Biblio

Malicious login, especially lateral movement, has been a primary and costly threat for enterprises. However, there exist two critical challenges in the existing methods. Specifically, they heavily rely on a limited number of predefined rules and features. When the attack patterns change, security experts must manually design new ones. Besides, they cannot explore the attributes' mutual effect specific to login operations. We propose MLTracer, a graph neural network (GNN) based system for detecting such attacks. It has two core components to tackle the previous challenges. First, MLTracer adopts a novel method to differentiate crucial attributes of login operations from the rest without experts' designated features. Second, MLTracer leverages a GNN model to detect malicious logins. The model involves a convolutional neural network (CNN) to explore attributes of login operations, and a co-attention mechanism to mutually improve the representations (vectors) of login attributes through learning their login-specific relation. We implement an evaluation of such an approach. The results demonstrate that MLTracer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, MLTracer effectively detects various attack scenarios with a remarkably low false positive rate (FPR).

Due to improving computational capacity of supercomputers, transmitting encrypted packets via one single network path is vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The versatile attackers secretly eavesdrop all the packets, classify packets into different streams, performs an exhaustive search for the decryption key, and extract sensitive personal information from the streams. However, new Internet Protocol (IP) brings great opportunities and challenges for preventing eavesdropping attacks. In this paper, we propose a Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) based Network Immune Scheme (P4NIS) against the eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, P4NIS is equipped with three lines of defense to improve the network immunity. The first line is promiscuous forwarding by splitting all the traffic packets in different network paths disorderly. Complementally, the second line encrypts transmission port fields of the packets using diverse encryption algorithms. The encryption could distribute traffic packets from one stream into different streams, and disturb eavesdroppers to classify them correctly. Besides, P4NIS inherits the advantages from the existing encryption-based countermeasures which is the third line of defense. Using a paradigm of programmable data planes-P4, we implement P4NIS and evaluate its performances. Experimental results show that P4NIS can increase difficulties of eavesdropping significantly, and increase transmission throughput by 31.7% compared with state-of-the-art mechanisms.

Along with the development of the Windows operating system, browser applications to surf the internet are also growing rapidly. The most widely used browsers today are Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Both browsers have a username and password management feature that makes users login to a website easily, but saving usernames and passwords in the browser is quite dangerous because the stored data can be hacked using brute force attacks or read through a program. One way to get a username and password in the browser is to use a program that can read Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox login data from the computer's internal storage and then show those data. In this study, an attack will be carried out by implementing Rubber Ducky using BadUSB to run the ChromePass and PasswordFox program and the PowerShell script using the Arduino Pro Micro Leonardo device as a USB Password Stealer. The results obtained from this study are the username and password on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox successfully obtained when the USB is connected to the target device, the average time of the attack is 14 seconds then sending it to the author's email.

There are various Lightweight Block Ciphers (LBC) nowadays that exist to meet the demand on security requirements of the current trend in computing world, the application in the resource-constrained devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. One way to evaluate these LBCs is to conduct a performance analysis. Performance evaluation parameters seek appropriate value such as encryption time, security level, scalability, and flexibility. Like SIMECK block cipher whose algorithm design was anchored with the SIMON and SPECK block ciphers were efficient in security and performance, there is a need to revisit its design. This paper aims to present a comparative study on the performance analysis of the enhanced round function of the SIMECK Family block cipher. The enhanced ARX structure of the round function on the three variants shows an efficient performance over the original algorithm in different simulations using the following methods of measurement; avalanche effect, runtime performance, and brute-force attack. Its recommended that the enhanced round function of the SIMECK family be evaluated by different security measurements and attacks.

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) can help administrators of a server in detecting attacks by analyzing packet data traffic on the network in real-time. If an attack occurs, an alert to the administrator is provided by NIDS so that the attack can be known and responded immediately. On the other hand, the alerts cannot be monitored by administrators all the time. Therefore, a system that automatically sends notifications to administrators in real-time by utilizing social media platforms is needed. This paper provides an analysis of the notification system built using Snort as NIDS with WhatsApp and Telegram as a notification platform. There are three types of attacks that are simulated and must be detected by Snort, which are Ping of Death attacks, SYN flood attacks, and SSH brute force attacks. The results obtained indicate that the system successfully provided notification in the form of attack time, IP source of the attack, source of attack port and type of attack in real-time.

