Biblio

All-or-nothing transforms (AONT) were proposed by Rivest as a message preprocessing technique for encrypting data to protect against brute-force attacks, and have many applications in cryptography and information security. Later the unconditionally secure AONT and their combinatorial characterization were introduced by Stinson. Informally, a combinatorial AONT is an array with the unbiased requirements and its security properties in general depend on the prior probability distribution on the inputs s-tuples. Recently, it was shown by Esfahani and Stinson that a combinatorial AONT has perfect security provided that all the inputs s-tuples are equiprobable, and has weak security provided that all the inputs s-tuples are with non-zero probability. This paper aims to explore on the gap between perfect security and weak security for combinatorial (t, s, v)-AONTs. Concretely, we consider the typical scenario that all the s inputs take values independently (but not necessarily identically) and quantify the amount of information H(\textbackslashmathcalX\textbackslashmid \textbackslashmathcalY) about any t inputs \textbackslashmathcalX that is not revealed by any s−t outputs \textbackslashmathcalY. In particular, we establish the general lower and upper bounds on H(\textbackslashmathcalX\textbackslashmid \textbackslashmathcalY) for combinatorial AONTs using information-theoretic techniques, and also show that the derived bounds can be attained in certain cases.

The major mode of communication between hearing-impaired or mute people and others is sign language. Prior, most of the recognition systems for sign language had been set simply to recognize hand signs and convey them as text. However, the proposed model tries to provide speech to the mute. Firstly, hand gestures for sign language recognition and facial emotions are trained using CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and then by training the emotion to speech model. Finally combining hand gestures and facial emotions to realize the emotion and speech.

Analyzing reflectionally symmetric features inside an image is one of the important processes for recognizing the peculiar appearance of natural and man-made objects, biological patterns, etc. In this work, we will point out an efficient detector of reflectionally symmetric shapes by addressing a class of projection-based signatures that are structured by a generalized \textbackslashmathcalR\_fm-transform model. To this end, we will firstly prove the \textbackslashmathcalR\_fmˆ-transform in accordance with reflectional symmetry detection. Then different corresponding \textbackslashmathcalR\_fm-signatures of binary shapes are evaluated in order to determine which the corresponding exponentiation of the \textbackslashmathcalR\_fm-transform is the best for the detection. Experimental results of detecting on single/compound contour-based shapes have validated that the exponentiation of 10 is the most discriminatory, with over 2.7% better performance on the multiple-axis shapes in comparison with the conventional one. Additionally, the proposed detector also outperforms most of other existing methods. This finding should be recommended for applications in practice.

Securing communication and information is known as cryptography. To convert messages from plain text to cipher text and the other way around. It is the process of protecting the data and sending it to the right audience so they can understand and process it. Hence, unauthorized access is avoided. This work suggests leveraging DNA technology for encrypt and decrypt the data. The main aim of utilizing the AES in this stage will transform ASCII code to hexadecimal to binary coded form and generate DNA. The message is encrypted with a random key. Shared key used for encrypt and decrypt the data. The encrypted data will be disguised as an image using steganography. To protect our data from hijackers, assailants, and muggers, it is frequently employed in institutions, banking, etc.

A dual-image watermarking approach is presented in this research. The presented work utilizes the properties of Hessenberg decomposition, Redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT), Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Singular value decomposition (SVD). For watermarking, the YCbCr color space is employed. Two watermark logos are for embedding. A YCbCr format conversion is performed on the RGB input image. The host image's Y and Cb components are divided into various sub-bands using RDWT. The Hessenberg decomposition is applied on high-low and low-high components. After that, SVD is applied to get dominant matrices. Two different logos are used for watermarking. Apply RDWT on both watermark images. After that, apply DCT and SVD to get dominant matrices of logos. Add dominant matrices of input host and watermark images to get the watermarked image. Average PSNR, MSE, Structural similarity index measurement (SSIM) and Normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) are used as the performance parameters. The resilience of the presented work is tested against various attacks such as Gaussian low pass filter, Speckle noise attack, Salt and Pepper, Gaussian noise, Rotation, Median and Average filter, Sharpening, Histogram equalization and JPEG compression. The presented scheme is robust and imperceptible when compared with other schemes.

Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).

Access control is a widely used technology to protect information security. The implementation of access control depends on the response generated by access control policies to users’ access requests. Therefore, ensuring the correctness of access control policies is an important step to ensure the smooth implementation of access control mechanisms. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a constraint based access control policy security analysis framework (CACPSAF) to perform security analysis on access control policies. The framework transforms the problem of security analysis of access control policy into the satisfiability of security principle constraints. The analysis and calculation of access control policy can be divided into formal transformation of access control policy, SMT coding of policy model, generation of security principle constraints, policy detection and evaluation. The security analysis of policies is divided into mandatory security principle constraints, optional security principle constraints and user-defined security principle constraints. The multi-dimensional security analysis of access control policies is realized and the semantic expression of policy analysis is stronger. Finally, the effectiveness of this framework is analyzed by performance evaluation, which proves that this framework can provide strong support for fine-grained security analysis of policies, and help to correctly model and conFigure policies during policy modeling, implementation and verification.

To protect the security of video information use encryption technology to be effective means. In practical applications, the structural complexity and real-time characteristics of video information make the encryption effect of some commonly used algorithms have some shortcomings. According to the characteristics of video, to design practical encryption algorithm is necessary. This paper proposed a novel scheme of chaotic image encryption, which is based on scrambling and diffusion structure. Firstly, the breadth first search method is used to scramble the pixel position in the original image, and then the pseudo-random sequence generated by the time-varying bilateral chaotic symbol system is used to transform each pixel of the scrambled image ratio by ratio or encryption. In the simulation experiment and analysis, the performance of the encrypted image message entropy displays that the new chaotic image encryption scheme is effective.

Chaotic cryptography is structurally related to the concepts of confusion and diffusion in traditional cryptography theory. Chaotic cryptography is formed by the inevitable connection between chaos theory and pure cryptography. In order to solve the shortcomings of the existing research on information encryption security system, this paper discusses the realization technology of information security, the design principles of encryption system and three kinds of chaotic mapping systems, and discusses the selection of development tools and programmable devices. And the information encryption security system based on chaos algorithm is designed and discussed, and the randomness test of three groups of encrypted files is carried out by the proposed algorithm and the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. Experimental data show that the uniformity of P-value value of chaos algorithm is 0.714 on average. Therefore, it is verified that the information encryption security system using chaos algorithm has high security.

The cutting-edge biometric recognition systems extract distinctive feature vectors of biometric samples using deep neural networks to measure the amount of (dis-)similarity between two biometric samples. Studies have shown that personal information (e.g., health condition, ethnicity, etc.) can be inferred, and biometric samples can be reconstructed from those feature vectors, making their protection an urgent necessity. State-of-the-art biometrics protection solutions are based on homomorphic encryption (HE) to perform recognition over encrypted feature vectors, hiding the features and their processing while releasing the outcome only. However, this comes at the cost of those solutions' efficiency due to the inefficiency of HE-based solutions with a large number of multiplications; for (dis-)similarity measures, this number is proportional to the vector's dimension. In this paper, we tackle the HE performance bottleneck by freeing the two common (dis-)similarity measures, the cosine similarity and the squared Euclidean distance, from multiplications. Assuming normalized feature vectors, our approach pre-computes and organizes those (dis-)similarity measures into lookup tables. This transforms their computation into simple table-lookups and summation only. We study quantization parameters for the values in the lookup tables and evaluate performances on both synthetic and facial feature vectors for which we achieve a recognition performance identical to the non-tabularized baseline systems. We then assess their efficiency under HE and record runtimes between 28.95ms and 59.35ms for the three security levels, demonstrating their enhanced speed.

Safety-critical systems require resiliency against both cyberattacks and environmental faults. Researches have shown that microkernels can isolate components and limit the capabilities of would-be attackers by confining the attack in the component that it is initiated in. This limits the propagation of faults to sensitive components in the system. Nonetheless, the isolation mechanism in microkernels is not fully investigated for its resiliency against hardware faults. This paper investigates whether microkernels provide protection against hardware faults and, if so, to what extent quantitatively. This work is part of an effort in establishing an overlap between security and reliability with the goal of maximizing both while minimizing their impact on performance. In this work, transient faults are emulated on the seL4 microkernel and Linux kernel using debugger-induced bit flips across random timestamps in benchmark applications. Results show differences in the frequency and final outcome of fault to error manifestation in the seL4 environment compared to the Linux environment, including a reduction in silent data corruptions.

