapping, and according to the definition of the security model proposed in the security analysis phase, we prove this permission verification method, showing that our scheme is secure. The comparison of theoretical analysis and simulation experiment results shows that this scheme has more complete functions and better performance than existing schemes, and the proposed authorization verification method is also secure.

Due to the intrinsic properties of Solid-State Drives (SSDs), invalid data remain in SSDs before erased by a garbage collection process, which increases the risk of being attacked by adversaries. Previous studies use erase and cryptography based schemes to purposely delete target data but face extremely large overhead. In this paper, we propose a Workload-Aware Secure Deletion scheme, called WAS-Deletion, to reduce the overhead of secure deletion by three major components. First, the WAS-Deletion scheme efficiently splits invalid and valid data into different blocks based on workload characteristics. Second, the WAS-Deletion scheme uses a new encryption allocation scheme, making the encryption follow the same direction as the write on multiple blocks and vertically encrypts pages with the same key in one block. Finally, a new adaptive scheduling scheme can dynamically change the configurations of different regions to further reduce secure deletion overhead based on the current workload. The experimental results indicate that the newly proposed WAS-Deletion scheme can reduce the secure deletion cost by about 1.2x to 12.9x compared to previous studies.

Technological progress has changed our world beyond recognition. However, along with the incredible benefits and conveniences we have received new dangers and risks. Mankind is increasingly becoming hostage to information technology and cyber world. Recently, cybercrime is one of the top 10 risks to sustainable development in the world. It poses serious new challenges to global security and economy. The aim of the article is to obtain an assessment of some of the financial effects of modern IT crimes based on an analysis of the main aspects of monetary costs and the hidden economic impact of cybercrime. A multifactor regression model has been proposed to determine the contribution of the cost of the main consequences of IT incidents: business disruption, information loss, revenue loss and equipment damage caused by different types of cyberattacks worldwide in 2019 to total cost of cyberattacks. Information loss has been found to have a major impact on the total cost of cyberattacks, reducing profits and incurring additional costs for businesses. It was built a canonical model for identifying the dependence of total submission to ID ransomware, total cost of cybercrime and the main indicators of economic development for the TOP-10 countries. There is a significant correlation between two sets of indicators, in particular, it is confirmed that most cyberattacks target countries - countries with a high level of development, and the consequences of IT crimes are more significant for low-income countries.

Security baseline hardening is a baseline configuration framework aims to improve the robustness of the operating system, lowering the risk and impact of breach incidents. In typical best practice, the security baseline hardening requires to have regular check and follow-up to keep the system in-check, this set of activities are called "Security Baseline Audit". The Security Baseline Audit process is responsible by the IT department. In terms of business, this process consumes a fair number of resources such as man-hour, time, and technical knowledge. In a huge production environment, the resources mentioned can be multiplied by the system's amount in the production environment. This research proposes improving the process with automation while maintaining the quality and security level at the standard. Robot Framework, a useful and flexible opensource automation framework, is being utilized in this research following with a very successful result where the configuration is aligned with CIS (Center for Internet Security) run by the automation process. A tremendous amount of time and process are decreased while the configuration is according to this tool's standard.

IoT systems commonly rely on cloud services. However, utilizing cloud providers can be problematic in terms of data security. Data stored in the cloud need to be secured from unauthorized malicious nodes and from the cloud providers themselves. Using a simple symmetric cipher can encrypt the data before uploading and decrypt it while retrieving. However, such a solution can be only applied between two parties with no support for multiple nodes. Whereas in IoT scenarios, many smart devices communicate and share data with each other. This paper proposes a solution that tackles the issue of sharing data securely between IoT devices by implementing a system that allows secure sharing of encrypted data in untrusted clouds. The implementation of the system performs the computation on connectionless clients with no involvement of the cloud server nor any third party. The cloud server is only used as a passive storage server. Analysis of the implemented prototype demonstrates that the system can be used in real-life applications with relatively small overhead. Based on the used hardware, key generation takes about 60 nanoseconds and the storage overhead is only a few kilobytes for large number of files and/or users.

