Biblio

Locking the functionality of an integrated circuit (IC) thwarts attacks such as intellectual property (IP) piracy, hardware Trojans, overbuilding, and counterfeiting. Although functional locking has been extensively investigated, locking the performance of an IC has been little explored. In this paper, we develop provably-secure performance locking, where only on applying the correct key the IC shows superior performance; for an incorrect key, the performance of the IC degrades significantly. This leads to a new business model, where the companies can design a single IC capable of different performances for different users. We develop mathematical definitions of security and theoretically, and experimentally prove the security against the state-of-the-art-attacks. We implemented performance locking on a FabScalar microprocessor, achieving a degradation in instructions per clock cycle (IPC) of up to 77% on applying an incorrect key, with an overhead of 0.6%, 0.2%, and 0% for area, power, and delay, respectively.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a new methodology in cybersecurity education. In the context of the cybersecurity profession, the `isolation problem' refers to the observed isolation of different knowledge units, as well as the isolation of technical and business perspectives. Due to limitations in existing cybersecurity education, professionals entering the field are often trapped in microscopic perspectives, and struggle to extend their findings to grasp the big picture in a target network scenario. Guided by a previous developed and published framework named “cross-layer situation knowledge reference model” (SKRM), which delivers comprehensive level big picture situation awareness, our new methodology targets at developing suites of teaching modules to address the above issues. The modules, featuring interactive hands-on labs that emulate real-world multiple-step attacks, will help students form a knowledge network instead of isolated conceptual knowledge units. Students will not just be required to leverage various techniques/tools to analyze breakpoints and complete individual modules; they will be required to connect logically the outputs of these techniques/tools to infer the ground truth and gain big picture awareness of the cyber situation. The modules will be able to be used separately or as a whole in a typical network security course.

Several assessment techniques and methodologies exist to analyze the security of an application dynamically. However, they either are focused on a particular product or are mainly concerned about the assessment process rather than the product's security confidence. Most crucially, they tend to assess the security of a target application as a standalone artifact without assessing its host infrastructure. Such attempts can undervalue the overall security posture since the infrastructure becomes crucial when it hosts a critical application. We present an ontology-based security model that aims to provide the necessary knowledge, including network settings, application configurations, testing techniques and tools, and security metrics to evaluate the security aptitude of a critical application in the context of its hosting infrastructure. The objective is to integrate the current good practices and standards in security testing and virtualization to furnish an on-demand and test-ready virtual target infrastructure to execute the critical application and to initiate a context-aware and quantifiable security assessment process in an automated manner. Furthermore, we present a security assessment architecture to reflect on how the ontology can be integrated into a standard process.

In recent years, service providers, such as mobile operators providing wireless services, collected location data in enormous extent with the increase of the usages of mobile phones. Vertical businesses, such as banks, may want to use this location information for their own scenarios. However, service providers cannot directly provide these private data to the vertical businesses because of the privacy and legal issues. In this demo, we show how privacy preserving solutions can be utilized using such location-based queries without revealing each organization's sensitive data. In our demonstration, we used partially homomorphic cryptosystem in our protocols and showed practicality and feasibility of our proposed solution.

Linux is used in a large variety of situations, from private homes on personal machines to businesses storing personal data on servers. This operating system is often seen as more secure than Windows or Mac OS X, but this does not mean that there are no security concerns to be had when running it. Attackers can crack simple passwords over a network, vulnerabilities can be exploited if firewalls do not close enough ports, and malware can be downloaded and run on a Linux system. In addition, sensitive information can be accessed through physical or network access if proper permissions are not set on the files or directories containing it. However, most of these attacks can be prevented by keeping a system up to date, maintaining a secure firewall, using an antivirus, making complex passwords, and setting strong file permissions. This paper presents a list of methods for securing a Linux system from both external and internal threats.

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly important to intelligent transportation system stakeholders, including cloud-based vehicular cloud (VC) and internet of vehicles (IoV) paradigms. This new trend involves communication and data exchange between several objects within different layers of control. Security in such a deployment is pivotal to realize the general IoT-based smart city. However, the evaluation of the degree of security regarding these paradigms remains a challenge. This study aims to discover and identify common security criteria (CSC) from a context-based analysis pattern and later to discuss, compare, and aggregate a conceptual model of CSC impartially. A privacy granularity classification that maintains data confidentiality is proposed alongside the security selection criteria.

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.

