Biblio

There is a stark contrast between the state of cyber security of national infrastructure in Ireland and the efforts underway to support cyber security technologists to work in the country. Notable attacks have recently occurred against the national health service, universities, and various other state bodies, prompting an interest in changing the current situation. This paper presents an overview of the security projects, commercial establishments, and policy in Ireland.

A recommender system aims to suggest the most relevant items to users based on their personal data. However, data privacy is a growing concern for anyone. Secure recommender system is a research direction to preserve user privacy while maintaining as high performance as possible. The most recent strategy is to use Federated Learning, a machine learning technique for privacy-preserving distributed training. In Federated Learning, a subset of users will be selected for training model using data at local systems, the server will securely aggregate the computing result from local models to generate a global model, finally that model will give recommendations to users. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to train Collaborative Filtering recommender system specialized for the ranking task in Federated Learning setting, where the goal is to protect user interaction information (i.e., implicit feedback). Specifically, with the help of the algorithm, the recommender system will be trained by Neural Collaborative Filtering, one of the state-of-the-art matrix factorization methods and Bayesian Personalized Ranking, the most common pairwise approach. In contrast to existing approaches which protect user privacy by requiring users to download/upload the information associated with all interactions that they can possibly interact with in order to perform training, the algorithm can protect user privacy at low communication cost, where users only need to obtain/transfer the information related to a small number of interactions per training iteration. Above all, through extensive experiments, the algorithm has demonstrated to utilize user data more efficient than the most recent research called FedeRank, while ensuring that user privacy is still preserved.

The latest generation of IoT systems incorporate machine learning (ML) technologies on edge devices. This introduces new engineering challenges to bring ML onto resource-constrained hardware, and complications for ensuring system security and privacy. Existing research prescribes iterative processes for machine learning enabled IoT products to ease development and increase product success. However, these processes mostly focus on existing practices used in other generic software development areas and are not specialized for the purpose of machine learning or IoT devices. This research seeks to characterize engineering processes and security practices for ML-enabled IoT systems through the lens of the engineering lifecycle. We collected data from practitioners through a survey (N=25) and interviews (N=4). We found that security processes and engineering methods vary by company. Respondents emphasized the engineering cost of security analysis and threat modeling, and trade-offs with business needs. Engineers reduce their security investment if it is not an explicit requirement. The threats of IP theft and reverse engineering were a consistent concern among practitioners when deploying ML for IoT devices. Based on our findings, we recommend further research into understanding engineering cost, compliance, and security trade-offs.

One of the major issues which are hindering widespread and seamless adoption of Internet of Thing (IoT) is security. The IoT devices are vulnerable and susceptible to attacks which became evident from a series of recent large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, leading to substantial business and financial losses. Furthermore, in order to find vulnerabilities in IoT, there is a lack of comprehensive security analysis framework. In this paper, we present a modular, adaptable and tunable framework, called PIT, to probe IoT systems at different layers of design and implementation. PIT consists of several security analysis engines, viz., penetration testing, fuzzing, static analysis, and dynamic analysis and an exploitation engine to discover multiple IoT vulnerabilities, respectively. We also develop a novel grey-box fuzzer, called Applica, as a part of the fuzzing engine to overcome the limitations of the present day fuzzers. The proposed framework has been evaluated on a real-world IoT testbed comprising of the state-of-the-art devices. We discovered several network and system-level vulnerabilities such as Buffer Overflow, Denial-of-Service, SQL Injection, etc., and successfully exploited them to demonstrate the presence of security loopholes in the IoT devices.

This demo paper presents the technical details and usage scenarios of μSE: a mutation-based tool for evaluating security-focused static analysis tools for Android. Mutation testing is generally used by software practitioners to assess the robustness of a given test-suite. However, we leverage this technique to systematically evaluate static analysis tools and uncover and document soundness issues.μSE's analysis has found 25 previously undocumented flaws in static data leak detection tools for Android.μSE offers four mutation schemes, namely Reachability, Complex-reachability, TaintSink, and ScopeSink, which determine the locations of seeded mutants. Furthermore, the user can extend μSE by customizing the API calls targeted by the mutation analysis.μSE is also practical, as it makes use of filtering techniques based on compilation and execution criteria that reduces the number of ineffective mutations.

This paper describes the process of developing data visualisations to enhance a commercial software platform for combating insider threat, whose existing UI, while perfectly functional, was limited in its ability to allow analysts to easily spot the patterns and outliers that visualisation naturally reveals. We describe the design and development process, proceeding from initial tasks/requirements gathering, understanding the platform’s data formats, the rationale behind the visualisations’ design, and then refining the prototype through gathering feedback from representative domain experts who are also current users of the software. Through a number of example scenarios, we show that the visualisation can support the identified tasks and aid analysts in discovering and understanding potentially risky insider activity within a large user base.

