Biblio

In recent years, the “whole chain” development level of China's intellectual property creation, protection and application has been greatly improved. At the same time, cloud computing technology is booming, and intellectual property data distributed platforms based on cloud storage are emerging one after another. Firstly, this paper introduces the domestic intellectual property cloud platform services from the perspectives of government, state-owned enterprises and private enterprises; Secondly, four typical distributed platforms provided by commercial resources are selected to summarize the problems faced by the operation mode of domestic intellectual property services; Then, it compares and discusses the functions and service modes of domestic intellectual property distributed platform, and takes TSITE IP as an example, puts forward the design and construction strategies of intellectual property protection, intellectual property operation service distributed platform and operation service mode under the background of information age. Finally, according to the development of contemporary information technology, this paper puts forward challenges and development direction for the future development of intellectual property platform.

STAMP (System Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) is one of the theories that has been attracting attention as a new safety analysis method for complex systems. CAST (Causal Analysis using System Theory) is a causal analysis method based on STAMP theory. The authors investigated an information security incident case, “AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) report on unauthorized access to information systems,” and attempted accident analysis using CAST. We investigated whether CAST could be applied to the cyber security analysis. Since CAST is a safety accident analysis technique, this study was the first to apply CAST to cyber security incidents. Its effectiveness was confirmed from the viewpoint of the following three research questions. Q1:Features of CAST as an accident analysis method Q2:Applicability and impact on security accident analysis Q3:Understanding cyber security incidents with a five-layer model.

The intelligent cyber-physical system (CPS) has been applied in various fields, covering multiple critical infras-tructures and human daily life support areas. CPS Security is a major concern and of critical importance, especially the security of the intelligent control component. Side-channel analysis (SCA) is the common threat exploiting the weaknesses in system operation to extract information of the intelligent CPS. However, existing literature lacks the systematic theo-retical analysis of the side-channel attacks on the intelligent CPS, without the ability to quantify and measure the leaked information. To address these issues, we propose the SCA-based model extraction attack on intelligent CPS. First, we design an efficient and novel SCA-based model extraction framework, including the threat model, hierarchical attack process, and the multiple micro-space parallel search enabled weight extraction algorithm. Secondly, an information theory-empowered analy-sis model for side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS is built. We propose a mutual information-based quantification method and derive the capacity of side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS, formulating the amount of information leakage through side channels. Thirdly, we develop the theoretical bounds of the leaked information over multiple attack queries based on the data processing inequality and properties of entropy. These convergence bounds provide theoretical means to estimate the amount of information leaked. Finally, experimental evaluation, including real-world experiments, demonstrates the effective-ness of the proposed SCA-based model extraction algorithm and the information theory-based analysis method in intelligent CPS.

Currently, statistical tests for random number generators (RNGs) are widely used in practice, and some of them are even included in information security standards. But despite the popularity of RNGs, consistent tests are known only for stationary ergodic deviations of randomness (a test is consistent if it detects any deviations from a given class when the sample size goes to infinity). However, the model of a stationary ergodic source is too narrow for some RNGs, in particular, for generators based on physical effects. In this article, we propose computable consistent tests for some classes of deviations more general than stationary ergodic and describe some general properties of statistical tests. The proposed approach and the resulting test are based on the ideas and methods of information theory.

The article describes an analytical model of the actions of an information security violator for the secret extraction of confidential information processed on the protected object in terms of the theory of Markov random processes. The characteristics of the existing models are given, as well as the requirements that are imposed on the model for simulating the process. All model states are described in detail, as well as the data flow that is used in the process simulation. The model is represented as a directed state graph. It also describes the option for evaluating the data obtained during modeling. In the modern world, with the developing methods and means of covert extraction of information, the problem of assessing the damage that can be caused by the theft of the organization's data is acute. This model can be used to build a model of information security threats.

