Biblio

Edge detection based embedding techniques are famous for data security and image quality preservation. These techniques use diverse edge detectors to classify edge and non-edge pixels in an image and then implant secrets in one or both of these classes. Image with conceived data is called stego image. It is noticeable that none of such researches tries to reform the original image from the stego one. Rather, they devote their concentration to extract the hidden message only. This research presents a solution to the raised reversibility problem. Like the others, our research, first, applies an edge detector e.g., canny, in a cover image. The scheme next collects \$n\$-LSBs of each of edge pixels and finally, concatenates them with encrypted message stream. This method applies a lossless compression algorithm to that processed stream. Compression factor is taken such a way that the length of compressed stream does not exceed the length of collected LSBs. The compressed message stream is then implanted only in the edge pixels by \$n\$-LSB substitution method. As the scheme does not destroy the originality of non-edge pixels, it presents better stego quality. By incorporation the mechanisms of encryption, concatenation, compression and \$n\$-LSB, the method has enriched the security of implanted data. The research shows its effectiveness while implanting a small sized message.

Steganography is the technique of hiding a confidential message in an ordinary message where the extraction of embedded information is done at its destination. Among the different carrier files formats; digital images are the most popular. This paper presents a Wavelet-based method for hiding secret information in digital images where skin areas are identified and used as a region of interest. The work presented here is an extension of a method published earlier by the authors that utilized a rule-based approach to detect skin regions. The proposed method, proposed embedding the secret data into the integer Wavelet coefficients of the approximation sub-band of the cover image. When compared to the original technique, experimental results showed a lower error percentage between skin maps detected before the embedding and during the extraction processes. This eventually increased the similarity between the original and the retrieved secret image.

In our time the rapid growth of internet and digital communications has been required to be protected from illegal users. It is important to secure the information transmitted between the sender and receiver over the communication channels such as the internet, since it is a public environment. Cryptography and Steganography are the most popular techniques used for sending data in secrete way. In this paper, we are proposing a new algorithm that combines both cryptography and steganography in order to increase the level of data security against attackers. In cryptography, we are using affine hill cipher method; while in steganography we are using Hybrid edge detection with LSB to hide the message. Our paper shows how we can use image edges to hide text message. Grayscale images are used for our experiments and a comparison is developed based on using different edge detection operators such as (canny-LoG ) and (Canny-Sobel). Their performance is measured using PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise ratio), MSE (Mean Squared Error) and EC (Embedding Capacity). The results indicate that, using hybrid edge detection (canny- LoG) with LSB for hiding data could provide high embedding capacity than using hybrid edge detection (canny- Sobel) with LSB. We could prove that hiding in the image edge area could preserve the imperceptibility of the Stego-image. This paper has also proved that the secrete message was extracted successfully without any distortion.

Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.

To restrict unauthorized access to the data of the website. Most of the web-based systems nowadays require users to verify themselves before accessing the website is authentic information. In terms of security, it is very important to take different security measures for the protection of the authentic data of the website. However, most of the authentication systems which are used on the web today have several security flaws. This document is based on the security of the previous schemes. Compared to the previous approaches, this “spoofed proof stateless session model” method offers superior security assurance in a scenario in which an attacker has unauthorized access to the data of the website. The various protocol models are being developed and implemented on the web to analyze the performance. The aim was to secure the authentic database backups of the website and prevent them from SQL injection attacks by using the read-only properties for the database. This limits potential harm and provides users with reasonable security safeguards when an attacker has an unauthorized read-only access to the website's authentic database. This scheme provides robustness to the disclosure of authentic databases. Proven experimental results show the overheads due to the modified authentication method and the insecure model.

Due to the simplicity of implementation and high threat level, SQL injection attacks are one of the oldest, most prevalent, and most destructive types of security attacks on Web-based information systems. With the continuous development and maturity of artificial intelligence technology, it has been a general trend to use AI technology to detect SQL injection. The selection of the sample set is the deciding factor of whether AI algorithms can achieve good results, but dataset with tagged specific category labels are difficult to obtain. This paper focuses on data augmentation to learn similar feature representations from the original data to improve the accuracy of classification models. In this paper, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks combined with genetic algorithms are applied to the field of Web vulnerability attacks, aiming to solve the problem of insufficient number of SQL injection samples. This method is also expected to be applied to sample generation for other types of vulnerability attacks.

Aiming at the specificity and complexity of the power IoT terminal, a method of power IoT terminal firmware vulnerability detection based on memory fuzzing is proposed. Use the method of bypassing the execution to simulate and run the firmware program, dynamically monitor and control the execution of the firmware program, realize the memory fuzzing test of the firmware program, design an automatic vulnerability exploitability judgment plug-in for rules and procedures, and provide power on this basis The method and specific process of the firmware vulnerability detection of the IoT terminal. The effectiveness of the method is verified by an example.

