Biblio

This study investigates the relationship between resilience of control systems to attacks and the information available to malicious attackers. Specifically, it is shown that control systems are guaranteed to be secure in an asymptotic manner by rendering reactions against potentially harmful actions covert. The behaviors of the attacker and the defender are analyzed through a repeated signaling game with an undisclosed belief under covert reactions. In the typical setting of signaling games, reactions conducted by the defender are supposed to be public information and the measurability enables the attacker to accurately trace transitions of the defender's belief on existence of a malicious attacker. In contrast, the belief in the game considered in this paper is undisclosed and hence common equilibrium concepts can no longer be employed for the analysis. To surmount this difficulty, a novel framework for decision of reasonable strategies of the players in the game is introduced. Based on the presented framework, it is revealed that any reasonable strategy chosen by a rational malicious attacker converges to the benign behavior as long as the reactions performed by the defender are unobservable to the attacker. The result provides an explicit relationship between resilience and information, which indicates the importance of covertness of reactions for designing secure control systems.

With increasing improvements in different areas, Internet control has been making prominent impacts in almost all areas of technology that has resulted in reasonable advances in every discrete field and therefore the industries too are proceeding to the field of IoT (Internet of Things), in which the communication among heterogeneous equipments is via Internet broadly. So imparting these advances of technology in the Power Station Plant sectors i.e. the power plants will be remotely controlled additional to remote monitoring, with no corporal place as a factor for controlling or monitoring. But imparting this technology the security factor needs to be considered as a basic and such methods need to be put into practice that the communication in such networks or control systems is defended against any third party interventions while the data is being transferred from one device to the other device through the internet (Unrestricted Channel). The paper puts forward exercising RSA,DES and AES encrypting schemes for the purpose of data encryption at the Data Link Layer i.e. before it is transmitted to the other device through Internet and as a result of this the security constraints are maintained. The records put to use have been supplied by NTPC, Dadri, India plus simulation part was executed employing MATLAB.

The globalization of IC manufacturing has increased the likelihood for IP providers to suffer financial and reputational loss from IP piracy. Logic locking prevents IP piracy by corrupting the functionality of an IP unless a correct secret key is inserted. However, existing logic-locking techniques can impose significant area overhead and performance impact (delay and power) on designs. In this work, we propose BISTLock, a logic-locking technique that utilizes built-in self-test (BIST) to isolate functional inputs when the circuit is locked. We also propose a set of security metrics and use the proposed metrics to quantify BISTLock's security strength for an open-source AES core. Our experimental results demonstrate that BISTLock is easy to implement and introduces an average of 0.74% area and no power or delay overhead across the set of benchmarks used for evaluation.

This paper presents a multi-channel, 12 bit, ADC IP core with programmable gain amplifier which is implemented as part of novel Security SoC. The measurement results show that effective number of bits (ENOB) of the ADC IP core reaches 8 bits, SNDR of 47.14dB and SFDR of 56.55dB at 100Ksps sampling rate. The input voltage range is 0V to 3.3V, active die area of 700um*620um in 0.35um CMOS process, and the ADC consumes 22mW in all channel auto-scan mode at 3.3V power supply.

Due to the constrained resource and computational limitation of many Internet of Things (IoT) devices, conventional security protections, which require high computational overhead are not suitable to be deployed. Thus, vulnerable IoT devices could be easily exploited by attackers to break into networks. In this paper, we employ cyber deception and moving target defense (MTD) techniques to proactively change the network topology with both real and decoy nodes with the support of software-defined networking (SDN) technology and investigate the impact of single-target and multi-target attacks on the effectiveness of the integrated mechanism via a hierarchical graphical security model with security metrics. We also implement a web-based visualization interface to show topology changes with highlighted attack paths. Finally, the qualitative security analysis is performed for a small-scale and SDN-supported IoT network with different combinations of decoy types and levels of attack intelligence. Simulation results show the integrated defense mechanism can introduce longer mean-time-to-security-failure and larger attack impact under the multi-target attack, compared with the single-target attack model. In addition, adaptive shuffling has better performance than fixed interval shuffling in terms of a higher proportion of decoy paths, longer mean-time-to-security-failure and largely reduced defense cost.

