Biblio

ICN (Information-Centric Networking) is a traditional networking approach which focuses on Internet design, while SDN (Software Defined Networking) is known as a speedy and flexible networking approach. Integrating these two approaches can solve different kinds of traditional networking problems. On the other hand, it may expose new challenges. In this paper, we study how these two networking approaches are been combined to form SDN-based ICN architecture to improve network administration. Recent research is explored to identify the SDN-based ICN challenges, provide a critical analysis of the current integration approaches, and determine open issues for further research.

The transmission and storage process for the power data in an intelligent grid has problems such as a single point of failure in the central node, low data credibility, and malicious manipulation or data theft. The characteristics of decentralization and tamper-proofing of blockchain and its distributed storage architecture can effectively solve malicious manipulation and the single point of failure. However, there are few safe and reliable data transmission methods for the significant number and various identities of users and the complex node types in the power blockchain. Thus, this paper proposes a collaborative control scheme between on-chain and off-chain power data based on the distributed oracle technology. By building a trusted on-chain transmission mechanism based on distributed oracles, the scheme solves the credibility problem of massive data transmission and interactive power data between smart contracts and off-chain physical devices safely and effectively. Analysis and discussion show that the proposed scheme can realize the collaborative control between on-chain and off-chain data efficiently, safely, and reliably.

In recent times, the use of cloud computing has gained popularity all over the world in the context of performing smart computations on big data. The privacy of sensitive data of the client is of utmost important issues. Data leakage or hijackers may theft significant information about the client that ultimately may affect the reputation and prestige of its owner (bank) and client (customers). In general, to save the privacy of our banking data it is preferred to store, process, and transmit the data in the form of encrypted text. But now the main concern leads to secure computation over encrypted text or another possible way to perform computation over clouds makes data more vulnerable to hacking and attacks. Existing classical encryption techniques such as RSA, AES, and others provide secure transaction procedures for data over clouds but these are not fit for secure computation over data in the clouds. In 2009, Gentry comes with a solution for such issues and presents his idea as Homomorphic encryption (HE) that can perform computation over encrypted text without decrypting the data itself. Now a day's privacy-enhancing techniques (PET) are there to explore more potential benefits in security issues and useful in historical cases of privacy failure. Differential privacy, Federated analysis, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proof, and secure multiparty computation are a privacy-enhancing technique that may useful in financial services as these techniques provide a fully-fledged mechanism for financial institutes. With the collaboration of industries, these techniques are may enable new data-sharing agreements for a more secure solution over data. In this paper, the primary concern is to investigate the different standards and properties of homomorphic encryption in digital banking and financial institutions.

In quantum cryptography research area, quantum digital signature is an important research field. To provide a better privacy for users in constructing quantum digital signature, the stronger anonymity of quantum digital signatures is required. Quantum ring signature scheme focuses on anonymity in certain scenarios. Using quantum ring signature scheme, the quantum message signer hides his identity into a group. At the same time, there is no need for any centralized organization when the user uses the quantum ring signature scheme. The group used to hide the signer identity can be immediately selected by the signer himself, and no collaboration between users.Since the quantum finite automaton signature scheme is very efficient quantum digital signature scheme, based on it, we propose a new quantum ring signature scheme. We also showed that the new scheme we proposed is of feasibility, correctness, anonymity, and unforgeability. And furthermore, the new scheme can be implemented only by logical operations, so it is easy to implement.

To conceive a CPS is a complex and multidisciplinary endeavour involving different stakeholders, potentially using a plethora of different languages to describe their views of the system at different levels of abstraction. Model-Driven Engineering comes, precisely, as a methodological approach to tackle the complexity of systems development with models as first-class citizens in the development process. The measure of realism of these models with respect to the real (sub)system is called fidelity. Usually, different models with different fidelity are then developed during the development process. Additionally, it is very common that the development process of CPS includes an incremental (and collaborative) use of simulations to study the behaviour emerging from the heterogeneous models of the system. Currently, the different models, with different fidelity, are managed in an ad hoc manner. Consequently, when a (Co)simulation is used to study a specific property of the system, the choice of the different models and their setup is made manually in a non-tractable way. In this paper we propose a structured new vision to CPS development, where the notion of simulation goal and multi-fidelity simulation unit are first-class citizens. The goal is to make a clear link between the system requirements, the system properties, the simulation goal and the multi-fidelity simulation unit. The outcome of this framework is a way to automatically determine the model at an adequate fidelity level suitable for answering a specific simulation goal.