To ensure comprehensive information protection, it is necessary to use various means of information protection, distributed by levels and segments of the information system. This creates a contradiction, which consists in the presence of many different means of information protection and the inability to ensure their joint coordinated application in ensuring the protection of information due to the lack of an automated control system. One of the tasks that contribute to the solution of this problem is the task of generating a feasible organizational structure and the structure of such an automated control system, the results of which would provide these options and choose the one that is optimal under given initial parameters and limitations. The problem is solved by reducing the General task with particular splitting the original graph of the automated cyber defense control system into subgraphs. As a result, the organizational composition and the automated cyber defense management system structures will provide a set of acceptable variants, on the basis of which the optimal choice is made under the given initial parameters and restrictions. As a result, admissible variants for the formation technique of organizational structure and structure by the automated control system of cyber defense is received.

Game theory is a branch of modern mathematics, which is a mathematical method to study how decision-makers should make decisions in order to strive for the maximum interests in the process of competition. In this paper, from the perspective of offensive and defensive confrontation, using game theory for reference, we build a dynamic evaluation model of information system security risk based on static game model. By using heisani transformation, the uncertainty of strategic risk of offensive and defensive sides is transformed into the uncertainty of each other's type. The security risk of pure defense strategy and mixed defense strategy is analyzed quantitatively, On this basis, an information security risk assessment algorithm based on static game model is designed.

With the rapid advancement of the electrical grid, substation automation systems (SASs) have been developing continuously. However, with the introduction of advanced features, such as remote control, potential cyber security threats in SASs are also increased. Additionally, crucial components in SASs, such as protection relays, usually come from third-party vendors and may not be fully trusted. Untrusted devices may stealthily perform harmful or unauthorised behaviours which could compromise or damage SASs, and therefore, bring adverse impacts to the primary plant. Thus, it is necessary to detect abnormal behaviours from an untrusted device before it brings about catastrophic impacts. Anomaly detection techniques are suitable to detect anomalies in SASs as they only bring minimal side-effects to normal system operations. Many researchers have developed various machine learning algorithms and mathematical models to improve the accuracy of anomaly detection. However, without prudent feature selection, it is difficult to achieve high accuracy when detecting attacks launched from internal trusted networks, especially for stealthy message modification attacks which only modify message payloads slightly and imitate patterns of benign behaviours. Therefore, this paper presents choices of features which improve the accuracy of anomaly detection within SASs, especially for detecting “stealthy” attacks. By including two additional features, Boolean control data from message payloads and physical values from sensors, our method improved the accuracy of anomaly detection by decreasing the false-negative rate from 25% to 5% approximately.

The critical nature of smart grids (SGs) attracts various network attacks and malicious manipulations. Existent SG solutions are less capable of ensuring secure and trustworthy operation. This is due to the large-scale nature of SGs and reliance on network protocols for trust management. A particular example of such severe attacks is the false data injection (FDI). FDI refers to a network attack, where meters' measurements are manipulated before being reported in such a way that the energy system takes flawed decisions. In this paper, we exploit the secure nature of blockchains to construct a data management framework based on public blockchain. Our framework enables trustworthy data storage, verification, and exchange between SG components and decision-makers. Our proposed system enables miners to invest their computational power to verify blockchain transactions in a fully distributed manner. The mining logic employs machine learning (ML) techniques to identify the locations of compromised meters in the network, which are responsible for generating FDI attacks. In return, miners receive virtual credit, which may be used to pay their electric bills. Our design circumvents single points of failure and intentional FDI attempts. Our numerical results compare the accuracy of three different ML-based mining logic techniques in two scenarios: focused and distributed FDI attacks for different attack levels. Finally, we proposed a majority-decision mining technique for the practical case of an unknown FDI attack level.

Digitization has been rapidly integrated with manufacturing industries and critical infrastructure to increase efficiency, productivity, and reduce wastefulness, a transition being labeled as Industry 4.0. However, this expansion, coupled with the poor cybersecurity posture of these Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, has made them prolific targets for exploitation. Moreover, modern Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) used in the Operational Technology (OT) sector are adopting open-source operating systems such as Linux instead of proprietary software, making such devices susceptible to Linux-based malware. Traditional malware detection approaches cannot be applied directly or extended to such environments due to the unique restrictions of these PLC devices, such as limited computational power and real-time requirements. In this paper, we propose ORRIS, a novel lightweight and out-of-the-device framework that detects malware at both kernel and user-level by processing the information collected using the Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface. We evaluate ORRIS against in-the-wild Linux malware achieving maximum detection accuracy of ≈99.7% with very few false-positive occurrences, a result comparable to the state-of-the-art commercial products. Moreover, we also develop and demonstrate a real-time implementation of ORRIS for commercial PLCs.

