Biblio

Data exfiltration is of increasing concern throughout the world. The number of incidents and capabilities of data exfiltration attacks are growing at an unprecedented rate. However, such attack vectors have not been deeply explored in the literature. This paper aims to address this gap by implementing a data exfiltration methodology, detailing some data exfiltration methods. Groups of exfiltration methods are incorporated into a program that can act as a testbed for owners of any network that stores sensitive data. The implemented methods are tested against the well-known network intrusion detection system Snort, where all of them have been successfully evaded detection by its community rule sets. Thus, in this paper, we have developed new countermeasures to prevent and detect data exfiltration attempts using these methods.

An effective response against information security violations in the technical systems remains relevant challenge nowadays, when their number, complexity, and the level of possible losses are growing. The violation can be caused by the set of the intruder's consistent actions. In the area of countermeasure selection for a proactive and reactive response against security violations, there are a large number of techniques. The techniques based on graph models seem to be promising. These models allow representing the set of actions caused the violation. Their advantages include the ability to forecast violations for timely decision-making on the countermeasures, as well as the ability to analyze and consider the coverage of countermeasures in terms of steps caused the violation. The paper proposes and describes a decision support method for responding against information security violations in the technical systems based on the graph models, as well as the developed models, including the countermeasure model and the graph representing the set of actions caused the information security violation.

A localized electromagnetic (EM) attack is a potent threat to security of embedded cryptographic implementations. The attack utilizes high resolution EM probes to localize and exploit information leakage in sub-circuits of a system, providing information not available in traditional EM and power attacks. In this paper, we propose a countermeasure based on randomizing the assignment of sensitive data to parallel datapath components in a high-performance implementation of AES. In contrast to a conventional design where each state register byte is routed to a fixed S-box, a permutation network, controlled by a transient random value, creates a dynamic random mapping between the state registers and the set of S-boxes. This randomization results in a significant reduction of exploitable leakage.We demonstrate the countermeasure's effectiveness under two attack scenarios: a more powerful attack that assumes a fully controlled access to an attacked implementation for building a priori EM-profiles, and a generic attack based on the black-box model. Spatial randomization leads to a 150× increase of the minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) for the profiled attack and a 3.25× increase of MTD for the black-box model attack.

The huge volume, variety, and velocity of big data have empowered Machine Learning (ML) techniques and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. However, the vast portion of data used to train AI systems is sensitive information. Hence, any vulnerability has a potentially disastrous impact on privacy aspects and security issues. Nevertheless, the increased demands for high-quality AI from governments and companies require the utilization of big data in the systems. Several studies have highlighted the threats of big data on different platforms and the countermeasures to reduce the risks caused by attacks. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing threats which violate privacy aspects and security issues inflicted by big data as a primary driving force within the AI/ML workflow. We define an adversarial model to investigate the attacks. Additionally, we analyze and summarize the defense strategies and countermeasures of these attacks. Furthermore, due to the impact of AI systems in the market and the vast majority of business sectors, we also investigate Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) that are actively involved in providing guidelines to protect the privacy and ensure the security of big data and AI systems. Our far-reaching goal is to bridge the research and standardization frame to increase the consistency and efficiency of AI systems developments guaranteeing customer satisfaction while transferring a high degree of trustworthiness.

Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Network (RPL) is a light weight routing protocol designed for LLN (Low Power Lossy Networks). It is a source routing protocol. Due to constrained nature of resources in LLN, RPL is exposed to various attacks such as blackhole attack, wormhole attack, rank attack, version attack, etc. IDS (Intrusion Detection System) is one of the countermeasures for detection and prevention of attacks for RPL based loT. Traditional IDS techniques are not suitable for LLN due to certain characteristics like different protocol stack, standards and constrained resources. In this paper, we have presented various IDS research contribution for RPL based routing attacks. We have also classified the proposed IDS in the literature, according to the detection techniques. Therefore, this comparison will be an eye-opening stuff for future research in mitigating routing attacks for RPL based IoT.