Sharding can significantly improve the blockchain scalability, by dividing nodes into small groups called shards that can handle transactions in parallel. However, all existing sharding systems adopt complete sharding, i.e., shards are isolated. It raises additional overhead to guarantee the atomicity and consistency of cross-shard transactions and seriously degrades the sharding performance. In this paper, we present Pyramid, the first layered sharding blockchain system, in which some shards can store the full records of multiple shards thus the cross-shard transactions can be processed and validated in these shards internally. When committing cross-shard transactions, to achieve consistency among the related shards, a layered sharding consensus based on the collaboration among several shards is presented. Compared with complete sharding in which each cross-shard transaction is split into multiple sub-transactions and cost multiple consensus rounds to commit, the layered sharding consensus can commit cross-shard transactions in one round. Furthermore, the security, scalability, and performance of layered sharding with different sharding structures are theoretically analyzed. Finally, we implement a prototype for Pyramid and its evaluation results illustrate that compared with the state-of-the-art complete sharding systems, Pyramid can improve the transaction throughput by 2.95 times in a system with 17 shards and 3500 nodes.

In view of the common edge computing-based cloud-side collaborative environment summary existing search key and authentication key sharing caused by data information leakage, this paper proposes a cryptographic search based on public key searchable encryption in an edge computing environment method, this article uses the public key to search for the characteristics of the encryption algorithm, and allows users to manage the corresponding private key. In the process of retrieval and execution, the security of the system can be effectively ensured through the secret trapdoor. Through the comparison of theoretical algorithms, the searchable encryption scheme in the edge computing environment proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the computing overhead on the user side, and complete the over-complex computing process on the edge server or the central server, which can improve the overall efficiency of encrypted search.

Multi-Agent system has the advantages of information sharing, knowledge accumulation and system stability, which is consistent with the concept of collaborative co-governance of public crisis management, and provides support for dealing with sudden public crises. Based on the background of the all-media environment, this study introduces the Internet-driven mass data management (“ crowdsourcing” crisis management) as a part of the crisis response system to improve the quality of information resource sharing. Crowdsourcing crisis management and Multi-Agent collaborative co-governance mechanism are combined with each other, so as to achieve a higher level of joint prevention and control mechanism, and explore how to effectively share information resources and emergency management resources across regions and departments in public crisis events.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are among the most harmful cyberattack types in the Internet. The main goal of a DDoS defense mechanism is to reduce the attack's effect as close as possible to their sources to prevent malicious traffic in the Internet. In this work, we examine the DDoS attacks as a rate management and congestion control problem and propose a collaborative fair rate throttling mechanism to combat DDoS attacks. Additionally, we propose anomaly detection mechanisms to detect attacks at the victim site, early attack detection mechanisms by intermediate Autonomous Systems (ASes), and feedback mechanisms between ASes to achieve distributed defense against DDoS attacks. To reduce additional vulnerabilities for the feedback mechanism, we use a secure, private, and authenticated communication channel between AS monitors to control the process. Our mathematical model presents proactive resource management, where the victim site sends rate adjustment requests to upstream routers. We conducted several experiments using a real-world dataset to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach under DDoS attacks. Our results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the impact of DDoS attacks with minimal overhead to routers. Moreover, the proposed anomaly detection techniques can help ASes to detect possible attacks and early attack detection by intermediate ASes.

In a cloud data center, the client requests are catered by placing the services in its servers. Such services are deployed through a sandboxing platform to ensure proper isolation among services from different users. Due to the lightweight nature, containers have become increasingly popular to support such sandboxing. However, for supporting effective and efficient data center resource usage with minimum resource footprints, improving the containers' consolidation ratio is significant for the cloud service providers. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose an exciting direction to significantly boost up the consolidation ratio of a data-center environment by effectively managing the containers' states. We observe that many cloud-based application services are event-triggered, so they remain inactive unless some external service request comes. We exploit the fact that the containers remain in an idle state when the underlying service is not active, and thus such idle containers can be checkpointed unless an external service request comes. However, the challenge here is to design an efficient mechanism such that an idle container can be resumed quickly to prevent the loss of the application's quality of service (QoS). We have implemented the system, and the evaluation is performed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm can manage the containers' states, ensuring the increase of consolidation ratio.

