Biblio

Transmitting data through the internet may have severe security risks due to illegal access done by attackers. Some methods have been introduced to overcome this issue, such as cryptography and steganography. Nevertheless, some problems still arise, such as the quality of the stego data. Specifically, it happens if the stego is shared with some users. In this research, a shared-secret mechanism is combined with steganography. For this purpose, the fuzzy logic edge detection and Prediction Error (PE) methods are utilized to hide private data. The secret sharing process is carried out after data embedding in the cover image. This sharing mechanism is performed on image pixels that have been converted to PE values. Various Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) values are obtained from the experiment. It is found that the number of participants and the threshold do not significantly affect the image quality of the shares.

In the coming future, Software-defined networking (SDN) will become a technology more responsive, fully automated, and highly secure. SDN is a way to manage networks by separate the control plane from the forwarding plane, by using software to manage network functions through a centralized control point. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the most popular malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network. The problem of the paper is the DDoS attack inside the SDN environment and how could use SDN specifications through the advantage of Open vSwitch programmability feature to stop the attack. This paper presents DDoS attack detection and mitigation in the SDN data-plane by applying a written SDN application in python language, based on the malicious traffic abnormal behavior to reduce the interference with normal traffic. The evaluation results reveal detection and mitigation time between 100 to 150 sec. The work also sheds light on the programming relevance with the open daylight controller over an abstracted view of the network infrastructure.

Recognizing the need for proactive analysis of cyber adversary behavior, this paper presents a new event-driven simulation model and implementation to reveal the efforts needed by attackers who have various entry points into a network. Unlike previous models which focus on the impact of attackers' actions on the defender's infrastructure, this work focuses on the attackers' strategies and actions. By operating on a request-response session level, our model provides an abstraction of how the network infrastructure reacts to access credentials the adversary might have obtained through a variety of strategies. We present the current capabilities of the simulator by showing three variants of Bronze Butler APT on a network with different user access levels.

The fifth-generation and beyond mobile networks should support extremely high and diversified requirements from a wide variety of emerging applications. It is envisioned that more advanced radio transmission, resource allocation, and networking techniques are required to be developed. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging since network infrastructure becomes increasingly complicated and heterogeneous. One promising solution is to leverage the great potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, which has been explored to provide solutions ranging from channel prediction to autonomous network management, as well as network security. As of today, however, the state of the art of integrating AI into wireless networks is mainly limited to use a dedicated AI algorithm to tackle a specific problem. A unified framework that can make full use of AI capability to solve a wide variety of network problems is still an open issue. Hence, this paper will present the concept of intelligence slicing where an AI module is instantiated and deployed on demand. Intelligence slices are applied to conduct different intelligent tasks with the flexibility of accommodating arbitrary AI algorithms. Two example slices, i.e., neural network based channel prediction and anomaly detection based industrial network security, are illustrated to demonstrate this framework.

Peer-assisted content distribution networks (CDNs)have emerged to improve performance and reduce deployment costs of traditional, infrastructure-based content delivery networks. This is done by employing peer-to-peer data transfers to supplement the resources of the network infrastructure. However, these hybrid systems are vulnerable to accounting attacks in which the peers, or caches, collude with clients in order to report that content was transferred when it was not. This is a particular issue in systems that incentivize cache participation, because malicious caches may collect rewards from the content publishers operating the CDN without doing any useful work. In this paper, we introduce CAPnet, the first technique that lets untrusted caches join a peer-assisted CDN while providing a bound on the effectiveness of accounting attacks. At its heart is a lightweight cache accountability puzzle that clients must solve before caches are given credit. This puzzle requires colocating the data a client has requested, so its solution confirms that the content has actually been retrieved. We analyze the security and overhead of our scheme in realistic scenarios. The results show that a modest client machine using a single core can solve puzzles at a rate sufficient to simultaneously watch dozens of 1080p videos. The technique is designed to be even more scalable on the server side. In our experiments, one core of a single low-end machine is able to generate puzzles for 4.26 Tbps of bandwidth - enabling 870,000 clients to concurrently view the same 1080p video. This demonstrates that our scheme can ensure cache accountability without degrading system productivity.

Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to rely on the resources of their own users. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Early P2P networks did not use proper mechanisms to manage fairness. However, after seeing difficulties and rise of freeloaders in networks like Gnutella, the importance of providing fairness for users have become apparent. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based security model which leads to a network infrastructure that lightens the work of Seeders and makes Leechers to contribute more. This method is able to prevent betrayals in Leecher-to-Leecher transactions and helps Seeders to be treated more fairly. This is what other incentive methods such as Bittorrent are incapable of doing. Additionally, by getting help from cryptography and combining it with our method, it is also possible to achieve secure channels, immune to spying, next to a fair network. This is the first protocol designed for P2P networks which has separated Leechers and Seeders without the need to a central server. The simulation results clearly show how our proposed approach can overcome free-riding issue. In addition, our findings revealed that our approach is able to provide an appropriate level of fairness for the users and can decrease the download time.

The Department of Homeland Security Cyber Security Division (CSD) chose Moving Target Defense as one of the fourteen primary Technical Topic Areas pertinent to securing federal networks and the larger Internet. Moving Target Defense over IPv6 (MT6D) employs an obscuration technique offering keyed access to hosts at a network level without altering existing network infrastructure. This is accomplished through cryptographic dynamic addressing, whereby a new network address is bound to an interface every few seconds in a coordinated manner. The goal of this research is to produce a Register Transfer Level (RTL) network security processor implementation to enable the production of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) variant of MT6D processor for wide deployment. RTL development is challenging in that it must provide system level functions that are normally provided by the Operating System's kernel and supported libraries. This paper presents the architectural design of a hardware engine for MT6D (HE-MT6D) and is complete in simulation. Unique contributions are an inline stream-based network packet processor with a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architecture, Network Time Protocol listener, and theoretical increased performance over previous software implementations.

The Named-Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a clean-slate Internet proposal on the wave of Information-Centric Networking. Although the NDN's data-plane seems to offer many advantages, e.g., native support for multicast communications and flow balance, it also makes the network infrastructure vulnerable to a specific DDoS attack, the Interest Flooding Attack (IFA). In IFAs, a botnet issuing unsatisfiable content requests can be set up effortlessly to exhaust routers' resources and cause a severe performance drop to legitimate users. So far several countermeasures have addressed this security threat, however, their efficacy was proved by means of simplistic assumptions on the attack model. Therefore, we propose a more complete attack model and design an advanced IFA. We show the efficiency of our novel attack scheme by extensively assessing some of the state-of-the-art countermeasures. Further, we release the software to perform this attack as open source tool to help design future more robust defense mechanisms.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that do not need to rely on a pre-existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Securing MANETs is a serious concern as current research on MANETs continues to progress. Each node in a MANET acts as a router, forwarding data packets for other nodes and exchanging routing information between nodes. It is this intrinsic nature that introduces the serious security issues to routing protocols. A black hole attack is one of the well-known security threats for MANETs. A black hole is a security attack in which a malicious node absorbs all data packets by sending fake routing information and drops them without forwarding them. In order to defend against a black hole attack, in this paper we propose a new threshold-based black hole attack prevention method. To investigate the performance of the proposed method, we compared it with existing methods. Our simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods from the standpoints of black hole node detection rate, throughput, and packet delivery rate.

As the Internet becomes an important part of the infrastructure our society depends on, it is crucial to construct networks that are able to work even when part of the network is compromised. This paper presents the first practical intrusion-tolerant network service, targeting high-value applications such as monitoring and control of global clouds and management of critical infrastructure for the power grid. We use an overlay approach to leverage the existing IP infrastructure while providing the required resiliency and timeliness. Our solution overcomes malicious attacks and compromises in both the underlying network infrastructure and in the overlay itself. We deploy and evaluate the intrusion-tolerant overlay implementation on a global cloud spanning East Asia, North America, and Europe, and make it publicly available.

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet, which began as a research experiment, was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, particularly for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification and to an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design-in particular, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm-offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods and present a survey of its applications to networking.

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet, which began as a research experiment, was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, particularly for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification and to an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design-in particular, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm-offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods and present a survey of its applications to networking.
 

The addition of synchrophasors such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) to the existing power grid will enhance real-time monitoring and analysis of the grid. The PMU collects bus voltage, line current, and frequency measurements and uses the communication network to send the measurements to the respective substation(s)/control center(s). Since this approach relies on network infrastructure, possible cyber security vulnerabilities have to be addressed to ensure that is stable, secure, and reliable. In this paper, security vulnerabilities associated with a synchrophasor network in a benchmark IEEE 68 bus (New England/New York) power system model are examined. Currently known feasible attacks are demonstrated. Recommended testing and verification methods are also presented.