Biblio

There are a large number of illegal websites on the Internet, such as pornographic websites, gambling websites, online fraud websites, online pyramid selling websites, etc. This paper studies the use of crawler technology for digital forensics on illegal websites. First, a crawler based illegal website forensics program is designed and developed, which can detect the peripheral information of illegal websites, such as domain name, IP address, network topology, and crawl key information such as website text, pictures, and scripts. Then, through comprehensive analysis such as word cloud analysis, word frequency analysis and statistics on the obtained data, it can help judge whether a website is illegal.

Currently, risk assessment of industrial control systems is static and performed manually. With the increased convergence of operational technology and information technology, risk assessment has to incorporate a combined safety and security analysis along with their interdependency. This paper investigates the data inputs required for safety and security assessments, also if the collection and utilisation of such data can be automated. A particular focus is put on integrated assessment methods which have the potential for automation. In case the overall process to identify potential hazards and threats and analyze what could happen if they occur can be automated, manual efforts and cost of operation can be reduced, thus also increasing the overall performance of risk assessment.

The success of the web and the consequent rise in data sharing have made network security a challenge. Attackers from all around the world target PC installations. When an attack is successful, an electronic device's security is jeopardised. The intrusion implicitly includes any sort of behaviours that purport to think twice about the respectability, secrecy, or accessibility of an asset. Information is shielded from unauthorised clients' scrutiny by the integrity of a certain foundation. Accessibility refers to the framework that gives users of the framework true access to information. The word "classification" implies that data within a given frame is shielded from unauthorised access and public display. Consequently, a PC network is considered to be fully completed if the primary objectives of these three standards have been satisfactorily met. To assist in achieving these objectives, Intrusion Detection Systems have been developed with the fundamental purpose of scanning incoming traffic on computer networks for malicious intrusions.

Human facial emotion recognition pays a variety of applications in society. The basic idea of Facial Emotion Recognition is to map the different facial emotions to a variety of emotional states. Conventional Facial Emotion Recognition consists of two processes: extracting the features and feature selection. Nowadays, in deep learning algorithms, Convolutional Neural Networks are primarily used in Facial Emotion Recognition because of their hidden feature extraction from the images. Usually, the standard Convolutional Neural Network has simple learning algorithms with finite feature extraction layers for extracting information. The drawback of the earlier approach was that they validated only the frontal view of the photos even though the image was obtained from different angles. This research work uses a deep Convolutional Neural Network along with a DenseNet-169 as a backbone network for recognizing facial emotions. The emotion Recognition dataset was used to recognize the emotions with an accuracy of 96%.

Smart home automation is one of the prominent topics of the current era, which has attracted the attention of researchers for several years due to smart home automation contributes to achieving many capabilities, which have had a real and vital impact on our daily lives, such as comfort, energy conservation, environment, and security. Home security is one of the most important of these capabilities. Many efforts have been made on research and articles that focus on this area due to the increased rate of crime and theft. The present paper aims to build a practically implemented smart home that enhances home control management and monitors all home entrances that are often vulnerable to intrusion by intruders and thieves. The proposed system depends on identifying the person using the face detection and recognition method and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a mechanism to enhance the performance of home security systems. The cloud server analyzes the received member identification to retrieve the permission to enter the home. The system showed effectiveness and speed of response in transmitting live captures of any illegal intrusive activity at the door or windows of the house. With the growth and expansion of the concept of smart homes, the amount of information transmitted, information security weakness, and response time disturbances, to reduce latency, data storage, and maintain information security, by employing Fog computing architecture in smart homes as a broker between the IoT layer and the cloud servers and the user layer.

