Biblio

Smart Internet of Things (IoT) applications will rely on advanced IoT platforms that not only provide access to IoT sensors and actuators, but also provide access to cloud services and data analytics. Future IoT platforms should thus provide connectivity and intelligence. One approach to connecting IoT devices, IoT networks to cloud networks and services is to use network federation mechanisms over the internet to create network slices across heterogeneous platforms. Network slices also need to be protected from potential external and internal threats. In this paper we describe an approach for enforcing global security policies in the federated cloud and IoT networks. Our approach allows a global security to be defined in the form of a single service manifest and enforced across all federation network segments. It relies on network function virtualisation (NFV) and service function chaining (SFC) to enforce the security policy. The approach is illustrated with two case studies: one for a user that wishes to securely access IoT devices and another in which an IoT infrastructure administrator wishes to securely access some remote cloud and data analytics services.

Cloud computing has become a widely used computing paradigm providing on-demand computing and storage capabilities based on pay-as-you-go model. Recently, many organizations, especially in the field of big data, have been adopting the cloud model to perform data analytics through leasing powerful Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can be attractive targets to attackers as well as untrusted cloud providers who aim to get unauthorized access to the business critical-data. The obvious security solution is to perform data analytics on encrypted data through the use of cryptographic keys as that of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, it is very easy to obtain AES cryptographic keys from the VM's Random Access Memory (RAM). In this paper, we present a novel key-scattering (KS) approach to protect the cryptographic keys while encrypting/decrypting data. Our solution is highly portable and interoperable. Thus, it could be integrated within today's existing cloud architecture without the need for further modifications. The feasibility of the approach has been proven by implementing a functioning prototype. The evaluation results show that our approach is substantially more resilient to brute force attacks and key extraction tools than the standard AES algorithm, with acceptable execution time.

Data analytics is being increasingly used in cyber-security problems, and found to be useful in cases where data volumes and heterogeneity make it cumbersome for manual assessment by security experts. In practical cyber-security scenarios involving data-driven analytics, obtaining data with annotations (i.e. ground-truth labels) is a challenging and known limiting factor for many supervised security analytics task. Significant portions of the large datasets typically remain unlabelled, as the task of annotation is extensively manual and requires a huge amount of expert intervention. In this paper, we propose an effective active learning approach that can efficiently address this limitation in a practical cyber-security problem of Phishing categorization, whereby we use a human-machine collaborative approach to design a semi-supervised solution. An initial classifier is learnt on a small amount of the annotated data which in an iterative manner, is then gradually updated by shortlisting only relevant samples from the large pool of unlabelled data that are most likely to influence the classifier performance fast. Prioritized Active Learning shows a significant promise to achieve faster convergence in terms of the classification performance in a batch learning framework, and thus requiring even lesser effort for human annotation. An useful feature weight update technique combined with active learning shows promising classification performance for categorizing Phishing/malicious URLs without requiring a large amount of annotated training samples to be available during training. In experiments with several collections of PhishMonger's Targeted Brand dataset, the proposed method shows significant improvement over the baseline by as much as 12%.

The complexity, multiplicity, and impact of cyber-attacks have been increasing at an alarming rate despite the significant research and development investment in cyber security products and tools. The current techniques to detect and protect cyber infrastructures from these smart and sophisticated attacks are mainly characterized as being ad hoc, manual intensive, and too slow. We present in this paper AIM-PSC that is developed jointly by researchers at AVIRTEK and The University of Arizona Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing that is inspired by biological systems, which can efficiently handle complexity, dynamism and uncertainty. In AIM-PSC system, an online monitoring and multi-level analysis are used to analyze the anomalous behaviors of networks, software systems and applications. By combining the results of different types of analysis using a statistical decision fusion approach we can accurately detect any types of cyber-attacks with high detection and low false alarm rates and proactively respond with corrective actions to mitigate their impacts and stop their propagation.

Many emerging applications, from domains such as healthcare and oil & gas, require several data processing systems for complex analytics. This demo paper showcases system, a framework that provides multi-platform task execution for such applications. It features a three-layer data processing abstraction and a new query optimization approach for multi-platform settings. We will demonstrate the strengths of system by using real-world scenarios from three different applications, namely, machine learning, data cleaning, and data fusion.

The amount of personal information contributed by individuals to digital repositories such as social network sites has grown substantially. The existence of this data offers unprecedented opportunities for data analytics research in various domains of societal importance including medicine and public policy. The results of these analyses can be considered a public good which benefits data contributors as well as individuals who are not making their data available. At the same time, the release of personal information carries perceived and actual privacy risks to the contributors. Our research addresses this problem area. In our work, we study a game-theoretic model in which individuals take control over participation in data analytics projects in two ways: 1) individuals can contribute data at a self-chosen level of precision, and 2) individuals can decide whether they want to contribute at all (or not). From the analyst's perspective, we investigate to which degree the research analyst has flexibility to set requirements for data precision, so that individuals are still willing to contribute to the project, and the quality of the estimation improves. We study this tradeoffs scenario for populations of homogeneous and heterogeneous individuals, and determine Nash equilibrium that reflect the optimal level of participation and precision of contributions. We further prove that the analyst can substantially increase the accuracy of the analysis by imposing a lower bound on the precision of the data that users can reveal.