In article the basic criteria of quality of work of the automated control system of technological process (APCS) are considered, the analysis of critical moments and level of information safety of APCS is spent. The model of maintenance of information safety of APCS on the basis of technology of predictive maintenance with application of intellectual methods of data processing is offered. The model allows to generate the list of actions at detection of new kinds of the threats connected with destructive influences on object, proceeding from acceptability of predicted consequences of work of APCS. In article with use of the system analysis the complex model of the technical object of automation is developed, allowing to estimate consequences from realization of threats of information safety at various system levels of APCS.

The ability to react to a malicious attack starts with high fidelity recognition, and with that, an agile response to the attack. The current Operational Technology (OT) systems for a critical infrastructure include an intrusion detection system (IDS), but the ability to adapt to an intrusion is a human initiated response. Orchestrators, which are coming of age in the financial sector and allow for levels of automated response, are not prevalent in the OT space. To evolve to such responses in the OT space, a tradeoff analysis is first needed. This tradeoff analysis should evaluate the mitigation benefits of responses versus the physical affects that result. Providing an informed and automated response decision. This paper presents a formulation of a novel tradeoff analysis and its use in advancing a cyber-physical architecture for automated responses (CyPhAAR).

In recent years, the integration of encryption schemes into cyber-physical systems (CPS) has attracted much attention to improve the confidentiality of sensor signals and control input signals sent over the network. However, in principle an adversary can still modify the sensor signals and the control input signals, even though he does not know the concrete values of the signals. In this paper, we shall first show that a standard encryption scheme can not prevent some sophisticated attacks such as covert attacks, which remain invisible in the CPS with encrypted communication and a conventional diagnosis system. To cope with this problem, an improved encryption scheme is proposed to mask the communication and to cancel the influence of the attack signal out of the system. The basic idea is to swap the plaintext and the generated random value in the somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme to prevent a direct access of the adversary to the transmitted plaintext. It will be shown that the CPS with the improved encryption scheme is resilient to covert attacks. The proposed encryption scheme and the CPS structure are finally illustrated through the well-established quadruple-tank process.

The new switching architecture of the neural networks was proposed. The switching neural networks consist of the neurons and the switchers. The goal is to reduce expenses on the artificial neural network design and training. For realization of complex models, algorithms and methods of management the neural networks of the big size are required. The number of the interconnection links “everyone with everyone” grows with the number of neurons. The training of big neural networks requires the resources of supercomputers. Time of training of neural networks also depends on the number of neurons in the network. Switching neural networks are divided into fragments connected by the switchers. Training of switcher neuron network is provided by fragments. On the basis of switching neural networks the devices of associative memory were designed with the number of neurons comparable to the human brain.

The ability to advance the state of the art in automated cybersecurity protections for industrial control systems (ICS) has as a prerequisite of understanding the trade-off space. That is, to enable a cyber feedback loop in a control system environment you must first consider both the security mitigation available, the benefits and the impacts to the control system functionality when the mitigation is used. More damaging impacts could be precipitated that the mitigation was intended to rectify. This paper details networked ICS that controls a simulation of the frequency response represented with the swing equation. The microgrid loads and base generation can be balanced through the control of an emulated battery and power inverter. The simulated plant, which is implemented in Raspberry Pi computers, provides an inexpensive platform to realize the physical effects of cyber attacks to show the trade-offs of available mitigating actions. This network design can include a commercial ICS controller and simple plant or emulated plant to introduce real world implementation of feedback controls, and provides a scalable, physical effects measurable microgrid for cyber resilience analysis (SPEMMCRA).

