Biblio

The security of lattice-based cryptosystems that are secure for the post-quantum period is based on the difficulty of the shortest vector problem (SVP) and the closest vector problem (CVP). In the literature, many sieving algorithms are proposed to solve these hard problems. In this paper, efficient implementation of HashSieve sieving algorithm is discussed. A modular software library to have an efficient implementation of HashSieve algorithm is developed. Modular software library is used as an infrastructure in order for the HashSieve efficient implementation to be better than the sample in the literature (Laarhoven's standard HashSieve implementation). According to the experimental results, it is observed that HashSieve efficient implementation has a better running time than the example in the literature. It is concluded that both implementations are close to each other in terms of the memory space used.

Through the widespread use of information technologies, institutions have started to offer most of their services electronically. The best example of this is e-government. Since institutions provide their services to the electronic environment, the quality of the services they provide increases and their access to services becomes easier. Since personal information can be verified with inter-agency information sharing systems, wrong or unfair transactions can be prevented. Since information sharing between institutions is generally done through web services, protection of personal data transmitted via web services is of great importance. There are comprehensive national and international regulations on the protection of personal data. According to these regulations, protection of personal data shared between institutions is a legal obligation; protection of personal data is an issue that needs to be handled comprehensively. This study, protection of personal data shared between institutions through web services against software developers is discussed. With a proposed application, it is aimed to take a new security measure for the protection of personal data. The proposed application consists of a web interface prepared using React and Java programming languages and rest services that provide anonymization of personal data.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the connection between medical devices and information systems to share, collect, process, store, and integrate patient and health data using network technologies. X-Rays, MR, MRI, and CT scans are the most frequently used patient medical image data. These images usually include patient information in one of the corners of the image. In this research work, to protect patient information, a new robust and secure watermarking algorithm developed for a selected region of interest (ROI) of medical images. First ROI selected from the medical image, then selected part divided equal blocks and applied Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) algorithm to embed a watermark into the selected coefficients. Several geometric and removal attacks are applied to the watermarked multimedia element such as lossy image compression, the addition of Gaussian noise, denoising, filtering, median filtering, sharpening, contrast enhancement, JPEG compression, and rotation. Experimental results show very promising results in PSNR and similarity ratio (SR) values after blocked DCT (B-DCT) based embedding algorithm against the Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), Least Significant Bits (LSB) and DCT algorithms.

Public key encryption with equality test (PKEET) enables the testing whether two ciphertexts encrypt the same message. Identity-based encryption with equality test (IBEET) simplify the certificate management of PKEET, which leads to many potential applications such as in smart city applications or Wireless Body Area Networks. Lee et al. (ePrint 2016) proposed a generic construction of IBEET scheme in the standard model utilising a 3-level hierachy IBE together with a one-time signature scheme, which can be instantiated in lattice setting. Duong et al. (ProvSec 2019) proposed the first direct construction of IBEET in standard model from lattices. However, their scheme achieve CPA security only. In this paper, we improve the Duong et al.'s construction by proposing an IBEET in standard model which achieves CCA2 security and with smaller ciphertext and public key size.

This article describes a new way to generate and distribute secret encryption keys, in which the processes of generating a public key and formicating a secret encryption key are performed in algebra with a parameter, the secrecy of which provides increased durability of the key.

Random numbers have a wide usage in the area of cryptography. In practice, pseudo random number generators are used in place of true random number generators, as regeneration of them may be required. Therefore because of generation methods of pseudo random number sequences, statistical randomness tests have a vital importance. In this paper, a randomness test suite is specified for long binary sequences. In literature, there are many randomness tests and test suites. However, in most of them, to apply randomness test, long sequences are partitioned into a certain fixed length and the collection of short sequences obtained is evaluated instead. In this paper, instead of partitioning a long sequence into fixed length subsequences, a concept of dynamic partitioning is introduced in accordance with the random variable in consideration. Then statistical methods are applied. The suggested suite, containing four statistical tests: Collision Tests, Weight Test, Linear Complexity Test and Index Coincidence Test, all of them work with the idea of dynamic partitioning. Besides the adaptation of this approach to randomness tests, the index coincidence test is another contribution of this work. The distribution function and the application of all tests are given in the paper.