Since deep learning (DL) can automatically learn features from source code, it has been widely used to detect source code vulnerability. To achieve scalable vulnerability scanning, some prior studies intend to process the source code directly by treating them as text. To achieve accurate vulnerability detection, other approaches consider distilling the program semantics into graph representations and using them to detect vulnerability. In practice, text-based techniques are scalable but not accurate due to the lack of program semantics. Graph-based methods are accurate but not scalable since graph analysis is typically time-consuming. In this paper, we aim to achieve both scalability and accuracy on scanning large-scale source code vulnerabilities. Inspired by existing DL-based image classification which has the ability to analyze millions of images accurately, we prefer to use these techniques to accomplish our purpose. Specifically, we propose a novel idea that can efficiently convert the source code of a function into an image while preserving the program details. We implement Vul-CNN and evaluate it on a dataset of 13,687 vulnerable functions and 26,970 non-vulnerable functions. Experimental results report that VulCNN can achieve better accuracy than eight state-of-the-art vul-nerability detectors (i.e., Checkmarx, FlawFinder, RATS, TokenCNN, VulDeePecker, SySeVR, VulDeeLocator, and Devign). As for scalability, VulCNN is about four times faster than VulDeePecker and SySeVR, about 15 times faster than VulDeeLocator, and about six times faster than Devign. Furthermore, we conduct a case study on more than 25 million lines of code and the result indicates that VulCNN can detect large-scale vulnerability. Through the scanning reports, we finally discover 73 vulnerabilities that are not reported in NVD.

The features of socio-cyber-physical systems are presented, which dictate the need to revise traditional management methods and transform the management system in such a way that it takes into account the presence of a person both in the control object and in the control loop. The use of situational control mechanisms is proposed. The features of this approach and its comparison with existing methods of situational awareness are presented. The comparison has demonstrated wider possibilities and scope for managing socio-cyber-physical systems. It is recommended to consider a wider class of types of relations that exist in socio-cyber-physical systems. It is indicated that such consideration can be based on the use of pseudo-physical logics considered in situational control. It is pointed out that it is necessary to design a classifier of situations (primarily in cyberspace), instead of traditional classifiers of threats and intruders.

With the development of artificial intelligence, the need for data sharing is becoming more and more urgent. However, the existing data sharing methods can no longer fully meet the data sharing needs. Privacy breaches, lack of motivation and mutual distrust have become obstacles to data sharing. We design a privacy-preserving, decentralized data sharing method based on blockchain smart contracts, named PPDS. To protect data privacy, we transform the data sharing problem into a model sharing problem. This means that the data owner does not need to directly share the raw data, but the AI model trained with such data. The data requester and the data owner interact on the blockchain through a smart contract. The data owner trains the model with local data according to the requester's requirements. To fairly assess model quality, we set up several model evaluators to assess the validity of the model through voting. After the model is verified, the data owner who trained the model will receive reward in return through a smart contract. The sharing of the model avoids direct exposure of the raw data, and the reasonable incentive provides a motivation for the data owner to share the data. We describe the design and workflow of our PPDS, and analyze the security using formal verification technology, that is, we use Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) to build a formal model for our approach, proving its security through simulation execution and model checking. Finally, we demonstrate effectiveness of PPDS by developing a prototype with its corresponding case application.

We propose Cleann, the first end-to-end framework that enables online mitigation of Trojans for embedded Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications. A Trojan attack works by injecting a backdoor in the DNN while training; during inference, the Trojan can be activated by the specific backdoor trigger. What differentiates Cleann from the prior work is its lightweight methodology which recovers the ground-truth class of Trojan samples without the need for labeled data, model retraining, or prior assumptions on the trigger or the attack. We leverage dictionary learning and sparse approximation to characterize the statistical behavior of benign data and identify Trojan triggers. Cleann is devised based on algorithm/hardware co-design and is equipped with specialized hardware to enable efficient real-time execution on resource-constrained embedded platforms. Proof of concept evaluations on Cleann for the state-of-the-art Neural Trojan attacks on visual benchmarks demonstrate its competitive advantage in terms of attack resiliency and execution overhead.

