Biblio

From an information-theoretic standpoint, the intrusion detection process can be examined. Given the IDS output(alarm data), we should have less uncertainty regarding the input (event data). We propose the Capability of Intrusion Detection (CID) measure, which is simply the ratio of mutual information between IDS input and output, and the input of entropy. CID has the desirable properties of (1) naturally accounting for all important aspects of detection capability, such as true positive rate, false positive rate, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and base rate, (2) objectively providing an intrinsic measure of intrusion detection capability, and (3) being sensitive to IDS operation parameters. When finetuning an IDS, we believe that CID is the best performance metric to use. In terms of the IDS’ inherent ability to classify input data, the so obtained operation point is the best that it can achieve.

This paper explores a practical approach to securing large wireless networks by applying Physical Layer Security (PLS). To date, PLS has mostly been seen as an information theory concept with few practical implementations. We present an Access Point (AP) selection algorithm that uses PLS to find an AP that offers the highest secrecy capacity to a legitimate user. We then propose an implementation of this algorithm using the novel concept of spectrum programming which extends Software-Defined Networking to the physical and data-link layers and makes wireless network management and control more flexible and scalable than traditional platforms. Our Wi-Fi network evaluation results show that our approach outperforms conventional solutions in terms of security, but at the expense of communication capacity, thus identifying a trade-off between security and performance. These results encourage implementation and extension to further wireless technologies.

The intelligent cyber-physical system (CPS) has been applied in various fields, covering multiple critical infras-tructures and human daily life support areas. CPS Security is a major concern and of critical importance, especially the security of the intelligent control component. Side-channel analysis (SCA) is the common threat exploiting the weaknesses in system operation to extract information of the intelligent CPS. However, existing literature lacks the systematic theo-retical analysis of the side-channel attacks on the intelligent CPS, without the ability to quantify and measure the leaked information. To address these issues, we propose the SCA-based model extraction attack on intelligent CPS. First, we design an efficient and novel SCA-based model extraction framework, including the threat model, hierarchical attack process, and the multiple micro-space parallel search enabled weight extraction algorithm. Secondly, an information theory-empowered analy-sis model for side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS is built. We propose a mutual information-based quantification method and derive the capacity of side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS, formulating the amount of information leakage through side channels. Thirdly, we develop the theoretical bounds of the leaked information over multiple attack queries based on the data processing inequality and properties of entropy. These convergence bounds provide theoretical means to estimate the amount of information leaked. Finally, experimental evaluation, including real-world experiments, demonstrates the effective-ness of the proposed SCA-based model extraction algorithm and the information theory-based analysis method in intelligent CPS.

Currently, statistical tests for random number generators (RNGs) are widely used in practice, and some of them are even included in information security standards. But despite the popularity of RNGs, consistent tests are known only for stationary ergodic deviations of randomness (a test is consistent if it detects any deviations from a given class when the sample size goes to infinity). However, the model of a stationary ergodic source is too narrow for some RNGs, in particular, for generators based on physical effects. In this article, we propose computable consistent tests for some classes of deviations more general than stationary ergodic and describe some general properties of statistical tests. The proposed approach and the resulting test are based on the ideas and methods of information theory.

State estimation (SE) plays a vital role in the reliable operation of modern power systems, gives situational awareness to the operators, and is employed in different functions of the Energy Management System (EMS), such as Optimal Power Flow (OPF), Contingency Analysis (CA), power market mechanism, etc. To increase SE's accuracy and protect it from compromised measurements, Bad Data Detection (BDD) algorithm is employed. However, the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the modern power system makes it a complicated cyber-physical system (CPS). It gives this opportunity to an adversary to find some loopholes and flaws, penetrate to CPS layer, inject false data, bypass existing BDD schemes, and consequently, result in security and stability issues. This paper employs a semi-supervised learning method to find normal data patterns and address the False Data Injection Attack (FDIA) problem. Based on this idea, the Probability Distribution Functions (PDFs) of measurement variations are derived for training and test data sets. Two distinct indices, i.e., Absolute Distance (AD) and Relative Entropy (RE), a concept in Information Theory, are utilized to find the distance between these two PDFs. In case an intruder compromises data, the related PDF changes. However, we demonstrate that AD fails to detect these changes. On the contrary, the RE index changes significantly and can properly detect FDIA. This proposed method can be used in a real-time attack detection process where the larger RE index indicates the possibility of an attack on the real-time data. To investigate the proposed methodology's effectiveness, we utilize the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) data (Jan.-Dec. 2019) with a 5-minute resolution and map it to the IEEE 14-bus test system, and prepare an appropriate data set. After that, two different case studies (attacks on voltage magnitude ( Vm), and phase angle (θ)) with different attack parameters (i.e., 0.90, 0.95, 0.98, 1.02, 1.05, and 1.10) are defined to assess the impact of an attack on the state variables at different buses. The results show that RE index is a robust and reliable index, appropriate for real-time applications, and can detect FDIA in most of the defined case studies.