The dummy-based method has been commonly used to protect the users location privacy in location-based services, since it can provide precise results and generally do not rely on a third party or key sharing. However, the close spatiotemporal correlation between the consecutively reported locations enables the adversary to identify some dummies, which lead to the existing dummy-based schemes fail to protect the users location privacy completely. To address this limit, this paper proposes a new algorithm to produce dummy location by generating dummy trajectory, which naturally takes into account of the spatiotemporal correlation all round. Firstly, the historical trajectories similar to the user's travel route are chosen as the dummy trajectories which depend on the distance between two trajectories with the help of home gateway. Then, the dummy is generated from the dummy trajectory by taking into account of time reachability, historical query similarity and the computation of in-degree/out-degree. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme successfully perturbs the spatiotemporal correlation between neighboring location sets, therefore, it is infeasible for the adversary to distinguish the users real location from the dummies. Furthermore, extensive experiments indicate that the proposal is able to protect the users location privacy effectively and efficiently.

Transactive Energy (TE) is an emerging discipline that utilizes economic and control techniques for operating and managing the power grid effectively. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) represent a fundamental shift away from traditionally centrally managed energy generation and storage to one that is rather distributed. However, integrating and managing DERs into the power grid is highly challenging owing to the TE implementation issues such as privacy, equity, efficiency, reliability, and security. The TE market structures allow utilities to transact (i.e., buy and sell) power services (production, distribution, and storage) from/to DER providers integrated as part of the grid. Flexible power pricing in TE enables power services transactions to dynamically adjust power generation and storage in a way that continuously balances power supply and demand as well as minimize cost of grid operations. Therefore, it has become important to analyze various market models utilized in different TE applications for their impact on above implementation issues.In this demo, we show-case the Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite (TE-SAT) with its three publicly available design studios for experimenting with TE markets. All three design studios are built using metamodeling tool called the Web-based Graphical Modeling Environment (WebGME). Using a Git-like storage and tracking backend server, WebGME enables multi-user editing on models and experiments using simply a web-browser. This directly facilitates collaboration among different TE stakeholders for developing and analyzing grid operations and market models. Additionally, these design studios provide an integrated and scalable cloud backend for running corresponding simulation experiments.

The number of applications and services that are hosted on cloud platforms is constantly increasing. Nowadays, more and more applications are hosted as services on cloud platforms, co-existing with other services in a mutually untrusted environment. Facilities such as virtual machines, containers and encrypted communication channels aim to offer isolation between the various applications and protect sensitive user data. However, such techniques are not always able to provide a secure execution environment for sensitive applications nor they offer guarantees that data are not monitored by an honest but curious provider once they reach the cloud infrastructure. The recent advancements of trusted execution environments within commodity processors, such as Intel SGX, provide a secure reverse sandbox, where code and data are isolated even from the underlying operating system. Moreover, Intel SGX provides a remote attestation mechanism, allowing the communicating parties to verify their identity as well as prove that code is executed on hardware-assisted software enclaves. Many approaches try to ensure code and data integrity, as well as enforce channel encryption schemes such as TLS, however, these techniques are not enough to achieve complete isolation and secure communications without hardware assistance or are not efficient in terms of performance. In this work, we design and implement a practical attestation system that allows the service provider to offer a seamless attestation service between the hosted applications and the end clients. Furthermore, we implement a novel caching system that is capable to eliminate the latencies introduced by the remote attestation process. Our approach allows the parties to attest one another before each communication attempt, with improved performance when compared to a standard TLS handshake.

The advanced persistent threat (APT) landscape has been studied without quantifiable data, for which indicators of compromise (IoC) may be uniformly analyzed, replicated, or used to support security mechanisms. This work culminates extensive academic and industry APT analysis, not as an incremental step in existing approaches to APT detection, but as a new benchmark of APT related opportunity. We collect 15,259 APT IoC hashes, retrieving subsequent sandbox execution logs across 41 different file types. This work forms an initial focus on Windows-based threat detection. We present a novel Windows APT executable (APT-EXE) dataset, made available to the research community. Manual and statistical analysis of the APT-EXE dataset is conducted, along with supporting feature analysis. We draw upon repeat and common APT paths access, file types, and operations within the APT-EXE dataset to generalize APT execution footprints. A baseline case analysis successfully identifies a majority of 117 of 152 live APT samples from campaigns across 2018 and 2019.

