Biblio

This article describes the principles of construction, training and use of neural networks. The features of the neural network approach are indicated, as well as the range of tasks for which it is most preferable. Algorithms of functioning, software implementation and results of work of an artificial neural network are presented.

Security of personal data in the e-healthcare has always been challenging issue. The embedded and wearable devices used to collect these personal and critical data of the patients and users are sensitive in nature. Attribute-Based Encryption is believed to provide access control along with data security for distributed data among multiple parties. These resources limited devices do have the capabilities to secure the data while sending to the cloud but instead it increases the overhead and latency of running the encryption algorithm. On the top of if confidentiality is required, which will add more latency. In order to reduce latency and overhead, we propose a new load balancing algorithm that will distribute the data to nearby devices with available resources to encrypt the data and send it to the cloud. In this article, we are proposing a load balancing algorithm for E-Health system called (GALB). Our algorithm is based on Genetic Algorithm (GA). Our algorithm (GALB) distribute the tasks that received to the main gateway between the devices on E-health environment. The distribution strategy is based on the available resources in the devices, the distance between the gateway and the those devices, and the complexity of the task (size) and CP-ABE encryption policy length. In order to evaluate our algorithm performance, we compare the near optimal solution proposed by GALB with the optimal solution proposed by LP.

Adaptation of e-commerce in third world countries requires more secure computing facilities. Online data is vulnerable and susceptible to active attacks. Hundreds of security mechanisms and services have been proposed to curb this challenge. However, available security mechanisms, sufficiently strong, are heavy for the machines used. To secure online data where machines' processing power and memory are deficient, a Hybrid Encryption Standard (HES) is proposed. The HES is built on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm and its siblings. The component units of the DES are redesigned towards reduced demands for processing power and memory. Precisely, white box designs of IP tables, PC tables, Expansion tables, Rotation tables, S-boxes and P-boxes are proposed, all aimed at reducing the processing time and memory demands. Evaluation of the performance of the HES algorithm against the performance of the traditional DES algorithm reveal that the HES out-performs the DES with regards to speed, memory demands, and general acceptance by novice practitioners in the cryptography field. In addition, reproducibility and flexibility are attractive features of the HES over the DES.

The analysis of large-scale software and finding security vulnerabilities while its evolving is difficult without using supplementary tools, because of the size and complexity of today's systems. However just by looking at a report, doesn't transmit the overall picture of the system in terms of security vulnerabilities and its evolution throughout the project lifecycle. Software visualization is a program comprehension technique used in the context of the present and explores large amounts of information precisely. For the analysis of security vulnerabilities of complex software systems, Secure Codecity with Evolution is an interactive 3D visualization tool that can be utilized. Its studies techniques and methods are used for graphically illustrating security aspects and the evolution of software. The Main goal of the proposed Framework defined as uplift, simplify, and clarify the mental representation that a software engineer has of a software system and its evolution in terms of its security. Static code was visualised based on a city metaphor, which represents classes as buildings and packages as districts of a city. Identified Vulnerabilities were represented in a different color according to the severity. To visualize a number of different aspects, A large variety of options were given. Users can evaluate the evolution of the security vulnerabilities of a system on several versions using Matrices provided which will help users go get an overall understanding about security vulnerabilities varies with different versions of software. This framework was implemented using SonarQube for software vulnerability detection and ThreeJs for implementing the City Metaphor. The evaluation results evidently show that our framework surpasses the existing tools in terms of accuracy, efficiency and usability.

The drawbacks of traditional methods of cybernetic vulnerability detection relate to the required time to identify new threats, to register them in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records, and to score them with the Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS). These problems can be mitigated by early vulnerability detection systems relying on social media and open-source data. This paper presents a model that aims to identify emerging cybernetic vulnerabilities in cybersecurity news articles, as part of a system for automatic detection of early cybernetic threats using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Three machine learning models were trained on a novel dataset of 1000 labeled news articles to create a strong baseline for classifying cybersecurity articles as relevant (i.e., introducing new security threats), or irrelevant: Support Vector Machines, a Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier, and a finetuned BERT model. The BERT model obtained the best performance with a mean accuracy of 88.45% on the test dataset. Our experiments support the conclusion that Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are an appropriate choice for early vulnerability detection systems in order to extract relevant information from cybersecurity news articles.