Unlike the traditional key-exchange based cryptography, physical layer security is built on information theory and aims to achieve unconditional security by exploiting the physical characteristics of wireless channels. With the growth of the number of wireless devices, physical layer security has been gradually emphasized by researchers. Various physical layer security protocols have been proposed for different communication scenarios. Since these protocols are based on information-theoretic security and the formalization work for information theory were not complete when these protocols were proposed, the security of these protocols lacked formal proofs. In this paper, we propose a formal definition for the secrecy capacity in non-degraded wiretap channel model and a formal proof for the secrecy capacity in binary symmetric channel with the help of SSReflect/Coq theorem prover.

Information leakage estimation for practical wiretap codes is a challenging task for which existing solutions are either too complex or suboptimal, and don't scale for large blocklengths. In this paper we present a new method, based on a modified version of the successive cancellation decoder in order to compute the information leakage for the wiretap polar code which improves upon existing methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. Results are presented for classical binary-input symmetric channels alike the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC), the Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC) and Binary Input Additive White Gaussian Noise channel (BI-AWGN).

We study quantum-secure covert-communication over lossy thermal-noise bosonic channels, the quantum mechanical model for many practical channels. We derive the expressions for the covert capacity of these channels: Lno-EA, when Alice and Bob share only a classical secret, and LEA, when they benefit from entanglement assistance. Entanglement assistance alters the fundamental scaling law for covert communication. Instead of Lno-EA$\surd$n-rno-EA(n), rno-EA(n) = o($\surd$n), entanglement assistance allows LEA$\surd$n log n - rEA(n), rEA(n) = o($\surd$n log n), covert bits to be transmitted reliably over n channel uses. However, noise in entanglement storage erases the log n gain from our achievability; work on the matching converse is ongoing.

In the federated learning system, parameter gradients are shared among participants and the central modulator, while the original data never leave their protected source domain. However, the gradient itself might carry enough information for precise inference of the original data. By reporting their parameter gradients to the central server, client datasets are exposed to inference attacks from adversaries. In this paper, we propose a quantitative metric based on mutual information for clients to evaluate the potential risk of information leakage in their gradients. Mutual information has received increasing attention in the machine learning and data mining community over the past few years. However, existing mutual information estimation methods cannot handle high-dimensional variables. In this paper, we propose a novel method to approximate the mutual information between the high-dimensional gradients and batched input data. Experimental results show that the proposed metric reliably reflect the extent of information leakage in federated learning. In addition, using the proposed metric, we investigate the influential factors of risk level. It is proven that, the risk of information leakage is related to the status of the task model, as well as the inherent data distribution.

We propose an information-theoretical method of attribution of literary texts, developed within the framework of information theory and mathematical statistics. Using the proposed method, the following two problems of disputed authorship in Russian and Soviet literature were investigated: i) the problem of false attribution of some novels to Nekrasov and ii) the problem of dubious attribution of two novels to Bulgakov. The research has shown the high efficiency of the data-compression method for attribution of literary texts.

Ben-Or and Linial (1985) introduced the full information model for coin-tossing protocols involving \$n\$ processors with unbounded computational power using a common broadcast channel for all their communications. For most adversarial settings, the characterization of the exact or asymptotically optimal protocols remains open. Furthermore, even for the settings where near-optimal asymptotic constructions are known, the exact constants or poly-logarithmic multiplicative factors involved are not entirely well-understood. This work studies \$n\$-processor coin-tossing protocols where every processor broadcasts an arbitrary-length message once. An adaptive Byzantine adversary, based on the messages broadcast so far, can corrupt \$k=1\$ processor. A bias-\$X\$ coin-tossing protocol outputs 1 with probability \$X\$; otherwise, it outputs 0 with probability (\$1-X\$). A coin-tossing protocol's insecurity is the maximum change in the output distribution (in the statistical distance) that a Byzantine adversary can cause. Our objective is to identify bias-\$X\$ coin-tossing protocols achieving near-optimal minimum insecurity for every \$Xın[0,1]\$. Lichtenstein, Linial, and Saks (1989) studied bias-\$X\$ coin-tossing protocols in this adversarial model where each party broadcasts an independent and uniformly random bit. They proved that the elegant “threshold coin-tossing protocols” are optimal for all \$n\$ and \$k\$. Furthermore, Goldwasser, Kalai, and Park (2015), Kalai, Komargodski, and Raz (2018), and Haitner and Karidi-Heller (2020) prove that \$k=\textbackslashtextbackslashmathcalO(\textbackslashtextbackslashsqrtn \textbackslashtextbackslashcdot \textbackslashtextbackslashmathsfpolylog(n)\$) corruptions suffice to fix the output of any bias-\$X\$ coin-tossing protocol. These results encompass parties who send arbitrary-length messages, and each processor has multiple turns to reveal its entire message. We use an inductive approach to constructing coin-tossing protocols using a potential function as a proxy for measuring any bias-\$X\$ coin-tossing protocol's susceptibility to attacks in our adversarial model. Our technique is inherently constructive and yields protocols that minimize the potential function. It is incidentally the case that the threshold protocols minimize the potential function, even for arbitrary-length messages. We demonstrate that these coin-tossing protocols' insecurity is a 2-approximation of the optimal protocol in our adversarial model. For any other \$Xın[0,1]\$ that threshold protocols cannot realize, we prove that an appropriate (convex) combination of the threshold protocols is a 4-approximation of the optimal protocol. Finally, these results entail new (vertex) isoperimetric inequalities for density-\$X\$ subsets of product spaces of arbitrary-size alphabets.

