Biblio

As IoT technologies mature, they are increasingly finding their way into more sensitive domains, such as Medical and Industrial IoT, in which safety and cyber-security are paramount. While the number of deployed IoT devices continues to increase annually, they still present severe cyber-security vulnerabilities, turning them into potential targets and entry points to support further attacks. Naturally, as these nodes are compromised, attackers aim at setting up stealthy communication behaviours, to exfiltrate data or to orchestrate nodes of a botnet in a cloaked fashion. Network covert channels are increasingly being used with such malicious intents. The IEEE 802.15.4 is one of the most pervasive protocols in IoT, and a fundamental part of many communication infrastructures. Despite this fact, the possibility of setting up such covert communication techniques on this medium has received very little attention. We aim at analysing the performance and feasibility of such covert-channel implementations upon the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. This will enable a better understanding of the involved risk and help supporting the development of further cyber-security mechanisms to mitigate this threat.

Improving the accuracy of intruders in innovative Intrusion detection by comparing Machine Learning classifiers such as Random Forest (RF) with Support Vector Machine (SVM). Two groups of supervised Machine Learning algorithms acquire perfection by looking at the Random Forest calculation (N=20) with the Support Vector Machine calculation (N=20)G power value is 0.8. Random Forest (99.3198%) has the highest accuracy than the SVM (9S.56l5%) and the independent T-test was carried out (=0.507) and shows that it is statistically insignificant (p \textgreater0.05) with a confidence value of 95% by comparing RF and SVM. Conclusion: The comparative examination displays that the Random Forest is more productive than the Support Vector Machine for identifying the intruders are significantly tested.

In this paper, two of the main Blockchain development platforms, Ethereum and EOS.IO are compared. The objective is to help developers select the most appropriate platform as the back-end Blockchain for their apps. A decentralized application was implemented on each of the platforms triggering basic operations and timing them. The simulations were performed on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, running up to 150 Blockchain nodes while recording the user response time, the CPU utilization, and the totally used memory in Mbytes. The results in this study show that although recognized as a major competitor to Ethereum, EOS.IO fails to outperform the Ethereum platform in this experiment, recording a very high response time in comparison to Ethereum.

As Meltdown mitigation, Kernel Page Table I solation (KPTI) was merged into Linux kernel mainline, and the performance impact is significant on x86 processors. Most of the previous work focuses on how KPTI affects Linux kernel performance within the scope of virtual machines or physical machines on x86. However, whether host KPTI affects virtual machines has not been well studied. What's more, there is relatively little research on ARM CPUs. This paper presents an in-depth study of how KPTI on the host affects the virtualized server performance and compares ARMv8 and x86. We first run several application benchmarks to demonstrate the performance impact does exist. The reason is that with a para-virtual I/O scheme, guest offloads I/O requests to the host side, which may incur user/kernel transitions. For the network I/O, when using QEMU as the back-end device, we saw a 1.7% and 5.5% slowdown on ARMv8 and x86, respectively. vhost and vhost-user, originally proposed to optimize performance, inadvertently mitigate the performance impact introduced by host KPTI. For CPU and memory-intensive benchmarks, the performance impact is trivial. We also find that virtual machines on ARMv8 are less affected by KPTI. To diagnose the root cause, we port HyperBench to the ARM virtualization platform. The final results show that swapping the translation table pointer register on ARMv8 is about 3.5x faster than x86. Our findings have significant implications for tuning the x86 virtualization platform's performance and helping ARMv8 administrators enable KPTI with confidence.

Nowadays, automotive products are intelligence intensive and thus inevitably handle multiple functionalities under the current high-speed networking environment. The embedded virtualization has high potentials in the automotive industry, thanks to its advantages in function integration, resource utilization, and security. The invention of ARM virtualization extensions has made it possible to run open-source hypervisors, such as Xen and KVM, for embedded applications. Nevertheless, there is little work to investigate the performance of these hypervisors on automotive platforms. This paper presents a detailed analysis of different types of open-source hypervisors that can be applied in the ARM platform. We carry out the virtualization performance experiment from the perspectives of CPU, memory, file I/O, and some OS operation performance on Xen and Jailhouse. A series of microbenchmark programs have been designed, specifically to evaluate the real-time performance of various hypervisors and the relevant overhead. Compared with Xen, Jailhouse has better latency performance, stable latency, and little interference jitter. The performance experiment results help us summarize the advantages and disadvantages of these hypervisors in automotive applications.