Machine learning (ML) applications are increasingly prevalent. Protecting the confidentiality of ML models becomes paramount for two reasons: (a) a model can be a business advantage to its owner, and (b) an adversary may use a stolen model to find transferable adversarial examples that can evade classification by the original model. Access to the model can be restricted to be only via well-defined prediction APIs. Nevertheless, prediction APIs still provide enough information to allow an adversary to mount model extraction attacks by sending repeated queries via the prediction API. In this paper, we describe new model extraction attacks using novel approaches for generating synthetic queries, and optimizing training hyperparameters. Our attacks outperform state-of-the-art model extraction in terms of transferability of both targeted and non-targeted adversarial examples (up to +29-44 percentage points, pp), and prediction accuracy (up to +46 pp) on two datasets. We provide take-aways on how to perform effective model extraction attacks. We then propose PRADA, the first step towards generic and effective detection of DNN model extraction attacks. It analyzes the distribution of consecutive API queries and raises an alarm when this distribution deviates from benign behavior. We show that PRADA can detect all prior model extraction attacks with no false positives.

As the accessibility of high-resolution smartphone camera has increased and an improved computational speed, it is now convenient to build Business Card Readers on mobile phones. The project aims to design and develop a Business Card Reader (BCR) Application for iOS devices, using an open-source OCR Engine - Tesseract. The system accuracy was tested and evaluated using a dataset of 55 digital business cards obtained from an online repository. The accuracy result of the system was up to 74% in terms of both text recognition and data detection. A comparative analysis was carried out against a commercial business card reader application and our application performed vastly reasonable.

Event logs that originate from information systems enable comprehensive analysis of business processes, e.g., by process model discovery. However, logs potentially contain sensitive information about individual employees involved in process execution that are only partially hidden by an obfuscation of the event data. In this paper, we therefore address the risk of privacy-disclosure attacks on event logs with pseudonymized employee information. To this end, we introduce PRETSA, a novel algorithm for event log sanitization that provides privacy guarantees in terms of k-anonymity and t-closeness. It thereby avoids disclosure of employee identities, their membership in the event log, and their characterization based on sensitive attributes, such as performance information. Through step-wise transformations of a prefix-tree representation of an event log, we maintain its high utility for discovery of a performance-annotated process model. Experiments with real-world data demonstrate that sanitization with PRETSA yields event logs of higher utility compared to methods that exploit frequency-based filtering, while providing the same privacy guarantees.

Cyber breaches can result in disruption to business operations, reputation damage as well as directly affecting the financial stability of the targeted corporations, with potential impacts on future profits and stock values. Automatic network-stream monitoring becomes necessary for cyber situation awareness, and time-series anomaly detection plays an important role in network stream monitoring. This study surveyed recent research on time-series analysis methods in respect of parametric and non-parametric techniques, and popular machine learning platforms for data analysis on streaming data on both single server and cloud computing environments. We believe it provides a good reference for researchers in both academia and industry to select suitable (time series) data analysis techniques, and computing platforms, dependent on the data scale and real-time requirements.

Warnings happen a lot in real transmission networks. These warnings can affect people's lives. It is significant to analyze the alarm association rules in the network. Many algorithms can help solve this problem but not considering the actual physical significance. Therefore, in this study, we mine the association rules in warning weblogs based on a sequential mining algorithm (GSP) with topology structure. We define a topology constraint from network physical connection data. Under the topology constraint, network nodes have topology relation if they are directly connected or have a common adjacency node. In addition, due to the large amount of data, we implement the hash-tree search method to improve the mining efficiency. The theoretical solution is feasible and the simulation results verify our method. In simulation, the topology constraint improves the accuracy for 86%-96% and decreases the run time greatly at the same time. The hash-tree based mining results show that hash tree efficiency improvements are in 3-30% while the number of patterns remains unchanged. In conclusion, using our method can mine association rules efficiently and accurately in warning weblogs.

Outsourcing services to cloud server (CS) becomes popular in these years. However, the outsourced services often involve with sensitive activity and CS naturally becomes a target of varieties of attacks. Even worse, CS itself can misuse the outsourced services for illegal profit. Traditional online banking system also can make use of a cloud framework to provide economical and high-speed online services to the consumers, which makes the financial dealing easy and convenient. Most of the banking organizations provide services through passbook, ATM, mobile banking, electronic banking (e-banking) etc. Among these, the e-banking and mobile banking are more convenient and becomes essential. Therefore, it is critical to provide an efficient, reliable and more importantly, secure e-banking services to the consumers. The cloud environment is suitable paradigm to a new, small and medium scale banking organization as it eliminates the requirement for them to start with small resources and increase gradually as the service demand rises. However, security is one of the main concerns since it deals with many sensitive data of the valuable customers. In addition to this, the access of various data needs to be restricted to prevent any unauthorized transaction. Nagaraju et al. presented a framework to achieve reliability and security in public cloud based online banking using multi-factor authentication concept. Unfortunately, the login and authentication protocol of this framework is prone to impersonation attack. In this paper, we have revised the framework to avoid this attack.