Despite the fact that the power grid is typically regarded as a relatively stable system, outages and electricity shortages are common occurrences. Grid security is mainly dependent on accurate vulnerability assessment. The vulnerability can be assessed in terms of topology-based metrics and flow-based metrics. In this work, power flow analysis is used to calculate the metrics under single line contingency (N-1) conditions. The effect of load uncertainty on system vulnerability is checked. The IEEE 30 bus power network has been used for the case study. It has been found that the variation in load demand affects the system vulnerability.

MIMO system makes full use of the space dimension, in the era of increasingly tense spectrum resources, which greatly improves the spectrum efficiency and is one of the future communication support technologies. At the same time, considering the high cost of direct communication between the two parties in a long distance, the relay communication mode has been paid more and more attention. In relay communication network, each node connected by relay has different security levels. In order to forward the information of all nodes, the relay node has the lowest security permission level. Therefore, it is meaningful to study the physical layer security problem in MIMO two-way relay system with relay as the eavesdropper. In view of the above situation, this paper proposes the physical layer security model of MIMO two-way relay cooperative communication network, designs a communication matching grouping algorithm with low complexity and a two-step carrier allocation optimization algorithm, which improves the total security capacity of the system. At the same time, theoretical analysis and simulation verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Vehicular networks are vulnerable to large scale attacks. Blockchain, implemented upon application layer, is recommended as one of the effective security and privacy solutions for vehicular networks. However, due to an increasing complexity of connected nodes, heterogeneous environment and rising threats, a robust security solution across multiple layers is required. Motivated by the Physical Layer Security (PLS) which utilizes physical layer characteristics such as channel fading to ensure reliable and confidential transmission, in this paper we analyze the impact of PLS on a blockchain-enabled vehicular network with two types of physical layer attacks, i.e., jamming and eavesdropping. Throughout the analysis, a Full Duplex Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (FD-NOMA) based vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is considered to reduce interference caused by jamming and meet 5G communication requirements. Simulation results show enhanced goodput of a blockckchain enabled vehicular network integrated with PLS as compared to the same solution without PLS.

In this short position paper, we discuss several potential security concerns that can be found at the physical layer of 6th-generation (6G) cellular networks. Discussion on 6G cellular networks is still at its early stage and thus several candidate radio technologies have been proposed but no single technology has yet been finally selected for 6G systems. Among several radio technologies, we focus on three promising ones for 6G physical-layer technologies: reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), Open-RAN (O-RAN), and full-duplex radios. We hope this position paper will spark more active discussion on the security concerns in these new radio technologies.

Swarm learning (SL) is an emerging promising decentralized machine learning paradigm and has achieved high performance in clinical applications. SL solves the problem of a central structure in federated learning by combining edge computing and blockchain-based peer-to-peer network. While there are promising results in the assumption of the independent and identically distributed (IID) data across participants, SL suffers from performance degradation as the degree of the non-IID data increases. To address this problem, we propose a generative augmentation framework in swarm learning called SL-GAN, which augments the non-IID data by generating the synthetic data from participants. SL-GAN trains generators and discriminators locally, and periodically aggregation via a randomly elected coordinator in SL network. Under the standard assumptions, we theoretically prove the convergence of SL-GAN using stochastic approximations. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-GAN outperforms state-of-art methods on three real world clinical datasets including Tuberculosis, Leukemia, COVID-19.

In this paper, we consider a discrete-time stochastic Stackelberg game where there is a defender (also called leader) who has to defend a target and an attacker (also called follower). The attacker has a private type that evolves as a controlled Markov process. The objective is to compute the stochastic Stackelberg equilibrium of the game where defender commits to a strategy. The attacker’s strategy is the best response to the defender strategy and defender’s strategy is optimum given the attacker plays the best response. In general, computing such equilibrium involves solving a fixed-point equation for the whole game. In this paper, we present an algorithm that computes such strategies by solving lower dimensional fixed-point equations for each time t. Based on this algorithm, we compute the Stackelberg equilibrium of a security example.

Security evaluation can be performed using a variety of analysis methods, such as attack trees, attack graphs, threat propagation models, stochastic Petri nets, and so on. These methods analyze the effect of attacks on the system, and estimate security attributes from different perspectives. However, they require information from experts in the application domain for properly capturing the key elements of an attack scenario: i) the attack paths a system could be subject to, and ii) the different characteristics of the possible adversaries. For this reason, some recent works focused on the generation of low-level security models from a high-level description of the system, hiding the technical details from the modeler.In this paper we build on an existing ontology framework for security analysis, available in the ADVISE Meta tool, and we extend it in two directions: i) to cover the attack patterns available in the CAPEC database, a comprehensive dictionary of known patterns of attack, and ii) to capture all the adversaries’ profiles as defined in the Threat Agent Library (TAL), a reference library for defining the characteristics of external and internal threat agents ranging from industrial spies to untrained employees. The proposed extension supports a richer combination of adversaries’ profiles and attack paths, and provides guidance on how to further enrich the ontology based on taxonomies of attacks and adversaries.