Ransomware attacks are taking advantage of the ongoing pandemics and attacking the vulnerable systems in business, health sector, education, insurance, bank, and government sectors. Various approaches have been proposed to combat ransomware, but the dynamic nature of malware writers often bypasses the security checkpoints. There are commercial tools available in the market for ransomware analysis and detection, but their performance is questionable. This paper aims at proposing an AI-based ransomware detection framework and designing a detection tool (AIRaD) using a combination of both static and dynamic malware analysis techniques. Dynamic binary instrumentation is done using PIN tool, function call trace is analyzed leveraging Cuckoo sandbox and Ghidra. Features extracted at DLL, function call, and assembly level are processed with NLP, association rule mining techniques and fed to different machine learning classifiers. Support vector machine and Adaboost with J48 algorithms achieved the highest accuracy of 99.54% with 0.005 false-positive rates for a multi-level combined term frequency approach.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a concept that decouples the control plane and the user plane. So the network administrator can easily control the network behavior through its own programs. However, the administrator may unconsciously apply some malicious programs on SDN controllers so that the whole network may be under the attacker’s control. In this paper, we discuss the malicious software issue on SDN networks. We use the idea of sandbox to propose a sandbox network called SanboxNet. We emulate a virtual isolated network environment to verify the SDN application functions. With continuous monitoring, we can locate the suspicious SDN applications. We also consider the sandbox-evading issue in our framework. The emulated networks and the real world networks will be indistinguishable to the SDN controller.

The market landscape has undergone dramatic change because of globalization, shifting marketing conditions, cost pressure, increased competition, and volatility. Transforming the operation of businesses has been possible because of the astonishing speed at which technology has witnessed the change. The automotive industry is on the edge of a revolution. The increased customer expectations, changing ownership, self-driving vehicles and much more have led to the transformation of automobiles, applications, and services from artificial intelligence, sensors, RFID to big data analysis. Large automobiles industries have been emphasizing the collection of data to gain insight into customer's expectations, preferences, and budgets alongside competitor's policies. Statistical methods can be applied to historical data, which has been gathered from various authentic sources and can be used to identify the impact of fixed and variable marketing investments and support automakers to come up with a more effective, precise, and efficient approach to target customers. Proper analysis of supply chain data can disclose the weak links in the chain enabling to adopt timely countermeasures to minimize the adverse effects. In order to fully gain benefit from analytics, the collaboration of a detailed set of capabilities responsible for intersecting and integrating with multiple functions and teams across the business is required. The effective role played by big data analysis in the automobile industry has also been expanded in the research paper. The research paper discusses the scope and challenges of big data. The paper also elaborates on the working technology behind the concept of big data. The paper illustrates the working of MapReduce technology that executes in the back end and is responsible for performing data mining.

In an increasingly asymmetric context of both instability and permanent innovation, organizations demand new capacities and learning patterns. In this sense, supervisors have adopted the metaphor of the "sandbox" as a strategy that allows their regulated parties to experiment and test new proposals in order to study them and adjust to the established compliance frameworks. Therefore, the concept of the "sandbox" is of educational interest as a way to revindicate failure as a right in the learning process, allowing students to think, experiment, ask questions and propose ideas outside the known theories, and thus overcome the mechanistic formation rooted in many of the higher education institutions. Consequently, this article proposes the application of this concept for educational institutions as a way of resignifying what students have learned.

Enforcing security and resilience in a cloud platform is an essential but challenging problem due to the presence of a large number of heterogeneous applications running on shared resources. A security analysis system that can detect threats or malware must exist inside the cloud infrastructure. Much research has been done on machine learning-driven malware analysis, but it is limited in computational complexity and detection accuracy. To overcome these drawbacks, we proposed a new malware detection system based on the concept of clustering and trend micro locality sensitive hashing (TLSH). We used Cuckoo sandbox, which provides dynamic analysis reports of files by executing them in an isolated environment. We used a novel feature extraction algorithm to extract essential features from the malware reports obtained from the Cuckoo sandbox. Further, the most important features are selected using principal component analysis (PCA), random forest, and Chi-square feature selection methods. Subsequently, the experimental results are obtained for clustering and non-clustering approaches on three classifiers, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression. The model performance shows better classification accuracy and false positive rate (FPR) as compared to the state-of-the-art works and non-clustering approach at significantly lesser computation cost.