Storing information in Blockchain has become in vogue in the Technical and Communication Industry with many major players jumping into the bandwagon. Two of the most prominent enablers for Blockchain are “Proof of Work” and “Proof of Stake”. Proof of work includes the members solving the complex problem without having a particular need for the solution (except as evidence, of course), which absorbs a large number of resources in turn. The proof of stake doesn’t require as many resources to enable Blockchain secure information store. Both methodologies have their advantages and their shortcomings. The article attempts to review the current literature and collate the results of the study to measure the performance of both the methodologies and to arrive at a consensus regarding either or both methodologies to implement Blockchain to store data. Post reviewing the performance aspects and security features of both Proofs of Stake and Proof of Work the reviewer attempts to arrive at a secure and better performing blended Blockchain methodology that has wide industry practical application.

The existing education system, which incorporates school assessments, has some flaws. Conventional teaching methods give students no immediate feedback, also make teachers to spend hours grading repetitive assignments, and aren't very constructive in showing students how to improve in their academics, and also fail to take advantage of digital opportunities that can improve learning outcomes. In addition, since a single teacher has to manage a class of students, it gets difficult to focus on each and every student in the class. Furthermore, with the help of a management system for better learning, educational organizations can now implement administrative analytics and execute new business intelligence using big data. This data visualization aids in the evaluation of teaching, management, and study success metrics. In this paper, there is put forward a discussion on how Data Mining and Data Analytics can help make the experience of learning and teaching both, easier and accountable. There will also be discussion on how the education organization has undergone numerous challenges in terms of effective and efficient teachings, student-performance. In addition development, and inadequate data storage, processing, and analysis will also be discussed. The research implements Python programming language on big education data. In addition, the research adopted an exploratory research design to identify the complexities and requirements of big data in the education field.

Payment systems are a critical component of everyday life in our society. While in many situations payments are still slow, opaque, siloed, expensive or even fail, users expect them to be fast, transparent, cheap, reliable and global. Recent technologies such as distributed ledgers create opportunities for near-real-time, cheaper and more transparent payments. However, in order to achieve a global payment system, payments should be possible not only within one ledger, but also across different ledgers and geographies.In this paper we propose Secure Payments with Overlay Networks (SPON), a service that enables global payments across multiple ledgers by combining the transaction exchange provided by the Interledger protocol with an intrusion-tolerant overlay of relay nodes to achieve (1) improved payment latency, (2) fault-tolerance to benign failures such as node failures and network partitions, and (3) resilience to BGP hijacking attacks. We discuss the design goals and present an implementation based on the Interledger protocol and Spines overlay network. We analyze the resilience of SPON and demonstrate through experimental evaluation that it is able to improve payment latency, recover from path outages, withstand network partition attacks, and disseminate payments fairly across multiple ledgers. We also show how SPON can be deployed to make the communication between different ledgers resilient to BGP hijacking attacks.

Internet of things (IoT) and Fog computing applications deal with sensitive data and need security tools to be protected against attackers. CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol), combined with DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security), provides security to IoT/Fog applications. However, processing times need to be considered when using this combination due to IoT/Fog environment constraints. Our work presents a CoAP with DTLS application and analyzes the performance of Raspberry Pi 3 during DTLS handshakes, data encryption and data decryption with the most relevant cipher suites. The performance of confirmable and non-confirmable CoAP POST requests is also measured and discussed in our work. We discovered that cipher suites that use RSA as an authentication method on handshake are slightly faster than cipher suites that use ECDSA, while symmetric key encryption with AES256(128)GCM are 40% faster than AES256(128) default modes. Our study also suggests CoAP modifications to obtain higher efficiency, and it might help future IoT/Fog application developers to understand CoAP and DTLS union, providing an application example and performance metrics.

Fog Computing is one of the edge computing paradigms that envisages being the proximate processing and storage infrastructure for a multitude of IoT appliances. With its dynamic deployability as a medium level cloud service, fog nodes are enabling heterogeneous service provisioning infrastructure that features scalability, interoperability, and adaptability. Out of the various 5G based services possible with the fog computing platforms, security services are imperative but minimally investigated direct live. Thus, in this research, we are focused on launching security services in a fog node with an architecture capable of provisioning on-demand service requests. As the fog nodes are constrained on resources, our intention is to integrate light-weight virtualization technology such as Docker for forming the service provisioning infrastructure. We managed to launch multiple security instances configured to be Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPSs) on the fog infrastructure emulated via a Raspberry Pi-4 device. This environment was tested with multiple network flows to validate its feasibility. In our proposed architecture, orchestration strategies performed by the security orchestrator were stated as guidelines for achieving pragmatic, dynamic orchestration with fog in IoT deployments. The results of this research guarantee the possibility of developing an ambient security service model that facilitates IoT devices with enhanced security.