The proliferation of autonomous and connected vehicles on our roads is increasingly felt. However, the problems related to the optimization of the energy consumed, to the safety, and to the security of these do not cease to arise on the tables of debates bringing together the various stakeholders. By focusing on the security aspect of such systems, we can realize that there is a family of problems that must be investigated as soon as possible. In particular, those that may manifest as the system expands. Therefore, this work aims to model and simulate the behavior of a system of autonomous and connected vehicles in the face of a malware invasion. In order to achieve the set objective, we propose a model to our system which is inspired by those used in epidimology, such as SI, SIR, SIER, etc. This being adapted to our case study, stochastic processes are defined in order to characterize its dynamics. After having fixed the values of the various parameters, as well as those of the initial conditions, we run 100 simulations of our system. After which we visualize the results got, we analyze them, and we give some interpretations. We end by outlining the lessons and recommendations drawn from the results.

Native code is now commonplace within Android app packages where it co-exists and interacts with Dex bytecode through the Java Native Interface to deliver rich app functionalities. Yet, state-of-the-art static analysis approaches have mostly overlooked the presence of such native code, which, however, may implement some key sensitive, or even malicious, parts of the app behavior. This limitation of the state of the art is a severe threat to validity in a large range of static analyses that do not have a complete view of the executable code in apps. To address this issue, we propose a new advance in the ambitious research direction of building a unified model of all code in Android apps. The JUCIFY approach presented in this paper is a significant step towards such a model, where we extract and merge call graphs of native code and bytecode to make the final model readily-usable by a common Android analysis framework: in our implementation, JUCIFY builds on the Soot internal intermediate representation. We performed empirical investigations to highlight how, without the unified model, a significant amount of Java methods called from the native code are “unreachable” in apps' callgraphs, both in goodware and malware. Using JUCIFY, we were able to enable static analyzers to reveal cases where malware relied on native code to hide invocation of payment library code or of other sensitive code in the Android framework. Additionally, JUCIFY'S model enables state-of-the-art tools to achieve better precision and recall in detecting data leaks through native code. Finally, we show that by using JUCIFY we can find sensitive data leaks that pass through native code.

The complexity and scale of modern software programs often lead to overlooked programming errors and security vulnerabilities. Developers often rely on automatic tools, like static analysis tools, to look for bugs and vulnerabilities. Static analysis tools are widely used because they can understand nontrivial program behaviors, scale to millions of lines of code, and detect subtle bugs. However, they are known to generate an excess of false alarms which hinder their utilization as it is counterproductive for developers to go through a long list of reported issues, only to find a few true positives. One of the ways proposed to suppress false positives is to use machine learning to identify them. However, training machine learning models requires good quality labeled datasets. For this purpose, we developed D2A [3], a differential analysis based approach that uses the commit history of a code repository to create a labeled dataset of Infer [2] static analysis output.

In this paper we consider cyber security requirements of the smart buildings. We identify cyber risks, threats, attack scenarios, security objectives and related security controls. The work was done as a part of a smart building design and construction work. From the controls identified w e concluded security practices for engineering-in smart buildings security. The paper provides an idea toward which system security engineers can strive in the basic design and implementation of the most critical components of the smart buildings. The intent of the concept is to help practitioners to avoid ad hoc approaches in the development of security mechanisms for smart buildings with shared space.

The increasing demand for the interconnected IoT based smart grid is facing threats from cyber-attacks due to inherent vulnerability in the smart grid network. There is a pressing need to evaluate and model these vulnerabilities in the network to avoid cascading failures in power systems. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a vulnerability assessment framework based on attack probability for the protection and security of a smart grid. Several factors were taken into consideration such as the probability of attack, propagation of attack from a parent node to child nodes, effectiveness of basic metering system, Kalman estimation and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The IEEE-300 bus smart grid was simulated using MATPOWER to study the effectiveness of the proposed framework by injecting false data injection attacks (FDIA); and studying their propagation. Our results show that the use of severity assessment standards such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), AMI measurements and Kalman estimates were very effective for evaluating the vulnerability assessment of smart grid in the presence of FDIA attack scenarios.