This Innovative Practice full paper describes a technical innovation for scalable teaching of cybersecurity hands-on classes using interactive learning environments. Hands-on experience significantly improves the practical skills of learners. However, the preparation and delivery of hands-on classes usually do not scale. Teaching even small groups of students requires a substantial effort to prepare the class environment and practical assignments. Further issues are associated with teaching large classes, providing feedback, and analyzing learning gains. We present our research effort and practical experience in designing and using learning environments that scale up hands-on cybersecurity classes. The environments support virtual networks with full-fledged operating systems and devices that emulate realworld systems. The classes are organized as simultaneous training sessions with cybersecurity assignments and learners' assessment. For big classes, with the goal of developing learners' skills and providing formative assessment, we run the environment locally, either in a computer lab or at learners' own desktops or laptops. For classes that exercise the developed skills and feature summative assessment, we use an on-premises cloud environment. Our approach is unique in supporting both types of deployment. The environment is described as code using open and standard formats, defining individual hosts and their networking, configuration of the hosts, and tasks that the students have to solve. The environment can be repeatedly created for different classes on a massive scale or for each student on-demand. Moreover, the approach enables learning analytics and educational data mining of learners' interactions with the environment. These analyses inform the instructor about the student's progress during the class and enable the learner to reflect on a finished training. Thanks to this, we can improve the student class experience and motivation for further learning. Using the presented environments KYPO Cyber Range Platform and Cyber Sandbox Creator, we delivered the classes on-site or remotely for various target groups of learners (K-12, university students, and professional learners). The learners value the realistic nature of the environments that enable exercising theoretical concepts and tools. The instructors value time-efficiency when preparing and deploying the hands-on activities. Engineering and computing educators can freely use our software, which we have released under an open-source license. We also provide detailed documentation and exemplary hands-on training to help other educators adopt our teaching innovations and enable sharing of reusable components within the community.

The EU goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 will require profound changes in the electricity supply chain. In this context, Distribution System Operators (DSOs) are expected to adopt solutions to efficiently integrate distributed energy resources (DER), including the implementation of local flexibility mechanisms. Thus, DSOs would procure services from DER like distributed generation, demand response, or storage to support grid expansion, attain significant cost savings, and swifter DER integration. However, the use of flexibility mechanisms still faces barriers posed by national regulation. Regulatory sandboxes may be used to overcome this gap by enabling and supporting the development of local flexibility mechanisms. This paper performs an international review of four leading countries in the use of sandbox and flexibility, identifies best practices, and, based on the lessons learned, provides recommendations to implement local flexibility mechanisms for DSOs in Spain under regulatory sandboxes

In recent times, the world has seen a tremendous increase in the number of attacks on IoT devices. A majority of these attacks have been botnet attacks, where an army of compromised IoT devices is used to launch DDoS attacks on targeted systems. In this paper, we study how the choice of a dataset and the extracted features determine the performance of a Machine Learning model, given the task of classifying Linux Binaries (ELFs) as being benign or malicious. Our work focuses on Linux systems since embedded Linux is the more popular choice for building today’s IoT devices and systems. We propose using 4 different types of files as the dataset for any ML model. These include system files, IoT application files, IoT botnet files and general malware files. Further, we propose using static, dynamic as well as network features to do the classification task. We show that existing methods leave out one or the other features, or file types and hence, our model outperforms them in terms of accuracy in detecting these files. While enhancing the dataset adds to the robustness of a model, utilizing all 3 types of features decreases the false positive and false negative rates non-trivially. We employ an exhaustive scenario based method for evaluating a ML model and show the importance of including each of the proposed files in a dataset. We also analyze the features and try to explain their importance for a model, using observed trends in different benign and malicious files. We perform feature extraction using the open source Limon sandbox, which prior to this work has been tested only on Ubuntu 14. We installed and configured it for Ubuntu 18, the documentation of which has been shared on Github.

The Open Data Cube (ODC), created and facilitated by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), is an open source software architecture that continues to gain global popularity through the integration of analysis-ready data (ARD) on cloud computing frameworks. In 2021, CEOS released a new ODC sandbox that provides global users with a free and open programming interface connected to Google Earth Engine datasets. The open source toolset allows users to run application algorithms using a Google Colab Python notebook environment. This tool demonstrates rapid creation of science products anywhere in the world without the need to download and process the satellite data. Basic operation of the tool will support many users but can also be scaled in size and scope to support enhanced user needs. The creation of the ODC sandbox was prompted by the migration of many CEOS ARD satellite datasets to the cloud. The combination of these datasets in an interoperable data cube framework will inspire the creation of many new application products and advance open science.

