Biblio

This paper explains how the commonly occurring DOS and Brute Force attacks on computer networks can be efficiently detected and network performance improved, which reduces costs and time. Therefore, network administrators attempt to instantly diagnose any network issues. The experimental work used the SNMP-MIB parameter datasets, which are collected via a specialised MIB dataset consisting of seven types of attack as noted in section three. To resolves such issues, this researched carried out several important contributions which are related to fault management concerns in computer network systems. A central task in the detection of the attacks relies on MIB feature behaviours using the suggested SFCM method. It was concluded that the DOS and Brute Force fault detection results for three different clustering methods demonstrated that the proposed SFCM detected every data point in the related group. Consequently, the FPC approached 1.0, its highest record, and an improved performance solution better than the EM methods and K-means are based on SNMP-MIB variables.

Wireless communications have encountered a considerable improvement and have integrated human life through various applications, mainly by the widespread of mobile ad hoc and sensor networks. A fundamental characteristic of wireless communications are in their broadcast nature, which allows accessibility of information without placing restrictions on a user's location. However, accessibility also makes wireless communications vulnerable to eavesdropping. To enhance the security of network communication, we propose a separate key generation server which is responsible for key generation using complex random algorithm. The key will remain in database in encrypted format. To prevent brute force attack, we propose various group key generation algorithms in which every group will have separate group key to verify group member's identity. The group key will be verified with the session information before decryption, so that our system will prevent attack if any attacker knows the group key. To increase the security of the system, we propose three level encryption securities: Client side encryption using AES, Server side encryption using AES, and Artificial noise generation and addition. By using this our system is free from brute force attack as we are using three level message security and complex Random key generation algorithms.

Modern operating systems for personal computers (including Linux, MAC, and Windows) provide user-level APIs for an application to access the I/O paths of another application. This design facilitates information sharing between applications, enabling applications such as screenshots. However, it also enables user-level malware to log a user's keystrokes or scrape a user's screen output. In this work, we explore a design called SwitchMan to protect a user's I/O paths against user-level malware attacks. SwitchMan assigns each user with two accounts: a regular one for normal operations and a protected one for inputting and outputting sensitive data. Each user account runs under a separate virtual terminal. Malware running under a user's regular account cannot access sensitive input/output under a user's protected account. At the heart of SwitchMan lies a secure protocol that enables automatic account switching when an application requires sensitive input/output from a user. Our performance evaluation shows that SwitchMan adds acceptable performance overhead. Our security and usability analysis suggests that SwitchMan achieves a better tradeoff between security and usability than existing solutions.

Living in the age of digital transformation, companies and individuals are moving to public and private clouds to store and retrieve information, hence the need to store and retrieve data is exponentially increasing. Existing storage technologies such as DAS are facing a big challenge to deal with these huge amount of data. Hence, newer technologies should be adopted. Storage Area Network (SAN) is a distributed storage technology that aggregates data from several private nodes into a centralized secure place. Looking at SAN from a security perspective, clearly physical security over multiple geographical remote locations is not adequate to ensure a full security solution. A SAN security framework needs to be developed and designed. This work investigates how SAN protocols work (FC, ISCSI, FCOE). It also investigates about other storages technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) including different metrics such as: IOPS (input output per second), Throughput, Bandwidths, latency, cashing technologies. This research work is focusing on the security vulnerabilities in SAN listing different attacks in SAN protocols and compare it to other such as NAS and DAS. Another aspect of this work is to highlight performance factors in SAN in order to find a way to improve the performance focusing security solutions aimed to enhance the security level in SAN.

Researchers are trying to find new ways of finding and pointing out Cybersecurity vulnerabilities by using innovative metrics. New theoretical proposals need to be tested in a real environment, using Cybersecurity tools applications that can validate the applicability of those in real life. This paper presents an experimental flexible environment, which can be used for the validation of several theoretical claims based on an “easy to use” architecture implemented in a cloud environment. The framework provides a much shorter time setup in the real world as well as a much better understanding based on log analysis provided by MS Azure. As a proof of concept, we have tested three different claims and provided proves of results such as screenshots and log samples.

