Biblio

Control flow integrity (CFI) checks are used in desktop systems, in order to protect them from various forms of attacks, but they are rarely investigated for embedded systems, due to their introduced overhead. The contribution of this paper is an efficient software implementation of a CFI-check for ARM-and Xtensa processors. Moreover, we propose the combination of this CFI-check with another defense mechanism against return-oriented-programming (ROP). We show that by this combination the security is significantly improved. Moreover, it will also in-crease the safety of the system, since the combination can detect a failed ROP-attack and bring the system in a safe state, which is not possible when using each technique separately. We will also report on the introduced overhead in code size and run time.

Smart metering is a mechanism through which fine-grained electricity usage data of consumers is collected periodically in a smart grid. However, a growing concern in this regard is that the leakage of consumers' consumption data may reveal their daily life patterns as the state-of-the-art metering strategies lack adequate security and privacy measures. Many proposed solutions have demonstrated how the aggregated metering information can be transformed to obscure individual consumption patterns without affecting the intended semantics of smart grid operations. In this paper, we expose a complete break of such an existing privacy preserving metering scheme [10] by determining individual consumption patterns efficiently, thus compromising its privacy guarantees. The underlying methodol-ogy of this scheme allows us to - i) retrieve the lower bounds of the privacy parameters and ii) establish a relationship between the privacy preserved output readings and the initial input readings. Subsequently, we present a rigorous experimental validation of our proposed attacking methodology using real-life dataset to highlight its efficacy. In summary, the present paper queries: Is the Whole lesser than its Parts? for such privacy aware metering algorithms which attempt to reduce the information leakage of aggregated consumption patterns of the individuals.

Currently, many organizations are moving to new digital management systems, which is accompanied not only by the introduction of new approaches based on the use of information technology, but also by a change in the organizational and management environment. Risk management is a process necessary to maintain the competitive advantage of an organization, but it can also become involved in the course of digitalization itself, which means that risk management also needs to change to meet modern conditions and ensure the effectiveness of the organization. This article discusses the risk management process in the digital environment. The main approach to the organization of this process is outlined, taking into account the use of information tools, together with the stages of this process, which directly affect the efficiency of the company. The risks that are specific to a digital organization are taken into account. Modern requirements for risk management for organizations are studied, ways of their implementation are outlined. The result is a risk management process that functions in a digital organization.

This short paper argues that current conceptions in trust formation scholarship miss the context of zero trust, a practice growing in importance in cyber security. The contribution of this paper presents a novel approach to help conceptualize and operationalize zero trust and a call for a research agenda. Further work will expand this model and explore the implications of zero trust in future digital systems.

Control systems for critical infrastructure are becoming increasingly interconnected while cyber threats against critical infrastructure are becoming more sophisticated and difficult to defend against. Historically, cyber security has emphasized building defenses to prevent loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability in digital information and systems, but in recent years cyber attacks have demonstrated that no system is impenetrable and that control system operation may be detrimentally impacted. Cyber resilience has emerged as a complementary priority that seeks to ensure that digital systems can maintain essential performance levels, even while capabilities are degraded by a cyber attack. This paper examines how cyber security and cyber resilience may be measured and quantified in a control system environment. Load Frequency Control is used as an illustrative example to demonstrate how cyber attacks may be represented within mathematical models of control systems, to demonstrate how these events may be quantitatively measured in terms of cyber security or cyber resilience, and the differences and similarities between the two mindsets. These results demonstrate how various metrics are applied, the extent of their usability, and how it is important to analyze cyber-physical systems in a comprehensive manner that accounts for all the various parts of the system.

As nuclear power plant Instrumentation and Control(I&C) systems have turned into digital systems, the possibility of cyber-attacks has increased. To protect the nuclear power plant from cyber-attacks, digital assets are classified and managed as critical digital assets which have safety, security and emergency preparedness functions. However, critical digital assets represent 70-80% of total digital assets, and applying and managing the same security control is inefficient. Therefore, this paper presents the criteria for identifying digital assets that are classified as vital digital assets that can directly affect the serious accidents of nuclear power plants.

Over the last years, the maritime sector has seen an important increase in digital systems on board. Whether used for platform management, navigation, logistics or office tasks, a modern ship can be seen as a fully featured, complex and moving information system. Meanwhile, cyber threats on the sector are real and, for instance, the year 2018 has seen a number of harmful public ransomware attacks impacting shore and ashore assets. Gaining cyber situation recognition, comprehension and projection through Maritime Cyber Situational Awareness is therefore a challenging but essential task for the sector. However, its elaboration has to face a number of issues, such as the collect and fusion of real-time data coming from the ships and an efficient visualization and situation sharing across maritime actors. In this paper, we describe our current work and results for maritime cyber situational awareness elaboration. Even if its development is still going on, the first operational feedback is very encouraging.

Recently, the home healthcare system has emerged as one of the most useful technology for e-healthcare. Contrary to classical recording methods of patient's medical data, which are, based on paper documents, nowadays all this sensitive data can be managed and forwarded through digital systems. These make possible for both patients and healthcare workers to access medical data or receive remote medical treatment using wireless interfaces whenever and wherever. However, simplifying access to these sensitive and private data can directly put patient's health and life in danger. In this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight biometric-based remote patient authentication scheme using elliptic curve encryption through which two mobile healthcare system communication parties could authenticate each other in public mobile healthcare environments. The security and performance analysis demonstrate that our proposal achieves better security than other concurrent schemes, with lower storage, communication and computation costs.

Our vision in this paper is that agency, as the individual ability to intervene and tailor the system, is a crucial element in building trust in IoT technologies. Following up on this vision, we will first address the issue of agency, namely the individual capability to adopt free decisions, as a relevant driver in building trusted human-IoT relations, and how agency should be embedded in digital systems. Then we present the main challenges posed by existing approaches to implement this vision. We show then our proposal for a model-based approach that realizes the agency concept, including a prototype implementation.