Whenever any internet user visits a website, a scripting language runs in the background known as JavaScript. The embedding of malicious activities within the script poses a great threat to the cyberworld. Attackers take advantage of the dynamic nature of the JavaScript and embed malicious code within the website to download malware and damage the host. JavaScript developers obfuscate the script to keep it shielded from getting detected by the malware detectors. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for analysing and detecting JavaScript using sandbox assisted ensemble model. We extract the payload using malware-jail sandbox to get the real script. Upon getting the extracted script, we analyse it to define the features that are needed for creating the dataset. We compute Pearson's r between every feature for feature extraction. An ensemble model consisting of Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Voted Perceptron and AdaBoost algorithm is used with voting technique to detect malicious JavaScript. Experimental results show that our proposed model can detect obfuscated and de-obfuscated malicious JavaScript with an accuracy of 99.6% and 0.03s detection time. Our model performs better than other state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and least training and detection time.

With each Windows operating system Microsoft introduces new features to its users. Newly added features present a challenge to digital forensics examiners as they are not analyzed or tested enough. One of the latest features, introduced in Windows 10 version 1909 is Windows Sandbox; a lightweight, temporary, environment for running untrusted applications. Because of the temporary nature of the Sandbox and insufficient documentation, digital forensic examiners are facing new challenges when examining this newly added feature which can be used to hide different illegal activities. Throughout this paper, the focus will be on analyzing different Windows artifacts and event logs, with various tools, left behind as a result of the user interaction with the Sandbox feature on a clear virtual environment. Additionally, the setup of testing environment will be explained, the results of testing and interpretation of the findings will be presented, as well as open-source tools used for the analysis.

The Open Data Cube (ODC) initiative, with support from the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) System Engineering Office (SEO) has developed a state-of-the-art suite of software tools and products to facilitate the analysis of Earth Observation data. This paper presents a short summary of our novel architecture approach in a project related to the Open Data Cube (ODC) community that provides users with their own ODC sandbox environment. Users can have a sandbox environment all to themselves for the purpose of running Jupyter notebooks that leverage the ODC. This novel architecture layout will remove the necessity of hosting multiple users on a single Jupyter notebook server and provides better management tooling for handling resource usage. In this new layout each user will have their own credentials which will give them access to a personal Jupyter notebook server with access to a fully deployed ODC environment enabling exploration of solutions to problems that can be supported by Earth observation data.

JavaScript is a popular attack vector for releasing malicious payloads on unsuspecting Internet users. Authors of this malicious JavaScript often employ numerous obfuscation techniques in order to prevent the automatic detection by antivirus and hinder manual analysis by professional malware analysts. Consequently, this paper presents SAFE-DEOBS, a JavaScript deobfuscation tool that we have built. The aim of SAFE-DEOBS is to automatically deobfuscate JavaScript malware such that an analyst can more rapidly determine the malicious script's intent. This is achieved through a number of static analyses, inspired by techniques from compiler theory. We demonstrate the utility of SAFE-DEOBS through a case study on real-world JavaScript malware, and show that it is a useful addition to a malware analyst's toolset.

Now-a-days web applications are everywhere. Usually these applications are developed by database program which are often written in popular host programming languages such as C, C++, C\#, Java, etc., with embedded Structured Query Language (SQL). These applications are used to access and process crucial data with the help of Database Management System (DBMS). Preserving the sensitive data from any kind of attacks is one of the prime factors that needs to be maintained by the web applications. The SQL injection attacks is one of the important security threat for the web applications. In this paper, we propose a code-based analysis approach to automatically detect and prevent the possible SQL Injection Attacks (SQLIA) in a query before submitting it to the underlying database. This approach analyses the user input by assigning a complex number to each input element. It has two part (i) input clustering and (ii) safe (non-malicious) input identification. We provide a details discussion of the proposal w.r.t the literature on security and execution overhead point of view.

