Biblio

Multimedia Internet of Things (IoT) devices, especially, the smartphones are embedded with sensors including Global Positioning System (GPS), barometer, microphone, accelerometer, etc. These sensors working together, present a fairly complete picture of the citizens' daily activities, with implications for their privacy. With the internet, Citizens in Smart Cities are able to perform their daily life activities online with their connected electronic devices. But, unfortunately, computer hackers tend to write automated malicious applications to attack websites on which these citizens perform their activities. These security threats sometime put their private information at risk. In order to prevent these security threats on websites, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) are generated, as a form of security mechanism to protect the citizens' private information. But with the advancement of deep learning, text-based CAPTCHAs can sometimes be vulnerable. As a result, it is essential to conduct performance evaluation on the CAPTCHAs that are generated before they are deployed on multimedia web applications. Therefore, this work proposed an optimal and light-weight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to solve both numerical and alpha-numerical complex text-based CAPTCHAs simultaneously. The accuracy of the proposed CNN model has been accelerated based on Cyclical Learning Rates (CLRs) policy. The proposed CLR-CNN model achieved a high accuracy to solve both numerical and alpha-numerical text-based CAPTCHAs of 99.87% and 99.66%, respectively. In real-time, we observed that the speed of the model has increased, the model is lightweight, stable, and flexible as compared to other CAPTCHA solving techniques. The result of this current work will increase awareness and will assist multimedia security Researchers to continue and develop more robust text-based CAPTCHAs with their security mechanisms capable of protecting the private information of citizens in Smart Cities.

Vehicles play an integral part in the life of a human being by facilitating in everyday tasks. The major concern that arises with this fact is that the rate of vehicle thefts have increased exponentially and retrieving them becomes almost impossible as the responsible party completely alters the stolen vehicles, leaving them untraceable. Ultimately, tracking and monitoring of vehicles using on-vehicle sensors is a promising and an efficient solution. The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to play a vital role in revolutionizing the Security and Safety industry through a system of sensor networks by periodically sending the data from the sensors to the cloud for storage, from where it can be accessed to view or take any necessary actions (if required). The main contributions of this paper are the implementation and results of the prototype of a vehicle tracking and monitoring system. The system comprises of an Arduino UNO board connected to the Global Positioning System (GPS) module, Neo-6M, which senses the exact location of the vehicle in the form of latitude and longitude, and the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, which sends the data to the Application Programming Interface (API) Cloud service, ThingSpeak, for storage and analyzing. An Android based mobile application is developed that utilizes the stored data from the Cloud and presents the user with the findings. Results show that the prototype is not only simple and cost effective, but also efficient and can be readily used by everyone from all walks of life to protect their vehicles.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by their ability to integrate the physical and information or cyber worlds. Their deployment in critical infrastructure have demonstrated a potential to transform the world. However, harnessing this potential is limited by their critical nature and the far reaching effects of cyber attacks on human, infrastructure and the environment. An attraction for cyber concerns in CPS rises from the process of sending information from sensors to actuators over the wireless communication medium, thereby widening the attack surface. Traditionally, CPS security has been investigated from the perspective of preventing intruders from gaining access to the system using cryptography and other access control techniques. Most research work have therefore focused on the detection of attacks in CPS. However, in a world of increasing adversaries, it is becoming more difficult to totally prevent CPS from adversarial attacks, hence the need to focus on making CPS resilient. Resilient CPS are designed to withstand disruptions and remain functional despite the operation of adversaries. One of the dominant methodologies explored for building resilient CPS is dependent on machine learning (ML) algorithms. However, rising from recent research in adversarial ML, we posit that ML algorithms for securing CPS must themselves be resilient. This article is therefore aimed at comprehensively surveying the interactions between resilient CPS using ML and resilient ML when applied in CPS. The paper concludes with a number of research trends and promising future research directions. Furthermore, with this article, readers can have a thorough understanding of recent advances on ML-based security and securing ML for CPS and countermeasures, as well as research trends in this active research area.

