Biblio

Industrial Internet-of-Things has been touted as the next revolution in the industrial domain, offering interconnectivity, independence, real-time operation, and self-optimization. Integration of smart systems, however, bridges the gap between information and operation technology, creating new avenues for attacks from the cyber domain. The dismantling of this air-gap, in conjunction with the devices' long lifespan -in the range of 20-30 years-, motivates us to bring the attention of the community to emerging advanced persistent threats. We demonstrate a threat that bridges the air-gap by leaking data from memory to analog peripherals through Direct Memory Access (DMA), delivered as a firmware modification through the supply chain. The attack automatically adapts to a target device by leveraging the Device Tree and resides solely in the peripherals, completely transparent to the main CPU, by judiciously short-circuiting specific components. We implement this attack on a commercial Programmable Logic Controller, leaking information over the available LEDs. We evaluate the presented attack vector in terms of stealthiness, and demonstrate no observable overhead on both CPU performance and DMA transfer speed. Since traditional anomaly detection techniques would fail to detect this firmware trojan, this work highlights the need for industrial control system-appropriate techniques that can be applied promptly to installed devices.

With technology at our fingertips waiting to be exploited, the past decade saw the revolutionizing Human Computer Interactions. The ease with which a user could interact was the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of a sales team. Human Computer Interactions have many underlying parameters like Data Visualization and Presentation as some to deal with. With the race, on for better and faster presentations, evolved many frameworks to be widely used by all software developers. As the need grew for user friendly applications, more and more software professionals were lured into the front-end sophistication domain. Application frameworks have evolved to such an extent that with just a few clicks and feeding values as per requirements we are able to produce a commercially usable application in a few minutes. These frameworks generate quantum lines of codes in minutes which leaves a contrail of bugs to be discovered in the future. We have also succumbed to the benchmarking in Software Quality Metrics and have made ourselves comfortable with buggy software's to be rectified in future. The exponential evolution in the cyber domain has also attracted attackers equally. Average human awareness and knowledge has also improved in the cyber domain due to the prolonged exposure to technology for over three decades. As the attack sophistication grows and zero day attacks become more popular than ever, the suffering end users only receive remedial measures in spite of the latest Antivirus, Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems installed. We designed a software to display the complete services and applications running in users Operating System in the easiest perceivable manner aided by Computer Graphics and Data Visualization techniques. We further designed a study by empowering the fence sitter users with tools to actively participate in protecting themselves from threats. The designed threats had impressions from the complete threat canvas in some form or other restricted to systems functioning. Network threats and any sort of packet transfer to and from the system in form of threat was kept out of the scope of this experiment. We discovered that end users had a good idea of their working environment which can be used exponentially enhances machine learning for zero day threats and segment the unmarked the vast threat landscape faster for a more reliable output.

The advent of the cyber domain has introduced a new dimension into warfare and complicated existing strategic concepts, provoking divergent responses within different national contexts and strategic cultures. Although current theories regarding cyber deterrence remain relatively nascent, a comparison of U.S. and Chinese strategic thinking highlights notable asymmetries between their respective approaches. While U.S. debates on cyber deterrence have primarily focused on the deterrence of cyber threats, Chinese theorists have also emphasized the potential importance of cyber capabilities to enhance strategic deterrence. Whereas the U.S. government has maintained a consistent declaratory policy for response, Beijing has yet to progress toward transparency regarding its cyber strategy or capabilities. However, certain PLA strategists, informed by a conceptualization of deterrence as integrated with warfighting, have advocated for the actualization of deterrence through engaging in cyber attacks. Regardless of whether these major cyber powers' evolving strategic thinking on cyber deterrence will prove logically consistent or feasibly operational, their respective perspectives will certainly shape their attempts to achieve cyber deterrence. Ultimately, cyber deterrence may continue to be "what states make of it," given conditions of "cyber anarchy" and prevailing uncertainties regarding cyber conflict. Looking forward, future strategic stability in Sino-U.S. cyber interactions will require mitigation of the misperceptions and heightened risks of escalation that could be exacerbated by these divergent strategic approaches.

Deterrence is badly needed in the cyber domain but it is hard to be achieved. Why is conventional deterrence not working effectively in the cyber domain? What specific characteristics should be considered when deterrence strategies are developed in this man-made domain? These are the questions that this paper intends to address. The research conducted helps to reveal what cyber deterrence can do and what it cannot do so that focus can be put on the enhancement of what it can do. To include varied perspectives, literature review is conducted. Some research works are specifically examined. Based on these studies, this research proposes a holistic approach in cyber deterrence that is empowered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. This approach is capable of making sudden, dynamic, stealthy, and random changes initiated by different contexts. It is able to catch attackers by surprise. The surprising and changing impact inflicts a cost on attackers and makes them to re-calculate the benefits that they might gain through further attacks, thus discouraging or defeating adversaries both mentally and virtually, and eventually controlling escalation of cyber conflicts.

Tactics Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) in cyber domain is an important threat information that describes the behavior and attack patterns of an adversary. Timely identification of associations between TTPs can lead to effective strategy for diagnosing the Cyber Threat Actors (CTAs) and their attack vectors. This study profiles the prevalence and regularities in the TTPs of CTAs. We developed a machine learning-based framework that takes as input Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) documents, selects the most prevalent TTPs with high information gain as features and based on them mine interesting regularities between TTPs using Association Rule Mining (ARM). We evaluated the proposed framework with publicly available TTPbased CTI documents. The results show that there are 28 TTPs more prevalent than the other TTPs. Our system identified 155 interesting association rules among the TTPs of CTAs. A summary of these rules is given to effectively investigate threats in the network.

Conducting active cyberdefense requires the acceptance of a proactive framework that acknowledges the lack of predictable symmetries between malicious actors and their capabilities and intent. Unlike physical weapons such as firearms, naval vessels, and piloted aircraft-all of which risk physical exposure when engaged in direct combat-cyberweapons can be deployed (often without their victims' awareness) under the protection of the anonymity inherent in cyberspace. Furthermore, it is difficult in the cyber domain to determine with accuracy what a malicious actor may target and what type of cyberweapon the actor may wield. These aspects imply an advantage for malicious actors in cyberspace that is greater than for those in any other domain, as the malicious cyberactor, under current international constructs and norms, has the ability to choose the time, place, and weapon of engagement. This being said, if defenders are to successfully repel attempted intrusions, then they must conduct an active cyberdefense within a framework that proactively engages threatening actions independent of a requirement to achieve attribution. This paper proposes that private business, government personnel, and cyberdefenders must develop a threat identification framework that does not depend upon attribution of the malicious actor, i.e., an attribution agnostic cyberdefense construct. Furthermore, upon developing this framework, network defenders must deploy internally based cyberthreat countermeasures that take advantage of defensive network environmental variables and alter the calculus of nefarious individuals in cyberspace. Only by accomplishing these two objectives can the defenders of cyberspace actively combat malicious agents within the virtual realm.