Biblio

To increase security and to offer user experiences according to the requirements of a hyper-connected world, modern vehicles are integrating complex electronic systems, being transformed into systems of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). While a great diversity of heterogeneous hardware and software components must work together and control in real-time crucial functionalities, cybersecurity for the automotive sector is still in its infancy. This paper provides an analysis of the most common vulnerabilities and risks of connected vehicles, using a real example based on industrial and market-ready technologies. Several components have been implemented to inject and simulate multiple attacks, which enable security services and mitigation actions to be developed and validated.

The advancement and penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and renewable energy sources (RES) are transforming legacy energy systems in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions and energy waste. Demand Response (DR) has been identified as a key enabler of integrating these, and other, Smart Grid technologies, while, simultaneously, ensuring grid stability and secure energy supply. The massive deployment of smart meters, IoT devices and DERs dictate the need to move to decentralized, or even localized, DR schemes in the face of the increased scale and complexity of monitoring and coordinating the actors and devices in modern smart grids. Furthermore, there is an inherent need to guarantee interoperability, due to the vast number of, e.g., hardware and software stakeholders, and, more importantly, promote trust and incentivize the participation of customers in DR schemes, if they are to be successfully deployed.In this work, we illustrate the design of an energy system that addresses all of the roadblocks that hinder the large scale deployment of DR services. Our DR framework incorporates modern Smart Grid technologies, such as fog-enabled and IoT devices, DERs and RES to, among others, automate asset handling and various time-consuming workflows. To guarantee interoperability, our system employs OpenADR, which standardizes the communication of DR signals among energy stakeholders. Our approach acknowledges the need for decentralization and employs blockchains and smart contracts to deliver a secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, auditable and reliable DR framework. Blockchains provide the infrastructure to design innovative DR schemes and incentivize active consumer participation as their aforementioned properties promote transparency and trust. In addition, we harness the power of smart contracts which allows us to design and implement fully automated contractual agreements both among involved stakeholders, as well as on a machine-to-machine basis. Smart contracts are digital agents that "live" in the blockchain and can encode, execute and enforce arbitrary agreements. To illustrate the potential and effectiveness of our smart contract-based DR framework, we present a case study that describes the exchange of DR signals and the autonomous instantiation of smart contracts among involved participants to mediate and monitor transactions, enforce contractual clauses, regulate energy supply and handle payments/penalties.

In recent trends, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things interpret an evolution of computerized integration connectivity. The specific research challenges in CPS as security, privacy, data analytics, participate sensing, smart decision making. In addition, The challenges in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) includes secure architecture, energy efficient protocols and quality of services. In this paper, we present an architectures of CPS and its protocols and applications. We propose software related mobile sensing paradigm namely Mobile Sensor Information Agent (MSIA). It works as plug-in based for CPS middleware and scalable applications in mobile devices. The working principle MSIA is acts intermediary device and gathers data from a various external sensors and its upload to cloud on demand. CPS needs tight integration between cyber world and man-made physical world to achieve stability, security, reliability, robustness, and efficiency in the system. Emerging software-defined networking (SDN) can be integrated as the communication infrastructure with CPS infrastructure to accomplish such system. Thus we propose a possible SDN-based CPS framework to improve the performance of the system.

The trending technological research platform is Internet of Things (IoT)and most probably it will stay that way for a while. One of the main application areas of IoT is Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), in which IoT devices can be leveraged as actuators and sensors in accordance with the system needs. The public acceptance and adoption of CPS services and applications will create a huge amount of privacy issues related to the processing, storage and disclosure of the user location information. As a remedy, our paper proposes a methodology to provide location privacy for the users of CPSs. Our proposal takes advantage of concepts such as mix-zone, context-awareness, and location-obfuscation. According to our best knowledge, the proposed methodology is the first privacy-preserving location service for CPSs that offers adaptable privacy levels related to the current context of the user.