In this paper, we implemented a mobile augmented reality system based on cloud computing. This system uses a mobile device with a camera to capture images of book spines and sends processed features to the cloud. In the cloud, the features are compared with the database and the information of the best matched book would be sent back to the mobile device. The information will then be rendered on the display via augmented reality. In order to reduce the transmission cost, the mobile device is used to perform most of the image processing tasks, such as the preprocessing, resizing, corner detection, and augmented reality rendering. On the other hand, the cloud is used to realize routine but large quantity feature comparisons. Using the cloud as the database also makes the future extension much more easily. For our prototype system, we use an Android smart phone as our mobile device, and Chunghwa Telecoms hicloud as the cloud.

Attacks on cloud-computing services are becoming more prevalent with recent victims including Tesla, Aviva Insurance and SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto[1]. The risk posed to organisations from malicious insiders is becoming more widely known about and consequently many are now investing in hardware, software and new processes to try to detect these attacks. As for all types of attack vector, there will always be those which are not known about and those which are known about but remain exceptionally difficult to detect - particularly in a timely manner. We believe that insider attacks are of particular concern in a cloud-computing environment, and that cloud-service providers should enhance their ability to detect them by means of indirect detection. We propose a combined attack-tree and kill-chain based method for identifying multiple indirect detection measures. Specifically, the use of attack trees enables us to encapsulate all detection opportunities for insider attacks in cloud-service environments. Overlaying the attack tree on top of a kill chain in turn facilitates indirect detection opportunities higher-up the tree as well as allowing the provider to determine how far an attack has progressed once suspicious activity is detected. We demonstrate the method through consideration of a specific type of insider attack - that of attempting to capture virtual machines in transit within a cloud cluster via use of a network tap, however, the process discussed here applies equally to all cloud paradigms.

This paper proposes a distributed deep learning framework for privacy-preserving medical data training. In order to avoid patients' data leakage in medical platforms, the hidden layers in the deep learning framework are separated and where the first layer is kept in platform and others layers are kept in a centralized server. Whereas keeping the original patients' data in local platforms maintain their privacy, utilizing the server for subsequent layers improves learning performance by using all data from each platform during training.

Nowadays, a massive number of data, referred as big data, are being collected from social networks and Internet of Things (IoT), which are of tremendous value. Many deep learning-based methods made great progress in the extraction of knowledge of those data. However, the knowledge extraction of the law data poses vast challenges on the deep learning, since the law data usually contain the privacy information. In addition, the amount of law data of an institution is not large enough to well train a deep model. To solve these challenges, some privacy-preserving deep learning are proposed to capture knowledge of privacy data. In this paper, we review the emerging topics of deep learning for the feature learning of the privacy data. Then, we discuss the problems and the future trend in deep learning for privacy-preserving feature learning on law data.

Big data will bring revolutionary changes from life to thinking for society as a whole. At the same time, the massive data and potential value of big data are subject to many security risks. Aiming at the above problems, a data privacy protection model for big data platform is proposed. First, the data privacy protection model of big data for data owners is introduced in detail, including protocol design, logic design, complexity analysis and security analysis. Then, the query privacy protection model of big data for ordinary users is introduced in detail, including query protocol design and query mode design. Complexity analysis and safety analysis are performed. Finally, a stand-alone simulation experiment is built for the proposed privacy protection model. Experimental data is obtained and analyzed. The feasibility of the privacy protection model is verified.

Manufacturing enterprises are constantly exploring new ways to improve their own production processes to address the increasing demand of customized production. However, such enterprises show a low degree of flexibility, which mainly results from the need to configure new production equipment at design and run time. In this paper we propose self-adaptation as an approach to improve data transmission flexibility in Industry 4.0 environments. We implement an autonomic manager using a generic autonomic management framework, which applies the most appropriate data transmission configuration based on security and business process related requirements, such as performance. The experimental evaluation is carried out in a MQTT infrastructure and the results show that using self-adaptation can significantly improve the trade-off between security and performance. We then propose to integrate anomaly detection methods as a solution to support self-adaptation by monitoring and learning the normal behavior of an industrial system and show how this can be used by the generic autonomic management framework.

