Biblio

Networked Control Systems (NCS) are widely used in Industry 4.0 to obtain better management and operational capabilities, as well as to reduce costs. However, despite the benefits provided by NCSs, the integration of communication networks with physical plants can also expose these systems to cyber threats. This work proposes a link monitoring strategy to identify linear time-invariant transfer functions performed by a Man-in-the-Middle during controlled data injection attacks in NCSs. The results demonstrate that the proposed identification scheme provides adequate accuracy when estimating the attack function, and does not interfere in the plant behavior when the system is not under attack.

In order to enhance the network security protection level of intelligent substation, this paper puts forward a model of intelligent substation network security defense system through the analysis of intelligent substation network security risk and protection demand, and using example proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the defense system. It is intelligent substation network security protection provides a new solution.

Aiming at the operation characteristics of power industry control system, this paper deeply analyses the attack mechanism and characteristics of power industry control system intrusion. On the basis of classifying and sorting out the attack characteristics of power industrial control system, this paper also attaches importance to break the basic theory and consequential technologies of industrial control network space security, and constructs the network intrusion as well as attack model of power industrial control system to realize the precise characterization of attackers' attack behavior, which provides a theoretical model for the analysis and early warning of attack behavior analysis of power industrial control systems.

The borderless, dynamic, high dimensional and virtual natures of cyberspace have brought unprecedented hard situation for defenders. To fight uncertain challenges in versatile cyberspace, a security framework based on the cloud computing platform that facilitates containerization technology to create a security capability pool to generate and distribute security payload according to system needs. Composed by four subsystems of the security decision center, the image and container library, the decision rule base and the security event database, this framework distills structured knowledge from aggregated security events and then deliver security load to the managed network or terminal nodes directed by the decision center. By introducing such unified and standardized top-level security framework that is decomposable, combinable and configurable in a service-oriented manner, it could offer flexibility and effectiveness in reconstructing security resource allocation and usage to reach higher efficiency.

Digital ant technology is a new distributed and self-organization cyberspace defense paradigm. This paper describes digital ants system's developing process, characteristics, system architecture and mechanisms to illustrate its superiority, searches the possible applications of digital ants system. The summary of the paper and the trends of digital ants system are pointed out.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a fusion of industrial automation systems and IoT systems. It features comprehensive sensing, interconnected transmission, intelligent processing, self-organization and self-maintenance. Its applications span intelligent transportation, smart factories, and intelligence. Many areas such as power grid and intelligent environment detection. With the widespread application of IIoT technology, the cyber security threats to industrial IoT systems are increasing day by day, and information security issues have become a major challenge in the development process. In order to protect the industrial IoT system from network attacks, this paper aims to study the industrial IoT information security protection technology, and the typical architecture of industrial Internet of things system, and analyzes the network security threats faced by industrial Internet of things system according to the different levels of the architecture, and designs the security protection strategies applied to different levels of structures based on the specific means of network attack.

The defense-in-depth approach has been widely recommended for designing critical information infrastructure, however, the lack of holistic design guidelines makes it difficult for many organizations to adopt the concept. Therefore, this paper proposes a holistic architectural framework and guidelines based on ring-based nested network zones for designing such highly secured information systems. This novel security architectural framework and guidelines offer the overall structural design and implementation options for holistically designing the N-tier/shared nothing system architectures. The implementation options, e.g. for the zone's perimeters, are recommended to achieve different capability levels of security or to trade off among different required security attributes. This framework enables the adaptive capability suitable for different real-world contexts. This paper also proposes an attack-hops verification approach as a tool to evaluate the architectural design.

Exponential growth of data produced and consumed by consumer electronic systems will strain data connectivity technologies beyond the next ten years. A private universal data platform is therefore required to connect CE Hardware for improved security, reliability and energy use. A novel Push-Pull data network architecture is hereto presented, employing multiple bridged peripheral links to create an ultra-fast, ultra-secure, private and low power data network to connect nearly any system. Bridging standard USB 3.0 technologies, we demonstrate a universally secure, ultra-low power and scalable switchable data platform offering the highest level of data privacy, security and performance. Delivering up to 12 times the throughput speeds of existing USB 3.0 data transfer cables, the presented solution builds on the reliability of universal peripheral communications links using proven ports, protocols and low-power components. A “Software Constructed” ad-hoc circuit network, the presented digital architecture delivers frictionless adoption and exceptional price-performance measures connecting both existing and future CE hardware.