Cloud, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies have introduced a new era of cybersecurity threats and challenges. To protect cloud infrastructure, in our earlier work, we proposed Software Defined Security Service (SDS2) to tackle security challenges centered around a new policy-based interaction model. The security architecture consists of three main components: a Security Controller, Virtual Security Functions (VSF), and a Sec-Manage Protocol. However, the security architecture requires an agile and specific protocol to transfer interaction parameters and security messages between its components where OpenFlow considers mainly as network routing protocol. So, The Sec-Manage protocol has been designed specifically for obtaining policy-based interaction parameters among cloud entities between the security controller and its VSFs. This paper focuses on the design and the implementation of the Sec-Manage protocol and demonstrates its use in setting, monitoring, and conveying relevant policy-based interaction security parameters.

Construction of the audit internal control system based on the online big data mining and decentralized model is done in this paper. How to integrate the novel technologies to internal control is the attracting task. IT audit is built on the information system and is independent of the information system itself. Application of the IT audit in enterprises can provide a guarantee for the security of the information system that can give an objective evaluation of the investment. This paper integrates the online big data mining and decentralized model to construct an efficient system. Association discovery is also called a data link. It uses similarity functions, such as the Euclidean distance, edit distance, cosine distance, Jeckard function, etc., to establish association relationships between data entities. These parameters are considered for comprehensive analysis.

Infrastructural systems such as the electricity grid, healthcare, and transportation networks today rely increasingly on the joint functioning of networked information systems and physical components, in short, on cyber-physical architectures. Despite tremendous advances in cryptography, physical-layer security and authentication, information attacks, both passive such as eavesdropping, and active such as unauthorized data injection, continue to thwart the reliable functioning of networked systems. In systems with joint cyber-physical functionality, the ability of an adversary to monitor transmitted information or introduce false information can lead to sensitive user data being leaked or result in critical damages to the underlying physical system. This paper investigates two broad challenges in information security in cyber-physical systems (CPSs): preventing retrieval of internal physical system information through monitored external cyber flows, and limiting the modification of physical system functioning through compromised cyber flows. A rigorous analytical framework grounded on information-theoretic security is developed to study these challenges in a general stochastic control system abstraction-a theoretical building block for CPSs-with the objectives of quantifying the fundamental tradeoffs between information security and physical system performance, and through the process, designing provably secure controller policies. Recent results are presented that establish the theoretical basis for the framework, in addition to practical applications in timing analysis of anonymous systems, and demand response systems in a smart electricity grid.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) play an increasingly significant role in many critical applications. These valuable applications attract various sophisticated attacks. This paper considers a stealthy estimation attack, which aims to modify the state estimation of the CPSs. The intelligent attackers can learn defense strategies and use clandestine attack strategies to avoid detection. To address the issue, we design a Chi-square detector in a Digital Twin (DT), which is an online digital model of the physical system. We use a Signaling Game with Evidence (SGE) to find the optimal attack and defense strategies. Our analytical results show that the proposed defense strategies can mitigate the impact of the attack on the physical estimation and guarantee the stability of the CPSs. Finally, we use an illustrative application to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.

Security has become the vital component of today's technology. People wish to safeguard their valuable items in bank lockers. With growing technology most of the banks have replaced the manual lockers by digital lockers. Even though there are numerous biometric approaches, these are not robust. In this work we propose a new approach for personal biometric identification based on features extracted from ECG.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are dynamically self-organized and self-configured technology ensuring efficient connection to Internet. Such networks suffer from many issues, like lack of performance efficiency when huge amount of traffic are injected inside the networks. To deal with such issues, we propose in this paper an adapted fuzzy framework; by monitoring the rate of change in queue length in addition to the current length of the queue, we are able to provide a measure of future queue state. Furthermore, by using explicit rate messages we can make node sources more responsive to unexpected changes in the network traffic load. The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed model.