Point of Sale (POS) systems has become the technology of choice for most businesses and offering number of advantages over traditional cash registers. They manage staffs, customers, transaction, inventory, sale and labor reporting, price adjustment, as well as keeping track of cash flow, expense management, reducing human errors and more. Whether traditional on-premise POS, or Cloud-Bases POS, they help businesses to run more efficiently. However, despite all these advantages, POS systems are becoming targets of a number of cyber-attacks. Security of a POS system is a key requirement of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This paper undertakes research into the PCI DSS and its accompanying standards, in an attempt to break or bypass security measures using varying degrees of vulnerability and penetration attacks in a methodological format. The resounding goal of this experimentation is to achieve a basis from which attacks can be made against a realistic networking environment from whence an intruder can bypass security measures thus exposing a vulnerability in the PCI DSS and potentially exposing confidential customer payment information.

Ciphertext-policy Attributes-based Encryption (CP-ABE) is an encouraging cryptographic mechanism. It behaves an access control mechanism for data security. A ciphertext and secret key of user are dependent upon attributes. As a nature of CP-ABE, the data owner defines access policy before encrypting plaintext by his right. Therefore, CP-ABE is suitable in a real environment. In CP-ABE, the revocation issue is demanding since each attribute is shared by many users. A policy-based revolutionary CP-ABE scheme is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, revocation takes place in policy level because a policy consists of threshold attributes and each policy is identified as a unique identity number. Policy revocation means that the data owner updates his policy identity number for ciphertext whenever any attribute is changed in his policy. To be a flexible updating policy control, four types of updating policy levels are identified for the data owner. Authorized user gets a secret key from a trusted authority (TA). TA updates the secret key according to the policy updating level done by the data owner. This paper tests personal health records (PHRs) and analyzes execution times among conventional CP-ABE, other enhanced CP-ABE and the proposed scheme.

Law enforcement agencies regularly take down botnets as the ultimate defense against global malware operations. By arresting malware authors, and simultaneously infiltrating or shutting down a botnet's network infrastructures (such as C2 servers), defenders stop global threats and mitigate pending infections. In this paper, we propose malware tarpits, an orthogonal defense that does not require seizing botnet infrastructures, and at the same time can also be used to slow down malware spreading and infiltrate its monetization techniques. A tarpit is a network service that causes a client to stay busy with a network operation. Our work aims to automatically identify network operations used by malware that will block the malware either forever or for a significant amount of time. We describe how to non-intrusively exploit such tarpit vulnerabilities in malware to slow down or, ideally, even stop malware. Using dynamic malware analysis, we monitor how malware interacts with the POSIX and Winsock socket APIs. From this, we infer network operations that would have blocked when provided certain network inputs. We augment this vulnerability search with an automated generation of tarpits that exploit the identified vulnerabilities. We apply our prototype MALPITY on six popular malware families and discover 12 previously-unknown tarpit vulnerabilities, revealing that all families are susceptible to our defense. We demonstrate how to, e.g., halt Pushdo's DGA-based C2 communication, hinder SalityP2P peers from receiving commands or updates, and stop Bashlite's spreading engine.

In the privacy protection method based on user collaboration, all participants and collaborators must share the maximum anonymity value set in the anonymous group. No user can get better quality of service by reducing the anonymity requirement. In this paper, a privacy protection algorithm random-QBE, which divides query information into blocks and exchanges randomly, is proposed. Through this method, personalized anonymity, query diversity and location anonymity in user cooperative privacy protection can be realized. And through multi-hop communication between collaborative users, this method can also satisfy the randomness of anonymous location, so that the location of the applicant is no longer located in the center of the anonymous group, which further increases the ability of privacy protection. Experiments show that the algorithm can complete the processing in a relatively short time and is suitable for deployment in real environment to protect user's location privacy.

With the development of cloud computing technology in the Internet of Things (IoT), the trajectory privacy in location-based services (LBSs) has attracted much attention. Most of the existing work adopts point-to-point and centralized models, which will bring a heavy burden to the user and cause performance bottlenecks. Moreover, previous schemes did not consider both online and offline trajectory protection and ignored some hidden background information. Therefore, in this paper, we design a trajectory protection scheme based on fog computing and k-anonymity for real-time trajectory privacy protection in continuous queries and offline trajectory data protection in trajectory publication. Fog computing provides the user with local storage and mobility to ensure physical control, and k-anonymity constructs the cloaking region for each snapshot in terms of time-dependent query probability and transition probability. In this way, two k-anonymity-based dummy generation algorithms are proposed, which achieve the maximum entropy of online and offline trajectory protection. Security analysis and simulation results indicate that our scheme can realize trajectory protection effectively and efficiently.