Physical Unclonable Function is an innovative hardware security primitives that exploit the physical characteristics of a physical object to generate a unique identifier, which play the role of the object's fingerprint. Silicon PUF, a popular type of PUFs, exploits the variation in the manufacturing process of integrated circuits (ICs). It needs an input called challenge to generate the response as an output. In addition, of classical attacks, PUFs are vulnerable to physical and modeling attacks. The performance of the PUFs is measured by several metrics like reliability, uniqueness and uniformity. So as an evidence, the main goal is to provide a complete tool that checks the strength and quantifies the performance of a given physical unconscionable function. This paper provides a tool and develops a set of metrics that can achieve safely the proposed goal.

The current study explored the influence of trust and distrust behaviors on performance, process, and purpose (trustworthiness) perceptions over time when participants were paired with a robot partner. We examined the changes in trustworthiness perceptions after trust violations and trust repair after those violations. Results indicated performance, process, and purpose perceptions were all affected by trust violations, but perceptions of process and purpose decreased more than performance following a distrust behavior. Similarly, trust repair was achieved in performance perceptions, but trust repair in perceived process and purpose was absent. When a trust violation occurred, process and purpose perceptions deteriorated and failed to recover from the violation. In addition, the trust violation resulted in untrustworthy perceptions of the robot. In contrast, trust violations decreased partner performance perceptions, and subsequent trust behaviors resulted in a trust repair. These findings suggest that people are more sensitive to distrust behaviors in their perceptions of process and purpose than they are in performance perceptions.

Due to the decentralization, irreversibility, and traceability, blockchain has attracted significant attention and has been deployed in many critical industries such as banking and logistics. However, the micro-architecture characteristics of blockchain programs still remain unclear. What's worse, the large number of micro-architecture events make understanding the characteristics extremely difficult. We even lack a systematic approach to identify the important events to focus on. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmarking methodology dubbed BBS to characterize blockchain programs at micro-architecture level. The key is to leverage fuzzy set theory to identify important micro-architecture events after the significance of them is quantified by a machine learning based approach. The important events for single programs are employed to characterize the programs while the common important events for multiple programs form an importance vector which is used to measure the similarity between benchmarks. We leverage BBS to characterize seven and six benchmarks from Blockbench and Caliper, respectively. The results show that BBS can reveal interesting findings. Moreover, by leveraging the importance characterization results, we improve that the transaction throughput of Smallbank from Fabric by 70% while reduce the transaction latency by 55%. In addition, we find that three of seven and two of six benchmarks from Blockbench and Caliper are redundant, respectively.

Tor's anonymity network is one of the most widely used anonymity networks online, it consists of thousands of routers run by volunteers. Tor preserves the anonymity of its users by relaying the traffic through a number of routers (called onion routers) forming a circuit. The current design of Tor's transport layer suffers from a number of problems affecting the performance of the network. Several researches proposed changes in the transport design in order to eliminate the effect of these problems and improve the performance of Tor's network. In this paper. we propose "QuicTor", an improvement to the transport layer of Tor's network by using Google's protocol "QUIC" instead of TCP. QUIC was mainly developed to eliminate TCP's latency introduced from the handshaking delays and the head-of-line blocking problem. We provide an empirical evaluation of our proposed design and compare it to two other proposed designs, IMUX and PCTCP. We show that QuicTor significantly enhances the performance of Tor's network.

In this paper, we propose an access control model featured with the efficient key update function in data outsourcing environment. Our access control is based on the combination of Ciphertext Policy - Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) and Role-based Access Control (RBAC). The proposed scheme aims to improve the attribute and key update management of the original CP-ABE. In our scheme, a user's key is incorporated into the attribute certificate (AC) which will be used to decrypt the ciphertext encrypted with CP-ABE policy. If there is any change (update or revoke) of the attributes appearing in the key, the key in the AC will be updated upon the access request. This significantly reduces the overheads in updating and distributing keys of all users simultaneously compared to the existing CP-ABE based schemes. Finally, we conduct the experiment to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme to show the efficiency of our proposed scheme.