The last couple of years have seen IoT-enabled sensors continuing to experience massive growth. Sensors have enhanced the possibility of large-scale IoT deployments in grid systems, vehicles, homes, and so forth. A network that incorporates different embedded systems has the underlying capability of transmitting information and receiving instructions through distributed sensor networks. Sensors are especially essential in gathering different pieces of information that relate to different IoT devices. However, security has become a critical concern for sensor networks that are enabled by the IoT. This is partly because of their design limitations like limited memory, weak processing capability, weak processing ability, and exposure to entities that are malicious. Even more, some ad hoc wireless sensor networks that are enabled by IoT are to some extent also prone to frequent changes in topology. This dynamic aspect tends to aggravate the security issues that are associated with sensors, thus enhancing the need to find a lasting solution. This paper sheds light on the IoT security requirements with special attention to issues related to sensors.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are gaining popularity as being the backbone of Cyber physical systems, IOT and various data acquisition from sensors deployed in remote, inaccessible terrains have remote deployment. However due to remote deployment, WSN is an adhoc network of large number of sensors either heli-dropped in inaccessible terrain like volcanoes, Forests, border areas are highly energy deficient and available in large numbers. This makes it the right soup to become vulnerable to various kinds of Security attacks. The lack of energy and resources makes it deprived of developing a robust security code for mitigation of various kinds of attacks. Many attempts have been made to suggest a robust security Protocol. But these consume so much energy, bandwidth, processing power, memory and other resources that the sole purpose of data gathering from inaccessible terrain from energy deprived sensors gets defeated. This paper makes an attempt to study the types of attacks on different layers of WSN and the examine the recent trends in development of various security protocols to mitigate the attacks. Further, we have proposed a simple, lightweight but powerful security protocol known as Simple Sensor Security Protocol (SSSP), which captures the uniqueness of WSN and its isolation from internet to develop an energy efficient security solution.

The power grid is considered to be the most critical piece of infrastructure in the United States because each of the other fifteen critical infrastructures, as defined by the Cyberse-curity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), require the energy sector to properly function. Due the critical nature of the power grid, the ability to detect anomalies in the power grid is of critical importance to prevent power outages, avoid damage to sensitive equipment and to maintain a working power grid. Over the past few decades, the modern power grid has evolved into a large Cyber Physical System (CPS) equipped with wide area monitoring systems (WAMS) and distributed control. As smart technology advances, the power grid continues to be upgraded with high fidelity sensors and measurement devices, such as phasor measurement units (PMUs), that can report the state of the system with a high temporal resolution. However, this influx of data can often become overwhelming to the legacy Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, as well as, the power system operator. In this paper, we propose using a deep learning (DL) convolutional neural network (CNN) as a module within the Automatic Network Guardian for ELectrical systems (ANGEL) Digital Twin environment to detect physical faults in a power system. The presented approach uses high fidelity measurement data from the IEEE 9-bus and IEEE 39-bus benchmark power systems to not only detect if there is a fault in the power system but also applies the algorithm to classify which bus contains the fault.

Recently, A. A. Khan et al proposed a lightweight authentication and key agreement framework for the next generation of smart grids. The framework uses third party authentication server and ECC algorithm, which has certain advantages in anonymity, secure communication and computational performance. However, this paper finds that this method cannot meet the requirements of semantic security through analysis. Therefore, we propose an improved scheme on this basis. And through the method of formal proof, we verify that the scheme can meet the requirement of semantic security and anonymity of smart grid.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Distributed Control Systems (DCS) use advanced computing, sensors, control systems, and communication networks to monitor and control industrial processes and distributed assets. The increased connectivity of these systems to corporate networks has exposed them to new security threats and made them a prime target for cyber-attacks with the potential of causing catastrophic economic, social, and environmental damage. Recent intensified sophisticated attacks on these systems have stressed the importance of methodologies and tools to assess the security risks of Industrial Control Systems (ICS). In this paper, we propose a novel game theory model and Monte Carlo simulations to assess the cybersecurity risks of an exemplary industrial control system under realistic assumptions. We present five game enrollments where attacker and defender agents make different preferences and we analyze the final outcome of the game. Results show that a balanced defense with uniform budget spending is the best strategy against a look-ahead attacker.