Due to the leakage of privacy information in the sensitive region of trajectory anonymity publishing, which is resulted by the attack, this paper aims at the trajectory anonymity algorithm of division of region. According to the start stop time of the trajectory, the current sensitive region is found with the k-anonymity set on the synchronous trajectory. If the distance between the divided sub-region and the adjacent anonymous area is not greater than the threshold d, the area will be combined. Otherwise, with the guidance of location mapping, the forged location is added to the sub-region according to the original location so that the divided sub-region can meet the principle of k-anonymity. While the forged location retains the relative position of each point in the sensitive region, making that the divided sub-region and the original Regional anonymity are consistent. Experiments show that compared with the existing trajectory anonymous algorithm and the synchronous trajectory data set with the same privacy, the algorithm is highly effective in both privacy protection and validity of data quality.

With the rapid development of micro-electronics and Information and Communication Technology (ICT), users can utilize various service such as Internet of Things(IoT), smart-healthcare and smart-home using wearable devices. However, the sensitive information of user are revealed by attackers because the medical services are provided through open channel. Therefore, secure mutual authentication and key establishment are essential to provide secure services for legitimate users in Wireless Body Area Networks(WBAN). In 2019, Gupta et al. proposed a lightweight anonymous user authentication and key establishment scheme for wearable devices. We demonstrate that their scheme cannot withstand user impersonation, session key disclosure and wearable device stolen attacks. We also propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication and key establishment scheme using wearable devices to resolve the security shortcomings of Gupta et al.'s scheme. The proposed scheme can be suitable to resource-limited environments.

Hiding contents of users' messages has been successfully addressed before, while anonymization of message senders remains a challenge since users do not usually trust ISPs and messaging application providers. To resolve this challenge, several solutions have been proposed so far. Among them, the Dining Cryptographers network protocol (DC-net) provides the strongest anonymity guarantees. However, DC-net suffers from two critical issues that makes it impractical, i.e., (1) collision possibility and (2) vulnerability against disruptions. Apart from that, we noticed a third critical issue during our investigation. (3) DC-net users can be deanonymized after they publish at least three messages. We name this problem the short stability issue and prove that anonymity is provided only for a few cycles of message publishing. As far as we know, this problem has not been identified in the previous research works. In this paper, we propose Harmonized and Stable DC-net (HSDC-net), a self-organizing protocol for anonymous communications. In our protocol design, we first resolve the short stability issue and obtain SDC-net, a stable extension of DC-net. Then, we integrate the Slot Reservation and Disruption Management sub-protocols into SDC-net to overcome the collision and security issues, respectively. The obtained HSDC-net protocol can also be integrated into blockchain-based cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to mix multiple transactions (belonging to different users) into a single transaction in such a way that the source of each payment is unknown. This preserves privacy of blockchain users. Our prototype implementation shows that HSDC-net achieves low latencies that makes it a practical protocol.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a distributed sensing paradigm that uses a variety of built-in sensors in smart mobile devices to enable ubiquitous acquisition of sensory data from surroundings. However, non-dedicated nature of MCS results in vulnerabilities in the presence of malicious participants to compromise the availability of the MCS components, particularly the servers and participants' devices. In this paper, we focus on Denial of Service attacks in MCS where malicious participants submit illegitimate task requests to the MCS platform to keep MCS servers busy while having sensing devices expend energy needlessly. After reviewing Artificial Intelligence-based security solutions for MCS systems, we focus on a typical location-based and energy-oriented DoS attack, and present a security solution that applies ensemble techniques in machine learning to identify illegitimate tasks and prevent personal devices from pointless energy consumption so as to improve the availability of the whole system. Through simulations, we show that ensemble techniques are capable of identifying illegitimate and legitimate tasks while gradient boosting appears to be a preferable solution with an AUC performance higher than 0.88 in the precision-recall curve. We also investigate the impact of environmental settings on the detection performance so as to provide a clearer understanding of the model. Our performance results show that MCS task legitimacy decisions with high F-scores are possible for both illegitimate and legitimate tasks.