Opportunities arising from IoT-enabled applications are significant, but market growth is inhibited by concerns over security and complexity. To address these issues, we propose the ERAMIS methodology, which is based on instantiation of a reference architecture that captures common design features, embodies best practice, incorporates good security properties by design, and makes explicit provision for operational security services and processes.

In order to enhance the network security protection level of intelligent substation, this paper puts forward a model of intelligent substation network security defense system through the analysis of intelligent substation network security risk and protection demand, and using example proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the defense system. It is intelligent substation network security protection provides a new solution.

Aiming at the operation characteristics of power industry control system, this paper deeply analyses the attack mechanism and characteristics of power industry control system intrusion. On the basis of classifying and sorting out the attack characteristics of power industrial control system, this paper also attaches importance to break the basic theory and consequential technologies of industrial control network space security, and constructs the network intrusion as well as attack model of power industrial control system to realize the precise characterization of attackers' attack behavior, which provides a theoretical model for the analysis and early warning of attack behavior analysis of power industrial control systems.

Many modern business models of the manufacturing industry use the possibilities of digitization. In particular, the idea of connecting machines to networks and communication infrastructure is gaining momentum. However, in addition to the considerable economic advantages, this development also brings decisive disadvantages. By connecting previously encapsulated industrial networks with untrustworthy external networks such as the Internet, machines and systems are suddenly exposed to the same threats as conventional IT systems. A key problem today is the typical network paradigm with static routers and switches that cannot meet the dynamic requirements of a modern industrial network. Current security solutions often only threat symptoms instead of tackling the cause. In this paper we will therefore analyze the weaknesses of current networks and security solutions using the example of industrial remote maintenance. We will then present a novel concept of how Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in combination with a policy framework that supports attribute-based access control can be used to meet current and future security requirements in dynamic industrial networks. Furthermore, we will introduce an examplary implementation of this novel security framework for the use case of industrial remote maintenance and evaluate the solution. Our results show that SDN in combination with an Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) policy framework is perfectly suited to increase flexibility and security of modern industrial networks at the same time.

Smart Farming is driven by the emergence of precise positioning systems and Internet of Things technologies which have already enabled site-specific applications, sustainable resource management, and interconnected machinery. Nowadays, so-called Farm Management Information Systems (FMISs) enable farm-internal interconnection of agricultural machines and implements and, thereby, allow in-field data exchange and the orchestration of collaborative agricultural processes. Machine data is often directly logged during task execution. Moreover, interconnection of farms, agricultural contractors, and marketplaces ease the collaboration. However, current FMISs lack in security and particularly in user authentication. In this paper, we present a security architecture for a decentralized, manufacturer-independent, and open-source FMIS. Special attention is turned on the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based continuous user authentication which greatly improves security and credibility of automated documentation, while at the same time preserves usability in practice.

Up to now, Software-defined network (SDN) has been developing for many years and various controller implementations have appeared. Most of these controllers contain the normal business logic as well as security defense function. This makes the business logic on the controller tightly coupled with the security function, which increases the burden of the controller and is not conducive to the evolution of the controller. To address this problem, we propose a proactive security framework PSA, which decouples the business logic and security function of the controller, and deploys the security function in the proactive security layer which lies between the data plane and the control plane, so as to provide a unified security defense framework for different controller implementations. Based on PSA, we design a security defense application for the data-to-control plane saturation attack, which overloads the infrastructure of SDN networks. We evaluate the prototype implementation of PSA in the software environments. The results show that PSA is effective with adding only minor overhead into the entire SDN infrastructure.

The intelligent power communication network is closely connected with the power system, and carries the data transmission and intelligent decision in a series of key services in the power system, which is an important guarantee for the smart power service. The self-healing control (SHC) of the distribution network monitors the data of each device and node in the distribution network in real time, simulates and analyzes the data, and predicts the hidden dangers in the normal operation of the distribution network. Control, control strategies such as correcting recovery and troubleshooting when abnormal or fault conditions occur, reducing human intervention, enabling the distribution network to change from abnormal operating state to normal operating state in time, preventing event expansion and reducing the impact of faults on the grid and users.