With the advancement in technology, inclusion of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the conventional Electrical Power Grid has become evident. The combination of communication system with physical system makes it cyber-physical system (CPS). Though the advantages of this improvement in technology are numerous, there exist certain issues with the system. Security and privacy concerns of a CPS are a major field and research and the insight of which is content of this paper.

The notion of Cyber Physical Systems is based on using recent computing, communication, and control methods to design and operate intelligent and autonomous systems that can provide using innovative technologies. The existence of several critical applications within the scope of cyber physical systems results in many security and privacy concerns. On the other hand, the distributive nature of these CPS increases security risks. In addition, certain CPS, such as medical ones, generate and process sensitive data regularly, hence, this data must be protected at all levels of generation, processing, and transmission. In this paper, we present a taxonomy based analysis for the state of the art work on security issues in CPS. We identify four types of analysis for security issues in CPS: Modeling, Detection, Prevention, and Response. In addition, we identified six applications of CPS where security is relevant: eHealth and medical, smart grid and power related, vehicular technologies, industrial control and manufacturing, autonomous systems and UAVs, and finally IoT related issues. Then we mapped existing works in the literature into these categories.

Cyber Physical System (CPS) is one of the emerging technologies of the day due to its large number of applications. Its applications extends to automotive, commercial, medical, home appliances and manufacturing industries. Mass research is being conducted in this area including design models, signal processing, control system models, communication models and security. One of the most important aspects of these is security and privacy of CPS. There are a number of vulnerabilities and threats that can be used by an attacker to exploit a cyber physical system. This paper provides a brief review of current security threats, vulnerabilities and its solutions for CPS. For the sake of simplicity the security threats have been divided into two classes i.e. control security and information security. Based on this division various attack methods and their possible solutions have been discussed.

The increasingly networked human society requires that human beings have a clear understanding and control over the structure, nature and behavior of various social networks. There is a tendency towards privacy in the study of network evolutions because privacy disclosure behavior in the network has gradually developed into a serious concern. For this purpose, we extended information theory and proposed a brand-new concept about so-called “habitual privacy” to quantitatively analyze privacy exposure behavior and facilitate privacy computation. We emphasized that habitual privacy is an inherent property of the user and is correlated with their habitual behaviors. The widely approved driving force in recent modeling complex networks is originated from activity. Thus, we propose the privacy-driven model through synthetically considering the activity impact and habitual privacy underlying the decision process. Privacy-driven model facilitates to more accurately capture highly dynamical network behaviors and figure out the complex evolution process, allowing a profound understanding of the evolution of network driven by privacy.

Today, connectivity is demanded in almost every domain, e.g., the smart home domain and its connected smart household devices like TVs and fridges, or the industrial automation domain, connecting plants, controllers and sensors to the internet for purposes like condition monitoring. This trend amplifies the need for secure applications that can protect their sensitive data against manipulation and leaks. However, many applications are still built without considering security in its design phase, often it is perceived as too complicated and time consuming. This is a major oversight, as fixing vulnerabilities after release is often not feasible when major architecture redesigns are necessary. Therefore, the software developer has to make sure that the developed software architecture is secure. Today, there are some tools available to help the software developer in identifying potential security weaknesses of their architecture. However, easy and fast to use tools that support the software developer in improving their architecture's security are lacking. The goal of my thesis is to make security improvements easily applicable by non-security and non-architecture experts by proposing systematic, easy to use and automated techniques that will help the software developer in designing secure software architectures. To achieve this goal, I propose a method that enables the software developer to automatically find flaws and weaknesses, as well as appropriate improvements in their given software architecture during the design phase. For this method, I adopt Model-Based Development techniques by extending and creating Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) for specifying the architecture itself and possible architectural improvements. Using these DSLs, my approach automatically suggests security enhancing improvements for the architecture, promoting increased security of software architectures and as such for the developed applications as a whole.