Research data sharing requires provision of adequate security. The requirements for data privacy are extremely demanding for medical data that is reused for research purposes. To address these requirements, the research institutions must implement adequate security measurements, and this demands large effort and costs to do it properly. The usage of adequate access controls and data encryption are key approaches to effectively protect research data confidentiality; however, the management of the encryption keys is challenging. There are novel mechanisms that can be explored for managing access to the encryption keys and encrypted files. These mechanisms guarantee that data are accessed by authorised users and that auditing is possible. In this paper we explore these mechanisms to implement a secure research medical data sharing system. In the proposed system, the research data are stored on a secure cloud system. The data are partitioned into subsets, each one encrypted with a unique key. After the authorisation process, researchers are given rights to use one or more of the keys and to selectively access and decrypt parts of the dataset. Our proposed solution offers automated fine-grain access control to research data, saving time and work usually made manually. Moreover, it maximises and fortifies users' trust in data sharing through secure clouds solutions. We present an initial evaluation and conclude with a discussion about the limitations, open research questions and future work around this challenging topic.

The design of safety-critical embedded systems is a complex process that involves the reuse of proven solutions to fulfill a set of requirements. While safety is considered as the major requirement to be satisfied in safety-critical embedded systems, the security attacks can affect the security as well as the safety of these systems. Therefore, ensuring the security of the safety-critical embedded systems is as important as ensuring the safety requirements. The concept of design patterns, which provides common solutions to widely recurring design problems, have been extensively engaged in the design of the hardware and software in many fields, including embedded systems. However, there is an inadequacy of experience with security patterns in the field of safety-critical embedded systems. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to integrate security patterns with safety patterns in the design of safety-critical embedded systems. Moreover, it presents a customized representation for security patterns to be more relevant to the common safety patterns in the context of safety-critical embedded systems.

DDoS attacks still represent a severe threat to network services. While there are more or less workable solutions to defend against these attacks, there is a significant space for further research regarding automation of reactions and subsequent management. In this paper, we focus on one piece of the whole puzzle. We strive to automatically infer filtering rules which are specific to the current DoS attack to decrease the time to mitigation. We employ a machine learning technique to create a model of the traffic mix based on observing network traffic during the attack and normal period. The model is converted into the filtering rules. We evaluate our approach with various setups of hyperparameters. The results of our experiments show that the proposed approach is feasible in terms of the capability of inferring successful filtering rules.

Cyber threats have been a major issue in the cyber security domain. Every hacker follows a series of cyber-attack stages known as cyber kill chain stages. Each stage has its norms and limitations to be deployed. For a decade, researchers have focused on detecting these attacks. Merely watcher tools are not optimal solutions anymore. Everything is becoming autonomous in the computer science field. This leads to the idea of an Autonomous Cyber Resilience Defense algorithm design in this work. Resilience has two aspects: Response and Recovery. Response requires some actions to be performed to mitigate attacks. Recovery is patching the flawed code or back door vulnerability. Both aspects were performed by human assistance in the cybersecurity defense field. This work aims to develop an algorithm based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a Convoluted Neural Network (CNN), far nearer to the human learning process for malware images. RL learns through a reward mechanism against every performed attack. Every action has some kind of output that can be classified into positive or negative rewards. To enhance its thinking process Markov Decision Process (MDP) will be mitigated with this RL approach. RL impact and induction measures for malware images were measured and performed to get optimal results. Based on the Malimg Image malware, dataset successful automation actions are received. The proposed work has shown 98% accuracy in the classification, detection, and autonomous resilience actions deployment.

Recently, it has been proposed to deal with fusion of multi-object densities exploiting the minimum information loss (MIL) rule, which has shown its superiority over generalized covariance intersection (GCI) fusion whenever sensor nodes have low detection probability. On the contrary, GCI shows better performance than MIL when dense clutter is involved in the measurements. In this paper, we are going to study the behavior of multi-object fusion with MIL and, respectively, GCI rules in the situation wherein the sensor network is exposed to cyber-attacks. Both theoretical and numerical analyses demonstrate that MIL is more robust than GCI fusion when the multi-sensor system is subject to a packet substitution attack.