In the business and research landscape of today, data analysis consumes public and proprietary data from numerous sources, and utilizes any one or more of popular data-parallel frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Flink. In the Data Lake setting these frameworks co-exist. Our earlier work has shown that data provenance in Data Lakes can aid with both traceability and management. The sheer volume of fine-grained provenance generated in a multi-framework application motivates the need for on-the-fly provenance processing. We introduce a new parallel stream processing algorithm that reduces fine-grained provenance while preserving backward and forward provenance. The algorithm is resilient to provenance events arriving out-of-order. It is evaluated using several strategies for partitioning a provenance stream. The evaluation shows that the parallel algorithm performs well in processing out-of-order provenance streams, with good scalability and accuracy.

Power communication network is an important infrastructure of power system. For a large number of widely distributed business terminals and communication terminals. The data protection is related to the safe and stable operation of the whole power grid. How to solve the problem that lots of nodes need a large number of keys and avoid the situation that these nodes cannot exchange information safely because of the lack of keys. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposed a segmentation and combination technology based on quantum key to extend the limited key. The basic idea was to obtain a division scheme according to different conditions, and divide a key into several different sub-keys, and then combine these key segments to generate new keys and distribute them to different terminals in the system. Sufficient keys were beneficial to key updating, and could effectively enhance the ability of communication system to resist damage and intrusion. Through the analysis and calculation, the validity of this method in the use of limited quantum keys to achieve the business data secure transmission of a large number of terminal was further verified.

With the continuously development of smart meter-reading technologies for decades, remote information collection of electricity, water, gas and heat meters have been realized. Due to the difference of electrical interfaces and communication protocols among various types of meters, communication modes of meter terminals are not so compatible, it is difficult to realize communication optimization of electricity, water, gas and heat meters information collection services. In addition, with the development of power consumption information acquisition system, the number of acquisition terminals soars greatly and the data of terminal access is highly concurrent. Therefore, the risk of security access is increasing. This paper presents a light-weighted security access scheme of power line communication based on multi-source data acquisition of electricity, water, gas and heat meters, which separates multi-source data acquisition services and achieve services security isolation and channel security isolation. The communication reliability and security of the meter-reading service of "electricity, water, gas and heat" will be improved and the integrated meter service will be realized reliably.

Cybersecurity assurance plays an important role in managing trust in smart grid communication systems. In this paper, cybersecurity assurance controls for smart grid communication networks and devices are delineated from the more technical functional controls to provide insights on recent innovative risk-based approaches to cybersecurity assurance in smart grid systems. The cybersecurity assurance control baselining presented in this paper is based on requirements and guidelines of the new family of IEC 62443 standards on network and systems security of industrial automation and control systems. The paper illustrates how key cybersecurity control baselining and tailoring concepts of the U.S. NIST SP 800-53 can be adopted in smart grid security architecture. The paper outlines the application of IEC 62443 standards-based security zoning and assignment of security levels to the zones in smart grid system architectures. To manage trust in the smart grid system architecture, cybersecurity assurance base lining concepts are applied per security impact levels. Selection and justification of security assurance controls presented in the paper is utilizing the approach common in Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) of the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency. As shown in the paper, enhanced granularity for managing trust both on the overall system and subsystem levels of smart grid systems can be achieved by implementation of the instructions of the CNSSI 1253 of the U.S. Committee of National Security Systems on security categorization and control selection for national security systems.

Industrial control systems are the fundamental infrastructures of a country. Since the intrusion attack methods for industrial control systems have become complex and concealed, the traditional protection methods, such as vulnerability database, virus database and rule matching cannot cope with the attacks hidden inside the terminals of industrial control systems. In this work, we propose a control flow anomaly detection algorithm based on the control flow of the business programs. First, a basic group partition method based on key paths is proposed to reduce the performance burden caused by tabbed-assert control flow analysis method through expanding basic research units. Second, the algorithm phases of standard path set acquisition and path matching are introduced. By judging whether the current control flow path is deviating from the standard set or not, the abnormal operating conditions of industrial control can be detected. Finally, the effectiveness of a control flow anomaly detection (checking) algorithm based on Path Matching (CFCPM) is demonstrated by anomaly detection ability analysis and experiments.