The advent of IoT edge devices has enabled the collection of rich datasets, as part of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), which has emerged as a key enabler for a wide gamut of safety-critical applications ranging from traffic control, environmental monitoring to assistive healthcare. Despite the clear advantages that such unprecedented quantity of data brings forth, it is also subject to inherent data trustworthiness challenges due to factors such as malevolent input and faulty sensors. Compounding this issue, there has been a plethora of proposed solutions, based on the use of traditional machine learning algorithms, towards assessing and sifting faulty data without any assumption on the trustworthiness of their source. However, there are still a number of open issues: how to cope with the presence of strong, colluding adversaries while at the same time efficiently managing this high influx of incoming user data. In this work, we meet these challenges by proposing the hybrid use of Deep Learning schemes (i.e., LSTMs) and conventional Machine Learning classifiers (i.e. One-Class Classifiers) for detecting and filtering out false data points. We provide a prototype implementation coupled with a detailed performance evaluation under various (attack) scenarios, employing both real and synthetic datasets. Our results showcase how the proposed solution outperforms various existing resilient aggregation and outlier detection schemes.

We use discrete-time adaptive control theory to design a novel false data injection (FDI) attack against automatic generation control (AGC), a critical system that maintains a power grid at its requisite frequency. FDI attacks can cause equipment damage or blackouts by falsifying measurements in the streaming sensor data used to monitor the grid's operation. Compared to prior work, the proposed attack (i) requires less knowledge on the part of the attacker, such as correctly forecasting the future demand for power; (ii) is stealthier in its ability to bypass standard methods for detecting bad sensor data and to keep the false sensor readings near historical norms until the attack is well underway; and (iii) can sustain the frequency excursion as long as needed to cause real-world damage, in spite of AGC countermeasures. We validate the performance of the proposed attack on realistic 37-bus and 118-bus setups in PowerWorld, an industry-strength power system simulator trusted by real-world operators. The results demonstrate the attack's improved stealthiness and effectiveness compared to prior work.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a subcategory of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that allows vehicles to communicate with other vehicles and static roadside infrastructure. However, the integration of cyber and physical systems introduce many possible points of attack that make VANET vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we implemented a machine learning-based intrusion detection system that identifies False Data Injection (FDI) attacks on a vehicular network. A co-simulation framework between MATLAB and NS-3 is used to simulate the system. The intrusion detection system is installed in every vehicle and processes the information obtained from the packets sent by other vehicles. The packet is classified into either trusted or malicious using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The comparison of the performance of the system is evaluated in different scenarios using the following metrics: classification rate, attack detection rate, false positive rate, and detection speed. Simulation results show that the SVM-based IDS is able to provide high accuracy detection, low false positive rate, consequently improving the traffic congestion in the simulated highway.

In order to protect the safety of power grid, improve the early warning precision of false data injection. This paper presents a dynamic detection model for false data injection attacks. Based on the characteristics of APT attacks, a model of attack characteristics for trusted regions is constructed. In order to realize the accurate state estimation, unscented Kalman filtering algorithm is used to estimate the state of nonlinear power system and realize dynamic attack detection. Experimental results show that the precision of this method is higher than 90%, which verifies the effectiveness of this paper in attack detection.

Malware detection is an important area of cyber security. Computer systems rely on malware detection applications to prevent malware attacks from succeeding. Malware detection is not a straightforward task, as new variants of malware are generated at an increasing rate. Machine learning (ML) has been utilised to generate predictive classification models to identify new malware variants which conventional malware detection methods may not detect. Machine learning, has however, been found to be vulnerable to different types of adversarial attacks, in which an attacker is able to negatively affect the classification ability of the ML model. Several defensive measures to prevent adversarial poisoning attacks have been developed, but they often rely on the use of a trusted clean dataset to help identify and remove adversarial examples from the training dataset. The defence in this paper does not require a trusted clean dataset, but instead, identifies intentional false negatives (zero day malware classified as benign) at the testing stage by examining the activation weights of the ML model. The defence was able to identify 94.07% of the successful targeted poisoning attacks.