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in smart regions/cities, for example, smart healthcare, smart homes/offices, there is an increase in security threats and risks. The IoT devices solve real-world problems by providing real-time connections, data and information. Besides this, the attackers can tamper with sensors, add or remove them physically or remotely. In this study, we address the IoT security sensor tampering issue in an office environment. We collect data from real-life settings and apply machine learning to detect sensor tampering using two methods. First, a real-time view of the traffic patterns is considered to train our isolation forest-based unsupervised machine learning method for anomaly detection. Second, based on traffic patterns, labels are created, and the decision tree supervised method is used, within our novel Anomaly Detection using Machine Learning (AD-ML) system. The accuracy of the two proposed models is presented. We found 84% with silhouette metric accuracy of isolation forest. Moreover, the result based on 10 cross-validations for decision trees on the supervised machine learning model returned the highest classification accuracy of 91.62% with the lowest false positive rate.

Resilience has been defined as a priority for the US critical infrastructure. This paper presents a process for incorporating resiliency-derived metrics into security system evaluations. To support this analysis, we used a multi-layer network model (MLN) reflecting the defined security system of a hypothetical nuclear power plant to define what metrics would be useful in understanding a system’s ability to absorb perturbation (i.e., system resilience). We defined measures focusing on the system’s criticality, rapidity, diversity, and confidence at each network layer, simulated adversary path, and the system as a basis for understanding the system’s resilience. For this hypothetical system, our metrics indicated the importance of physical infrastructure to overall system criticality, the relative confidence of physical sensors, and the lack of diversity in assessment activities (i.e., dependence on human evaluations). Refined model design and data outputs will enable more nuanced evaluations into temporal, geospatial, and human behavior considerations. Future studies can also extend these methodologies to capture respond and recover aspects of resilience, further supporting the protection of critical infrastructure.

Poultry farming has contributed immensely to global food security and the economy. Its produces are favourites and hugely subscribed, due to the uniqueness of their nutrients to all categories of people and the alternatives they provide to other high-cholesterol proteins. The increase in the world's population will continuously stretch for an increase in demands for poultry products. A smart way to ensure continuous production and increased yields in various farms is to adopt automated and remote management of poultries. This paper modelled and developed a collaborative system using the synergistic wireless sensor network technology and the internet of things. The system integrated resourcefully selected wireless sensors, mobile phone, other autonomous devices and the internet to remotely monitor and control environmental parameters and activities within the farm. Parameters such as temperature, humidity, water level, food valve level, ammonia gas, illumination are sensed, benchmarked against selected thresholds, and communicated wirelessly to the sink node and the internet cloud. The required control actions can also be initiated remotely by the administrator through messages or command signal. Also, the various parameters and actions can be read or documented in real-time over the web. The system was tested and evaluated to give an average of about 93.7% accuracy in parameters detection and 2s delay in real-time response. Therefore, a modelled system has been developed to provide robust and more intuitive solutions in poultry farming.

Traditionally, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have been operated as air-gapped networks, without a necessity to connect directly to the Internet. With the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, along with the cloud computing shift in traditional IT environments, ICS systems went through an adaptation period in the recent years, as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) became popular. ICS systems, also called Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS), operate on physical devices (i.e., actuators, sensors) at the lowest layer. An anomaly that effect this layer, could potentially result in physical damage. Due to the new attack surfaces that came about with IIoT movement, precise, accurate, and prompt intrusion/anomaly detection is becoming even more crucial in ICS. This paper proposes a novel method for real-time intrusion/anomaly detection based on a cyber-physical system network traffic. To evaluate the proposed anomaly detection method's efficiency, we run our implementation against a network trace taken from a Secure Water Treatment Testbed (SWAT) of iTrust Laboratory at Singapore.

We consider the problem of security for unmanned aerial vehicle flight control systems. To provide a concrete setting, we consider the security problem in the context of a helicopter which is compromised by a malicious agent that distorts elevation measurements to the control loop. This is a particular example of the problem of the security of stochastic control systems under erroneous observation measurements caused by malicious sensors within the system. In order to secure the control system, we consider dynamic watermarking, where a private random excitation signal is superimposed onto the control input of the flight control system. An attack detector at the actuator can then check if the reported sensor measurements are appropriately correlated with the private random excitation signal. This is done via two specific statistical tests whose violation signifies an attack. We apply dynamic watermarking technique to a 2-rotor-based 3-DOF helicopter control system test-bed. We demonstrate through both simulation and experimental results the performance of the attack detector on two attack models: a stealth attack, and a random bias injection attack.