With the interconnection of services and customers, network attacks are capable of large amounts of damage. Flexible Random Virtual IP Multiplexing (FRVM) is a Moving Target Defence (MTD) technique that protects against reconnaissance and access with address mutation and multiplexing. Security techniques must be trusted, however, FRVM, along with past MTD techniques, have gaps in realistic evaluation and thorough analysis of security and performance. FRVM, and two comparison techniques, were deployed on a virtualised network to demonstrate FRVM's security and performance trade-offs. The key results include the security and performance trade-offs of address multiplexing and address mutation. The security benefit of IP address multiplexing is much greater than its performance overhead, deployed on top of address mutation. Frequent address mutation significantly increases an attackers' network scan durations as well as effectively obfuscating and hiding network configurations.

So-called IoT, based on use of enabling technologies like 5G, Wi-Fi, BT, NFC, RFID, IPv6 as well as being widely applied for sensor networks, robots, Wearable and Cyber-PHY, invades rapidly to our every day. There are a lot of apps and software platforms to IoT support. However, a most important problem of QoS optimization, which lays in Performance, Reliability and Scalability for IoT, is not yet solved. The extended Internet of the future needs these solutions based on the cooperation between fog and clouds with delegating of the analytics blocks via agents, adaptive interfaces and protocols. The next problem is as follows: IoT can generate large arrays of unmanaged, weakly-structured, and non-configured data of various types, known as "Big Data". The given papers deals with the both problems. A special problem is Security and Privacy in potentially "dangerous" IoTscenarios. Anyway, this subject needs as special discussion for risks evaluation and cooperative intrusion detection. Some advanced approaches for optimization of Performance, Reliability and Scalability for IoT-solutions are offered within the paper. The paper discusses the Best Practises and Case Studies aimed to solution of the established problems.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a novel paradigm which enables the deployment of network functions on commodity hardware. As such, it also stands for a deployment en-abler for any novel networking function or networking paradigm such as Named Data Networking (NDN), the most promising solution relying on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm. However, dedicated solutions for the security and performance orchestration of such an emerging paradigm are still lacking thus preventing its adoption by network operators. In this paper, we propose a first step toward a content-oriented orchestration whose purpose is to deploy, manage and secure an NDN virtual network. We present the way we leverage the TOSCA standard, using a crafted NDN oriented extension to enable the specification of both deployment and operational behavior requirements of NDN services. We also highlight NDN-related security and performance policies to produce counter-measures against anomalies that can either come from attacks or performance incidents.

The confidentiality of data stored in embedded and handheld devices has become an urgent necessity more than ever before. Encryption of sensitive data is a well-known technique to preserve their confidentiality, however it comes with certain costs that can heavily impact the device processing resources. Utilizing multicore processors, which are equipped with current embedded devices, has brought a new era to enhance data confidentiality while maintaining suitable device performance. Encrypting the complete storage area, also known as Full Disk Encryption (FDE) can still be challenging, especially with newly emerging massive storage systems. Alternatively, since the most user sensitive data are residing inside persisting databases, it will be more efficient to focus on securing SQLite databases, through encryption, where SQLite is the most common RDBMS in handheld and embedded systems. This paper addresses the problem of ensuring data protection in embedded and mobile devices while maintaining suitable device performance by mitigating the impact of encryption. We presented here a proposed design for a parallel database encryption system, called SQLite-XTS. The proposed system encrypts data stored in databases transparently on-the-fly without the need for any user intervention. To maintain a proper device performance, the system takes advantage of the commodity multicore processors available with most embedded and mobile devices.

Experimentation tools facilitate exploration of Tor performance and security research problems and allow researchers to safely and privately conduct Tor experiments without risking harm to real Tor users. However, researchers using these tools configure them to generate network traffic based on simplifying assumptions and outdated measurements and without understanding the efficacy of their configuration choices. In this work, we design a novel technique for dynamically learning Tor network traffic models using hidden Markov modeling and privacy-preserving measurement techniques. We conduct a safe but detailed measurement study of Tor using 17 relays (\textasciitilde2% of Tor bandwidth) over the course of 6 months, measuring general statistics and models that can be used to generate a sequence of streams and packets. We show how our measurement results and traffic models can be used to generate traffic flows in private Tor networks and how our models are more realistic than standard and alternative network traffic generation\textasciitildemethods.