With the proliferation of false redundant information on various e-commerce platforms, ineffective recommendations and other untrustworthy behaviors have seriously hindered the healthy development of e-commerce platforms. Modern recommendation systems often use side information to alleviate these problems and also increase prediction accuracy. One such piece of side information, which has been widely investigated, is trust. However, it is difficult to obtain explicit trust relationship data, so researchers infer trust values from other methods, such as the user-to-item relationship. In this paper, addressing the problems, we proposed a novel trust-based recommender model called UITrust, which uses user-item relationship value to improve prediction accuracy. With the improvement the traditional similarity measures by employing the entropies of user and item history ratings to reflect the global rating behavior on both. We evaluate the proposed model using two real-world datasets. The proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline methods. Also, we can use the UITrust to alleviate the sparsity problem associated with correlation-based similarity. In addition to that, the proposed model has a better computational complexity for making predictions than the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method.

In November 2019, the government of Iran enforced a week-long total Internet blackout that prevented the majority of Internet connectivity into and within the nation. This work elaborates upon the Iranian Internet blackout by characterizing the event through Internet-scale, near realtime network traffic measurements. Beginning with an investigation of compromised machines scanning the Internet, nearly 50 TB of network traffic data was analyzed. This work discovers 856,625 compromised IP addresses, with 17,182 attributed to the Iranian Internet space. By the second day of the Internet shut down, these numbers dropped by 18.46% and 92.81%, respectively. Empirical analysis of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm revealed that over 90% of compromised Iranian hosts were fingerprinted as IoT devices, which saw a significant drop throughout the shutdown (96.17% decrease by the blackout's second day). Further examination correlates BGP reachability metrics and related data with geolocation databases to statistically evaluate the number of reachable Iranian ASNs (dropping from approximately 1100 to under 200 reachable networks). In-depth investigation reveals the top affected ASNs, providing network forensic evidence of the longitudinal unplugging of such key networks. Lastly, the impact's interruption of the Bitcoin cryptomining market is highlighted, disclosing a massive spike in unsuccessful (i.e., pending) transactions. When combined, these network traffic measurements provide a multidimensional perspective of the Iranian Internet shutdown.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is in charge of the route exchange at the Internet scale. Anomalies in BGP can have several causes (mis-configuration, outage and attacks). These anomalies are classified into large or small scale anomalies. Machine learning models are used to analyze and detect anomalies from the complex data extracted from BGP behavior. Two types of data representation can be used inside the machine learning models: a graph representation of the network (graph features) or a statistical computation on the data (statistical features). In this paper, we evaluate and compare the accuracy of machine learning models using graph features and statistical features on both large and small scale BGP anomalies. We show that statistical features have better accuracy for large scale anomalies, and graph features increase the detection accuracy by 15% for small scale anomalies and are well suited for BGP small scale anomaly detection.

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new systems and protocols. We have developed an experimental network construction tool called LiONv1 (Lightweight On-Demand Networking, ver.1). LiONv1 satisfies the following four requirements: programmer-friendly configuration file based on Infrastructure as Code, multiple virtualization technologies for virtual nodes, physical topology conscious virtual node placement, and L3 protocol agnostic virtual networks. None of existing experimental network environments satisfy all the four requirements. In this paper, we develop LiONv2 which satisfies three more requirements: diversity of available network devices, Internet-scale deployment, and disaggregation of network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 employs NETCONF and YANG to achieve diversity of available network devices and Internet-scale deployment. LiONv2 also defines two YANG models which disaggregate network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 is implemented in Go and C languages with public libraries for Go. Measurement results show that construction time of a virtual network is irrelevant to the number of virtual nodes if a single virtual node is created per physical node.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced novel incentives for adversaries to exploit the state of turmoil. As we have witnessed with the increase in for instance phishing attacks and domain name registrations piggybacking the COVID-19 brand name. In this paper, we perform an analysis at Internet-scale of COVID-19 domain name registrations during the early stages of the virus' spread, and investigate the rationales behind them. We leverage the DomainTools COVID-19 Threat List and additional measurements to analyze over 150,000 domains registered between January 1st 2020 and May 1st 2020. We identify two key rationales for covid-related domain registrations. Online marketing, by either redirecting traffic or hosting a commercial service on the domain, and domain parking, by registering domains containing popular COVID-19 keywords, presumably anticipating a profit when reselling the domain later on. We also highlight three public policy take-aways that can counteract this domain registration behavior.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm at large continues to be compromised, hindering the privacy, dependability, security, and safety of our nations. While the operational security communities (i.e., CERTS, SOCs, CSIRT, etc.) continue to develop capabilities for monitoring cyberspace, tools which are IoT-centric remain at its infancy. To this end, we address this gap by innovating an actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) feed related to Internet-scale infected IoT devices. The feed analyzes, in near real-time, 3.6TB of daily streaming passive measurements ( ≈ 1M pps) by applying a custom-developed learning methodology to distinguish between compromised IoT devices and non-IoT nodes, in addition to labeling the type and vendor. The feed is augmented with third party information to provide contextual information. We report on the operation, analysis, and shortcomings of the feed executed during an initial deployment period. We make the CTI feed available for ingestion through a public, authenticated API and a front-end platform.