We study how information flows through a multi-robot network in order to better understand how to provide resilience to malicious information. While the notion of global resilience is well studied, one way existing methods provide global resilience is by bringing robots closer together to improve the connectivity of the network. However, large changes in network structure can impede the team from performing other functions such as coverage, where the robots need to spread apart. Our goal is to mitigate the trade-off between resilience and network structure preservation by applying resilience locally in areas of the network where it is needed most. We introduce a metric, Influence, to identify vulnerable regions in the network requiring resilience. We design a control law targeting local resilience to the vulnerable areas by improving the connectivity of robots within these areas so that each robot has at least 2F+1 vertex-disjoint communication paths between itself and the high influence robot in the vulnerable area. We demonstrate the performance of our local resilience controller in simulation and in hardware by applying it to a coverage problem and comparing our results with an existing global resilience strategy. For the specific hardware experiments, we show that our control provides local resilience to vulnerable areas in the network while only requiring 9.90% and 15.14% deviations from the desired team formation compared to the global strategy.

In this paper, we deal with the resilient consensus problem in networked control systems in which a group of agents are interacting with each other. A min-max-based resilient consensus algorithm has been proposed to help normal agents reach an agreement upon their state values in the presence of misbehaving ones. It is shown that the use of the developed algorithm will result in less computational load and fast convergence. Both synchronous and asynchronous update schemes for the network have been studied. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated through numerical examples.

In recent years, business environments are undergoing disruptive changes across sectors [1]. Globalization and technological advances, such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things, have completely redesigned business activities, bringing to light an ever-increasing interest and attention towards the customer [2], especially in healthcare sector. In this context, researchers is paying more and more attention to the introduction of new technologies capable of meeting the patients’ needs [3, 4] and the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed and still contributes to accelerate this phenomenon [5]. Therefore, emerging technologies (i.e., AI-enabled solutions, service robots, conversational agents) are proving to be effective partners in improving medical care and quality of life [6]. Conversational agents, often identified in other ways as “chatbots”, are AI-enabled service robots based on the use of text [7] and capable of interpreting natural language and ensuring automation of responses by emulating human behavior [8, 9, 10]. Their introduction is linked to help institutions and doctors in the management of their patients [11, 12], at the same time maintaining the negligible incremental costs thanks to their virtual aspect [13–14]. However, while the utilization of these tools has significantly increased during the pandemic [15, 16, 17], it is unclear what benefits they bring to service delivery. In order to identify their contributions, there is a need to find out which activities can be supported by conversational agents.This paper takes a grounded approach [18] to achieve contextual understanding design and to effectively interpret the context and meanings related to conversational agents in healthcare interactions. The study context concerns six chatbots adopted in the healthcare sector through semi-structured interviews conducted in the health ecosystem. Secondary data relating to these tools under consideration are also used to complete the picture on them. Observation, interviewing and archival documents [19] could be used in qualitative research to make comparisons and obtain enriched results due to the opportunity to bridge the weaknesses of one source by compensating it with the strengths of others. Conversational agents automate customer interactions with smart meaningful interactions powered by Artificial Intelligence, making support, information provision and contextual understanding scalable. They help doctors to conduct the conversations that matter with their patients. In this context, conversational agents play a critical role in making relevant healthcare information accessible to the right stakeholders at the right time, defining an ever-present accessible solution for patients’ needs. In summary, conversational agents cannot replace the role of doctors but help them to manage patients. By conveying constant presence and fast information, they help doctors to build close relationships and trust with patients.

Resiliency of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) against malicious attacks has been a topic of active research in the past decade due to widely recognized importance. Resilient CPS is capable of tolerating some attacks, operating at a reduced capacity with core functions maintained, and failing gracefully to avoid any catastrophic consequences. Existing work includes an architecture for hierarchical control systems, which is a subset of CPS with wide applicability, that is tailored for resiliency. Namely, the architecture consists of local, network and supervision layers and features such as simplex structure, resource isolation by hypervisors, redundant sensors/actuators, and software defined network capabilities. Existing work also includes methods of ensuring a level of resiliency at each one of the layers, respectively. However, for a holistic system level resiliency, individual methods at each layers must be coordinated in their deployment because all three layers interact for the operation of CPS. For this purpose, a resiliency coordinator for CPS is proposed in this work. The resiliency coordinator is the interconnection of central resiliency coordinator in the supervision layer, network resiliency coordinator in the network layer, and finally, local resiliency coordinators in multiple physical systems that compose the physical layer. We show, by examples, the operation of the resiliency coordinator and illustrate that RC accomplishes a level of attack resiliency greater than the sum of resiliency at each one of the layers separately.

