Biblio

More and more organizations are today using the cloud for their business as a quite convenient alternative to in-house solutions for storing, processing, and managing data. Cloud-based solutions are then permeating almost all aspects of business organizations, resulting appealing also for functions that, already in-house, may result sensitive or security critical, and whose enforcement in the cloud requires then particular care. In this paper, we provide an approach for securely relying on cloud-based services for the enforcement of Internal Controls and Audit (ICA) functions for corporate governance. Our approach is based on the use of selective encryption and of tags to provide a level of self-protection to data and for enabling only authorized parties to access data and perform operations on them, providing privacy and integrity guarantees, as well as accountability and non-repudiation.

The implication of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in critical infrastructures (e.g., smart grids, water distribution networks, etc.) has introduced new security issues and vulnerabilities to those systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that black-box system identification using Support Vector Regression (SVR) can be used efficiently to build a model of a given industrial system even when this system is protected with a watermark-based detector. First, we briefly describe the Tennessee Eastman Process used in this study. Then, we present the principal of detection scheme and the theory behind SVR. Finally, we design an efficient black-box SVR algorithm for the Tennessee Eastman Process. Extensive simulations prove the efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

The facial recognition time by time takes more importance, due to the extend kind of applications it has, but it is still challenging when faces big variations in the characteristics of the biometric data used in the process and especially referring to the transportation of information through the internet in the internet of things context. Based on the systematic review and rigorous study that supports the extraction of the most relevant information on this topic [1], a software architecture proposal which contains basic security requirements necessary for the treatment of the data involved in the application of facial recognition techniques, oriented to an IoT environment was generated. Concluding that the security and privacy considerations of the information registered in IoT devices represent a challenge and it is a priority to be able to guarantee that the data circulating on the network are only accessible to the user that was designed for this.

The purpose of the work is a formalized description of the method determining numerical expression of the danger from actions potentially implemented by an information security violator. The implementation of such actions may lead to a disruption of the ordered functioning of multilevel distributed automated process control systems, which indicates the importance of developing new adequate solutions for predicting attacks consequences. The analysis of the largest destructive effects on information security systems of critical objects is carried out. The most common methods of obtaining the value of the hazard quotient of information security violators' destructive actions are considered. Based on the known methods for determining the possible damage from attacks implemented by a potential information security violator, a new, previously undetected in open sources method for determining the hazard quotient of destructive actions of an information security violator has been proposed. In order to carry out experimental calculations by the proposed method, the authors developed the required software. The calculations results are presented and indicate the possibility of using the proposed method for modeling threats and information security violators when designing an information security system for automated process control systems.

Data privacy has been an important area of research in recent years. Dataset often consists of sensitive data fields, exposure of which may jeopardize interests of individuals associated with the data. In order to resolve this issue, privacy techniques can be used to hinder the identification of a person through anonymization of the sensitive data in the dataset to protect sensitive information, while the anonymized dataset can be used by the third parties for analysis purposes without obstruction. In this research, we investigated a privacy technique, k-anonymity for different values of on different number columns of the dataset. Next, the information loss due to k-anonymity is computed. The anonymized files go through the classification process by some machine-learning algorithms i.e., Naive Bayes, J48 and neural network in order to check a balance between data anonymity and data utility. Based on the classification accuracy, the optimal values of and are obtained, and thus, the optimal and can be used for k-anonymity algorithm to anonymize optimal number of columns of the dataset.

With the explosion of Industry 4.0, industrial facilities and critical infrastructures are transforming into “smart” systems that dynamically adapt to external events. The result is an ecosystem of heterogeneous physical and cyber components, such as programmable logic controllers, which are more and more exposed to cyber-physical attacks, i.e., security breaches in cyberspace that adversely affect the physical processes at the core of industrial control systems. We apply runtime enforcement techniques, based on an ad-hoc sub-class of Ligatti et al.'s edit automata, to enforce specification compliance in networks of potentially compromised controllers, formalised in Hennessy and Regan's Timed Process Language. We define a synthesis algorithm that, given an alphabet P of observable actions and an enforceable regular expression e capturing a timed property for controllers, returns a monitor that enforces the property e during the execution of any (potentially corrupted) controller with alphabet P and complying with the property e. Our monitors correct and suppress incorrect actions coming from corrupted controllers and emit actions in full autonomy when the controller under scrutiny is not able to do so in a correct manner. Besides classical properties, such as transparency and soundness, the proposed enforcement ensures non-obvious properties, such as polynomial complexity of the synthesis, deadlock- and diverge-freedom of monitored controllers, together with scalability when dealing with networks of controllers.