Performing a live digital forensics investigation on a running system is challenging due to the time pressure under which decisions have to be made. Newly proliferating and frequently applied types of malware (e.g., fileless malware) increase the need to conduct digital forensic investigations in real-time. In the course of these investigations, forensic experts are confronted with a wide range of different forensic tools. The decision, which of those are suitable for the current situation, is often based on the cyber forensics experts’ experience. Currently, there is no reliable automated solution to support this decision-making. Therefore, we derive requirements for visually supporting the decision-making process for live forensic investigations and introduce a research prototype that provides visual guidance for cyber forensic experts during a live digital forensics investigation. Our prototype collects relevant core information for live digital forensics and provides visual representations for connections between occurring events, developments over time, and detailed information on specific events. To show the applicability of our approach, we analyze an exemplary use case using the prototype and demonstrate the support through our approach.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer a wide range of promising benefits by reducing traffic accidents, environmental pollution, traffic congestion and land usage etc. However, to reap the intended benefits of AVs, it is inevitable that this technology should be trusted and accepted by the public. The consumer's substantial trust upon AVs will lead to its widespread adoption in the real-life. It is well understood that the preservation of strong security and privacy features influence a consumer's trust on a product in a positive manner. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of digital labels for AVs to increase consumers awareness and trust regarding the security level of their vehicle. We present an architecture called Cybersecurity Box (CSBox) that leverages digital labels to display and inform consumers and passengers about cybersecurity status of the AV in use. The introduction of cybersecurity digital labels on the dashboard of AVs would attempt to increase the trust level of consumers and passengers on this promising technology.

Cloud computing is a technology that provides users with a large storage space and an enormous computing power. For privacy purpose, the sensitive data should be encrypted before being outsourced to the cloud. To search over the outsourced data, searchable encryption (SE) schemes have been proposed in the literature. An SE scheme should perform searches over encrypted data without causing any sensitive information leakage. To this end, a few security constraints were elaborated to guarantee the security of the SE schemes, namely, the keyword privacy, the trapdoor unlinkability, and the access pattern. The latter is very hard to be respected and most approaches fail to guarantee the access pattern constraint when performing a search. This constraint consists in hiding from the server the search result returned to the user. The non respect of this constraint may cause sensitive information leakage as demonstrated in the literature. To fix this security lack, we propose a method that allows to securely request and receive the needed documents from the server after performing a search. The proposed method that we call the access pattern hiding (APH) technique allows to respect the access pattern constraint. An experimental study is conducted to validate the APH technique.

The use of static code analysis tools for security audits can be time consuming, as the many existing tools focus on different aspects and therefore development teams often use several of these tools to keep code quality high and prevent security issues. Displaying the results of multiple tools, such as code smells and security warnings, in a unified interface can help developers get a better overview and prioritize upcoming work. We present visualizations and a dashboard that interactively display results from static code analysis for “interesting” commits during development. With this, we aim to provide an effective visual analytics tool for code security analysis results.

In the federated learning system, parameter gradients are shared among participants and the central modulator, while the original data never leave their protected source domain. However, the gradient itself might carry enough information for precise inference of the original data. By reporting their parameter gradients to the central server, client datasets are exposed to inference attacks from adversaries. In this paper, we propose a quantitative metric based on mutual information for clients to evaluate the potential risk of information leakage in their gradients. Mutual information has received increasing attention in the machine learning and data mining community over the past few years. However, existing mutual information estimation methods cannot handle high-dimensional variables. In this paper, we propose a novel method to approximate the mutual information between the high-dimensional gradients and batched input data. Experimental results show that the proposed metric reliably reflect the extent of information leakage in federated learning. In addition, using the proposed metric, we investigate the influential factors of risk level. It is proven that, the risk of information leakage is related to the status of the task model, as well as the inherent data distribution.

Nowadays, Security is the biggest challenge in communication networks. Well defined security protocols not only solve the privacy and security issues but also help to reduce the implementation cost and simplify network's operation. Network society demands more reliable and secure network services as well as infrastructure. In communication networks, data theft, hacking, fraud, cyber warfare are serious security threats. Security as defined by experts is confirming protected communication amongst communication/computing systems and consumer applications in private and public networks, it is important for promising privacy, confidentiality, and protection of information. This paper highlights the security related issues and challenges in communication networks. We also present the holistic view for the underlaying physical layer including physical infrastructure attacks, jamming, interception, and eavesdropping. This research focused on improving the security measures and protocols in different communication networks.