This paper presents CapeVM, a sensor node virtual machine aimed at delivering both high performance and a sandboxed execution environment that ensures malicious code cannot corrupt the VM's internal state or perform actions not allowed by the VM. CapeVM uses Ahead-of-Time compilation and introduces a range of optimisations to eliminate most of the overhead present in previous work on sensor node AOT compilers. A sandboxed execution environment is guaranteed by a set of checks. The structured nature of the VM's instruction set allows the VM to perform most checks at load time, reducing the need for expensive run-time checks compared to native code approaches. While some overhead from using a VM and adding sandbox checks cannot be avoided, CapeVM's optimisations reduce this overhead dramatically. We evaluate CapeVM using a set of IoT applications and show this results in a performance just 2.1x slower than unsandboxed native code. Thus, CapeVM combines the desirable properties ofexisting work on both sandboxed execution and virtual machines for sensor nodes, with significantly improved performance.

Virtualized infrastructure is a key capability of modern enterprise data centers and cloud computing, enabling a more agile and dynamic IT infrastructure with fast IT provisioning, simplified, automated management, and flexible resource allocation to handle a broad set of workloads. However, at the same time, virtualization introduces new challenges, since securing virtual servers is more difficult than physical machines. HyTrust Inc. has developed an innovative security solution, called HyTrust Cloud Control (HTCC), to mitigate risks associated with virtualization and cloud technologies. HTCC is a virtual appliance deployed as a transparent proxy in front of a VMware-based virtualized environment. Since HTCC serves as a gateway to a customer virtualized environment, it is important to carefully assess its performance and scalability as well as provide its accurate resource sizing. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for accomplishing this goal. First, we describe a special framework, based on a nested virtualization technique, which enables the creation and deployment of a large scale virtualized environment (with 30,000 VMs) using a limited number of physical servers (4 servers in our experiments). Second, we introduce a design and implementation of a novel, extensible benchmark, called HT-vmbench, that allows to mimic the session-based activities of different system administrators and users in virtualized environments. The benchmark is implemented using VMware Web Service SDK. By executing HT-vmbench in the emulated large-scale virtualized environments, we can support an efficient performance assessment of management and security solutions (such as HTCC), their overhead, and provide capacity planning rules and resource sizing recommendations.

Security is of concern of any computing system. Intruders break into machines to steal private data, important credentials, or credit cards. Causing damage, denying services, spaming, and defrauding are among intruders' goals. Security engineers strive to secure systems against many kinds of attacks. Different security controls are deployed at variety of perimeters to fight attacks. Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, encryption techniques, spam filters, and anti-adware are among such security controls. As a last line of defense, the Antivirus (AV) is of an important concern to the end-users community. Mainly, the AV achieves security by scanning data against its database of virus signatures. In addition, the AV tries to reach a pleasant balance between security and performance because end-users are not willing to deploy a performance-killing AV. When to scan data is an important design factor an Antivirus has to make. In this study, we test two AV aspects. First, we want to know how aggressive the AV is against kernel-level activities compared with user-level activities. In order to do that, we implemented a kernel-level device driver that reads malware with the present of the AV. Second, because AVs are equipped with on-access scanners that are triggered based on file access, we want to know how the AV is achieving that and how that could affect the overall performance.

Every company may be located at the junction of several Supply Chains (SCs) to meet the requirements of many different end customers. To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage over its business rivals, a company needs to continuously improve its relations to its different stakeholders as well as its performance in terms of integrating its decision processes and hence, its communication and information systems. Furthermore, customers' growing awareness of green and sustainable matters and new national and international regulations force enterprises to rethink their whole system. In this paper we propose a model to quantify the identified potential risks to assist in designing or re-designing a supply chain. So that managers may take adequate decisions to have the continuing ability of satisfying customers' requirements. A case study, developed at kuehne + nagel Luxembourg is provided.

Dynamic software updating (DSU) is an extremely useful feature to be used during software evolution. It can be used to reduce down-time costs, for security enhancements, profiling and testing new functionalities. There are many studies and solutions on dynamic software updating regarding diverse problems introduced by the topic, but there is a lack of research which compares various approaches concerning supported changes and demands on resources. In this paper, we are comparing currently available concepts for Java programming language that deal with dynamically applied changes and measuring the impact of those changes on computer resource demands.