Underwater Wireless Communication Network (UWCN) is highly emerging in recent times due to the broad variety of underwater applications ranging from disaster prediction, environmental resource monitoring, military security surveillance and assisted navigation. Since the kind of accuracy these applications demands from the dynamic underwater environment is really high, so there is a need for effective way of study underwater communication networks. Usually underwater networks can be studied with the help of actual underwater testbed or with the model of the underwater network. Studying the underwater system with the actual underwater testbed is costly. The effective way of analysis can be done by creating a mathematical model of underwater systems. Queuing theory is one of the most popular mathematical theories used for conventional circuit switched networks whereas it can’t be applied for modeling modern packet switched networks which has high variability compared to that of circuit switched networks. So this paper presents Stochastic Network Calculus (SNC) as the mathematical theory for modeling underwater communication networks. Underlying principles and basic models provided by SNC for analyzing the performance graduates of UWCN is discussed in detail for the benefit of researchers looking for the effective mathematical theory for modeling the system in the domain of underwater communication.

A successful phishing attack is prelude to various other severe attacks such as login credentials theft, unauthorized access to user’s confidential data, malware and ransomware infestation of victim’s machine etc. This paper proposes a real time lightweight machine learning based security framework for detection of phishing attacks through analysis of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The proposed framework initially extracts a set of highly discriminating and uncorrelated features from the URL string corpus. These extracted features are then used to transform the URL strings into their corresponding numeric feature vectors, which are eventually used to train various machine learning based classifier models for identification of malicious phishing URLs. Performance analysis of the proposed security framework on two well known datasets: Kaggle dataset and UNB dataset shows that it is capable of detecting malicious phishing URLs with high precision, while at the same time maintain a very low level of false positive rate. The proposed framework is also shown to outperform other similar security frameworks proposed in the literature.121https://www.kaggle.com/antonyj453/ur1dataset2https://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/ur1-2016.htm1

Blockchain technology is the need of an hour for ensuring security and data privacy. However, very limited tools and documentation are available, therefore, the traditional code-centric implementation of Blockchain is challenging for programmers and developers due to inherent complexities. To overcome these challenges, in this article, a novel and efficient framework is proposed that is based on the Model-Driven Architecture. Particularly, a Meta-model (M2 level Ecore Model) is defined that contains the concepts of Blockchain technology. As a part of tool support, a tree editor (developed using Eclipse Modeling Framework) and a Sirius based graphical modeling tool with a drag-drop palette have been provided to allow modeling and visualization of simple and complex Blockchain-based scenarios for security labs in a very user-friendly manner. A Model to Text (M2T) transformation code has also been written using Acceleo language that transforms the modeled scenarios into java code for Blockchain application in the security lab. The validity of the proposed framework has been demonstrated via a case study. The results prove that our framework can be reliably used and further extended for automation and development of Blockchain-based application for security labs with simplicity.

With the development of artificial intelligence, facial expression recognition (FER) has greatly improved performance in deep learning, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in the study of combining attention to focus the network on key parts of the face. For facial expression recognition, this paper designs a network model, which use spatial transformer network to transform the input image firstly, and then adding channel attention and spatial attention to the convolutional network. In addition, in this paper, the GELU activation function is used in the convolutional network, which improves the recognition rate of facial expressions to a certain extent.

Automated analysis of facial expressions is one of the most interesting and challenging problems in many areas such as human-computer interaction. Facial images are affected by many factors, such as intensity, pose and facial expressions. These factors make facial expression recognition problem a challenge. The aim of this paper is to propose a new method based on the pyramid local binary pattern (PLBP) and the pyramid local phase quantization (PLPQ), which are the extension of the local binary pattern (LBP) and the local phase quantization (LPQ) as two methods for extracting texture features. LBP operator is used to extract LBP feature in the spatial domain and LPQ operator is used to extract LPQ feature in the frequency domain. The combination of features in spatial and frequency domains can provide important information in both domains. In this paper, PLBP and PLPQ operators are separately used to extract features. Then, these features are combined to create a new feature vector. The advantage of pyramid transform domain is that it can recognize facial expressions efficiently and with high accuracy even for very low-resolution facial images. The proposed method is verified on the CK+ facial expression database. The proposed method achieves the recognition rate of 99.85% on CK+ database.