Software Defined Vehicular Networking (SDVN) could be the future of the vehicular networks, enabling interoperability between heterogeneous networks and mobility management. Thus, the deployment of large SDVN is considered. However, SDVN is facing major security issues, in particular, authentication and access control issues. Indeed, an unauthorized SDN controller could modify the behavior of switches (packet redirection, packet drops) and an unauthorized switch could disrupt the operation of the network (reconnaissance attack, malicious feedback). Due to the SDVN features (decentralization, mobility) and the SDVN requirements (flexibility, scalability), the Blockchain technology appears to be an efficient way to solve these authentication and access control issues. Therefore, many Blockchain-based approaches have already been proposed. However, two key challenges have not been addressed: authentication and access control for SDN controllers and high scalability for the underlying Blockchain network. That is why in this paper we propose an innovative and scalable architecture, based on a set of interconnected Blockchain sub-networks. Moreover, an efficient access control mechanism and a cross-sub-networks authentication/revocation mechanism are proposed for all SDVN devices (vehicles, roadside equipment, SDN controllers). To demonstrate the benefits of our approach, its performances are compared with existing solutions in terms of throughput, latency, CPU usage and read/write access to the Blockchain ledger. In addition, we determine an optimal number of Blockchain sub-networks according to different parameters such as the number of certificates to store and the number of requests to process.

An attacker's success crucially depends on the reconnaissance phase of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which is the first step to gather intelligence. Although several solutions have been proposed against network reconnaissance attacks, they fail to address the needs of legitimate users' requests. Thus, we propose a cloud-based deception framework which aims to confuse the attacker with reconnaissance replies while allowing legitimate uses. The deception is based on for-warding the reconnaissance packets to a cloud infrastructure through tunneling and SDN so that the returned IP addresses to the attacker will not be genuine. For handling legitimate requests, we create a reflected virtual topology in the cloud to match any changes in the original physical network to the cloud topology using SDN. Through experimentations on GENI platform, we show that our framework can provide reconnaissance responses with negligible delays to the network clients while also reducing the management costs significantly.

The performance-driven design of SDN architectures leaves many security vulnerabilities, a notable one being the communication bottleneck between the controller and the switches. Functioning as a cache between the controller and the switches, the flow table mitigates this bottleneck by caching flow rules received from the controller at each switch, but is very limited in size due to the high cost and power consumption of the underlying storage medium. It thus presents an easy target for attacks. Observing that many existing defenses are based on simplistic attack models, we develop a model of intelligent attacks that exploit specific cache-like behaviors of the flow table to infer its internal configuration and state, and then design attack parameters accordingly. Our evaluations show that such attacks can accurately expose the internal parameters of the target flow table and cause measurable damage with the minimum effort.

Inter-networked control systems make smart buildings increasingly efficient but can lead to severe operational disruptions and infrastructure damage. It is vital the security state of smart buildings is properly assessed so that thorough and cost effective risk management can be established. This paper uniquely reports on an actual risk assessment performed in 2018 on one of the world's most densely monitored, state-of-the-art, smart buildings. From our observations, we suggest that current practice may be inadequate due to a number of challenges and deficiencies, including the lack of a recognised smart building risk assessment methodology. As a result, the security posture of many smart buildings may not be as robust as their risk assessments suggest. Crucially, we highlight a number of key recommendations for a more comprehensive risk assessment process for smart buildings. As a whole, we believe this practical experience report will be of interest to a range of smart building stakeholders.

Software-defined networks (SDN), through their programmability, significantly increase network resilience by enabling dynamic reconfiguration of network topologies in response to faults and potentially malicious attacks detected in real-time. Another key trend in network softwarization is cloud-native software, which, together with SDN, will be an integral part of the core of future 5G networks. In SDN, the control plane forms the "brain" of the software-defined network and is typically implemented as a set of distributed controller replicas to avoid a single point of failure. Distributed consensus algorithms are used to ensure agreement among the replicas on key data even in the presence of faults. Security is also a critical concern in ensuring that attackers cannot compromise the SDN control plane; byzantine fault tolerance algorithms can provide protection against compromised controller replicas. However, while reliability/availability and security form key attributes of resilience, they are typically modeled separately in SDN, without consideration of the potential impacts of their interaction. In this paper we present an initial framework for a model that unifies reliability, availability, and security considerations in distributed consensus. We examine – via simulation of our model – some impacts of the interaction between accidental faults and malicious attacks on SDN and suggest potential mitigations unique to cloud-native software.