To detect specific types of bugs and vulnerabilities, static analysis tools must be correctly configured with security-relevant methods (SRM), e.g., sources, sinks, sanitizers and authentication methods-usually a very labour-intensive and error-prone process. This work presents the semi-automated tool SWAN\_ASSIST, which aids the configuration with an IntelliJ plugin based on active machine learning. It integrates our novel automated machine-learning approach SWAN, which identifies and classifies Java SRM. SWAN\_ASSIST further integrates user feedback through iterative learning. SWAN\_ASSIST aids developers by asking them to classify at each point in time exactly those methods whose classification best impact the classification result. Our experiments show that SWAN\_ASSIST classifies SRM with a high precision, and requires a relatively low effort from the user. A video demo of SWAN\_ASSIST can be found at https://youtu.be/fSyD3V6EQOY. The source code is available at https://github.com/secure-software-engineering/swan.

Responding to network security incidents requires interference with ongoing attacks to restore the security of services running on production systems. This approach prevents damage, but drastically impedes the collection of threat intelligence and the analysis of vulnerabilities, exploits, and attack strategies. We propose the live confinement of suspicious microservices into a sandbox network that allows to monitor and analyze ongoing attacks under quarantine and that retains an image of the vulnerable and open production network. A successful sandboxing requires that it happens completely transparent to and cannot be detected by an attacker. Therefore, we introduce a novel metric to measure the Quality of Deception (QoD) and use it to evaluate three proposed network deception mechanisms. Our evaluation results indicate that in our evaluation scenario in best case, an optimal QoD is achieved. In worst case, only a small downtime of approx. 3s per microservice (MS) occurs and thus a momentary drop in QoD to 70.26% before it converges back to optimum as the quarantined services are restored.

The sheer size of IoT networks being deployed today presents an "attack surface" and poses significant security risks at a scale never before encountered. In other words, a single device/node in a network that becomes infected with malware has the potential to spread malware across the network, eventually ceasing the network functionality. Simply detecting and quarantining the malware in IoT networks does not guarantee to prevent malware propagation. On the other hand, use of traditional control theory for malware confinement is not effective, as most of the existing works do not consider real-time malware control strategies that can be implemented using uncertain infection information of the nodes in the network or have the containment problem decoupled from network performance. In this work, we propose a two-pronged approach, where a runtime malware detector (HaRM) that employs Hardware Performance Counter (HPC) values to detect the malware and benign applications is devised. This information is fed during runtime to a stochastic model predictive controller to confine the malware propagation without hampering the network performance. With the proposed solution, a runtime malware detection accuracy of 92.21% with a runtime of 10ns is achieved, which is an order of magnitude faster than existing malware detection solutions. Synthesizing this output with the model predictive containment strategy lead to achieving an average network throughput of nearly 200% of that of IoT networks without any embedded defense.

Cloud computing is not adequately secure due to the currently used traditional trust methods such as global trust model and local trust model. These are prone to security vulnerabilities. This paper introduces a trust model based on the fuzzy mathematics and gray relational theory. Fuzzy mathematics and gray relational analysis (Fuzzy-GRA) aims to improve the poor dynamic adaptability of cloud computing. Fuzzy-GRA platform is used to test and validate the behavior of the model. Furthermore, our proposed model is compared to other known models. Based on the experimental results, we prove that our model has the edge over other existing models.

This paper proposes a triple-layer, high capacity, message security scheme. The first two layers are of a cryptographic nature, whereas the third layer is of a steganographic nature. In the first layer, AES-128 encryption is performed on the secret message. In the second layer, a chaotic logistic map encryption is applied on the output of the first secure layer to increase the security of the scheme. In the third layer of security, a 2D image steganography technique is performed, where the least significant bit (LSB) -embedding is done according to a zigzag pattern in each of the three color planes of the cover image (i.e. RGB). The distinguishing feature of the proposed scheme is that the secret data is hidden in a zigzag manner that cannot be predicted by a third party. Moreover, our scheme achieves higher values of peak signal to noise ratio (PPSNR), mean square error (MSE), the structural similarity index metric (SSIM), normal cross correlation (NCC) and image fidelity (IF) compared to its counterparts form the literature. In addition, a histogram analysis as well as the high achieved capacity are magnificent indicators for a reliable and high capacity steganographic scheme.