In this paper, we investigate joint sensor-actuator cyber attacks in discrete event systems. We assume that attackers can attack some sensors and actuators at the same time by altering observations and control commands. Because of the nondeterminism in observation and control caused by cyber attacks, the behavior of the supervised systems becomes nondeterministic and deviates from the target. We define two bounds on languages, an upper-bound and a lower-bound, to describe the nondeterministic behavior. We then use the upper-bound language to investigate the safety supervisory control problem under cyber attacks. After introducing CA-controllability and CA-observability, we successfully solve the supervisory control problem under cyber attacks.

In this research we have explained to set up an Infrared Array Sensor system that is IOT based in order to provide security at remote location. We have tried to Establishment of cloud environment to host IOT application & Development of IOT Application using Asp.net with C\# programming platform. We have Integrated IOT with Infrared Array sensors in order to implement proposed work. In this research camera captures the external event and sent signal to Infrared grid array sensor. Internet of Things (IoT) would enable applications of utmost societal value including smart cities, smart grids & smart healthcare. For majority of such applications, strict dependability requirements are placed on IOT performance, & sensor data as well as actuator commands must be delivered reliably & timely.

Nowadays energy systems in many countries improve and develop being based on the concept of deep integration of energy as well as infocomm grids. Thus, energy grids find the possibility to analyze the state of the whole system in real time, to predict the processes in it, to have interactive cooperation with the clients and to run the appliance. Such concept has been named Smart Grid. This work highlights the concept of Smart Grid, possible vectors of attacks and identification of attack of false data injection (FDI) into the flow of measuring received from the sensors. Identification is based on the use of spatial and temporal correlations in Smart Grids.

An essential ingredient of the smart grid is software-based services. Increasingly, software is used to support control strategies and services that are critical to the grid's operation. Therefore, its correct operation is essential. For various reasons, software and its configuration needs to be updated. This update process represents a significant overhead for smart grid operators and failures can result in financial losses and grid instabilities. In this paper, we present a framework for determining the root causes of software rollout failures in the smart grid. It uses distributed sensors that indicate potential issues, such as anomalous grid states and cyber-attacks, and a causal inference engine based on a formalism called evidential networks. The aim of the framework is to support an adaptive approach to software rollouts, ensuring that a campaign completes in a timely and secure manner. The framework is evaluated for a software rollout use-case in a low voltage distribution grid. Experimental results indicate it can successfully discriminate between different root causes of failure, supporting an adaptive rollout strategy.

We propose an autoencoder based approach to anomaly detection in smart grid systems. Data collecting sensors within smart home systems are susceptible to many data corruption issues, such as malicious attacks or physical malfunctions. By applying machine learning to a smart home or grid, sensor anomalies can be detected automatically for secure data collection and sensor-based system functionality. In addition, we tested the effectiveness of this approach on real smart home sensor data collected for multiple years. An early detection of such data corruption issues is essential to the security and functionality of the various sensors and devices within a smart home.

Fueled by the emergence of IoT-enabled medical sensors and big data analytics, nations all over the world are widely adopting digitalization of healthcare systems. This is certainly a positive trend for improving the entire spectrum of quality of care, but this convenience is also posing a huge challenge on the security of healthcare data. For ensuring privacy and protection of healthcare data, access control is regarded as one of the first-line-of-defense mechanisms. As none of the traditional enterprise access control models can completely cater to the need of the healthcare domain which includes a myriad of contexts, in this paper, we present a context-policy-based access control scheme. Our scheme relies on the eTRON cybersecurity architecture for tamper-resistance and cryptographic functions, and leverages a context-specific blend of classical discretionary and role-based access models for incorporation into legacy systems. Moreover, our scheme adheres to key recommendations of prominent statutory and technical guidelines including HIPAA and HL7. The protocols involved in the proposed access control system have been delineated, and a proof-of-concept implementation has been carried out - along with a comparison with other systems, which clearly suggests that our approach is more responsive to different contexts for protecting healthcare data.