When users in various web and mobile applications enjoy the convenience of recommendation systems, they are vulnerable to attribute inference attacks. The accumulating online behaviors of users (e.g., clicks, searches, ratings) naturally brings out user preferences, and poses an inevitable threat of privacy that adversaries can infer one's private profiles (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, political view) with AI-based algorithms. Existing defense methods assume the existence of a trusted third party, rely on computationally intractable algorithms, or have impact on recommendation utility. These imperfections make them impractical for privacy preservation in real-life scenarios. In this work, we introduce BiasBooster, a practical proactive defense method based on behavior segmentation, to protect user privacy against attribute inference attacks from user behaviors, while retaining recommendation utility with a heuristic recommendation aggregation module. BiasBooster is a user-centric approach from client side, which proactively divides a user's behaviors into weakly related segments and perform them with several dummy identities, then aggregates real-time recommendations for user from different dummy identities. We estimate its effectiveness of preservation on both privacy and recommendation utility through extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets. A Chrome extension is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of applying BiasBooster in real world. Experimental results show that compared to existing defenses, BiasBooster substantially reduces the averaged accuracy of attribute inference attacks, with minor utility loss of recommendations.

Wireless sensors are often deployed in environments where it is difficult for them to discern friend from enemy. An example case is a military tactical scenario, where sensors are deployed to map the location of an item but where some of the nodes have been compromised or where there are other malicious nodes present. In this scenario, sharing data with other network nodes may present a critical security risk to the sensor nodes. Blockchain technology, with its ability to house a secure distributed ledger, offers a possible solution. However, blockchain applications for Wireless Sensor Networks suffer from poor latency in block propagation which in turn decreases throughput and network scalability. Several researchers have proposed solutions for improved network throughput. In this work, a comparison of these existing works is performed leading to a taxonomy of existing algorithms. Characteristics consistently found in algorithms reporting improved throughput are presented and, later, these characteristics are used in the development of a new algorithm for improving throughput. The proposed algorithm utilizes a proof-of- authority consensus algorithm with a node trust-based scheme. The proposed algorithm shows strong results over the base case algorithm and was evaluated with blockchain network simulations of up to 20000 nodes.

With the rapid technological advancement of the universal internet of vehicles (UIoV), it becomes crucial to ensure safe and secure communication over the network, in an effort to achieve the implementation objective of UIoV effectively. A UIoV is characterized by highly dynamic topology, scalability, and thus vulnerable to various types of security and privacy attacks (i.e., replay attack, impersonation attack, man-in-middle attack, non-repudiation, and modification). Since the components of UIoV are constrained by numerous factors (e.g., low memory devices, low power), which makes UIoV highly susceptible. Therefore, existing schemes to address the privacy and security facets of UIoV exhibit an enormous scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and efficiency. This paper presents a lightweight authentication and batch verification scheme (LABVS) for UIoV using a bilinear map and cryptographic operations (i.e., one-way hash function, concatenation, XOR) to minimize the rate of message loss occurred due to delay in response time as in single message verification scheme. Subsequently, the scheme results in a high level of security and privacy. Moreover, the performance analysis substantiates that LABVS minimizes the computational delay and has better performance in the delay-sensitive network in terms of security and privacy as compared to the existing schemes.

Ensuring secure transmission over the communication channel is a fundamental responsibility to achieve the implementation objective of universal internet of vehicles (UIoV) efficiently. Characteristics like highly dynamic topology and scalability of UIoV makes it more vulnerable to different types of privacy and security attacks. Considerable scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and performance can be observed within the existing schemes that address the privacy and security aspects of UIoV. In this paper, we present an improvised authentication and lightweight batch verification method for security and privacy in UIoV. The suggested method reduces the message loss rate, which occurred due to the response time delay by implementing some low-cost cryptographic operations like one-way hash function, concatenation, XOR, and bilinear map. Furthermore, the performance analysis proves that the proposed method is more reliable that reduces the computational delay and has a better performance in the delay-sensitive network as compared to the existing schemes. The experimental results are obtained by implementing the proposed scheme on a desktop-based configuration as well as Raspberry Pi 4.

Live Linux distribution devices can hold Linux operating system for portability. Using such devices and distributions, one can access system or critical files, which otherwise cannot be accessed by guest or any unauthorized user. Events like file leakage before the official announcement. These announcements can vary from mobile companies to software industries. Damages caused by such vulnerabilities can be data theft, data tampering, or permanent deletion of certain records. This study uncovers the security flaws of operating system against live device attacks. For this study, we used live devices with different Linux distributions. Target operating systems are exposed to live device attacks and their behavior is recorded against different Linux distribution. This study also compares the robustness level of different operating system against such attacks.

Withgrowing times and technology, and the data related to it is increasing on daily basis and so is the daunting task to manage it. The present solution to this problem i.e our present databases, are not the long-term solutions. These data volumes need to be stored safely and retrieved safely to use. This paper presents an overview of security issues for big data. Big Data encompasses data configuration, distribution and analysis of the data that overcome the drawbacks of traditional data processing technology. Big data manages, stores and acquires data in a speedy and cost-effective manner with the help of tools, technologies and frameworks.