In today's era, the smart grid is the carrier of the new energy technology revolution and a very critical development stage for grid intelligence. In the process of smart grid operation, maintenance and maintenance, many heterogeneous and polymorphic data can be formed, that is to say big data. This paper analyzes the power big data prediction technology for smart grid applications, and proposes practical application strategies In this paper, an in-depth analysis of the relationship between cloud computing and big data key technologies and smart grid is carried out, and an overview of the key technologies of electric power big data is carried out.

As a new generation of power grid system, smart grid and smart meter conduct two-way communication to realize the intelligent collection, monitoring and dispatching of user power data, so as to achieve a safer, stable, reliable and efficient power grid environment. With the vigorous development of power grid, there are also some security and privacy problems. This paper uses Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm and role-based access control strategy to ensure the privacy security in the process of multi-dimensional aggregation, data transmission and sharing of power data. Applying the characteristics of blockchain technology such as decentralization, non tampering and traceability to the smart grid can effectively solve the privacy and security problems of power data transmission and sharing in the smart grid. This paper compares Paillier encryption algorithm with PPAR algorithm and SIAHE algorithm in terms of encryption mechanism, number of aggregators and computational complexity respectively. The results show that Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm has higher data privacy and security.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) plays a leading role in maritime navigation, traffic control, local and global maritime situational awareness. Today, the reliable and secure AIS operation is threatened by probable cyber attacks such as imitation of ghost vessels, false distress or security messages, or fake virtual aids-to-navigation. We propose a method for ensuring the authentication and integrity of AIS messages based on the use of the Message Authentication Code scheme and digital watermarking (WM) technology to organize an additional tag transmission channel. The method provides full compatibility with the existing AIS functionality.

Accurate and synchronized timing information is required by power system operators for controlling the grid infrastructure (relays, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), etc.) and determining asset positions. Satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) is the primary source of timing information. However, GPS disruptions today (both intentional and unintentional) can significantly compromise the reliability and security of our electric grids. A robust alternate source for accurate timing is critical to serve both as a deterrent against malicious attacks and as a redundant system in enhancing the resilience against extreme events that could disrupt the GPS network. To achieve this, we rely on the highly accurate, terrestrial atomic clock-based network for alternative timing and synchronization. In this paper, we discuss an experimental setup for an alternative timing approach. The data obtained from this experimental setup is continuously monitored and analyzed using various time deviation metrics. We also use these metrics to compute deviations of our clock with respect to the National Institute of Standards and Technologys (NIST) GPS data. The results obtained from these metric computations are elaborately discussed. Finally, we discuss the integration of the procedures involved, like real-time data ingestion, metric computation, and result visualization, in a novel microservices-based architecture for situational awareness.

Increasing connectivity and automation in vehicles leads to a greater potential attack surface. Such vulnerabilities within vehicles can also be used for auto-theft, increasing the potential for attackers to disable anti-theft mechanisms implemented by vehicle manufacturers. We utilize patterns derived from Controller Area Network (CAN) bus traffic to verify driver “behavior”, as a basis to prevent vehicle theft. Our proposed model uses semi-supervised learning that continuously profiles a driver, using features extracted from CAN bus traffic. We have selected 15 key features and obtained an accuracy of 99% using a dataset comprising a total of 51 features across 10 different drivers. We use a number of data analysis algorithms, such as J48, Random Forest, JRip and clustering, using 94K records. Our results show that J48 is the best performing algorithm in terms of training and testing (1.95 seconds and 0.44 seconds recorded, respectively). We also analyze the effect of using a sliding window on algorithm performance, altering the size of the window to identify the impact on prediction accuracy.

Smart cities deploy large numbers of sensors and collect a tremendous amount of data from them. For example, Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMIs), which consist of physical meters that collect usage data about public utilities such as power and water, are an important building block in a smart city. In a typical sensor network, the measurement devices are connected through a computer network, which exposes them to cyber attacks. Furthermore, the data is centrally managed at the operator’s servers, making it vulnerable to insider threats.Our goal is to protect the integrity of data collected by large-scale sensor networks and the firmware in measurement devices from cyber attacks and insider threats. To this end, we first develop a comprehensive threat model for attacks against data and firmware integrity, which can target any of the stakeholders in the operation of the sensor network. Next, we use our threat model to analyze existing defense mechanisms, including signature checks, remote firmware attestation, anomaly detection, and blockchain-based secure logs. However, the large size of the Trusted Computing Base and a lack of scalability limit the applicability of these existing mechanisms. We propose the Feather-Light Blockchain Infrastructure (FLBI) framework to address these limitations. Our framework leverages a two-layer architecture and cryptographic threshold signature chains to support large networks of low-capacity devices such as meters and data aggregators. We have fully implemented the FLBI’s end-to-end functionality on the Hyperledger Fabric and private Ethereum blockchain platforms. Our experiments show that the FLBI is able to support millions of end devices.