This paper presents a framework for medium access control (MAC) and physical (PRY) cross-layer security design of wireless avionics intra-communications (WAICs). The paper explores the different options based on the latest results of MAC-PRY cross-layer design and the available standard technologies for WAICs. Particular emphasis is given to solutions based on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and recent developments towards a wireless technology with ultra-low latency and high reliability in the context of 5G and machine-type traffic support. One major objective is to improve WAICs technology and thus match the real-time, reliability and safety critical performance of the internal aeronautics bus technologies (e.g., ARINC 664). The main identified vulnerabilities and potential solutions are explored, as well as their impact on system design complexity and feasibility for wireless networks on-board aircraft. The solutions are presented in the context of the European project SCOTT (secure connected trustable things) using the recently released reference architecture for trusted IoT systems. Other aspects of SCOTT such as trust, privacy, security classes, and safety are also discussed here for the aeronautics domain.

The burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) has offered unprecedented opportunities for innovations and applications that are continuously changing our life. At the same time, the large amount of pervasive IoT applications have posed paramount threats to the user's security and privacy. While a lot of efforts have been dedicated to deal with such threats from the hardware, the software, and the applications, in this paper, we argue and envision that more effective and comprehensive protection for IoT systems can only be achieved via a cross-layer approach. As such, we present our initial design of XLF, a cross-layer framework towards this goal. XLF can secure the IoT systems not only from each individual layer of device, network, and service, but also through the information aggregation and correlation of different layers.

With the explosive data growth arise from internet of things, how to ensure information security is facing unprecedented challenges. In this paper, a joint PHY/MAC layer security scheme with artificial noise design in singular value decomposition (SVD) based multiple input multiple output hybrid automatic retransmission request (MIMO HARQ) system is proposed to resolve the problem of low data rates in existing cross-layer security design and further adapt to the high data rate requirement of 5G. First, the SVD was applied to simplify MIMO systems into several parallel sub-channels employing HARQ protocol. Then, different from traditional null space based artificial noise design, the artificial noise design, which is dependent on the characteristics of channel states and transmission rounds, is detailed presented. Finally, the analytical and simulation results proved that with the help of the proposed artificial noise, both the information security and data rate performance can be significantly improved compared with that in single input single output (SISO) system.

Internet is a common method of trading business today. The usage of cryptocurrencies has increased these days and it has become a trend to utilize them. Cryptocurrency exchange servicers provide different smartphone apps that unfortunately may become the target of malicious attacks. This paper focuses on how it achieves highest security and proposes the multiple layered security analyses method for cryptocurrency exchange servicers.

Hardware vulnerabilities are often due to design mistakes because the designer does not sufficiently consider potential security vulnerabilities at the design stage. As a result, various security solutions have been developed to protect ICs, among which the language-based hardware security verification serves as a promising solution. The verification process will be performed while compiling the HDL of the design. However, similar to other formal verification methods, the language-based approach also suffers from scalability issue. Furthermore, existing solutions either lead to hardware overhead or are not designed for vulnerable or malicious logic detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a new language based framework, QIF-Verilog, to evaluate the trustworthiness of a hardware system at register transfer level (RTL). This framework introduces a quantified information flow (QIF) model and extends Verilog type systems to provide more expressiveness in presenting security rules; QIF is capable of checking the security rules given by the hardware designer. Secrets are labeled by the new type and then parsed to data flow, to which a QIF model will be applied. To demonstrate our approach, we design a compiler for QIF-Verilog and perform vulnerability analysis on benchmarks from Trust-Hub and OpenCore. We show that Trojans or design faults that leak information from circuit outputs can be detected automatically, and that our method evaluates the security of the design correctly.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) model in clustering as an approach to achieve higher network scalability in distributed cognitive radio networks. Specifically, it analyzes the effects of RL parameters, namely the learning rate and discount factor in a volatile environment, which consists of member nodes (or secondary users) that launch attacks with various probabilities of attack. The clusterhead, which resides in an operating region (environment) that is characterized by the probability of attacks, countermeasures the malicious SUs by leveraging on a RL model. Simulation results have shown that in a volatile operating environment, the RL model with learning rate α= 1 provides the highest network scalability when the probability of attacks ranges between 0.3 and 0.7, while the discount factor γ does not play a significant role in learning in an operating environment that is volatile due to attacks.