Recent concepts in defense herald an increasing degree of automation of future military systems, with an emphasis on accelerating sensing-to-decision loops at the tactical edge, reducing their network communication footprint, and improving the inference quality of intelligent components in the loop. These requirements pose resource management challenges, calling for operating-system-like constructs that optimize the use of limited computational resources at the tactical edge. This paper describes these challenges and presents IoBT-OS, an operating system for the Internet of Battlefield Things that aims to optimize decision latency, improve decision accuracy, and reduce corresponding resource demands on computational and network components. A simple case-study with initial evaluation results is shown from a target tracking application scenario.

Cloud computing is a model of service provisioning in heterogeneous distributed systems that encourages many researchers to explore its benefits and drawbacks in executing workflow applications. Recently, high-quality security protection has been a new challenge in workflow allocation. Different tasks may and may not have varied security demands, security overhead may vary for different virtual machines (VMs) at which the task is assigned. This paper proposes a Security Oriented Deadline-Aware workflow allocation (SODA) strategy in an IaaS cloud environment to minimize the risk probability of the workflow tasks while considering the deadline met in a deterministic environment. SODA picks out the task based on the highest security upward rank and assigns the selected task to the trustworthy VMs. SODA tries to simultaneously satisfy each task’s security demand and deadline at the maximum possible level. The simulation studies show that SODA outperforms the HEFT strategy on account of the risk probability of the cloud system on scientific workflow, namely CyberShake.

With the continuous development of computer technology, the coverage of informatization solutions covers all walks of life and all fields of society. For colleges and universities, teaching and scientific research are the basic tasks of the school. The scientific research ability of the school will affect the level of teachers and the training of students. The establishment of a good scientific research environment has become a more important link in the development of universities. SR(Scientific research) data is a prerequisite for SR activities. High-quality SR management data services are conducive to ensuring the quality and safety of SRdata, and further assisting the smooth development of SR projects. Therefore, this article mainly conducts research and practice on cloud computing-based scientific research management data services in colleges and universities. First, analyze the current situation of SR data management in colleges and universities, and the results show that the popularity of SR data management in domestic universities is much lower than that of universities in Europe and the United States, and the data storage awareness of domestic researchers is relatively weak. Only 46% of schools have developed SR data management services, which is much lower than that of European and American schools. Second, analyze the effect of CC(cloud computing )on the management of SR data in colleges and universities. The results show that 47% of SR believe that CC is beneficial to the management of SR data in colleges and universities to reduce scientific research costs and improve efficiency, the rest believe that CC can speed up data storage and improve security by acting on SR data management in colleges and universities.

The aim of this paper is to examine noteworthy cyberattacks that have taken place against ICS and SCADA systems and to analyse them. This paper also proposes a new classification scheme based on the severity of the attack. Since the information revolution, computers and associated technologies have impacted almost all aspects of daily life, and this is especially true of the industrial sector where one of the leading trends is that of automation. This widespread proliferation of computers and computer networks has also made it easier for malicious actors to gain access to these systems and networks and carry out harmful activities.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a rapidly growing branch of IoT (Internet of Things), which requires special treatment to cyber security due to confidentiality of healthcare data and patient health threat. Healthcare data and automated medical devices might become vulnerable targets of malicious cyber-attacks. While a large number of robotic applications, including medical and healthcare, employ robot operating system (ROS) as their backbone, not enough attention is paid for ROS security. The paper discusses a security of ROS-based swing doors automation in the context of a robotic hospital framework, which should be protected from cyber-attacks.

