Biblio

For future Internet, information-centric networking (ICN) is considered a potential solution to many of its current problems, such as content distribution, mobility, and security. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a more popular ICN project. However, concern regarding the protection of user data persists. Information caching in NDN decouples content and content publishers, which leads to content security threats due to lack of secure controls. Therefore, this paper presents a CP-ABE (ciphertext policy attribute based encryption) access control scheme based on hash table and data segmentation (CHTDS). Based on data segmentation, CHTDS uses a method of linearly splitting fixed data blocks, which effectively improves data management. CHTDS also introduces CP-ABE mechanism and hash table data structure to ensure secure access control and privilege revocation does not need to re-encrypt the published content. The analysis results show that CHTDS can effectively realize the security and fine-grained access control in the NDN environment, and reduce communication overhead for content access.

Automotive systems are currently undergoing a rapid evolution through the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. The main focus of this evolution is to improve the driving experience, including automated controls, intelligent navigation and safety systems. Moreover, the extremely rapid pace that such technologies are brought into the vehicles, necessitates the presence of adequate testing of new features to avoid operational errors. Apart from testing though, IoT and SDN technologies also widen the threat landscape of cyber-security risks due to the amount of connectivity interfaces that are nowadays exposed in vehicles. In this paper we present a new method, based on OMNET++, for testing new in-vehicle features and assessing security risks through network simulation. The method is demonstrated through a case-study on a Toyota Prius, whose network data are analyzed for the detection of anomalies caused from security threats or operational errors.

This paper proposes an approach based on Bayesian Networks to support cyber security analysts in improving the cyber-security posture of the smart grid. We build a system model that exploits real world context information from both Information and Operational Technology environments in the smart grid, and we use it to demonstrate sample predictive and diagnostic analyses. The innovative contribution of this work is in the methodology capability of capturing the many dependencies involved in the assessment of security threats, and of supporting the security analysts in planning defense and detection mechanisms for energy digital infrastructures.

Security challenges present in Machine-to-Machine Communication (M2M-C) and big data paradigm are fundamentally different from conventional network security challenges. In M2M-C paradigms, “Trust” is a vital constituent of security solutions that address security threats and for such solutions,it is important to quantify and evaluate the amount of trust in the information and its source. In this work, we focus on Machine Learning (ML) Based Trust (MLBT) evaluation model for detecting malicious activities in a vehicular Based M2M-C (VBM2M-C) network. In particular, we present an Entropy Based Feature Engineering (EBFE) coupled Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model which is optimized with Binary Particle Swarm optimization technique. Based on three performance metrics, i.e., Accuracy Rate (AR), True Positive Rate (TPR), False Positive Rate (FPR), the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated in comparison to the state-of-the-art ensemble models, such as XGBoost and Random Forest. The simulation results demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model with approximately 10% improvement in accuracy, TPR and FPR, with reference to the attacker density of 30% compared with the start-of-the-art algorithms.

In Bitcoin's incentive system that supports open mining pools, block withholding attacks incur huge security threats. In this paper, we investigate the mutual attacks among pools as this determines the macroscopic utility of the whole distributed system. Existing studies on pools' interactive attacks usually employ the conventional game theory, where the strategies of the players are considered pure and equal, neglecting the existence of powerful strategies and the corresponding favorable game results. In this study, we take advantage of the Zero-Determinant (ZD) strategy to analyze the block withholding attack between any two pools, where the ZD adopter has the unilateral control on the expected payoffs of its opponent and itself. In this case, we are faced with the following questions: who can adopt the ZD strategy? individually or simultaneously? what can the ZD player achieve? In order to answer these questions, we derive the conditions under which two pools can individually or simultaneously employ the ZD strategy and demonstrate the effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use the ZD strategy to analyze the block withholding attack among pools.

Phishing attacks are one of the most common and least defended security threats today. We present an approach which uses natural language processing techniques to analyze text and detect inappropriate statements which are indicative of phishing attacks. Our approach is novel compared to previous work because it focuses on the natural language text contained in the attack, performing semantic analysis of the text to detect malicious intent. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we have evaluated it using a large benchmark set of phishing emails.