In this paper, secrecy outage probability (SOP) of cooperative communications in ESCRNs is numerically evaluated by the recommended precise closed-form formula which is corroborated by numerous computer simulations. Results expose that the relay's location, energy scavenging time, message recovering time, and power division for energy scavenging and message recovering dramatically impact the SOP of the cooperative communications in ESCRNs. Moreover, results infer that the SOP is constant either in energy scavenging non-cognitive networks (ES-nonCRNs) or in ESCRNs with infinite power transmitters.

In this paper, we propose an exact closed-form expression of secrecy outage probability (SOP) for underlay cognitive network with energy scavenging capable relay over Nakagami-m fading channels and under both (maximum transmit and interference) power constraints. Various results validated the proposed expression and shed insights into the security performance of this network in key specifications.

In this paper, the physical layer (PHY)security performance of a dual-hop cooperative relaying in a cognitive-radio system in the presence of an eavesdropper is investigated. The dual-hop transmission is composed of an asymmetric radio frequency (RF)link and a free space optical (FSO)link. In the considered system, an unlicensed secondary user (SU)uses the spectrum which is shared by a licensed primary user (PU)in a controlled manner to keep the interference at PU receiver, below a predefined value. Furthermore, among M available relays, one relay with the best end-to-end signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR)is selected for transmission. It is assumed that all of the RF links follow Rayleigh fading and all of the FSO links follow Gamma-Gamma distribution. Simulations results for some important security metrics, such as the average secrecy capacity (SC), and secrecy outage probability (SOP)are presented, where some practical issues of FSO links such as atmospheric turbulence, and pointing errors are taken into consideration.

Matrices as mathematical models have been used in each branch of scientific fields for hundred years. We propose a new type of matrices, called topological coding matrices (Topcode-matrices). Topcode-matrices show us the following advantages: Topcode-matrices can be saved in computer easily and run quickly in computation; since a Topcode-matrix corresponds two or more Topsnut-gpws, so Topcode-matrices can be used to encrypt networks such that the encrypted networks have higher security; Topcode-matrices can be investigated and applied by people worked in more domains; Topcode-matrices can help us to form new operations, new parameters and new topics of graph theory, such as vertex/edge splitting operations and connectivities of graphs. Several properties and applications on Topcode-matrices, and particular Topcode-matrices, as well as unknown problems are introduced.

The presented method of encoding and steganographic embedding of a series of bits for the hidden message was first developed by modifying the digital platform (bases) of the elements of the image container. Unlike other methods, steganographic coding and embedding is accomplished by changing the elements of the image fragment, followed by the formation of code structures for the established structure of the digital representation of the structural elements of the image media image. The method of estimating quantitative indicators of embedded critical data is presented. The number of bits of the container for the developed method of steganographic coding and embedding of critical information is estimated. The efficiency of the presented method is evaluated and the comparative analysis of the value of the embedded digital data in relation to the method of weight coefficients of the discrete cosine transformation matrix, as well as the comparative analysis of the developed method of steganographic coding, compared with the Koch and Zhao methods to determine the embedded data resistance against attacks of various types. It is determined that for different values of the quantization coefficient, the most critical are the built-in containers of critical information, which are built by changing the part of the digital video data platform depending on the size of the digital platform and the number of bits of the built-in container.