The concept of network slicing in 5G mobile networks introduces new challenges for security management: Given the combination of Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers, mobile network operators as Software-as-a-Service providers, and the various verticals as customers, multi-layer and multi-tenancy-capable management architectures are required. This paper addresses the challenges for correlation of security events in such 5G scenarios with a focus on event processing at telecommunication service providers. After an analysis of the specific demand for network-slice-centric security event correlation in 5G networks, ongoing standardization efforts, and related research, we propose a multi-tenancy-capable event correlation architecture along with a scalable information model. The event processing, alerting, and correlation workflow is discussed and has been implemented in a network and security management system prototype, leading to a demonstration of first results acquired in a lab setup.

Internet of Things (IoT) is spreading increasingly in different areas of application. Accordingly, IoT also gets deployed in health care including ambient assisted living, telemedicine or medical smart homes. However, IoT also involves risks. Next to increased security issues also safety concerns are occurring. Deploying health care sensors and utilizing medical data causes a high need for IoT architectures free of vulnerabilities in order to identify weak points as early as possible. To address this, we are developing a safety and security analysis approach including a standardized meta model and an IoT safety and security framework comprising a customizable analysis language.

The operation and management of network is facing increasing complexities brought by the evolution of network protocols and the demands of rapid service delivery. In this paper, we propose a programmable network management architecture, which manages network based on NETCONF protocol and provides REST APIs to upper layer so that further programming can be done based on the APIs to implement flexible management. Functions of devices can be modeled based on YANG language, and the models can be translated into REST APIs. We apply it to the management of ADN (Address Driven Network), an innovative network architecture proposed by Tsinghua University to inhibit IP spoofing, improve network security and provide high service quality. We model the functions of ADN based on YANG language, and implement the network management functions based on the REST APIs. We deploy and evaluate it in a laboratory environment. Test result shows that the programmable network management architecture is flexible to implement management for new network services.

In order to protect power grid network, the security assessment techniques which include both cyber side and the physical side should be considered. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating the dynamic vulnerability of cyber-physical power system (CPPS) considering the power grid infrastructures failure. First, according to the functional characteristics of different components, the impact of a single component function failure on CPPS operation is analyzed and quantified, such as information components, communication components and power components; then, the dynamic vulnerability of multiple components synchronization function failure is calculated, and the full probability evaluation formula of CPPS operational dynamic vulnerability is built; Thirdly, from an attacker's perspective to identify the most hazardous component combinations for CPPS multi-node collaborative attack; Finally, a local CPPS model is established based on the IEEE-9 bus system to quantify its operational dynamic vulnerability, and the effectiveness of proposed method is verified.

Multicast distribution employs the model of many-to-many so that it is a more efficient way of data delivery compared to traditional one-to-one unicast distribution, which can benefit many applications such as media streaming. However, the lack of security features in its nature makes multicast technology much less popular in an open environment such as the Internet. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) take advantage of IP multicast technology's high efficiency of data delivery to provide Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) to their users. But without the full control on their networks, ISPs cannot collect revenue for the services they provide. Secure Internet Group Management Protocol (SIGMP), an extension of Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), and Group Security Association Management Protocol (GSAM), have been proposed to enforce receiver access control at the network level of IP multicast. In this paper, we analyze operational details and issues of both SIGMP and GSAM. An examination of the performance of both protocols is also conducted.

Often, analysts have to face a challenging situation when formally verifying the implementation of a security protocol: they need to build a model of the protocol from only poorly or not documented code, and with little or no help from the developers to better understand it. Security protocols implementations frequently use services provided by libraries coded in the C programming language; automatic tools for codelevel reverse engineering offer good support to comprehend the behavior of code in object-oriented languages but are ineffective to deal with libraries in C. Here we propose a systematic, yet human-dependent approach, which combines the capabilities of state-of-the-art tools in order to help the analyst to retrieve, step by step, the security protocol specifications from a library in C. Those specifications can then be used to create the formal model needed to carry out the analysis.