The information-theoretic approach to security entails harnessing the correlated randomness available in nature to establish security. It uses tools from information theory and coding and yields provable security, even against an adversary with unbounded computational power. However, the feasibility of this approach in practice depends on the development of efficiently implementable schemes. In this paper, we review a special class of practical schemes for information-theoretic security that are based on 2-universal hash families. Specific cases of secret key agreement and wiretap coding are considered, and general themes are identified. The scheme presented for wiretap coding is modular and can be implemented easily by including an extra preprocessing layer over the existing transmission codes.

Many important security informatics problems require consideration of dynamical phenomena for their solution; examples include predicting the behavior of individuals in social networks and distinguishing malicious and innocent computer network activities based on activity traces. While information theory offers powerful tools for analyzing dynamical processes, to date the application of information-theoretic methods in security domains has focused on static analyses (e.g., cryptography, natural language processing). This paper leverages information-theoretic concepts and measures to quantify the similarity of pairs of stochastic dynamical systems, and shows that this capability can be used to solve important problems which arise in security applications. We begin by presenting a concise review of the information theory required for our development, and then address two challenging tasks: 1.) characterizing the way influence propagates through social networks, and 2.) distinguishing malware from legitimate software based on the instruction sequences of the disassembled programs. In each application, case studies involving real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed techniques outperform standard methods.

We investigate the potential of an information-spectrum approach to information-theoretic security. We show how this approach provides conceptually simple yet powerful results that can be used to investigate complex communication scenarios. In particular, we illustrate the usefulness of information-spectrum methods by analyzing the effect of channel state information (CSI) on the secure rates achievable over wiretap channels. We establish a formula for secrecy capacity, which we then specialize to compute achievable rates for ergodic fading channels in the presence of imperfect CSI. Our results confirm the importance of having some knowledge about the eavesdropper's channel, but also show that imperfect CSI does not necessarily preclude security.

In this paper we consider the pollution attack in network coded systems where network nodes are computationally limited. We consider the combined use of cryptographic signature based security and information theoretic network error correction and propose a fountain-like network error correction code construction suitable for this purpose.

While information-theoretic security is stronger than computational security, it has long been considered impractical. In this work, we provide new insights into the design of practical information-theoretic cryptosystems. Firstly, from a theoretical point of view, we give a brief introduction into the existing information theoretic security criteria, such as the notions of Shannon's perfect/ideal secrecy in cryptography, and the concept of strong secrecy in coding theory. Secondly, from a practical point of view, we propose the concept of ideal secrecy outage and define a outage probability. Finally, we show how such probability can be made arbitrarily small in a practical cryptosystem.

Summary form only given. We discuss information-theoretic methods to prove the security of cryptosystems. We study what is called, unconditionally secure (or information-theoretically secure) cryptographic schemes in search for a system that can provide long-term security and that does not impose limits on the adversary's computational power.

In the past, two main approaches for the purpose of authentication, including information-theoretic authentication codes and complexity-theoretic message authentication codes (MACs), were almost independently developed. In this paper, we consider to construct new MACs, which are both computationally secure and information-theoretically secure. Essentially, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs), where artificial noise is used to interfere with the complexity-theoretic MACs and quantization is further employed to facilitate packet-based transmission. With a channel coding formulation of key recovery in the MACs, the generation of standard authentication tags can be seen as an encoding process for the ensemble of codes, where the shared key between Alice and Bob is considered as the input and the message is used to specify a code from the ensemble of codes. Then, we show that artificial noise in ANA-MACs can be well employed to resist the key recovery attack even if the opponent has an unlimited computing power. Finally, a pragmatic approach for the analysis of ANA-MACs is provided, and we show how to balance the three performance metrics, including the completeness error, the false acceptance probability, and the conditional equivocation about the key. The analysis can be well applied to a class of ANA-MACs, where MACs with Rijndael cipher are employed.