Reported vulnerabilities have grown significantly over the recent years, with SQL injection (SQLi) being one of the most prominent, especially in web applications. For these, such increase can be explained by the integration of multiple software parts (e.g., various plugins and modules), often developed by different organizations, composing thus web application variants. Machine Learning has the potential to be a great ally on finding vulnerabilities, aiding experts by reducing the search space or even by classifying programs on their own. However, previous work usually does not consider SQLi or utilizes techniques hard to scale. Moreover, there is a clear gap in vulnerability detection with machine learning for PHP, the most popular server-side language for web applications. This paper presents a Deep Learning model able to classify PHP slices as vulnerable (or not) to SQLi. As slices can belong to any variant, we propose the use of an intermediate language to represent the slices and interpret them as text, resorting to well-studied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Preliminary results of the use of the model show that it can discover SQLi, helping programmers and precluding attacks that would eventually cost a lot to repair.

Using artificial intelligence technology to help network security has become a major trend. At present, major countries in the world have successively invested R & D force in the attack and defense of automatic network based on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Navy, the U.S. air force, and the DOD strategic capabilities office have invested heavily in the development of artificial intelligence network defense systems. DARPA launched the network security challenge (CGC) to promote the development of automatic attack system based on artificial intelligence. In the 2016 Defcon final, mayhem (the champion of CGC in 2014), an automatic attack team, participated in the competition with 14 human teams and once defeated two human teams, indicating that the automatic attack method generated by artificial intelligence system can scan system defects and find loopholes faster and more effectively than human beings. Japan's defense ministry also announced recently that in order to strengthen the ability to respond to network attacks, it will introduce artificial intelligence technology into the information communication network defense system of Japan's self defense force. It can be predicted that the deepening application of artificial intelligence in the field of network attack and defense may bring about revolutionary changes and increase the imbalance of the strategic strength of cyberspace in various countries. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically investigate the current situation of network attack and defense based on artificial intelligence at home and abroad, comprehensively analyze the development trend of relevant technologies at home and abroad, deeply analyze the development outline and specification of artificial intelligence attack and defense around the world, and refine the application status and future prospects of artificial intelligence attack and defense, so as to promote the development of artificial intelligence attack and Defense Technology in China and protect the core interests of cyberspace, of great significance

Exploring the intrinsic interconnections between the knowledge encoded in PRe-trained Deep Neural Networks (PR-DNNs) of heterogeneous tasks sheds light on their mutual transferability, and consequently enables knowledge transfer from one task to another so as to reduce the training effort of the latter. In this paper, we propose the DEeP Attribution gRAph (DEPARA) to investigate the transferability of knowledge learned from PR-DNNs. In DEPARA, nodes correspond to the inputs and are represented by their vectorized attribution maps with regards to the outputs of the PR-DNN. Edges denote the relatedness between inputs and are measured by the similarity of their features extracted from the PR-DNN. The knowledge transferability of two PR-DNNs is measured by the similarity of their corresponding DEPARAs. We apply DEPARA to two important yet under-studied problems in transfer learning: pre-trained model selection and layer selection. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in solving both these problems. Code, data and models reproducing the results in this paper are available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/DEPARA.

We study the attribution problem for deep networks applied to perception tasks. For vision tasks, attribution techniques attribute the prediction of a network to the pixels of the input image. We propose a new technique called Blur Integrated Gradients (Blur IG). This technique has several advantages over other methods. First, it can tell at what scale a network recognizes an object. It produces scores in the scale/frequency dimension, that we find captures interesting phenomena. Second, it satisfies the scale-space axioms, which imply that it employs perturbations that are free of artifact. We therefore produce explanations that are cleaner and consistent with the operation of deep networks. Third, it eliminates the need for baseline parameter for Integrated Gradients for perception tasks. This is desirable because the choice of baseline has a significant effect on the explanations. We compare the proposed technique against previous techniques and demonstrate application on three tasks: ImageNet object recognition, Diabetic Retinopathy prediction, and AudioSet audio event identification. Code and examples are at https://github.com/PAIR-code/saliency.