Big data continues to grow in the manufacturing domain due to increasing interconnectivity on the shop floor in the course of the fourth industrial revolution. The optimization of machines based on either real-time or historical machine data provides benefits to both machine producers and operators. In order to be able to make use of these opportunities, it is necessary to access the machine data, which can include sensitive information such as intellectual property. Employing the use case of machine tools, this paper presents a solution enabling industrial data sharing and cloud collaboration while protecting sensitive information. It employs the edge computing paradigm to apply differential privacy to machine data in order to protect sensitive information and simultaneously allow machine producers to perform the necessary calculations and analyses using this data.

This paper presents a high-level circuit obfuscation technique to prevent the theft of intellectual property (IP) of integrated circuits. In particular, our technique protects a class of circuits that relies on constant multiplications, such as neural networks and filters, where the constants themselves are the IP to be protected. By making use of decoy constants and a key-based scheme, a reverse engineer adversary at an untrusted foundry is rendered incapable of discerning true constants from decoys. The time-multiplexed constant multiplication (TMCM) block of such circuits, which realizes the multiplication of an input variable by a constant at a time, is considered as our case study for obfuscation. Furthermore, two TMCM design architectures are taken into account; an implementation using a multiplier and a multiplierless shift-adds implementation. Optimization methods are also applied to reduce the hardware complexity of these architectures. The well-known satisfiability (SAT) and automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) based attacks are used to determine the vulnerability of the obfuscated designs. It is observed that the proposed technique incurs small overheads in area, power, and delay that are comparable to the hardware complexity of prominent logic locking methods. Yet, the advantage of our approach is in the insight that constants - instead of arbitrary circuit nodes - become key-protected.

USB flash drives are used widely to store or transfer data among the employees in the company. There was greater concern about leaks of information especially company crown jewel or intellectual property data inside the USB flash drives because of theft, loss, negligence or fraud. This study is a real case in XYZ company which aims to find remaining the company’s crown jewel or intellectual property data inside the USB flash drives that belong to the employees. The research result showed that sensitive information (such as user credentials, product recipes and customer credit card data) could be recovered from the employees’ USB flash drives. It could obtain a high-risk impact on the company as reputational damage and sabotage product from the competitor. This result will help many companies to increase security awareness in protecting their crown jewel by having proper access control and to enrich knowledge regarding digital forensic for investigation in the company or enterprise.

Aggressive time-to-market constraints and enormous hardware design and fabrication costs have pushed the semiconductor industry toward hardware Intellectual Properties (IP) core design. However, the globalization of the integrated circuits (IC) supply chain exposes IP providers to theft and illegal redistribution of IPs. Watermarking and fingerprinting are proposed to detect IP piracy. Nevertheless, they come with additional hardware overhead and cannot guarantee IP security as advanced attacks are reported to remove the watermark, forge, or bypass it. In this work, we propose a novel methodology, GNN4IP, to assess similarities between circuits and detect IP piracy. We model the hardware design as a graph and construct a graph neural network model to learn its behavior using the comprehensive dataset of register transfer level codes and gate-level netlists that we have gathered. GNN4IP detects IP piracy with 96% accuracy in our dataset and recognizes the original IP in its obfuscated version with 100% accuracy.