Numerous IoT applications, like building automation or process control of industrial sites, exist today. These applications inherently have a strong connection to the physical world. Hence, IT security threats cannot only cause problems like data leaks but also safety issues which might harm people. Attacks on IT systems are not only performed by outside attackers but also insiders like administrators. For this reason, we present ongoing work on a Byzantine fault tolerant configuration management system (CMS) that provides control over administrators, restrains their rights, and enforces separation of concerns. We reach this goal by conducting a configuration management process that requires multi-party authorization for critical configurations to prevent individual malicious administrators from performing undesired actions. Only after a configuration has been authorized by multiple experts, it is applied to the targeted devices. For the whole configuration management process, our CMS guarantees accountability and traceability. Lastly, our system is tamper-resistant as we leverage Hyperledger Fabric, which provides a distributed execution environment for our CMS and a blockchain-based distributed ledger that we use to store the configurations. A beneficial side effect of this approach is that our CMS is also suitable to manage configurations for infrastructure shared across different organizations that do not need to trust each other.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a fusion of industrial automation systems and IoT systems. It features comprehensive sensing, interconnected transmission, intelligent processing, self-organization and self-maintenance. Its applications span intelligent transportation, smart factories, and intelligence. Many areas such as power grid and intelligent environment detection. With the widespread application of IIoT technology, the cyber security threats to industrial IoT systems are increasing day by day, and information security issues have become a major challenge in the development process. In order to protect the industrial IoT system from network attacks, this paper aims to study the industrial IoT information security protection technology, and the typical architecture of industrial Internet of things system, and analyzes the network security threats faced by industrial Internet of things system according to the different levels of the architecture, and designs the security protection strategies applied to different levels of structures based on the specific means of network attack.

With the development of scientific information technology, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IOT) promoted the information industry once again to a new stage of economic and technological development. From the perspective of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information security, this paper analyzed the current state of the IOT and the security threats, and then researched the security primary technologies of the IOT security architecture. IOT security architecture established the foundation for a reliable information security system for the IOT.

The prevalence of Cloud Computing has appealed many users to put their business into low-cost and flexible cloud servers instead of bare-metal machines. Most virtual machines in the cloud run commodity operating system(e.g., linux), and the complexity of such operating systems makes them more bug-prone and easier to be compromised. To mitigate the security threats, previous works attempt to mediate and filter system calls, transform all unpopular paths into popular paths, or implement a nested kernel along with the untrusted outter kernel to enforce certain security policies. However, such solutions only enforce read-only protection or assume that popular paths in the kernel to contain almost no bug, which is not always the case in the real world. To overcome their shortcomings and combine their advantages as much as possible, we propose a hardware-assisted isolation mechanism that isolates untrusted part of the kernel. To achieve isolation, we prepare multiple restricted Extended Page Table (EPT) during boot time, each of which has certain critical data unmapped from it so that the code executing in the isolated environment could not access sensitive data. We leverage the VMFUNC instruction already available in recent Intel processors to directly switch to another pre-defined EPT inside guest virtual machine without trapping into the underlying hypervisor, which is faster than the traditional trap-and-emulate procedure. The semantic gap is minimized and real-time check is achieved by allowing EPT violations to be converted to Virtualization Exception (VE), which could be handled inside guest kernel in non-root mode. Our preliminary evaluation shows that with hardware virtualization feature, we are able to run the untrusted code in an isolated environment with negligible overhead.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a major paradigm in controlling and managing number of heterogeneous networks. It's a real challenge however to secure such complex networks which are heterogeneous in network security. The centralization of the intelligence in network presents both an opportunity as well as security threats. This paper focuses on various potential security challenges at the various levels of SDN architecture such as Denial of service (DoS) attack and its countermeasures. The paper shows the detection of DoS attck with S-FlowRT.

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime as new usage scenarios arise and vulnerabilities are discovered. Adaptive security and privacy promise to address these threats by increasing awareness and automating prevention, detection and recovery from security and privacy requirements' failures at runtime by re-configuring system controls and perhaps even changing requirements. This paper discusses the need for adaptive security and privacy in smart grids by presenting some motivating scenarios. We then outline some research issues that arise in engineering adaptive security. We particularly scrutinize published reports by NIST on smart grid security and privacy as the basis for our discussions.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an implementation of cloud computing that leverages virtualization technology to provide on-demand network functions such as firewalls, domain name servers, etc., as software services. One of the methods that help us understand the design and implementation process of such a new system in an abstract way is architectural modeling. Architectural modeling can be presented through UML diagrams to show the interaction between different components and its stakeholders. Also, it can be used to analyze the security threats and the possible countermeasures to mitigate the threats. In this paper, we show some of the possible threats that may jeopardize the security of NFV. We use misuse patterns to analyze misuses based on privilege escalation and VM escape threats. The misuse patterns are part of an ongoing catalog, which is the first step toward building a security reference architecture for NFV.