In the distributed file sharing system, a large number of users share bandwidth, upload resources and store them in a decentralized manner, thus offering both an abundant supply of high-quality resources and high-speed download. However, some users only enjoy the convenient service without uploading or sharing, which is called free riding. Free-riding may discourage other honest users. When free-riding users mount to a certain number, the platform may fail to work. The current available incentive mechanisms, such as reciprocal incentive mechanisms and reputation-based incentive mechanisms, which suffer simple incentive models, inability to achieve incentive circulation and dependence on a third-party trusted agency, are unable to completely solve the free-riding problem.In this paper we build a blockchain-based distributed file sharing platform and design a nested incentive scheme for this platform. The proposed nested incentive mechanism achieves the circulation of incentives in the platform and does not rely on any trusted third parties for incentive distribution, thus providing a better solution to free-riding. Our distributed file sharing platform prototype is built on the current mainstream blockchain. Nested incentive scheme experiments on this platform verify the effectiveness and superiority of our incentive scheme in solving the free-riding problem compared to other schemes.

Swarm intelligence, a nature-inspired concept that includes multiplicity, stochasticity, randomness, and messiness is emergent in most real-life problem-solving. The concept of swarming can be integrated with herding predators in an ecological system. This paper presents the development of stabilizing velocity-based controllers for a Lagrangian swarm of \$nın \textbackslashtextbackslashmathbbN\$ individuals, which are supposed to capture a moving target (intruder). The controllers are developed from a Lyapunov function, total potentials, designed via Lyapunov-based control scheme (LbCS) falling under the classical approach of artificial potential fields method. The interplay of the three central pillars of LbCS, which are safety, shortness, and smoothest course for motion planning, results in cost and time effectiveness and efficiency of velocity controllers. Computer simulations illustrate the effectiveness of control laws.

Even if there is a rapid proliferation with the advantages of low cost, the emerging on-demand cloud services have led to an increase in cybercrime activities. Cyber criminals are utilizing cloud services through its distributed nature of infrastructure and create a lot of challenges to detect and investigate the incidents by the security personnel. The tracing of command flow forms a clue for the detection of malicious activity occurring in the system through System Calls Analysis (SCA). As machine learning based approaches are known to automate the work in detecting malwares, simple Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approaches are often reporting low value of accuracy. In this work, a malware classification system proposed with the supervised machine learning of unknown malware instances through Support Vector Machine - Stochastic Gradient Descent (SVM-SGD) algorithm. The performance of the system evaluated on CIC-IDS2017 dataset with labelled attacks. The system is compared with traditional signature based detection model and observed to report less number of false alerts with improved accuracy. The signature based detection gets an accuracy of 86.12%, while the SVM-SGD gets the best accuracy of 99.13%. The model is found to be lightweight but efficient in detecting malware with high degree of accuracy.

Integrity verification of cloud data is of great importance for secure and effective cloud storage since attackers can change the data even though it is encrypted. Traditional integrity verification schemes only let the client know the integrity status of the remote data. When the data is corrupted, the system cannot hold the server accountable. Besides, almost all existing schemes assume that the users are credible. Instead, especially in a dynamic operation environment, users can deny their behaviors, and let the server bear the penalty of data loss. To address the issues above, we propose an accountable dynamic storage integrity verification (ADS-IV) scheme which provides means to detect or eliminate misbehavior of all participants. In the meanwhile, we modify the Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF) to recover the corrupted data and use the Mahalanobis distance to calculate the degree of damage. We prove that our scheme is secure under Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption and Discrete Logarithm (DL) assumption and that the audit process is privacy-preserving. The experimental results demonstrate that the computational complexity of the audit is constant; the storage overhead is \$O(\textbackslashtextbackslashsqrt n )\$, which is only 1/400 of the size of the original data; and the whole communication overhead is O(1).As a result, the proposed scheme is not only suitable for large-scale cloud data storage systems, but also for systems with sensitive data, such as banking systems, medical systems, and so on.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices use different types of media and protocols to communicate to Internet, but security is compromised since the devices are not using encryption, authentication and integrity. Virtual Private Network of Things (VPNoT) is a new technology designed to create end to end encrypted tunnels for IoT devices, in this case, the VPNoT device is based on OpenVPN that provides confidentiality and integrity, also based on Raspberry Pi as the hardware and Linux as the operating system, both provide connectivity using different types of media to access Internet and network management. IoT devices and sensors can be connected to the VPNoT device so an encrypted tunnel is created to an IoT Server. VPNoT device uses a profile generated by the server, then all devices form a virtual private network (VPN). VPNoT device can act like a router when necessary and this environment works for IPv6 and IPv4 with a great advantage that OpenVPN traverses NAT permitting private IoT servers be accessible to the VPN. The annual cost of the improvement is about \$455 USD per year for 10 VPNoT devices.