Threat Actor Attribution is the task of identifying an attacker responsible for an attack. This often requires expert analysis and involves a lot of time. There had been attempts to detect a threat actor using machine learning techniques that use information obtained from the analysis of malware samples. These techniques will only be able to identify the attack, and it is trivial to guess the attacker because various attackers may adopt an attack method. A state-of-the-art method performs attribution of threat actors from text reports using Machine Learning and NLP techniques using Threat Intelligence reports. We use the same set of Threat Reports of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). In this paper, we propose a Deep Learning architecture to attribute Threat actors based on threat reports obtained from various Threat Intelligence sources. Our work uses Neural Networks to perform the task of attribution and show that our method makes the attribution more accurate than other techniques and state-of-the-art methods.

With the deployment of artificial intelligent (AI) algorithms in a large variety of applications, there creates an increasing need for high-performance computing capabilities. As a result, different hardware platforms have been utilized for acceleration purposes. Among these hardware-based accelerators, the field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have gained a lot of attention due to their re-programmable characteristics, which provide customized control logic and computing operators. For example, FPGAs have recently been adopted for on-demand cloud services by the leading cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, providing acceleration for various compute-intensive tasks. While the co-residency of multiple tenants on a cloud FPGA chip increases the efficiency of resource utilization, it also creates unique attack surfaces that are under-explored. In this paper, we exploit the vulnerability associated with the shared power distribution network on cloud FPGAs. We present a stealthy power attack that can be remotely launched by a malicious tenant, shutting down the entire chip and resulting in denial-of-service for other co-located benign tenants. Specifically, we propose stealthy-shutdown: a well-timed power attack that can be implemented in two steps: (1) an attacker monitors the realtime FPGA power-consumption detected by ring-oscillator-based voltage sensors, and (2) when capturing high power-consuming moments, i.e., the power consumption by other tenants is above a certain threshold, she/he injects a well-timed power load to shut down the FPGA system. Note that in the proposed attack strategy, the power load injected by the attacker only accounts for a small portion of the overall power consumption; therefore, such attack strategy remains stealthy to the cloud FPGA operator. We successfully implement and validate the proposed attack on three FPGA evaluation kits with running real-world applications. The proposed attack results in a stealthy-shutdown, demonstrating severe security concerns of co-tenancy on cloud FPGAs. We also offer two countermeasures that can mitigate such power attacks.

Shared register emulations on top of message-passing systems provide an illusion of a simpler shared memory system which can make the task of a system designer easier. Numerous shared register applications have a considerably high read-to-write ratio. Thus, having algorithms that make reads more efficient than writes is a fair trade-off.Typically, such algorithms for reads and writes are asymmetric and sacrifice the stringent consistency condition atomicity, as it is impossible to have fast reads for multi-writer atomicity. Safety is a consistency condition that has has gathered interest from both the systems and theory community as it is weaker than atomicity yet provides strong enough guarantees like "strong consistency" or read-my-write consistency. One requirement that is assumed by many researchers is that of the reliable broadcast (RB) primitive, which ensures the "all or none" property during a broadcast. One drawback is that such a primitive takes 1.5 rounds to complete and requires server-to-server communication.This paper implements an efficient multi-writer multi-reader safe register without using a reliable broadcast primitive. Moreover, we provide fast reads or one-shot reads – our read operations can be completed in one round of client-to-server communication. Of course, this comes with the price of requiring more servers when compared to prior solutions assuming reliable broadcast. However, we show that this increased number of servers is indeed necessary as we prove a tight bound on the number of servers required to implement Byzantine-fault tolerant safe registers in a system without reliable broadcast.We extend our results to data stored using erasure coding as well. We present an emulation of single-writer multi-reader safe register based on MDS codes. The usage of MDS codes reduces storage and communication costs. On the negative side, we also show that to use MDS codes and at the same time achieve one-shot reads, we need even more servers.

Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from simulation to reality is still extremely challenging. We present a novel approach to model-free reinforcement learning that can leverage existing sub-optimal solutions as an algorithmic prior during training and deployment. During training, our gated fusion approach enables the prior to guide the initial stages of exploration, increasing sample-efficiency and enabling learning from sparse long-horizon reward signals. Importantly, the policy can learn to improve beyond the performance of the sub-optimal prior since the prior's influence is annealed gradually. During deployment, the policy's uncertainty provides a reliable strategy for transferring a simulation-trained policy to the real world by falling back to the prior controller in uncertain states. We show the efficacy of our Multiplicative Controller Fusion approach on the task of robot navigation and demonstrate safe transfer from simulation to the real world without any fine-tuning. The code for this project is made publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/mcf-nav/home.

Mining of data is used to analyze facts to discover formerly unknown patterns, classifying and grouping the records. There are several crucial scalable statistics mining platforms that have been developed in latest years. RapidMiner is a famous open source software which can be used for advanced analytics, Weka and Orange are important tools of machine learning for classifying patterns with techniques of clustering and regression, whilst Knime is often used for facts preprocessing like information extraction, transformation and loading. This article encapsulates the most important and robust platforms.

Cloud computing (CC) systems prevail to be the widespread computational paradigms for offering immense scalable and elastic services. Computing resources in cloud environment should be scheduled to facilitate the providers to utilize the resources moreover the users could get low cost applications. The most prominent need in job scheduling is to ensure Quality of service (QoS) to the user. In the boundary of the third party the scheduling takes place hence it is a significant condition for assuring its security. The main objective of our work is to offer QoS i.e. cost, makespan, minimized migration of task with security enforcement moreover the proposed algorithm guarantees that the admitted requests are executed without violating service level agreement (SLA). These objectives are attained by the proposed Fuzzy Ant Bee Colony algorithm. The experimental outcome confirms that secured job scheduling objective with assured QoS is attained by the proposed algorithm.

With its huge real-world demands, large-scale confidential computing still cannot be supported by today's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), due to the lack of scalable and effective protection of high-throughput accelerators like GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs etc. Although attempts have been made recently to extend the CPU-like enclave to GPUs, these solutions require change to the CPU or GPU chips, may introduce new security risks due to the side-channel leaks in CPU-GPU communication and are still under the resource constraint of today's CPU TEE.To address these problems, we present the first Heterogeneous TEE design that can truly support large-scale compute or data intensive (CDI) computing, without any chip-level change. Our approach, called HETEE, is a device for centralized management of all computing units (e.g., GPUs and other accelerators) of a server rack. It is uniquely designed to work with today's data centres and clouds, leveraging modern resource pooling technologies to dynamically compartmentalize computing tasks, and enforce strong isolation and reduce TCB through hardware support. More specifically, HETEE utilizes the PCIe ExpressFabric to allocate its accelerators to the server node on the same rack for a non-sensitive CDI task, and move them back into a secure enclave in response to the demand for confidential computing. Our design runs a thin TCB stack for security management on a security controller (SC), while leaving a large set of software (e.g., AI runtime, GPU driver, etc.) to the integrated microservers that operate enclaves. An enclaves is physically isolated from others through hardware and verified by the SC at its inception. Its microserver and computing units are restored to a secure state upon termination.We implemented HETEE on a real hardware system, and evaluated it with popular neural network inference and training tasks. Our evaluations show that HETEE can easily support the CDI tasks on the real-world scale and incurred a maximal throughput overhead of 2.17% for inference and 0.95% for training on ResNet152.