Modern technologies for searching viruses, cloud-edge computing, and also federated algorithms and machine learning architectures are shown. The architectures for searching malware based on the xor metric applied in the design and test of computing systems are proposed. A Federated ML method is proposed for searching for malware, which significantly speeds up learning without the private big data of users. A federated infrastructure of cloud-edge computing is described. The use of signature analysis and the assertion engine for searching malware is shown. The paradigm of LTF-computing for searching destructive components in software applications is proposed.

Internet of Things (IoT) apps provide great convenience but exposes us to new safety threats. Unlike traditional software systems, threats may emerge from the joint behavior of multiple apps. While prior studies use handcrafted safety and security policies to detect these threats, these policies may not anticipate all usages of the devices and apps in a smart home, causing false alarms. In this study, we propose to use the technique of mining sandboxes for securing an IoT environment. After a set of behaviors are analyzed from a bundle of apps and devices, a sandbox is deployed, which enforces that previously unseen behaviors are disallowed. Hence, the execution of malicious behavior, introduced from software updates or obscured through methods to hinder program analysis, is blocked.While sandbox mining techniques have been proposed for Android apps, we show and discuss why they are insufficient for detecting malicious behavior in a more complex IoT system. We prototype IoTBox to address these limitations. IoTBox explores behavior through a formal model of a smart home. In our empirical evaluation to detect malicious code changes, we find that IoTBox achieves substantially higher precision and recall compared to existing techniques for mining sandboxes.

Simulating quantum field theories on a quantum computer is one of the most exciting fundamental physics applications of quantum information science. Dynamical time evolution of quantum fields is a challenge that is beyond the capabilities of classical computing, but it can teach us important lessons about the fundamental fabric of space and time. Whether we may answer scientific questions of interest using near-term quantum computing hardware is an open question that requires a detailed simulation study of quantum noise. Here we present a large scale simulation study powered by a multi-node implementation of qsim using the Google Cloud Platform. We additionally employ newly-developed GPU capabilities in qsim and show how Tensor Processing Units — Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) specialized for Machine Learning — may be used to dramatically speed up the simulation of large quantum circuits. We demonstrate the use of high performance cloud computing for simulating ℤ2 quantum field theories on system sizes up to 36 qubits. We find this lattice size is not able to simulate our problem and observable combination with sufficient accuracy, implying more challenging observables of interest for this theory are likely beyond the reach of classical computation using exact circuit simulation.

A common way to detect malware attacks and avoid their destructive impact on a system is the use of virtual machines; A.K.A sandboxing. Attackers, on the other hand, strive to detect sandboxes when their software is running under such a virtual environment. Accordingly, they postpone launching any attack (Malware) as long as operating under such an execution environment. Thus, it is common among malware developers to utilize different sandbox detection techniques (sometimes referred to as Anti-VM or Anti-Virtualization techniques). In this paper, we present novel, side-channel-based techniques to detect sandboxes. We show that it is possible to detect even sandboxes that were properly configured and so far considered to be detection-proof. This paper proposes and implements the first attack which leverage side channels leakage between sibling logical cores to determine the execution environment.

This paper builds an Augmented Reality Sandbox (AR Sandbox) system based on augmented reality technology, and performs a 3D reconstruction for the sandbox terrain using the depth sensor Microsoft Kinect in the AR Sandbox, as an entry point to pave the way for later development of related metaverse applications, such as the metaverse architecting and visual interactive modeling. The innovation of this paper is that for the AR Sandbox scene, a 3D reconstruction method based on depth sensor is proposed, which can automatically cut off the edge of the sandbox table in Kinect field of view, and accurately and completely reconstruct the sandbox terrain in Matlab.

Named Data Network (NDN) is considered to be the future of Internet architecture. The nature of NDN is to disseminate data based on the naming scheme rather than the location of the node. This feature caters to the need of vehicular applications, resulting in Vehicular Named Data Networks (VNDN). Although it is still in the initial stages of research, the collaboration has assured various advantages which attract the researchers to explore the architecture further. VNDN face challenges such as intermittent connectivity, mobility of nodes, design of efficient forwarding and naming schemes, among others. In order to develop effective forwarding strategies, behavior of data and interest packets under various circumstances needs to be studied. In this paper, propagation behavior of data and interest packets is analyzed by considering metrics such as Interest Satisfaction Ratio (ISR), Hop Count Difference (HCD) and Copies of Data Packets Processed (CDPP). These metrics are evaluated under network conditions such as varying network size, node mobility and amount of interest produced by each node. Simulation results show that data packets do not follow the reverse path of interest packets.