The annotated dataset is the foundation for Supervised Natural Language Processing. However, the cost of obtaining dataset is high. In recent years, the Few-Shot Learning has gradually attracted the attention of researchers. From the definition, in this paper, we conclude the difference in Few-Shot Learning between Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. On that basis, the current Few-Shot Learning on Natural Language Processing is summarized, including Transfer Learning, Meta Learning and Knowledge Distillation. Furthermore, we conclude the solutions to Few-Shot Learning in Natural Language Processing, such as the method based on Distant Supervision, Meta Learning and Knowledge Distillation. Finally, we present the challenges facing Few-Shot Learning in Natural Language Processing.

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is widely used as an efficient communication architecture in multi-core and many-core System-on-Chips (SoCs). However, the shared communication resources in NoCs, e.g., channels, buffers, and routers might be used to conduct attacks compromising the security of NoC-based SoCs. Almost all of the proposed encryption-based protection methods in the literature need to leave some parts of the packet unencrypted to allow the routers to process/forward packets accordingly. This uncovers the source/destination information of the packet to malicious routers, which can be used in various attacks. In this paper, we propose the idea of secure anonymous routing with minimal hardware overhead to hide the source/destination information while exchanging secure information over the network. The proposed method uses a novel source-routing algorithm that works with encrypted destination addresses and prevents malicious routers from discovering the source/destination of secure packets. To support our proposal, we have designed and implemented a new NoC architecture that works with encrypted addresses. The conducted hardware evaluations show that the proposed security solution combats the security threats at an affordable cost of 1% area and 10% power overheads chip-wide.

Middleware for IoT (Internet of Things) helps application developers face challenges, such as device heterogeneity, service interoperability, security and scalability. While extensively adopted nowadays, IoT middleware systems are static because, after deployment, updates are only possible by stopping the thing. Therefore, adaptive capabilities can improve existing solutions by allowing their dynamic adaptation to changes in the environmental conditions, evolve provided functionalities, or fix bugs. This paper presents AMoT, an adaptive publish/subscribe middleware for IoT whose design and implementation adopt software architecture principles and evolutive adaptation mechanisms. The experimental evaluation of AMoT helps to measure the impact of the proposed adaptation mechanisms while also comparing the performance of AMoT with a widely adopted MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) based middleware. In the end, adaptation has an acceptable performance cost and the advantage of tunning the middleware functionality at runtime.

This paper presents an IoT enabled real time occupancy semantic search system leveraging ETSI defined context information and interface meta model standard- ``Next Generation Service Interface for Linked Data'' (NGSI-LD). It facilitates interoperability, integration and federation of information exchange related to spatial infrastructure among geo-distributed deployed IoT entities, different stakeholders, and process domains. This system, in the presented use case, solves the problem of adhoc booking of meetings in real time through semantic discovery of spatial data and metadata related to room occupancy and thus enables optimum utilization of spatial infrastructure in university campuses. Therefore, the proposed system has the capability to save on effort, cost and productivity in institutional spatial management contexts in the longer run and as well provide a new enriched user experience in smart public buildings. Additionally, the system empowers different stakeholders to plan, forecast and fulfill their spatial infrastructure requirements through semantic data search analysis and real time data driven planning. The initial performance results of the system have shown quick response enabled semantic discovery of data and metadata (textless2 seconds mostly). The proposed system would be a steppingstone towards smart management of spatial infrastructure which offers scalability, federation, vendor agnostic ecosystem, seamless interoperability and integration and security by design. The proposed system provides the fundamental work for its extension and potential in relevant spatial domains of the future.

Since the personal data protection law is on the way of many countries, how to use data mining method to secure sensitive information has become a challenge for enterprises. To make sure every employee follows company's data protection strategy, it may take lots of time and cost to seek and scan thousands of folders and files in user equipment, ensuring that the file contents meet IT security policies. Hence, this paper proposed a lightweight, pattern-based detection system, PIDS, which is expecting to enable an affordable data leakage prevention with essential cost and high efficiency in small business enterprise. For verification and evaluation, PIDS has been deployed on more than 100,000 PCs of collaboration enterprises, and the feedback shows that the system is able to approach its original design functionality for finding violated or sensitive contents efficiently.