In today's time Software Defined Network (SDN) gives the complete control to get the data flow in the network. SDN works as a central point to which data is administered centrally and traffic is also managed. SDN being open source product is more prone to security threats. The security policies are also to be enforced as it would otherwise let the controller be attacked the most. The attacks like DDOS and DOS attacks are more commonly found in SDN controller. DDOS is destructive attack that normally diverts the normal flow of traffic and starts the over flow of flooded packets halting the system. Machine Learning techniques helps to identify the hidden and unexpected pattern of the network and hence helps in analyzing the network flow. All the classified and unclassified techniques can help detect the malicious flow based on certain parameters like packet flow, time duration, accuracy and precision rate. Researchers have used Bayesian Network, Wavelets, Support Vector Machine and KNN to detect DDOS attacks. As per the review it's been analyzed that KNN produces better result as per the higher precision and giving a lower falser rate for detection. This paper produces better approach of hybrid Machine Learning techniques rather than existing KNN on the same data set giving more accuracy of detecting DDOS attacks on higher precision rate. The result of the traffic with both normal and abnormal behavior is shown and as per the result the proposed algorithm is designed which is suited for giving better approach than KNN and will be implemented later on for future.

Widespread use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) introduced many security threats due to the nature of such networks, particularly limited hardware resources and infrastructure less nature. Denial of Service attack is one of the most common types of attacks that face such type of networks. Building an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System to mitigate the effect of Denial of Service attack is not an easy task. This paper proposes the use of two machine learning techniques, namely decision trees and Support Vector Machines, to detect attack signature on a specialized dataset. The used dataset contains regular profiles and several Denial of Service attack scenarios in WSNs. The experimental results show that decision trees technique achieved better (higher) true positive rate and better (lower) false positive rate than Support Vector Machines, 99.86% vs 99.62%, and 0.05% vs. 0.09%, respectively.

Nowadays, IoT has crossed all borders and become ubiquitous in everyday life. This emerging technology has a huge success in closing the gap between the digital and the real world. However, security and privacy become huge concerns especially in the medical field which prevent the healthcare industry from adopting it despite its benefits and potentials. This paper focuses on identifying potential security threats to the IoMT and presents the security mechanisms to remove any possible impediment from immune information security of IoMT. A summarized framework of the layered-security model is proposed followed by a specific assessment review of each layer.

With the rapid development of the popularity of wireless networks, there are also increasing security threats that follow, and wireless network security issues are becoming increasingly important. Radio frequency fingerprints generated by device tolerance in wireless device transmitters have physical characteristics that are difficult to clone, and can be used for identity authentication of wireless devices. In this paper, we propose a radio frequency fingerprint extraction method based on fractional Fourier transform for transient signals. After getting the features of the signal, we use RPCA to reduce the dimension of the features, and then use KNN to classify them. The results show that when the SNR is 20dB, the recognition rate of this method is close to 100%.

This Wireless Sensor Network is a network of devices that communicates the information gathered from a monitored field through wireless links. Small size sensor nodes constitute wireless sensor networks. A Sensor is a device that responds and detects some type of input from both the physical or environmental conditions, such as pressure, heat, light, etc. Applications of wireless sensor networks include home automation, street lighting, military, healthcare and industrial process monitoring. As wireless sensor networks are distributed across large geographical area, these are vulnerable to various security threats. This affects the performance of the wireless sensor networks. The impact of security issues will become more critical if the network is used for mission-critical applications like tactical battlefield. In real life deployment scenarios, the probability of failure of nodes is more. As a result of resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional methods which involve large overhead computation and communication are not feasible in WSNs. Hence, design and deployment of secured WSNs is a challenging task. Attacks on WSNs include attack on confidentiality, integrity and availability. There are various types of architectures that are used to deploy WSNs. Some of them are data centric, hierarchical, location based, mobility based etc. This work discusses the security issue of hierarchical architecture and proposes a solution. In hierarchical architectures, sensor nodes are grouped to form clusters. Intra-cluster communication happens through cluster heads. Cluster heads also facilitate inter-cluster communication with other cluster heads. Aggregation of data generated by sensor nodes is done by cluster heads. Aggregated data also get transferred to base through multi-hop approach in most cases. Cluster heads are vulnerable to various malicious attacks and this greatly affects the performance of the wireless sensor network. The proposed solution identifies attacked cluster head and changes the CH by identifying the fittest node using genetic algorithm based search.