Given a selected complex orthogonal space-time block code (STBC), transformation algorithms are provided to build a set, S, of unique orthogonal STBCs with cardinality equal to \textbackslashtextbarS\textbackslashtextbar = 2r+c+k-1·r!·c!, where r, c, and k are the number of rows, columns, and data symbols in the STBC matrix, respectively. A communications link is discussed that encodes data symbols with a chosen STBC from the set known only to the transmitter and intended receiver as a means of providing physical layer security (PLS). Expected bit error rate (BER) and informationtheoretic results for an eavesdropper with a priori knowledge of the communications link parameters with the exception of the chosen STBC are presented. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to confirm the possible BER results expected when decoding the communications link with alternative STBCs from the set. Application of the transformation algorithms provided herein are shown to significantly increase the brute force decoding complexity of an eavesdropper compared to a related work in the literature.

Today's blockchain designs suffer from a trilemma claiming that no blockchain system can simultaneously achieve decentralization, security, and performance scalability. For current blockchain systems, as more nodes join the network, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and storage) stays constant at best. A leading idea for enabling blockchains to scale efficiency is the notion of sharding: different subsets of nodes handle different portions of the blockchain, thereby reducing the load for each individual node. However, existing sharding proposals achieve efficiency scaling by compromising on trust - corrupting the nodes in a given shard will lead to the permanent loss of the corresponding portion of data. In this paper, we settle the trilemma by demonstrating a new protocol for coded storage and computation in blockchains. In particular, we propose PolyShard: "polynomially coded sharding" scheme that achieves information-theoretic upper bounds on the efficiency of the storage, system throughput, as well as on trust, thus enabling a truly scalable system.

The increasingly networked human society requires that human beings have a clear understanding and control over the structure, nature and behavior of various social networks. There is a tendency towards privacy in the study of network evolutions because privacy disclosure behavior in the network has gradually developed into a serious concern. For this purpose, we extended information theory and proposed a brand-new concept about so-called “habitual privacy” to quantitatively analyze privacy exposure behavior and facilitate privacy computation. We emphasized that habitual privacy is an inherent property of the user and is correlated with their habitual behaviors. The widely approved driving force in recent modeling complex networks is originated from activity. Thus, we propose the privacy-driven model through synthetically considering the activity impact and habitual privacy underlying the decision process. Privacy-driven model facilitates to more accurately capture highly dynamical network behaviors and figure out the complex evolution process, allowing a profound understanding of the evolution of network driven by privacy.

More and more security and privacy issues are arising as new technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, are widely applied in nowadays. For decreasing the privacy breaches in access control system under opening and cross-domain environment. In this paper, we suggest a game and risk based access model for privacy preserving by employing Shannon information and game theory. After defining the notions of Privacy Risk and Privacy Violation Access, a high-level framework of game theoretical risk based access control is proposed. Further, we present formulas for estimating the risk value of access request and user, construct and analyze the game model of the proposed access control by using a multi-stage two player game. There exists sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium each stage in the risk based access control and it's suitable to protect the privacy by limiting the privacy violation access requests.

{1 We present a construction for exact-repair regenerating codes with an information-theoretic secrecy guarantee against an eavesdropper with access to the content of (up to) ℓ nodes. The proposed construction works for the entire range of per-node storage and repair bandwidth for any distributed storage system with parameters (n

With an increasing number of wireless devices, the risk of being eavesdropped increases as well. From information theory, it is well known that wiretap codes can asymptotically achieve vanishing decoding error probability at the legitimate receiver while also achieving vanishing leakage to eavesdroppers. However, under finite blocklength, there exists a tradeoff among different parameters of the transmission. In this work, we propose a flexible wiretap code design for Gaussian wiretap channels under finite blocklength by neural network autoencoders. We show that the proposed scheme has higher flexibility in terms of the error rate and leakage tradeoff, compared to the traditional codes.

Ze the quality of channels into either completely noisy or noieseless channels. This paper presents extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) analysis for iterative decoding of Polar codes to reveal the mechanism of channel transformation. The purpose of understanding the transformation process are to comprehend the placement process of information bit and frozen bit and to comprehend the security standard of Polar codes. Mutual information derived based on the concept of EXIT chart for check nodes and variable nodes of low density parity check (LDPC) codes and applied to Polar codes. This paper explores the quality of the polarized channels in finite blocklength. The finite block-length is of our interest since in the fifth telecommunications generation (5G) the block length is limited. This paper reveals the EXIT curve changes of Polar codes and explores the polarization characteristics, thus, high value of mutual informations for frozen bit are needed to be detectable. If it is the other way, the error correction capability of Polar codes would be drastically decreases. These results are expected to be a reference for developments of Polar codes for 5G technologies and beyond.