Man in the middle Attack (MIMA) problem of Diffie-Hellman key exchange (D-H) protocol, has led to introduce the Hash Diffie-Hellman key exchange (H-D-H) protocol. Which was cracked by applying the brute force attack (BFA) results of hash function. For this paper, a system will be suggested that focusses on an improved key exchange (D-H) protocol, and distributed transform encoder (DTE). That system utilized for enhanced (D-H) protocol algorithm when (D-H) is applied for generating the keys used for encrypting data of long messages. Hash256, with two secret keys and one public key are used for D-H protocol improvements. Finally, DTE where applied, this cryptosystem led to increase the efficiency of data transfer security with strengthening the shared secret key code. Also, it has removed the important problems such as MITM and BFA, as compared to the previous work.

Password Guessing Attacks, for instance, Brute Force and word reference ambushes on online records are directly wide spread. Guarding the ambushes and giving the accommodating login the genuine customers together is a problematic endeavour. The present structures are lacking to give both the security and solace together. Phishing is a digital assault that targets credulous online clients fooling into uncovering delicate data, for example, username, secret key, standardized savings number or charge card number and so forth. Assailants fool the Internet clients by concealing site page as a dependable or real page to recover individual data. Password Guessing Attacks Resistance Protocol (PGARP) limits the full-scale number of logins attempts from darken remote hosts to as low as a single undertaking for each username, genuine customers all around (e.g., when tries are created utilizing known, occasionally used machines) can make a couple failed login tries before being tried with an ATT. A specific most distant point will be made to oblige the number of failed attempts with the ATT in order to keep the attacks. After the failed login attempt with ATT limit accomplished, an admonition will be sent to the customer concerning the failed login tries have accomplished the best measurement. This admonition will caution the customer and the customer will be urged to change the mystery expression and security question.

The Software Defined Network (SDN) provides higher programmable functionality for network configuration and management dynamically. Moreover, SDN introduces a centralized management approach by dividing the network into control and data planes. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning enabled intrusion detection and prevention system (DL-IDPS) to prevent secure shell (SSH) brute-force attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in SDN. The packet length in SDN switch has been collected as a sequence for deep learning models to identify anomalous and malicious packets. Four deep learning models, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Stacked Auto-encoder (SAE), are implemented and compared for the proposed DL-IDPS. The experimental results show that the proposed MLP based DL-IDPS has the highest accuracy which can achieve nearly 99% and 100% accuracy to prevent SSH Brute-force and DDoS attacks, respectively.

Brute-force login attempts are common for every host on the public Internet. While most of them can be discarded as low-threat attacks, targeted attack campaigns often use a dictionary-based brute-force attack to establish a foothold in the network. Therefore, it is important to characterize the attackers' behavior to prioritize defensive measures and react to new threats quickly. In this paper we present a set of metrics that can support threat hunters in characterizing brute-force login attempts. Based on connection metadata, timing information, and the attacker's dictionary these metrics can help to differentiate scans and to find common behavior across distinct IP addresses. We evaluated our novel metrics on a real-world data set of malicious login attempts collected by our honeypot Honeygrove. We highlight interesting metrics, show how clustering can be leveraged to reveal common behavior across IP addresses, and describe how selected metrics help to assess the threat level of attackers. Amongst others, we for example found strong indicators for collusion between ten otherwise unrelated IP addresses confirming that a clustering of the right metrics can help to reveal coordinated attacks.

We propose a high efficiency Early-Complete Brute Force Elimination method that speeds up the analysis flow of the Camouflage Integrated Circuit (IC). The proposed method is targeted for security qualification of the Camouflaged IC netlists in Intellectual Property (IP) protection. There are two main features in the proposed method. First, the proposed method features immediate elimination of the incorrect Camouflage gates combination for the rest of computation, concentrating the resources into other potential correct Camouflage gates combination. Second, the proposed method features early complete, i.e. revealing the correct Camouflage gates once all incorrect gates combination are eliminated, increasing the computation speed for the overall security analysis. Based on the Python programming platform, we implement the algorithm of the proposed method and test it for three circuits including ISCAS’89 benchmarks. From the simulation results, our proposed method, on average, features 71% lesser number of trials and 79% shorter run time as compared to the conventional method in revealing the correct Camouflage gates from the Camouflaged IC netlist.

Network traffic anomaly detection is of critical importance in cybersecurity due to the massive and rapid growth of sophisticated computer network attacks. Indeed, the more new Internet-related technologies are created, the more elaborate the attacks become. Among all the contemporary high-level attacks, dictionary-based brute-force attacks (BFA) present one of the most unsurmountable challenges. We need to develop effective methods to detect and mitigate such brute-force attacks in realtime. In this paper, we investigate SSH and FTP brute-force attack detection by using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning approach. Additionally, we made use of machine learning (ML) classifiers: J48, naive Bayes (NB), decision table (DT), random forest (RF) and k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN), for additional detection purposes. We used the well-known labelled dataset CICIDS2017. We evaluated the effectiveness of the LSTM and ML algorithms, and compared their performance. Our results show that the LSTM model outperforms the ML algorithms, with an accuracy of 99.88%.