Network slicing qualitatively transforms network infrastructures such that they have maximum flexibility in the context of ever-changing service requirements. While the agility of cloud native network functions (CNFs) demonstrates significant promise, virtualization and softwarization severely degrade the performance of such network functions. Considerable efforts were expended to improve the performance of virtualized systems, and at this stage 10 Gbps throughput is a real target even for container/VM-based applications. Nonetheless, the current performance of CNFs with state-of-the-art enhancements does not meet the performance requirements of next-generation 6G networks that aim for terabit-class throughput. The present pace of performance enhancements in hardware indicates that straightforward optimization of existing system components has limited possibility of filling the performance gap. As it would be reasonable to expect a single silver-bullet technology to dramatically enhance the ability of CNFs, an organic integration of various data-plane technologies with a comprehensive vision is a potential approach. In this paper, we show a future vision of system architecture for terabit-class CNFs based on effective harmonization of the technologies within the wide-range of network systems consisting of commodity hardware devices. We focus not only on the performance aspect of CNFs but also other pragmatic aspects such as interoperability with the current environment (not clean slate). We also highlight the remaining missing-link technologies revealed by the goal-oriented approach.

The theoretical basis made it possible to implement software for automated secure biometric verification and personal identification, which can be used by information security systems (including access control and management systems). The work is devoted to solving an urgent problem - the development of methods and algorithms for generating a key for a storage device based on biometric parameters. Biometric cryptosystems take advantage of biometrics to improve the security of encryption keys. The ability not to store a key that is derived from biometric data is a direct advantage of the method of generating cryptographic keys from biometric data of users over other existing encryption methods.

Biometric data is prone to attacks and threats from hackers who are professionals in cyber-crimes. Therefore, securing the data is very essential. Steganographic approach, which is a process of concealing data, is proposed as a solution to this. Biometrics are hidden inside other biometrics for safe storage and secure transmission. Also, it is designed to be robust against attacks, and cannot be detected easily. The intention of this paper is to highlight a method of hiding one image in another image by using mid position value(mpv) technique. Here we have to choose the secret biometric on which Arnold transform will be applied resulting in a scrambled version of the secret biometric. This will be enveloped inside cover image which results in a stego-image. Lastly, hidden secret biometric will be decoded from this stego image, which will first result in a scrambled secret biometric. Inverse Arnold Transform will be applied on this to finally result in the decoded secret biometric. The paper further explains the working and processes in detail.

This paper proposes a configurable architecture of butterfly unit (BU) supporting number theoretic transform (NTT) and inverse NTT (INTT) accelerators in the ring learning with error based homomorphic encryption. The proposed architecture is fully pipelined and carefully optimized the critical path delay. To compare with related works, several BU designs of different bit-size specific primes are synthesized and successfully placed-and-routed on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU102 FPGA platform. Implementation results show that the proposed BU designs achieve 3× acceleration with more efficient resource utilization compared with previous works. Thus, the proposed BU architecture is worthwhile to develop NTTINTT accelerators in advanced homomorphic encryption systems.

The Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is a dynamically composed network of intelligent sensors and actuators that operate as a command and control, communications, computers, and intelligence complex-system with the aim to enable multi-domain operations. The use of artificial intelligence can help transform the IoBT data into actionable insight to create information and decision advantage on the battlefield. In this work, we focus on how accounting for uncertainty in IoBT systems can result in more robust and safer systems. Human trust in these systems requires the ability to understand and interpret how machines make decisions. Most real-world applications currently use deterministic machine learning techniques that cannot incorporate uncertainty. In this work, we focus on the machine learning task of classifying vehicles from their audio recordings, comparing deterministic convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with Bayesian CNNs to show that correctly estimating the uncertainty can help lead to robust decision-making in IoBT.