The recent proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology poses major security and privacy concerns. Specifically, the use of personal IoT devices, such as tablets, smartphones, and even smartwatches, as part of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, may result in severe network security breaches in enterprise environments. Such devices increase the attack surface by weakening the digital perimeter of the enterprise network and opening new points of entry for malicious activities. In this paper we demonstrate a novel attack scenario in an enterprise environment by exploiting the smartwatch device of an innocent employee. Using a malicious application running on a suitable smartwatch, the device imitates a real Wi-Fi direct printer service in the network. Using this attack scenario, we illustrate how an advanced attacker located outside of the organization can leak/steal sensitive information from the organization by utilizing the compromised smartwatch as a means of attack. An attack mitigation process and countermeasures are suggested in order to limit the capability of the remote attacker to execute the attack on the network, thus minimizing the data leakage by the smartwatch.

Cloud storage can provide outsourcing data services for both organizations and individuals. However, cloud storage still faces many challenges, e.g., public integrity auditing, the support of dynamic data, and low computational audit cost. To solve the problems, a number of techniques have been proposed. Recently, Tian et al. proposed a novel public auditing scheme for secure cloud storage based on a new data structure DHT. The authors claimed that their scheme was proven to be secure. Unfortunately, through our security analysis, we find that the scheme suffers from one attack and one security shortage. The attack is that an adversary can forge the data to destroy the correctness of files without being detected. The shortage of the scheme is that the updating operations for data blocks is vulnerable and easy to be modified. Finally, we give our countermeasures to remedy the security problems.

This paper explores fully integrated inductive voltage regulators (FIVR) as a technique to improve the side channel resistance of encryption engines. We propose security aware design modes for low passive FIVR to improve robustness of an encryption-engine against statistical power attacks in time and frequency domain. A Correlation Power Analysis is used to attack a 128-bit AES engine synthesized in 130nm CMOS. The original design requires \textasciitilde250 Measurements to Disclose (MTD) the 1st byte of key; but with security-aware FIVR, the CPA was unsuccessful even after 20,000 traces. We present a reversibility based threat model for the FIVR-based protection improvement and show the robustness of security aware FIVR against such threat.

Physical attacks especially fault attacks represent one the major threats against embedded systems. In the state of the art, software countermeasures against fault attacks are either applied at the source code level where it will very likely be removed at compilation time, or at assembly level where several transformations need to be performed on the assembly code and lead to significant overheads both in terms of code size and execution time. This paper presents the use of compiler techniques to efficiently automate the application of software countermeasures against instruction-skip fault attacks. We propose a modified LLVM compiler that considers our security objectives throughout the compilation process. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on AES implementations running on an ARM-based microcontroller in terms of security overhead compared to existing solutions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging architecture that seeks to interconnect all of the "things" we use on a daily basis. Whereas the Internet originated as a way to connect traditional computing devices in order to share information, IoT includes everything from automobiles to appliances to buildings. As networks and devices become more diverse and disparate in their communication methods and interfaces, traditional host-to host technologies such as Internet Protocol (IP) are challenged to provide the level of data exchange and security needed to operate in this new network paradigm. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a developing Internet architecture that can help implement the IoT paradigm in a more efficient and secure manner. This paper introduces the NDN architecture in comparison to the traditional IP-based architecture and discusses several security concepts pertaining to NDN that make this a powerful technology for implementing the Internet of Things.

Given the increasing complexity of modern electronics and the cost of fabrication, entities from around the globe have become more heavily involved in all phases of the electronics supply chain. In this environment, hardware Trojans (i.e., malicious modifications or inclusions made by untrusted third parties) pose major security concerns, especially for those integrated circuits (ICs) and systems used in critical applications and cyber infrastructure. While hardware Trojans have been explored significantly in academia over the last decade, there remains room for improvement. In this article, we examine the research on hardware Trojans from the last decade and attempt to capture the lessons learned. A comprehensive adversarial model taxonomy is introduced and used to examine the current state of the art. Then the past countermeasures and publication trends are categorized based on the adversarial model and topic. Through this analysis, we identify what has been covered and the important problems that are underinvestigated. We also identify the most critical lessons for those new to the field and suggest a roadmap for future hardware Trojan research.