Mutriku wave farm is the first commercial plant all around the world. Since July 2011 it has been continuously selling electricity to the grid. It operates with the OWC technology and has 14 operating Wells-type turbines. In the plant there is a SCADA data recording system that collects the most important parameters of the turbines; among them, the pressure in the inlet chamber, the position of the security valve (from fully open to fully closed) and the generated power in the last 5 minutes. There is also an electricity meter which provides information about the amount of electric energy sold to the grid. The 2014 winter (January, February and March), and especially the first fortnight of February, was a stormy winter with rough sea state conditions. This was reflected both in the performance of the turbines (high pressure values, up to 9234.2 Pa; low opening degrees of the security valve, down to 49.4°; and high power generation of about 7681.6 W, all these data being average values) and in the calculated capacity factor (CF = 0.265 in winter and CF = 0.294 in February 2014). This capacity factor is a good tool for the comparison of different WEC technologies or different locations and shows an important seasonal behavior.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are vulnerable to various modelling attacks. The chaotic behaviour of oscillating systems can be leveraged to improve their security against these attacks. We have integrated an Arbiter PUF implemented on a FPGA with Chua's oscillator circuit to obtain robust final responses. These responses are tested against conventional Machine Learning and Deep Learning attacks for verifying security of the design. It has been found that such a design is robust with prediction accuracy of nearly 50%. Moreover, the quality of the PUF architecture is evaluated for uniformity and uniqueness metrics and Monte Carlo analysis at varying temperatures is performed for determining reliability.

Security vulnerabilities are among the most critical software defects in existence. When identified, programmers aim to produce patches that prevent the vulnerability as quickly as possible, motivating the need for automatic program repair (APR) methods to generate patches automatically. Unfortunately, most current APR methods fall short because they approximate the properties necessary to prevent the vulnerability using examples. Approximations result in patches that either do not fix the vulnerability comprehensively, or may even introduce new bugs. Instead, we propose property-based APR, which uses human-specified, program-independent and vulnerability-specific safety properties to derive source code patches for security vulnerabilities. Unlike properties that are approximated by observing the execution of test cases, such safety properties are precise and complete. The primary challenge lies in mapping such safety properties into source code patches that can be instantiated into an existing program. To address these challenges, we propose Senx, which, given a set of safety properties and a single input that triggers the vulnerability, detects the safety property violated by the vulnerability input and generates a corresponding patch that enforces the safety property and thus, removes the vulnerability. Senx solves several challenges with property-based APR: it identifies the program expressions and variables that must be evaluated to check safety properties and identifies the program scopes where they can be evaluated, it generates new code to selectively compute the values it needs if calling existing program code would cause unwanted side effects, and it uses a novel access range analysis technique to avoid placing patches inside loops where it could incur performance overhead. Our evaluation shows that the patches generated by Senx successfully fix 32 of 42 real-world vulnerabilities from 11 applications including various tools or libraries for manipulating graphics/media files, a programming language interpreter, a relational database engine, a collection of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, and a collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation tools.

Various aspects of security and privacy in many application domains can be assessed based on proper analysis of successive measurements that are collected on a given system. This work is devoted to such issues in the context of timed stochastic Petri net models. We assume that certain events and part of the marking trajectories are observable to adversaries who aim to determine when the system is performing secret operations, such as time intervals during which the system is executing certain critical sequences of events (as captured, for instance, in language-based opacity formulations). The combined use of the k-step trajectory-observer and the Markov model of the stochastic Petri net leads to probabilistic indicators helpful for evaluating language-based opacity of the given system, related timing aspects, and possible strategies to improve them.

The exponential usage of messaging services for communication raises many questions in privacy fields. Privacy issues in such services strongly depend on the graph-theoretical properties of users' interactions representing the real friendships between users. One of the most important issues of privacy is that users may disclose information of other users beyond the scope of the interaction, without realizing that such information could be aggregated to reveal sensitive information. Determining vulnerable interactions from non-vulnerable ones is difficult due to the lack of awareness mechanisms. To address this problem, we analyze the topological relationships with the level of trust between users to notify each of them about their vulnerable social interactions. Particularly, we analyze the impact of trusting vulnerable friends in infecting other users' privacy concerns by modeling a new vulnerability contagion process. Simulation results show that over-trusting vulnerable users speeds the vulnerability diffusion process through the network. Furthermore, vulnerable users with high reputation level lead to a high convergence level of infection, this means that the vulnerability contagion process infects the biggest number of users when vulnerable users get a high level of trust from their interlocutors. This work contributes to the development of privacy awareness framework that can alert users of the potential private information leakages in their communications.

Adversarial examples that fool machine learning models, particularly deep neural networks, have been a topic of intense research interest, with attacks and defenses being developed in a tight back-and-forth. Most past defenses are best effort and have been shown to be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. Recently a set of certified defenses have been introduced, which provide guarantees of robustness to norm-bounded attacks. However these defenses either do not scale to large datasets or are limited in the types of models they can support. This paper presents the first certified defense that both scales to large networks and datasets (such as Google's Inception network for ImageNet) and applies broadly to arbitrary model types. Our defense, called PixelDP, is based on a novel connection between robustness against adversarial examples and differential privacy, a cryptographically-inspired privacy formalism, that provides a rigorous, generic, and flexible foundation for defense.