NEMESIS provides powerful and cost-effective defenses against extreme Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks through a number of network maneuvers. However, selection of which maneuvers to deploy when and with what parameters requires great care to achieve optimal outcomes in the face of overwhelming attack. Analytical wargaming allows game theoretic optimal Courses of Action (COA) to be created real-time during live operations, orders of magnitude faster than packet-level simulation and with equivalent outcomes to even expert human hand-crafted COAs.

In recent years, the research community has increasingly focused on understanding the security and privacy challenges posed by deep learning models. However, the security domain and the privacy domain have typically been considered separately. It is thus unclear whether the defense methods in one domain will have any unexpected impact on the other domain. In this paper, we take a step towards enhancing our understanding of deep learning models when the two domains are combined together. We do this by measuring the success of membership inference attacks against two state-of-the-art adversarial defense methods that mitigate evasion attacks: adversarial training and provable defense. On the one hand, membership inference attacks aim to infer an individual's participation in the target model's training dataset and are known to be correlated with target model's overfitting. On the other hand, adversarial defense methods aim to enhance the robustness of target models by ensuring that model predictions are unchanged for a small area around each sample in the training dataset. Intuitively, adversarial defenses may rely more on the training dataset and be more vulnerable to membership inference attacks. By performing empirical membership inference attacks on both adversarially robust models and corresponding undefended models, we find that the adversarial training method is indeed more susceptible to membership inference attacks, and the privacy leakage is directly correlated with model robustness. We also find that the provable defense approach does not lead to enhanced success of membership inference attacks. However, this is achieved by significantly sacrificing the accuracy of the model on benign data points, indicating that privacy, security, and prediction accuracy are not jointly achieved in these two approaches.

The biggest challenge of sharing data stored in cloud-storage is privacy-preservation. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution for enforcing the security of private data stored in some cloud storage for sharing. We consider an environment where even if the cloud service provider is not-reliable or is compromised, our data still remain secure. The data Owner encrypts the private files using a secret key, file identifier and hash function and then uploads the cipher text files to the cloud. When a Data user requests access to a file, the owner establishes a key with the user and creates a new key, which is sent to the user. The user can then extract the original key by using the mutually established secret key and use it to decrypt the encrypted file. Thus we propose a system which is computationally simple yet provides a secure mechanism for sharing private data even over an untrusted cloud service provider.

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime as new usage scenarios arise and vulnerabilities are discovered. Adaptive security and privacy promise to address these threats by increasing awareness and automating prevention, detection and recovery from security and privacy requirements' failures at runtime by re-configuring system controls and perhaps even changing requirements. This paper discusses the need for adaptive security and privacy in smart grids by presenting some motivating scenarios. We then outline some research issues that arise in engineering adaptive security. We particularly scrutinize published reports by NIST on smart grid security and privacy as the basis for our discussions.

Phishing is a security attack to acquire personal information like passwords, credit card details or other account details of a user by means of websites or emails. Phishing websites look similar to the legitimate ones which make it difficult for a layman to differentiate between them. As per the reports of Anti Phishing Working Group (APWG) published in December 2018, phishing against banking services and payment processor was high. Almost all the phishy URLs use HTTPS and use redirects to avoid getting detected. This paper presents a focused literature survey of methods available to detect phishing websites. A comparative study of the in-use anti-phishing tools was accomplished and their limitations were acknowledged. We analyzed the URL-based features used in the past to improve their definitions as per the current scenario which is our major contribution. Also, a step wise procedure of designing an anti-phishing model is discussed to construct an efficient framework which adds to our contribution. Observations made out of this study are stated along with recommendations on existing systems.

With the rapid development of computer science, Internet and information technology, the application scale of network is expanding constantly, and the data volume is increasing day by day. Therefore, the demand for data processing needs to be improved urgently, and Cloud computing and big data technology as the product of the development of computer networks came into being. However, the following data collection, storage, and the security and privacy issues in the process of use are faced with many risks. How to protect the security and privacy of cloud data has become one of the urgent problems to be solved. Aiming at the problem of security and privacy of data in cloud computing environment, the security of the data is ensured from two aspects: the storage scheme and the encryption mode of the cloud data.

Internet of Things (IoT) Devices are monitoring and controlling systems that interact with the physical world by collecting, processing and transmitting data using the internet. IoT devices include home automation systems, smart grid, transportation systems, medical devices, building controls, manufacturing and industrial control systems. With the increase in deployment of IoT devices, there will be a corresponding increase in the amount of data generated by these devices, therefore, resulting in the need of large scale data processing systems to process and extract information for efficient and impactful decision making that will improve quality of living.