The whole Software-Defined Networking (SDN) system might be out of service when the control plane is overloaded by control plane saturation attacks. In this attack, a malicious host can manipulate massive table-miss packets to exhaust the control plane resources. Even though many studies have focused on this problem, systems still suffer from more influenced switches because of centralized mitigation policies, and long recovery delay because of the remaining attack flows. To solve these problems, we propose FSDM, a Fast recovery Saturation attack Detection and Mitigation framework. For detection, FSDM extracts the distribution of Control Channel Occupation Rate (CCOR) to detect the attack and locates the port that attackers come from. For mitigation, with the attacker's location and distributed Mitigation Agents, FSDM adopts different policies to migrate or block attack flows, which influences fewer switches and protects the control plane from resource exhaustion. Besides, to reduce the system recovery delay, FSDM equips a novel functional module called Force\_Checking, which enables the whole system to quickly clean up the remaining attack flows and recovery faster. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments, which show that, with the increasing of attack PPS (Packets Per Second), FSDM only suffers a minor recovery delay increase. Compared with traditional methods without cleaning up remaining flows, FSDM saves more than 81% of ping RTT under attack rate ranged from 1000 to 4000 PPS, and successfully reduced the delay of 87% of HTTP requests time under large attack rate ranged from 5000 to 30000 PPS.

This work focuses on the design and implementation of a microcontroller for apply all the knowledge acquired during Engineering Electronics career. In order to improve the knowledge about RF technologies, security system have been created, which increases the number of applications used in these days. This design utilizes light sensors as the end device for detecting any changes of resistance. The results show that the designed system can send and receive data until 100 meters of distance between module sides (receiver-transmitter). This security system designed using PIC 16F84 microcontroller as entire brain of the system with sensors, has been successfully designed and implement considering some factors such as economy, availability of components and durability in the design process.

Most machine learning-based malware detection systems use various supervised learning methods to classify different instances of software as benign or malicious. This approach provides no information regarding the behavioral characteristics of malware. It also requires a large amount of training data and is prone to labeling difficulties and can reduce accuracy due to redundant training data. Therefore, we propose a malware detection method based on deep learning, which uses malware images and a set of autoencoders to detect malware. The method is to design an autoencoder to learn the functional characteristics of malware, and then to observe the reconstruction error of autoencoder to realize the classification and detection of malware and benign software. The proposed approach achieves 93% accuracy and comparatively better F1-score values while detecting malware and needs little training data when compared with traditional malware detection systems.

The following topics are dealt with: security of data; distributed power generation; power engineering computing; power grids; power system security; computer network security; voltage control; risk management; power system measurement; critical infrastructures.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a popular recommendation system that makes recommendations based on similar users' preferences. Though it is widely used, CF is prone to Shilling/Profile Injection attacks, where fake profiles are injected into the CF system to alter its outcome. Most of the existing shilling attacks do not work on online systems and cannot be efficiently implemented in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce an efficient Multi-Armed-Bandit-based reinforcement learning method to practically execute online shilling attacks. Our method works by reducing the uncertainty associated with the item selection process and finds the most optimal items to enhance attack reach. Such practical online attacks open new avenues for research in building more robust recommender systems. We treat the recommender system as a black box, making our method effective irrespective of the type of CF used. Finally, we also experimentally test our approach against popular state-of-the-art shilling attacks.

Due to environmental influence and technology limitation, a wireless sensor/sensors module can neither store or process all raw data locally nor reliably forward it to a destination in heterogeneous IoT environment. As a result, the data collected by the IoT's sensors are inherently noisy, unreliable, and may trigger many false alarms. These false or misleading data can lead to wrong decisions once the data reaches end entities. Therefore, it is highly recommended and desirable to acquire trustworthy data before data transmission, aggregation, and data storing at the end entities/cloud. In this paper, we propose an In-network Generalized Trustworthy Data Collection (IGTDC) framework for trustworthy data acquisition and faulty sensor detection in the IoT environment. The key idea of IGTDC is to allow a sensor's module to examine locally whether the raw data is trustworthy before transmitting towards upstream nodes. It further distinguishes whether the acquired data can be trusted or not before data aggregation at the sink/edge node. Besides, IGTDC helps to recognize a faulty or compromised sensor. For a reliable data collection, we use collaborative IoT technique, gate-level modeling, and programmable logic device (PLD) to ensure that the acquired data is reliable before transmitting towards upstream nodes/cloud. We use a hardware-based technique called “Gray Code” to detect a faulty sensor. Through simulations we reveal that the acquired data in IGTDC framework is reliable that can make a trustworthy data collection for event detection, and assist to distinguish a faulty sensor.