Biblio

The growing number of cybersecurity incidents and the always increasing complexity of cybersecurity attacks is forcing the industry and the research community to develop robust and effective methods to detect and respond to network attacks. Many tools are either built upon a large number of rules and signatures which only large third-party vendors can afford to create and maintain, or are based on complex artificial intelligence engines which, in most cases, still require personalization and fine-tuning using costly service contracts offered by the vendors.This paper introduces an open-source network traffic monitoring system based on the concept of cyberscore, a numerical value that represents how a network activity is considered relevant for spotting cybersecurity-related events. We describe how this technique has been applied in real-life networks and present the result of this evaluation.

Browsers are one of the most widely used types of software around the world. This prevalence makes browsers a prime target for cyberattacks. To mitigate these threats, users can practice safe browsing habits and take advantage of the security features available to browsers. These protections, however, could be severely crippled if the browser itself were malicious. Presented in this paper is the concept of the evil-twin browser (ETB), a clone of a legitimate browser that looks and behaves identically to the original browser, but discreetly performs other tasks that harm a user's security. To better understand the concept of the evil-twin browser, a prototype ETB named ChroNe was developed. The creation and installation process of ChroN e is discussed in this paper. This paper also explores the motivation behind creating such a browser, examines existing relevant work, inspects the open-source codebase Chromium that assisted in ChroNe's development, and discusses relevant topics like ways to deliver an ETB, the capabilities of an ETB, and possible ways to defend against ETBs.

Open Source Software plays an important role in many software ecosystems. Whether in operating systems, network stacks, or as low-level system drivers, software we encounter daily is permeated with code contributions from open source projects. Decentralized development and open collaboration in open source projects introduce unique challenges: code submissions from unknown entities, limited personpower for commit or dependency reviews, and bringing new contributors up-to-date in projects’ best practices & processes.In 27 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with owners, maintainers, and contributors from a diverse set of open source projects, we investigate their security and trust practices. For this, we explore projects’ behind-the-scene processes, provided guidance & policies, as well as incident handling & encountered challenges. We find that our participants’ projects are highly diverse both in deployed security measures and trust processes, as well as their underlying motivations. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for the open source software ecosystem and how the research community can better support open source projects in trust and security considerations. Overall, we argue for supporting open source projects in ways that consider their individual strengths and limitations, especially in the case of smaller projects with low contributor numbers and limited access to resources.

In recent years we have observed an escalation of cybersecurity attacks, which are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect as they use more advanced evasion techniques and encrypted communications. The research community has often proposed the use of machine learning techniques to overcome the limitations of traditional cybersecurity approaches based on rules and signatures, which are hard to maintain, require constant updates, and do not solve the problems of zero-day attacks. Unfortunately, machine learning is not the holy grail of cybersecurity: machine learning-based techniques are hard to develop due to the lack of annotated data, are often computationally intensive, they can be target of hard to detect adversarial attacks, and more importantly are often not able to provide explanations for the predicted outcomes. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to cybersecurity detection leveraging on the concept of security score. Our approach demonstrates that extracting signals via deep packet inspections paves the way for efficient detection using traffic analysis. This work has been validated against various traffic datasets containing network attacks, showing that it can effectively detect network threats without the complexity of machine learning-based solutions.

Cyber-power resiliency analysis of the distribution system is becoming critical with increase in adverse cyberevents. Distribution network operators need to assess and analyze the resiliency of the system utilizing the analytical tool with a carefully designed visualization and be driven by data and model-based analytics. This work introduces the Cyber-Physical Security Assessment Metric (CP-SAM) visualization tool to assist operators in ensuring the energy supply to critical loads during or after a cyber-attack. CP-SAM also provides decision support to operators utilizing measurement data and distribution power grid model and through well-designed visualization. The paper discusses the concepts of cyber-physical resiliency, software design considerations, open-source software components, and use cases for the tool to demonstrate the implementation and importance of the developed tool.