Large-scale onboarding of industrial cyber physical systems requires efficiency and security. In situations with the dynamic addition of devices (e.g., from subcontractors entering a workplace), automation of the onboarding process is desired. The Eclipse Arrowhead framework, which provides a platform for industrial automation, requires reliable, flexible, and secure device onboarding to local clouds. In this paper, we propose a device onboarding method in the Arrowhead framework where decentralized authorization is provided by Power of Attorney. The model allows users to subgrant power to trusted autonomous devices to act on their behalf. We present concepts, an implementation of the proposed system, and a use case for scalable onboarding where Powers of Attorney at two levels are used to allow a subcontractor to onboard its devices to an industrial site. We also present performance evaluation results.

Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.

Satisfying the growing demand for electricity is a huge challenge for electricity providers without a robust and good infrastructure. For effective electricity management, the infrastructure has to be strengthened from the generation stage to the transmission and distribution stages. In the current electrical infrastructure, the evolution of smart grids provides a significant solution to the problems that exist in the conventional system. Enhanced management visibility and better monitoring and control are achieved by the integration of wireless sensor network technology in communication systems. However, to implement these solutions in the existing grids, the infrastructural constraints impose a major challenge. Along with the choice of technology, it is also crucial to avoid exorbitant implementation costs. This paper presents a self-stabilizing hierarchical algorithm for the existing electrical network. Neighborhood Area Networks (NAN) and Home Area Networks (HAN) layers are used in the proposed architecture. The Home Node (HN), Simple Node (SN) and Cluster Head (CH) are the three types of nodes used in the model. Fraudulent users in the system are identified efficiently using the proposed model based on the observations made through simulation on OMNeT++ simulator.

he growing trend towards network “softwarization” allows the creation and deployment of even complex network environments in a few minutes or seconds, rather than days or weeks as required by traditional methods. This revolutionary approach made it necessary to seek automatic processes to solve network security problems. One of the main issues in the automation of network security concerns the proper and efficient modeling of network traffic. In this paper, we describe two optimized Traffic Flows representation models, called Atomic Flows and Maximal Flows. In addition to the description, we have validated and evaluated the proposed models to solve two key network security problems - security verification and automatic configuration - showing the advantages and limitations of each solution.

The growing maturity of orchestration languages is contributing to the elaboration of cloud composite services, whose resources may be deployed over different distributed infrastructures. These composite services are subject to changes over time, that are typically required to support cloud properties, such as scalability and rapid elasticity. In particular, the migration of their elementary resources may be triggered by performance constraints. However, changes induced by this migration may introduce vulnerabilities that may compromise the resources, or even the whole cloud service. In that context, we propose an automated SMT1-based security framework for supporting the migration of resources in cloud composite services, and preventing the occurrence of new configuration vulnerabilities. We formalize the underlying security automation based on SMT solving, in order to assess the migrated resources and select adequate counter-measures, considering both endogenous and exogenous security mechanisms. We then evaluate its benefits and limits through large series of experiments based on a proof-of-concept prototype implemented over the CVC4 commonly-used open-source solver. These experiments show a minimal overhead with regular operating systems deployed in cloud environments.

Information Technology (IT) governance crosses the organization practices, culture, and policy that support IT management in controlling five key functions, which are strategic alignment, performance management, resource management, value delivery, and risk management. The line of sight is extended from the corporate strategy to the risk management, and risk controls are assessed against operational goals. Thus, the risk management model is concerned with ensuring that the corporate risks are sufficiently controlled and managed. Many organizations rely on IT services to facilitate and sustain their operations, which mandate the existence of a risk management model in their IT governance. This paper examines prior research based on IT governance by using a risk management framework. It also proposes a new method for calculating and classifying IT-related risks. Additionally, we assessed our technique with one of the critical IT services that proves the reliability and accuracy of the implemented model.