Biblio
This project develops techniques to protect against sensor attacks on cyber-physical systems. Specifically, a resilient version of the Kalman filtering technique accompanied with a watermarking approach is proposed to detect cyber-attacks and estimate the correct state of the system. The defense techniques are used in conjunction and validated on two case studies: i) an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) in which an attacker alters the reference angle and ii) a Cube Satellite (CubeSat) in which an attacker modifies the orientation of the satellite degrading its performance. Based on this work, we show that the proposed techniques in conjunction achieve better resiliency and defense capability than either technique alone against spoofing and replay attacks.
Due to practical constraints in preventing phishing through public network or insecure communication channels, simple physical unclonable function (PDF)-based authentication protocol with unrestricted queries and transparent responses is vulnerable to modeling and replay attacks. In this paper, we present a PUF-based authentication method to mitigate the practical limitations in applications where a resource-rich server authenticates a device with no strong restriction imposed on the type of PUF designs or any additional protection on the binary channel used for the authentication. Our scheme uses an active deception protocol to prevent machine learning (ML) attacks on a device. The monolithic system makes collection of challenge response pairs (CRPs) easy for model building during enrollment but prohibitively time consuming upon device deployment. A genuine server can perform a mutual authentication with the device at any time with a combined fresh challenge contributed by both the server and the device. The message exchanged in clear does not expose the authentic CRPs. The false PUF multiplexing is fortified against prediction of waiting time by doubling the time penalty for every unsuccessful authentication.
We consider distributed Kalman filter for dynamic state estimation over wireless sensor networks. It is promising but challenging when network is under cyber attacks. Since the information exchange between nodes, the malicious attacks quickly spread across the entire network, which causing large measurement errors and even to the collapse of sensor networks. Aiming at the malicious network attack, a trust-based distributed processing frame is proposed. Which allows neighbor nodes to exchange information, and a series of trusted nodes are found using truth discovery. As a demonstration, distributed Cooperative Localization is considered, and numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by considering random, false data injection and replay attacks.
In order to solve the problem of vulnerable password guessing attacks caused by dictionary attacks, replay attacks in the authentication process, and man-in-the-middle attacks in the existing wireless local area network in terms of security authentication, we make some improvements to the 802.1X / EAP authentication protocol based on the study of the current IEEE802.11i security protocol with high security. After introducing the idea of Kerberos protocol authentication and applying the idea in the authentication process of 802.1X / EAP, a new protocol of Kerberos extensible authentication protocol (KEAP) is proposed. Firstly, the protocol introduces an asymmetric key encryption method, uses public key encryption during data transmission, and the receiver uses the corresponding private key for decryption. With unidirectional characteristics and high security, the encryption can avoid password guessing attacks caused by dictionary attacks as much as possible. Secondly, aiming at the problem that the request message sent from the client to the authentication server is vulnerable to replay attacks, the protocol uses a combination of the message sequence number and the random number, and the message serial number is added to the request message sent from the client to the authentication server. And establish a list database for storing message serial number and random number in the authentication server. After receiving a transfer message, the serial number and the random number are extracted and compared with the values in the list database to distinguish whether it is a retransmission message. Finally, the protocol introduces a keychain mechanism and uses an irreversible Hash function to encrypt the final authentication result, thereby effectively solving the man-in-the-middle attack by the pretender. The experiment uses the OPNET 14.5 simulation platform to model the KEAP protocol and simulate simulation attacks, and compares it with the current more common EAP-TLS authentication protocol. Experimental results show that the average traffic of the KEAP protocol is at least 14.74% higher than the EAP-TLS authentication protocol, and the average bit error rate is reduced by at least 24.00%.
To prevent users' privacy from leakage, more and more mobile devices employ biometric-based authentication approaches, such as fingerprint, face recognition, voiceprint authentications, etc., to enhance the privacy protection. However, these approaches are vulnerable to replay attacks. Although state-of-art solutions utilize liveness verification to combat the attacks, existing approaches are sensitive to ambient environments, such as ambient lights and surrounding audible noises. Towards this end, we explore liveness verification of user authentication leveraging users' lip movements, which are robust to noisy environments. In this paper, we propose a lip reading-based user authentication system, LipPass, which extracts unique behavioral characteristics of users' speaking lips leveraging build-in audio devices on smartphones for user authentication. We first investigate Doppler profiles of acoustic signals caused by users' speaking lips, and find that there are unique lip movement patterns for different individuals. To characterize the lip movements, we propose a deep learning-based method to extract efficient features from Doppler profiles, and employ Support Vector Machine and Support Vector Domain Description to construct binary classifiers and spoofer detectors for user identification and spoofer detection, respectively. Afterwards, we develop a binary tree-based authentication approach to accurately identify each individual leveraging these binary classifiers and spoofer detectors with respect to registered users. Through extensive experiments involving 48 volunteers in four real environments, LipPass can achieve 90.21% accuracy in user identification and 93.1% accuracy in spoofer detection.
Cyber-physical systems connect the physical world and the information world by sensors and actuators. These sensors are usually small embedded systems which have many limitations on wireless communication, computing and storage. This paper proposes a lightweight coding method for secure and reliable transmission over a wireless communication links in cyber-physical systems. The reliability of transmission is provided by forward error correction. And to ensure the confidentiality, we utilize different encryption matrices at each time of coding which are generated by the sequence number of packets. So replay attacks and other cyber threats can be resisted simultaneously. The issues of the prior reliable transmission protocols and secure communication protocols in wireless networks of a cyber-physical system are reduced, such as large protocol overhead, high interaction delay and large computation cost.
Wearable devices are being more popular in our daily life. Especially, smart wristbands are booming in the market recently, which can be used to monitor health status, track fitness data, or even do medical tests, etc. For this reason, smart wristbands can obtain a lot of personal data. Hence, users and manufacturers should pay more attention to the security aspects of smart wristbands. However, we have found that some Bluetooth Low Energy based smart wristbands have very weak or even no security protection mechanism, therefore, they are vulnerable to replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, brute-force attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, etc. We have investigated four different popular smart wristbands and a smart watch. Among them, only the smart watch is protected by some security mechanisms while the other four smart wristbands are not protected. In our experiments, we have also figured out all the message formats of the controlling commands of these smart wristbands and developed an Android software application as a testing tool. Powered by the resolved command formats, this tool can directly control these wristbands, and any other wristbands of these four models, without using the official supporting applications.
Biometrics is attracting increasing attention in privacy and security concerned issues, such as access control and remote financial transaction. However, advanced forgery and spoofing techniques are threatening the reliability of conventional biometric modalities. This has been motivating our investigation of a novel yet promising modality transient evoked otoacoustic emission (TEOAE), which is an acoustic response generated from cochlea after a click stimulus. Unlike conventional modalities that are easily accessible or captured, TEOAE is naturally immune to replay and falsification attacks as a physiological outcome from human auditory system. In this paper, we resort to wavelet analysis to derive the time-frequency representation of such nonstationary signal, which reveals individual uniqueness and long-term reproducibility. A machine learning technique linear discriminant analysis is subsequently utilized to reduce intrasubject variability and further capture intersubject differentiation features. Considering practical application, we also introduce a complete framework of the biometric system in both verification and identification modes. Comparative experiments on a TEOAE data set of biometric setting show the merits of the proposed method. Performance is further improved with fusion of information from both ears.