Geo-social applications deal with constantly sharing user's current geographic information in terms of location (Latitude and Longitude). Such application can be used by many people to get information about their surrounding with the help of their friend's locations and their recommendations. But without any privacy protection, these systems can be easily misused by tracking the users. We are proposing Error Based Transformation (ERB) approach for location transformation which provides significantly improved location privacy without adding uncertainty in to query results or relying on strong assumptions about server security. The key insight is to apply secure user-specific, distance-preserving coordinate transformations to all location data shared with the server. Only the friends of a user can get exact co-ordinates by applying inverse transformation with secret key shared with them. Servers can evaluate all location queries correctly on transformed data. ERB privacy mechanism guarantee that servers are unable to see or infer actual location data from the transformed data. ERB privacy mechanism is successful against a powerful adversary model where prototype measurements used to show that it provides with very little performance overhead making it suitable for today's mobile device.

Geo-social applications deal with constantly sharing user's current geographic information in terms of location (Latitude and Longitude). Such application can be used by many people to get information about their surrounding with the help of their friend's locations and their recommendations. But without any privacy protection, these systems can be easily misused by tracking the users. We are proposing Error Based Transformation (ERB) approach for location transformation which provides significantly improved location privacy without adding uncertainty in to query results or relying on strong assumptions about server security. The key insight is to apply secure user-specific, distance-preserving coordinate transformations to all location data shared with the server. Only the friends of a user can get exact co-ordinates by applying inverse transformation with secret key shared with them. Servers can evaluate all location queries correctly on transformed data. ERB privacy mechanism guarantee that servers are unable to see or infer actual location data from the transformed data. ERB privacy mechanism is successful against a powerful adversary model where prototype measurements used to show that it provides with very little performance overhead making it suitable for today's mobile device.

This paper analyzes security problems of modern computer systems caused by vulnerabilities in their operating systems (OSs). Our scrutiny of widely used enterprise OSs focuses on their vulnerabilities by examining the statistical data available on how vulnerabilities in these systems are disclosed and eliminated, and by assessing their criticality. This is done by using statistics from both the National Vulnerabilities Database and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures System. The specific technical areas the paper covers are the quantitative assessment of forever-day vulnerabilities, estimation of days-of-grey-risk, the analysis of the vulnerabilities severity and their distributions by attack vector and impact on security properties. In addition, the study aims to explore those vulnerabilities that have been found across a diverse range of OSs. This leads us to analyzing how different intrusion-tolerant architectures deploying the OS diversity impact availability, integrity, and confidentiality.

Today's virtual switches not only support legacy network protocols and standard network management interfaces, but also become adapted to OpenFlow as a prevailing communication protocol. This makes them a core networking component of today's virtualized infrastructures which are able to handle sophisticated networking scenarios in a flexible and software-defined manner. At the same time, these virtual SDN data planes become high-value targets because a compromised switch is hard to detect while it affects all components of a virtualized/SDN-based environment.Most of the well known programmable virtual switches in the market are open source which makes them cost-effective and yet highly configurable options in any network infrastructure deployment. However, this comes at a cost which needs to be addressed. Accordingly, this paper raises an alarm on how attackers may leverage white box analysis of software switch functionalities to lunch effective low profile attacks against it. In particular, we practically present how attackers can systematically take advantage of static and dynamic code analysis techniques to lunch a low rate saturation attack on virtual SDN data plane in a cloud data center.

The safety of web browsers is essential to the privacy of Internet users and the security of their computing systems. In the last few years, there have been several cyber attacks geared towards compromising surfers' data and systems via exploiting browser-based vulnerabilities. Android and a number of mobile operating systems have been supporting a UI component called WebView, which can be embedded in any mobile application to render the web contents. Yet, this mini-browser component has been found to be vulnerable to various kinds of attacks. For instance, an attacker in her WebView-Embedded app can inject malicious JavaScripts into the WebView to modify the web contents or to steal user's input values. This kind of attack is particularly challenging due to the full control of attackers over the content of the loaded pages. In this paper, we are proposing and testing a server-side moving target defense technique to counter the risk of JavaScript injection attacks on mobile WebViews. The solution entails creating redundant HTML forms, randomizing their attributes and values, and asserting stealthy prompts for the user data. The solution does not dictate any changes to the browser or applications codes, neither it requires key sharing with benign clients. The results of our performance and security analysis suggest that our proposed approach protects the confidentiality and integrity of user input values with minimum overhead.