Current FAA strategic objectives include a migration to Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) with the integration of time-based management data and tools to increase efficiencies and reduce operating costs within the National Airspace System (NAS). Under TBO, integration across various FAA systems will take on greater importance than ever. To ensure the security of this integration without impacting data and tool availability, the FAA should consider adopting a Zero Trust Framework (ZTF) into the NAS.ZTF was founded on the belief that strong boundary security protections alone (traditionally referred to as the castle-moat approach) were no longer adequate to protecting critical data from outside threats and, with ever-evolving threat sophistication, contamination within a network perimeter is assumed to already exist (see Figure 1).To address this, theorists developed a framework where trust is controlled and applied to all internal network devices, users, and applications in what was termed a "Never Trust; Always Verify" approach to distinguish the authorized from the unauthorized elements wanting to access network data.To secure achievement of TBO objectives and add defensive depth to counter potential insider threats, the FAA must consider implementing a hybrid approach to the ZTF theory. This would include continued use of existing boundary protections provided by the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) network, with the additional strength afforded by the application of ZTF, in what is called the NAS Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) platform.This paper discusses a proposal to implement a hybrid ZTX approach to securing TBO infrastructure and applications in the NAS.

Physical unclonable functions(PUFs) are widely used as hardware root-of-trust to secure IoT devices, data and services. A PUF exploits inherent randomness introduced during manufacturing to give a unique digital fingerprint. Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) based PUFs can be used as a mature technology for authentication. An SRAM with a number of SRAM cells gives an unrepeatable and random pattern of 0's and 1's during power on. As it is a unique pattern, it can be called as SRAM fingerprint and can be used as a PUF. The chance of producing more number of same values (either zero or one) is higher during power on. If a particular value present at almost all the cell during power on, it will lead to the dominance of either zero or one in the cryptographic key sequence. As the cryptographic key is generated by randomly taking address location of SRAM cells, (the subset of power on values of all the SRAM cells)the probability of occurring the same sequence most of the time is higher. In order to avoid that situation, SRAM should have to produce an equal number of zeros and ones during power on. SRAM PUF is implemented in Cadence Virtuoso tool. To generate equal zeros and ones during power on, variations can be done in the physical dimensions and to increase the stability body biasing can be effectively done.

The bioinformatics features are collected by pattern recognition technology, and the digital coding and format conversion of the feature data are realized by using the theory of topological group transformation. Authentication and Signature based on Zero Knowledge Proof Technology can be used as the trusted credentials of cloud platform and cannot be forged, thus realizing trusted and secure access.

Access to data at large scales expedites the progress of research in medical fields. Nevertheless, accessibility to patients' data faces significant challenges on regulatory, organizational and technical levels. In light of this, we present a novel approach based on the crowdsourcing paradigm to solve this data scarcity problem. Utilizing the infrastructure that blockchain provides, our decentralized platform enables researchers to solicit contributions to their well-defined research study from a large crowd of volunteers. Furthermore, to overcome the challenge of breach of privacy and mutual trust, we employed the cryptographic primitive of Zero-knowledge Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK). This not only allows participants to make contributions without exposing their privacy-sensitive health data, but also provides a means for a distributed network of users to verify the validity of the contributions in an efficient manner. Finally, since without an incentive mechanism in place, the crowdsourcing platform would be rendered ineffective, we incorporated smart contracts to ensure a fair reciprocal exchange of data for reward between patients and researchers.

The blockchain's cross-chain atomic exchange uses smart contracts to replace trusted third parties, but atomic exchange cannot guarantee the anonymity of transactions, and it will inevitably increase the risk of privacy leakage. Therefore, this paper proposes an atom based on zero-knowledge proof. Improved methods of exchange to ensure the privacy of both parties in a transaction. The anonymous improvement scheme in this article uses the UTXO unconsumed model to add a new anonymous list in the blockchain. When sending assets to smart contracts, zero-knowledge proof is used to provide self-certification of ownership of the asset, and then the transaction is broken down. Only the hash value of the transaction is sent to the node, and the discarded list is used to verify the validity of the transaction, which achieves the effect of storing assets anonymously in the smart contract. At the same time, a smart contract is added when the two parties in the transaction communicate to exchange the contract address of the newly set smart contract between the two parties in the transaction. This can prevent the smart contract address information from being stolen when the two parties in the transaction communicate directly.