This paper presents a novel method, combining new formulations and sampling, to improve the scalability of sum-of-squares (SOS) programming-based system verification. Region-of-attraction approximation problems are considered for polynomial, polynomial with generalized Lur'e uncertainty, and rational trigonometric multi-rigid-body systems. Our method starts by identifying that Lagrange multipliers, traditionally heavily used for S-procedures, are a major culprit of creating bloated SOS programs. In light of this, we exploit inherent system properties-continuity, convexity, and implicit algebraic structure-and reformulate the problems as quotient-ring SOS programs, thereby eliminating all the multipliers. These new programs are smaller, sparser, less constrained, yet less conservative. Their computation is further improved by leveraging a recent result on sampling algebraic varieties. Remarkably, solution correctness is guaranteed with just a finite (in practice, very small) number of samples. Altogether, the proposed method can verify systems well beyond the reach of existing SOS-based approaches (32 states); on smaller problems where a baseline is available, it computes tighter solution 2-3 orders of magnitude faster.

As neural networks make their way into safety-critical systems, where misbehavior can lead to catastrophes, there is a growing interest in certifying the equivalence of two structurally similar neural networks - a problem known as differential verification. For example, compression techniques are often used in practice for deploying trained neural networks on computationally- and energy-constrained devices, which raises the question of how faithfully the compressed network mimics the original network. Unfortunately, existing methods either focus on verifying a single network or rely on loose approximations to prove the equivalence of two networks. Due to overly conservative approximation, differential verification lacks scalability in terms of both accuracy and computational cost. To overcome these problems, we propose NEURODIFF, a symbolic and fine-grained approximation technique that drastically increases the accuracy of differential verification on feed-forward ReLU networks while achieving many orders-of-magnitude speedup. NEURODIFF has two key contributions. The first one is new convex approximations that more accurately bound the difference of two networks under all possible inputs. The second one is judicious use of symbolic variables to represent neurons whose difference bounds have accumulated significant error. We find that these two techniques are complementary, i.e., when combined, the benefit is greater than the sum of their individual benefits. We have evaluated NEURODIFF on a variety of differential verification tasks. Our results show that NEURODIFF is up to 1000X faster and 5X more accurate than the state-of-the-art tool.

This paper shows how the Xtensa architecture can be attacked with Return-Oriented-Programming (ROP). The presented techniques include possibilities for both supported Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs). Especially for the windowed ABI a powerful mechanism is presented that not only allows to jump to gadgets but also to manipulate registers without relying on specific gadgets. This paper purely focuses on how the properties of the architecture itself can be exploited to chain gadgets and not on specific attacks or a gadget catalog.

The problem of optimizing the security policy for the composite information system is formulated. Subject-object model for information system is used. Combining different types of security policies is formalized. The target function for the optimization task is recorded. The optimization problem for combining two discretionary security policies is solved. The case of combining two mandatory security policies is studied. The main problems of optimization the composite security policy are formulated. +50 CHMBOJIOB‼!

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.

A significant challenge in modern computer security is the growing skill gap as intruder capabilities increase, making it necessary to begin automating elements of penetration testing so analysts can contend with the growing number of cyber threats. In this paper, we attempt to assist human analysts by automating a single host penetration attack. To do so, a smart agent performs different attack sequences to find vulnerabilities in a target system. As it does so, it accumulates knowledge, learns new attack sequences and improves its own internal penetration testing logic. As a result, this agent (AgentPen for simplicity) is able to successfully penetrate hosts it has never interacted with before. A computer security administrator using this tool would receive a comprehensive, automated sequence of actions leading to a security breach, highlighting potential vulnerabilities, and reducing the amount of menial tasks a typical penetration tester would need to execute. To achieve autonomy, we apply an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, Q-learning, with an approximator that incorporates a deep neural network architecture. The security audit itself is modelled as a Markov Decision Process in order to test a number of decision-making strategies and compare their convergence to optimality. A series of experimental results is presented to show how this approach can be effectively used to automate penetration testing using a scalable, i.e. not exhaustive, and adaptive approach.