Computer security has gained more and more attention in a public over the last years, since computer systems are suffering from significant and increasing security threats that cause security breaches by exploiting software vulnerabilities. The most efficient way to ensure the system security is to patch the vulnerable system before a malicious attack occurs. Besides the commonly-used push-type patch management, the pull-type patch management is also adopted. The main issues in the pull-type patch management are two-fold; when to check the vulnerability information and when to apply a patch? This paper considers the security patch management for a virtual machine (VM) based intrusion tolerant system (ITS), where the system undergoes the patch management with a periodic vulnerability checking strategy, and evaluates the system security from the availability aspect. A composite stochastic reward net (SRN) model is applied to capture the attack behavior of adversary and the defense behaviors of system. Two availability measures; interval availability and point-wise availability are formulated to quantify the system security via phase expansion. The proposed approach and metrics not only enable us to quantitatively assess the system security, but also provide insights on the patch management. In numerical experiments, we evaluate effects of the intrusion rate and the number of vulnerability checking on the system security.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) attract growing interest from architects and attackers, given their potential effect on privacy and safety of ecosystems and users. Architectural tactics have been proposed as a design-time abstraction useful to guide and evaluate systems design decisions that address specific system qualities, but there is little published evidence of how Security Tactics help to mitigate security threats in the context of Cyber-Physical Systems. This article reports the principled derivation of architectural tactics for an actual SCADA-SAP bridge, where security was the key concern; the key inputs were (1) a well-known taxonomies of architectural tactics, and (2) a detailed record of trade-offs among these tactics. The project architects used client-specified quality attributes to identify relevant tactics in the taxonomy, and information on their trade-offs to guide top-level decisions on system global shape. We venture that all architectural tactics taxonomies should be enriched with explicit trade-offs, allowing architects to compare alternative solutions that seem equally good on principle but are not so in practice.

Aiming at the incomplete and incomplete security mechanism of wireless access system in emergency communication network, this paper proposes a security mechanism requirement construction method for wireless access system based on security evaluation standard. This paper discusses the requirements of security mechanism construction in wireless access system from three aspects: the definition of security issues, the construction of security functional components and security assurance components. This method can comprehensively analyze the security threats and security requirements of wireless access system in emergency communication network, and can provide correct and reasonable guidance and reference for the establishment of security mechanism.

The increasing integration of information and communication technologies has undoubtedly boosted the efficiency of Critical Infrastructures (CI). However, the first wave of IoT devices, together with the management of enormous amount of data generated by modern CIs, has created serious architectural issues. While the emerging Fog and Multi-Access Edge Computing (FMEC) paradigms can provide a viable solution, they also bring inherent security issues, that can cause dire consequences in the context of CIs. In this paper, we analyze the applications of FMEC solutions in the context of CIs, with a specific focus on related security issues and threats for the specific while broad scenarios: a smart airport, a smart port, and a smart offshore oil and gas extraction field. Leveraging these scenarios, a set of general security requirements for FMEC is derived, together with crucial research challenges whose further investigation is cornerstone for a successful adoption of FMEC in CIs.

The Internet of Things is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity, requiring massive data processing and storage. Unfortunately, because of the unique characteristics of resource constraints, short-range communication, and self-organization in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud or fog nodes for outsourced computation and storage, which has brought about a series of novel challenging security and privacy threats. For this reason, one of the critical challenges of having numerous IoT devices is the capacity to manage them and their data. A specific concern is from which devices or Edge clouds to accept join requests or interaction requests. This paper discusses a design concept for developing the IoT data management platform, along with a data management and lineage traceability implementation of the platform based on blockchain and smart contracts, which approaches the two major challenges: how to implement effective data management and enrich rational interoperability for trusted groups of linked Things; And how to settle conflicts between untrusted IoT devices and its requests taking into account security and privacy preserving. Experimental results show that the system scales well with the loss of computing and communication performance maintaining within the acceptable range, works well to effectively defend against unauthorized access and empower data provenance and transparency, which verifies the feasibility and efficiency of the design concept to provide privacy, fine-grained, and integrity data management over the IoT devices by introducing the blockchain-based data management platform.

As a modern power transmission network, smart grid connects plenty of terminal devices. However, along with the growth of devices are the security threats. Different from the previous separated environment, an adversary nowadays can destroy the power system by attacking these devices. Therefore, it's critical to ensure the security and safety of terminal devices. To achieve this goal, detecting the pre-existing vulnerabilities of the device program and enhance the terminal security, are of great importance and necessity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that detects existing buffer-overflow vulnerabilities of terminal devices via automatic static analysis (ASA). We utilize the static analysis to extract the device program information and build corresponding program models. By further matching the generated program model with pre-defined vulnerability patterns, we achieve vulnerability detection and error reporting. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method can effectively detect buffer-overflow vulnerabilities of smart terminals with a high accuracy and a low false positive rate.

This paper presents a contemporary review of communication architectures and topographies for MANET-connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. Routing protocols for multi-hop MANETs are analyzed with a focus on the standardized Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks. Various security threats and vulnerabilities in current MANET routing are described and security enhanced routing protocols and trust models presented as methodologies for supporting secure routing. Finally, the paper identifies some key research challenges in the emerging domain of MANET-IoT connectivity.