GPS signals, the main origin of navigation, are not functional in indoor environments. Therefore, Wi-Fi access points have started to be increasingly used for localization and tracking inside the buildings by relying on fingerprint-based approach. However, with these types of approaches, several concerns regarding the privacy of the users have arisen. Malicious individuals can determine a clients daily habits and activities by simply analyzing their wireless signals. While there are already efforts to incorporate privacy to the existing fingerprint-based approaches, they are limited to the characteristics of the homo-morphic cryptographic schemes they employed. In this paper, we propose to enhance the performance of these approaches by exploiting another homomorphic algorithm, namely DGK, with its unique encrypted sorting capability and thus pushing most of the computations to the server side. We developed an Android app and tested our system within a Columbia University dormitory. Compared to existing systems, the results indicated that more power savings can be achieved at the client side and DGK can be a viable option with more powerful server computation capabilities.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack has the characteristics of complex attack means, long duration and great harmfulness. Based on the idea of dynamic deception, the paper proposed an APT defense system framework, and analyzed the deception defense process. The paper proposed a hybrid encryption communication mechanism based on socket, a dynamic IP address generation method based on SM4, a dynamic timing selection method based on Viterbi algorithm and a dynamic policy allocation mechanism based on DHCPv6. Tests show that the defense system can dynamically change and effectively defense APT attacks.

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is a rapidly developing field which has evolved in direct response to exponential growth in cyber related crimes and attacks. CTI supports Communication and Information System (CIS)Security in order to bolster defenses and aids in the development of threat models that inform an organization's decision making process. In a military organization like NATO, CTI additionally supports Cyberspace Operations by providing the Commander with essential intelligence about the adversary, their capabilities and objectives while operating in and through cyberspace. There have been many contributions to the CTI field; a noteworthy contribution is the ATT&CK® framework by the Mitre Corporation. ATT&CK® contains a comprehensive list of adversary tactics and techniques linked to custom or publicly known Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) which aids an analyst in the characterization of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). The ATT&CK® framework also demonstrates possibility of supporting an organization with linking observed tactics and techniques to specific APT behavior, which may assist with adversary characterization and identification, necessary steps towards attribution. The NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCI Agency) have been experimenting with the use of deception techniques (including decoys) to increase the collection of adversary related data. The collected data is mapped to the tactics and techniques described in the ATT&CK® framework, in order to derive evidence to support adversary characterization; this intelligence is pivotal for the Commander to support mission planning and determine the best possible multi-domain courses of action. This paper describes the approach, methodology, outcomes and next steps for the conducted experiments.

In this paper, we design NETHCF, a line-rate in-network system for filtering spoofed traffic. NETHCF leverages the opportunity provided by programmable switches to design a novel defense against spoofed IP traffic, and it is highly efficient and adaptive. One key challenge stems from the restrictions of the computational model and memory resources of programmable switches. We address this by decomposing the HCF system into two complementary components-one component for the data plane and another for the control plane. We also aggregate the IP-to-Hop-Count (IP2HC) mapping table for efficient memory usage, and design adaptive mechanisms to handle end-to-end routing changes, IP popularity changes, and network activity dynamics. We have built a prototype on a hardware Tofino switch, and our evaluation demonstrates that NETHCF can achieve line-rate and adaptive traffic filtering with low overheads.

In this paper, we propose the first traffic monitoring and labeling system for iOS devices, named iMonitor, which not just captures mobile network traffic in .pcap files, but also provides comprehensive APP-related and user-related information of captured packets. Through further analysis, one can obtain the exact APP or device where each packet comes from. The labeled traffic can be used in many research areas for mobile security, such as privacy leakage detection and user profiling. Given the implementation methodology of NetworkExtension framework of iOS 9+, APP labels of iMonitor are reliable enough so that labeled traffic can be regarded as training data for any traffic classification methods. Evaluations on real iPhones demonstrate that iMonitor has no notable impact upon user experience even with slight packet latency. Also, the experiment result supports our motivation that mobile traffic monitoring for iOS is absolutely necessary, as traffic generated by different OSes like Android and iOS are different and unreplaceable in researches.