Shared register emulations on top of message-passing systems provide an illusion of a simpler shared memory system which can make the task of a system designer easier. Numerous shared register applications have a considerably high read-to-write ratio. Thus, having algorithms that make reads more efficient than writes is a fair trade-off.Typically, such algorithms for reads and writes are asymmetric and sacrifice the stringent consistency condition atomicity, as it is impossible to have fast reads for multi-writer atomicity. Safety is a consistency condition that has has gathered interest from both the systems and theory community as it is weaker than atomicity yet provides strong enough guarantees like "strong consistency" or read-my-write consistency. One requirement that is assumed by many researchers is that of the reliable broadcast (RB) primitive, which ensures the "all or none" property during a broadcast. One drawback is that such a primitive takes 1.5 rounds to complete and requires server-to-server communication.This paper implements an efficient multi-writer multi-reader safe register without using a reliable broadcast primitive. Moreover, we provide fast reads or one-shot reads – our read operations can be completed in one round of client-to-server communication. Of course, this comes with the price of requiring more servers when compared to prior solutions assuming reliable broadcast. However, we show that this increased number of servers is indeed necessary as we prove a tight bound on the number of servers required to implement Byzantine-fault tolerant safe registers in a system without reliable broadcast.We extend our results to data stored using erasure coding as well. We present an emulation of single-writer multi-reader safe register based on MDS codes. The usage of MDS codes reduces storage and communication costs. On the negative side, we also show that to use MDS codes and at the same time achieve one-shot reads, we need even more servers.

Account data of electrical power system is the link of all businesses in the whole life cycle of equipment. It is of great significance to improve the data quality of power equipment account data for improving the information level of power enterprises. In the past, there was only the error correction technology to check whether it was empty and whether it contained garbled code. The error correction technology for same field of the same kind of power equipment account data is proposed in this paper. Combined with the characteristics of production business, the possible similar power equipment can be found through the function location type and other fields of power equipment account data. Based on the principle of search scoring, the horizontal comparison is used to search and score in turn. Finally, the potential spare parts and existing data quality are identified according to the scores. And judge whether it is necessary to carry out inspection maintenance.

Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from simulation to reality is still extremely challenging. We present a novel approach to model-free reinforcement learning that can leverage existing sub-optimal solutions as an algorithmic prior during training and deployment. During training, our gated fusion approach enables the prior to guide the initial stages of exploration, increasing sample-efficiency and enabling learning from sparse long-horizon reward signals. Importantly, the policy can learn to improve beyond the performance of the sub-optimal prior since the prior's influence is annealed gradually. During deployment, the policy's uncertainty provides a reliable strategy for transferring a simulation-trained policy to the real world by falling back to the prior controller in uncertain states. We show the efficacy of our Multiplicative Controller Fusion approach on the task of robot navigation and demonstrate safe transfer from simulation to the real world without any fine-tuning. The code for this project is made publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/mcf-nav/home.

Open-source development is a well-accepted model by software development communities from both academia and industry. Many companies and corporations adopt and use open source systems daily as a core component in their business activities. One of the most important factors that will determine the success of this model is security. The security of software systems is a combination of source code quality, stability, and vulnerabilities. Software vulnerabilities can be introduced by many factors, some of which are the way that programmers write their programs, their background on security standards, and safe programming practices. This paper describes a cloud-based software tool developed by the authors that can help our computing communities in both academia and research to evaluate their software systems on the source code level to help them identify and detect some of the well-known source code vulnerability patterns that can cause security issues if maliciously exploited. The paper also presents an empirical study on the prevalence of vulnerable C/C++ coding patterns inside three large-scale open-source systems comprising more than 42 million lines of source code. The historical data for the studied systems is presented over five years to uncover some historical trends to highlight the changes in the system analyzed over time concerning the presence of some of the source code vulnerabilities patterns. The majority of results show the continued usage of known unsafe functions.

Antisparse coding aims at spreading the information uniformly over representation coefficients and can be expressed as the solution of an ℓ∞-norm regularized problem. In this paper, we propose a new methodology, coined "safe squeezing", accelerating the computation of antisparse representations. The idea consists in identifying saturated entries of the solution via simple tests and compacting their contribution to achieve some form of dimensionality reduction. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach leads to significant computational gain.