Grid modernization efforts with the latest information and communication technologies will significantly benefit smart grids in the coming years. More optical fibre communications between consumers and the control center will promise better demand response and customer engagement, yet the increasing attack surface and man-in-the-middle (MITM) threats can result in security and privacy challenges. Among the studies for more secure smart grid communications, quantum key distribution protocols (QKD) have emerged as a promising option. To bridge the theoretical advantages of quantum communication to its practical utilization, however, comprehensive investigations have to be conducted with realistic cyber-physical smart grid structures and scenarios. To facilitate research in this direction, this paper proposes an open-source, research-oriented co-simulation platform that orchestrates cyber and power simulators under the MOSAIK framework. The proposed platform allows flexible and realistic power flow-based co-simulation of quantum communications and electrical grids, where different cyber and power topologies, QKD protocols, and attack threats can be investigated. Using quantum-based communication under MITM attacks, the paper presented detailed case studies to demonstrate how the platform enables quick setup of a lowvoltage distribution grid, implementation of different protocols and cryptosystems, as well as evaluations of both communication efficiency and security against MITM attacks. The platform has been made available online to empower researchers in the modelling of quantum-based cyber-physical systems, pilot studies on quantum communications in smart grid, as well as improved attack resilience against malicious intruders.

Reproducible experimental work is a vital part of the scientific method. It is a concern that is often, however, overlooked in modern computational intelligence research. Scientific research within the areas of programming language theory and mathematics have made advances that are directly applicable to the research areas of evolutionary and swarm intelligence. Through the use of functional programming and the established abstractions that functional programming provides, it is possible to define the elements of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms as compositional computations. These compositional blocks then compose together to allow the declarations of an algorithm, whilst considering the declaration as a "sub-program". These sub-programs may then be executed at a later time and provide the blueprints of the computation. Storing experimental results within a robust data-set file format, which is widely supported by analysis tools, provides additional flexibility and allows different analysis tools to access datasets in the same efficient manner. This paper presents an open-source software library for evolutionary and swarm-intelligence algorithms which allows the type-safe, compositional, monadic and functional declaration of algorithms while tracking and managing effects (e.g. usage of a random number generator) that directly influences the execution of an algorithm.

The behavior of modern power systems is becoming more stochastic and dynamic, due to the increased penetration of variable generation, demand response, new power market structure, extreme weather conditions, contingencies, and unexpected events. It is critically important to predict potential system operational issues so that grid planners and operators can take preventive actions to mitigate the impact, e.g., lack of operational reserves. In this paper, an innovative software tool is presented to assist power grid operators in a balancing authority in predicting the grid stress level over the next operating day. It periodically collects necessary information from public domain such as weather forecasts, electricity demand, and automatically estimates the stress levels on a daily basis. Advanced Neural Network and regression tree algorithms are developed as the prediction engines to achieve this goal. The tool has been tested on a few key balancing authorities and successfully predicted the growing system peak load and increased stress levels under extreme heat waves.

This paper begins to describe a new kind of database, one that explores a diverse range of movement in the field of dance through capture of different bodies and different backgrounds - or what we are terming movement vernaculars. We re-purpose Ivan Illich's concept of 'vernacular work' [11] here to refer to those everyday forms of dance and organized movement that are informal, refractory (resistant to formal analysis), yet are socially reproduced and derived from a commons. The project investigates the notion of vernaculars in movement that is intentional and aesthetic through the development of a computational approach that highlights both similarities and differences, thereby revealing the specificities of each individual mover. This paper presents an example of how this movement database is used as a research tool, and how the fruits of that research can be added back to the database, thus adding a novel layer of annotation and further enriching the collection. Future researchers can then benefit from this layer, further refining and building upon these techniques. The creation of a robust, open source, movement lexicon repository will allow for observation, speculation, and contextualization - along with the provision of clean and complex data sets for new forms of creative expression.