This work seeks to advance the state of the art in HPC I/O performance analysis and interpretation. In particular, we demonstrate effective techniques to: (1) model output performance in the presence of I/O interference from production loads; (2) build features from write patterns and key parameters of the system architecture and configurations; (3) employ suitable machine learning algorithms to improve model accuracy. We train models with five popular regression algorithms and conduct experiments on two distinct production HPC platforms. We find that the lasso and random forest models predict output performance with high accuracy on both of the target systems. We also explore use of the models to guide adaptation in I/O middleware systems, and show potential for improvements of at least 15% from model-guided adaptation on 70% of samples, and improvements up to 10 x on some samples for both of the target systems.

The number of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) immensely grew in recent years. A frequent challenge in the assurance of the dependability of IoT systems is that components of the system appear as a black box. This paper presents a semi-automatic testing methodology for black-box systems that combines automata learning and fuzz testing. Our testing technique uses stateful fuzzing based on a model that is automatically inferred by automata learning. Applying this technique, we can simultaneously test multiple implementations for unexpected behavior and possible security vulnerabilities.We show the effectiveness of our learning-based fuzzing technique in a case study on the MQTT protocol. MQTT is a widely used publish/subscribe protocol in the IoT. Our case study reveals several inconsistencies between five different MQTT brokers. The found inconsistencies expose possible security vulnerabilities and violations of the MQTT specification.

Phishing URLs mainly target individuals and/or organizations through social engineering attacks by exploiting the humans' weaknesses in information security awareness. These URLs lure online users to access fake websites, and harvest their confidential information, such as debit/credit card numbers and other sensitive information. In this work, we introduce a phishing detection technique based on URL lexical analysis and machine learning classifiers. The experiments were carried out on a dataset that originally contained 1056937 labeled URLs (phishing and legitimate). This dataset was processed to generate 22 different features that were reduced further to a smaller set using different features reduction techniques. Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Neural Network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were all evaluated, and results show the superiority of SVMs, which achieved the highest accuracy in detecting the analyzed URLs with a rate of 99.89%. Our approach can be incorporated within add-on/middleware features in Internet browsers for alerting online users whenever they try to access a phishing website using only its URL.

With the development of communication technology, the disadvantages of traditional notification methods such as low efficiency gradually appear. With the introduction of WAP with WTLS security and its development and maintenance, more and more notification systems are using this technology. Through the analysis, design and implementation of notification system for large user groups, this paper studies how to collect and notify data without affecting the business system, and proposes a scheme of real-time data acquisition and filtering based on trigger. The middleware and application server implementation transaction management and database operation to separate CICS middleware technology based on research using UNIXC, Socket programming, SQL statements, SYBASE database technology, from the system requirements, business process, function structure, database and data structure, the input and output of the system, system testing the aspects such as design of practical significance to intelligent notification system for large user groups. Finally, the paper describes the test effect of the system in detail. 10 users send 1, 5, 10 and 20 strokes at the same time, and the completion time is 0.28, 1.09, 1.58 and 2.20 seconds, which proves that the system has practical significance.

Web Scraping is the technique of extracting desired data in an automated way by scanning the internal links and content of a website, this activity usually performed by systematically programmed bots. This paper explains our proposed solution to protect the blog content from theft and from being copied to other destinations by mitigating the scraping bots. To achieve our purpose we applied two steps in two levels, the first one, on the main blog page level, mitigated the work of crawler bots by adding extra empty articles anchors among real articles, and the next step, on the article page level, we add a random number of empty and hidden spans with randomly generated text among the article's body. To assess this solution we apply it to a local project developed using PHP language in Laravel framework, and put four criteria that measure the effectiveness. The results show that the changes in the file size before and after the application do not affect it, also, the processing time increased by few milliseconds which still in the acceptable range. And by using the HTML-similarity tool we get very good results that show the symmetric over style, with a few bit changes over the structure. Finally, to assess the effects on the bots, scraper bot reused and get the expected results from the programmed middleware. These results show that the solution is feasible to be adopted and use to protect blogs content.