The 5G network solutions currently standardised and deployed do not yet enable the full potential of pervasive networking and computing envisioned in 5G initial visions: network services and slices with different QoS profiles do not span multiple operators; security, trust and automation is limited. The evolution of 5G towards a truly production-level stage needs to heavily rely on automated end-to-end network operations, use of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cognitive network orchestration and management and minimal manual interventions (zero-touch automation). All these elements are key to implement highly pervasive network infrastructures. Moreover, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can be adopted to implement distributed security and trust through Smart Contracts among multiple non-trusted parties. In this paper, we propose an initial concept of a zero-touch security and trust architecture for ubiquitous computing and connectivity in 5G networks. Our architecture aims at cross-domain security & trust orchestration mechanisms by coupling DLTs with AI-driven operations and service lifecycle automation in multi-tenant and multi-stakeholder environments. Three representative use cases are identified through which we will validate the work which will be validated in the test facilities at 5GBarcelona and 5TONIC/Madrid.

This work describes the architecture and prototype implementation of a novel trust-aware continuous authorization technology that targets consumer Internet of Things (IoT), e.g., Smart Home. Our approach extends previous authorization models in three complementary ways: (1) By incorporating trust-level evaluation formulae as conditions inside authorization rules and policies, while supporting the evaluation of such policies through the fusion of an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) authorization policy engine with a Trust-Level-Evaluation-Engine (TLEE). (2) By introducing contextualized, continuous monitoring and re-evaluation of policies throughout the authorization life-cycle. That is, mutable attributes about subjects, resources and environment as well as trust levels that are continuously monitored while obtaining an authorization, throughout the duration of or after revoking an existing authorization. Whenever change is detected, the corresponding authorization rules, including both access control rules and trust level expressions, are re-evaluated.(3) By minimizing the computational and memory footprint and maximizing concurrency and modular evaluation to improve performance while preserving the continuity of monitoring. Finally we introduce an application of such model in Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) for consumer IoT.

Zero Trust Model ensures each node is responsible for the approval of the transaction before it gets committed. The data owners can track their data while it’s shared amongst the various data custodians ensuring data security. The consensus algorithm enables the users to trust the network as malicious nodes fail to get approval from all nodes, thereby causing the transaction to be aborted. The use case chosen to demonstrate the proposed consensus algorithm is the college placement system. The algorithm has been extended to implement a diversified, decentralized, automated placement system, wherein the data owner i.e. the student, maintains an immutable certificate vault and the student’s data has been validated by a verifier network i.e. the academic department and placement department. The data transfer from student to companies is recorded as transactions in the distributed ledger or blockchain allowing the data to be tracked by the student.

The increased use of cloud services and its various security and privacy challenges such as identity theft, data breach, data integrity and data confidentiality has made trust management, which is one of the most multifaceted aspect in cloud computing, inevitable. The growing reputation of cloud computing technology makes it immensely important to be acquainted with the meaning of trust in the cloud, as well as identify how the customer and the cloud service providers establish that trust. The traditional trust management mechanisms represent a static trust relationship which falls deficit while meeting up the dynamic requirement of cloud services. In this paper, a conceptual zero trust strategy for the cloud environment has been proposed. The model offers a conceptual typology of perceptions and philosophies for establishing trust in cloud services. Further, importance of trust establishment and challenges of trust in cloud computing have also been explored and discussed.

In order to the development of IoT, IETF developed a standard named 6LoWPAN for increase the usage of IPv6 to the tiny and smart objects with low power. Generally, the 6LoWPAN radio link needs end to end (e2e) security for its IPv6 communication process. 6LoWPAN requires light weight variant of security solutions in IPSec. A new security approach of 6LoWPAN at adaptation layer to provide e2e security with light weight IPSec. The existing security protocol IPsec is not suitable for its 6LoWPAN IoT environment because it has heavy restrictions on memory, power, duty cycle, additional overhead transmission. The IPSec had packet overhead problem due to share the secret key between two communicating peers by IKE (Internet Key Exchange) protocol. Hence the existing security protocol IPSec solutions are not suitable for lightweight-based security need in 6LoWPAN IoT. This paper describes 6LowPSec protocol with AES-CCM (Cipher block chaining Message authentication code with Counter mode) cryptographic algorithm with key size of 128 bits with minimum power consumption and duty cycle.