Microgrids' dependency on communication links exposes the control systems to cyber attack threats. In this work, instead of designing reactive defense approaches, a proacitve moving target defense mechanism is proposed for securing microgrid secondary frequency control from denial of service (DoS) attack. The sensor data is transmitted by following a Markov process, not in a deterministic way. This uncertainty will increase the difficulty for attacker's decision making and thus significantly reduce the attack space. As the system parameters are constantly changing, a gain scheduling based secondary frequency controller is designed to sustain the system performance. Case studies of a microgrid with four inverter-based DGs show the proposed moving target mechanism can enhance the resiliency of the microgrid control systems against DoS attacks.

Moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive defense mechanism aiming to thwart a potential attacker. The key underlying idea of MTD is to increase uncertainty and confusion for attackers by changing the attack surface (i.e., system or network configurations) that can invalidate the intelligence collected by the attackers and interrupt attack execution; ultimately leading to attack failure. Recently, the significant advance of software-defined networking (SDN) technology has enabled several complex system operations to be highly flexible and robust; particularly in terms of programmability and controllability with the help of SDN controllers. Accordingly, many security operations have utilized this capability to be optimally deployed in a complex network using the SDN functionalities. In this paper, by leveraging the advanced SDN technology, we developed an attack graph-based MTD technique that shuffles a host's network configurations (e.g., MAC/IP/port addresses) based on its criticality, which is highly exploitable by attackers when the host is on the attack path(s). To this end, we developed a hierarchical attack graph model that provides a network's vulnerability and network topology, which can be utilized for the MTD shuffling decisions in selecting highly exploitable hosts in a given network, and determining the frequency of shuffling the hosts' network configurations. The MTD shuffling with a high priority on more exploitable, critical hosts contributes to providing adaptive, proactive, and affordable defense services aiming to minimize attack success probability with minimum MTD cost. We validated the out performance of the proposed MTD in attack success probability and MTD cost via both simulation and real SDN testbed experiments.

A Robot Operating System (ROS) plays a significant role in organizing industrial robots for manufacturing. With an increasing number of the robots, the operators integrate a ROS with networked communication to share the data. This cyber-physical nature exposes the ROS to cyber attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a cross-layer approach to achieve secure and resilient control of a ROS. In the physical layer, due to the delay caused by the security mechanism, we design a time-delay controller for the ROS agent. In the cyber layer, we define cyber states and use Markov Decision Process to evaluate the tradeoffs between physical and security performance. Due to the uncertainty of the cyber state, we extend the MDP to a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP). We propose a threshold solution based on our theoretical results. Finally, we present numerical examples to evaluate the performance of the secure and resilient mechanism.

Naval Battlefield Network communications rely on wireless network technologies to transmit data between different naval entities, such as ships and shore nodes. Existing naval battle networks heavily depend on the satellite communication system using single-path TCP for reliable, non-interactive data. While satisfactory for traditional use cases, this communication model may be inadequate for outlier cases, such as those arising from satellite failure and wireless signal outage. To promote network stability and assurance in such scenarios, the addition of unmanned aerial vehicles to function as relay points can complement network connectivity and alleviate potential strains in adverse conditions. The inherent mobility of aerial vehicles coupled with existing source node movements, however, leads to frequent network handovers with non-negligible overhead and communication interruption, particularly in the present single-path model. In this paper, we propose a solution based on multi-path TCP and software-defined networking, which, when applied to mobile wireless heterogeneous networks, reduces the network handover delay and improves the total throughput for transmissions among various naval entities at sea and littoral. In case of single link failure, the presence of a connectable relay point maintains TCP connectivity and reduces the risk of service interruption. To validate feasibility and to evaluate performance of our solution, we constructed a Mininet- WiFi emulation testbed. Compared against single-path TCP communication methods, execution of the testbed when configured to use multi-path TCP and UAV relays yields demonstrably more stable network handovers with relatively low overhead, greater reliability of network connectivity, and higher overall end-to-end throughput. Because the SDN global controller dynamically adjusts allocations per user, the solution effectively eliminates link congestion and promotes more efficient bandwidth utilization.