We propose an Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Deep Learning (DL)-based image analysis framework for hardware assurance of digital integrated circuits (ICs). Our aim is to examine and verify various hardware information from analyzing the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images of an IC. In our proposed framework, we apply DL-based methods at all essential steps of the analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such framework that makes heavy use of DL-based methods at all essential analysis steps. Further, to reduce time and effort required in model re-training, we propose and demonstrate various automated or semi-automated training data preparation methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of using synthetic data to train a model. By applying our proposed framework to analyzing a set of SEM images of a large digital IC, we prove its efficacy. Our DL-based methods are fast, accurate, robust against noise, and can automate tasks that were previously performed mainly manually. Overall, we show that DL-based methods can largely increase the level of automation in hardware assurance of digital ICs and improve its accuracy.

Summary & Conclusions: The work described addresses assurance of a planning and execution software system being added to an in-orbit CubeSat to demonstrate autonomous control of that spacecraft. Our focus was on how to develop assurance of the correct operation of the added software in its operational context, our approach to which was to use an assurance case to guide and organize the information involved. The relatively manageable magnitude of the CubeSat and its autonomy demonstration experiment made it plausible to try out our assurance approach in a relatively short timeframe. Additionally, the time was ripe to inject useful assurance results into the ongoing development and testing of the autonomy demonstration. In conducting this, we sought to answer several questions about our assurance approach. The questions, and the conclusions we reached, are as follows: 1. Question: Would our approach to assurance apply to the introduction of a planning and execution software into an existing system? Conclusion: Yes. The use of an assurance case helped focus our attention on the more challenging aspects, notably the interactions between the added software and the existing software system into which it was being introduced. This guided us to choose a hazard analysis method specifically for software interactions. In addition, we were able to automate generation of assurance case elements from the hazard analysis' tabular representation. 2. Question: Would our methods prove understandable to the software engineers tasked with integrating the software into the CubeSat's existing system? Conclusion: Somewhat. In interim discussions with the software engineers we found the assurance case style, of decomposing an argument into smaller pieces, to be useful and understandable to organize discussion. Ultimately however we did not persuade them to adopt assurance cases as the means to present review information. We attribute this to reluctance to deviate from JPL's tried and true style of holding reviews. For the CubeSat project as a whole, hosting an autonomy demonstration was already a novelty. Combining this with presentation of review information via an assurance case, with which our reviewers would be unaccustomed, would have exacerbated the unfamiliarity. 3. Question: Would conducting our methods prove to be compatible with the (limited) time available of the software engineers? Conclusion: Yes. We used a series of six brief meetings (approximately one hour each) with the development team to first identify the interactions as the area on which to focus, and to then perform the hazard analysis on those interactions. We used the meetings to confirm, or correct as necessary, our understanding of the software system and the spacecraft context. Between meetings we studied the existing software documentation, did preliminary analyses by ourselves, and documented the results in a concise form suitable for discussion with the team. 4. Question: Would our methods yield useful results to the software engineers? Conclusion: Yes. The hazard analysis systematically confirmed existing hazards' mitigations, and drew attention to a mitigation whose implementation needed particular care. In some cases, the analysis identified potential hazards - and what to do about them - should some of the more sophisticated capabilities of the planning and execution software be used. These capabilities, not exercised in the initial experiments on the CubeSat, may be used in future experiments. We remain involved with the developers as they prepare for these future experiments, so our analysis results will be of benefit as these proceed.

Substantial portions of attacks on the security of enterprises are perpetrated by Insiders having authorized privileges. Thus insider threat and attack detection is an important aspect of Security management. In the published literature, efforts are on to model the insider threats based on the behavioral traits of employees. The psycho-social behaviors are hard to encode in the software systems. Also, in some cases, there are privacy issues involved. In this paper, the human and non-human agents in a system are described in a novel unified model. The enterprise is described as an automaton and its states are classified secure, safe, unsafe and compromised. The insider agents and threats are modeled on the basis of the automaton and the model is validated using a case study.