Low-power wireless network technology is one of the main key characteristics in communication systems that are needed by the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, the 6LoWPAN standard is one of the communication protocols which has been identified as an important protocol in IoT applications. Networking technology in 6LoWPAN transfer IPv6 packets efficiently in link-layer framework that is well-defined by IEEE 802.14.5 protocol. 6Lo WPAN development is still having problems such as threats and entrust crises. The most important part when developing this new technology is the challenge to secure the network. Data security is viewed as a major consideration in this network communications. Many researchers are working to secure 6LoWPAN communication by analyzing the architecture and network features. 6LoWPAN security weakness or vulnerability is exposed to various forms of network attack. In this paper, the security solutions for 6LoWPAN have been investigated. The requirements of safety in 6LoWPAN are also presented.

Robots are networks of a variety of computing devices, such as powerful computing platforms but also tiny microcontrollers. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the dominant framework for powerful computing devices. While ROS version 2 adds important features like quality of service and security, it cannot be directly applied to microcontrollers because of its large memory footprint. The micro-ROS project has ported the ROS 2 API to microcontrollers. However, the standard ROS 2 concepts are not enough for real-time performance: In the ROS 2 release “Foxy”, the standard ROS 2 Executor, which is the central component responsible for handling timers and incoming message data, is neither real-time capable nor deterministic. Domain-specific requirements of mobile robots, like sense-plan-act control loops, cannot be addressed with the standard ROS 2 Executor. In this paper, we present an advanced Executor for the ROS 2 C API which provides deterministic scheduling and supports domain-specific requirements. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated on a 32-bit microcontroller.

The popularity and demand of home automation has increased exponentially in recent years because of the ease it provides. Recently, development has been done in this domain and few systems have been proposed that either use voice assistants or application for controlling the electrical appliances. However; less emphasis is laid on power efficiency and this system cannot be integrated with the existing appliances and hence, the entire system needs to be upgraded adding to a lot of additional cost in purchasing new appliances. In this research, the objective is to design such a system that emphasises on power efficiency as well as can be integrated with the already existing appliances. NodeMCU, along with Raspberry Pi, Firebase realtime database, is used to create a system that accomplishes such endeavours and can control relays, which can control these appliances without the need of replacing them. The experiments in this paper demonstrate triggering of electrical appliances using voice assistant, fire alarm on the basis of flame sensor and temperature sensor. Moreover; use of android application was presented for operating electrical appliances from a remote location. Lastly, the system can be modified by adding security cameras, smart blinds, robot vacuums etc.

Mobile and IoT operating systems–and their ensuing software updates–are usually distributed as binary files. Given that these binary files are commonly closed source, users or businesses who want to assess the security of the software need to rely on reverse engineering. Further, verifying the correct application of the latest software patches in a given binary is an open problem. The regular application of software patches is a central pillar for improving mobile and IoT device security. This requires developers, integrators, and vendors to propagate patches to all affected devices in a timely and coordinated fashion. In practice, vendors follow different and sometimes improper security update agendas for both mobile and IoT products. Moreover, previous studies revealed the existence of a hidden patch gap: several vendors falsely reported that they patched vulnerabilities. Therefore, techniques to verify whether vulnerabilities have been patched or not in a given binary are essential. Deep learning approaches have shown to be promising for static binary analyses with respect to inferring binary similarity as well as vulnerability detection. However, these approaches fail to capture the dynamic behavior of these systems, and, as a result, they may inundate the analysis with false positives when performing vulnerability discovery in the wild. In particular, they cannot capture the fine-grained characteristics necessary to distinguish whether a vulnerability has been patched or not. In this paper, we present PATCHECKO, a vulnerability and patch presence detection framework for executable binaries. PATCHECKO relies on a hybrid, cross-platform binary code similarity analysis that combines deep learning-based static binary analysis with dynamic binary analysis. PATCHECKO does not require access to the source code of the target binary nor that of vulnerable functions. We evaluate PATCHECKO on the most recent Google Pixel 2 smartphone and the Android Things IoT firmware images, within which 25 known CVE vulnerabilities have been previously reported and patched. Our deep learning model shows a vulnerability detection accuracy of over 93%. We further prune the candidates found by the deep learning stage–which includes false positives–via dynamic binary analysis. Consequently, PATCHECKO successfully identifies the correct matches among the candidate functions in the top 3 ranked outcomes 100% of the time. Furthermore, PATCHECKO's differential engine distinguishes between functions that are still vulnerable and those that are patched with an accuracy of 96%.