Efficient application of Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) technology on the battlefield calls for innovative solutions to control and manage the deluge of heterogeneous IoBT devices. This paper presents an innovative paradigm to address heterogeneity in controlling IoBT and IoT devices, enabling multi-force cooperation in challenging battlefield scenarios.

Intellectual Property (IP) infringement including piracy and overproduction have emerged as significant threats in the semiconductor supply chain. Key-based obfuscation techniques (i.e., logic locking) are widely applied to secure legacy IP from such attacks. However, the fundamental question remains open whether an attacker is allowed an exponential amount of time to seek correct key or could it be useful to lock out the design in a non-destructive manner after several incorrect attempts. In this paper, we address this question with a robust design lockout technique. Specifically, we perform comparisons on obfuscation logic output that reflects the condition (correct or incorrect) of the applied key without changing the system behavior. The proposed approach, when combined with key obfuscation (logic locking) technique, increases the difficulty of reverse engineering key obfuscated RTL module. We provide security evaluation of DLockout against three common side-channel attacks followed by a quantitative assessment of the resilience. We conducted a set of experiments on four datapath intensive IPs and one crypto core for three different key lengths (32-, 64-, and 128-bit) under the typical design corner. On average, DLockout incurs negligible area, power, and delay overheads.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast collection of interconnected sensors, devices, and services that share data and information over the Internet with the objective of leveraging multiple information sources to optimize related systems. The technologies associated with the IoT have significantly improved the quality of many existing applications by reducing costs, improving functionality, increasing access to resources, and enhancing automation. The adoption of IoT by industries has led to the next industrial revolution: Industry 4.0. The rise of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) promises to enhance factory management, process optimization, worker safety, and more. However, the rollout of the IIoT is not without significant issues, and many of these act as major barriers that prevent fully achieving the vision of Industry 4.0. One major area of concern is the security and privacy of the massive datasets that are captured and stored, which may leak information about intellectual property, trade secrets, and other competitive knowledge. As a way forward toward solving security and privacy concerns, we aim in this paper to identify common input-output (I/O) design patterns that exist in applications of the IIoT. These design patterns enable constructing an abstract model representation of data flow semantics used by such applications, and therefore better understand how to secure the information related to IIoT operations. In this paper, we describe communication protocols and identify common I/O design patterns for IIoT applications with an emphasis on data flow in edge devices, which, in the industrial control system (ICS) setting, are most often involved in process control or monitoring.

In this paper, we propose a compositional scheme for the construction of abstractions for networks of control systems by using the interconnection matrix and joint dissipativity-type properties of subsystems and their abstractions. In the proposed framework, the abstraction, itself a control system (possibly with a lower dimension), can be used as a substitution of the original system in the controller design process. Moreover, we provide a procedure for constructing abstractions of a class of nonlinear control systems by using the bounds on the slope of system nonlinearities. We illustrate the proposed results on a network of linear control systems by constructing its abstraction in a compositional way without requiring any condition on the number or gains of the subsystems. We use the abstraction as a substitute to synthesize a controller enforcing a certain linear temporal logic specification. This example particularly elucidates the effectiveness of dissipativity-type compositional reasoning for large-scale systems.

At present, the network architecture is based on the TCP/IP protocol and node communications are achieved by the IP address and identifier of the node. The IP address in the network remains basically unchanged, so it is more likely to be attacked by network intruder. To this end, it is important to make periodic dynamic hopping in a specific address space possible, so that an intruder fails to obtain the internal network address and grid topological structure in real time and to continue to perform infiltration by the building of a new address space layout randomization system on the basis of SDN from the perspective of an attacker.

A parallel brute force attack on RC4 algorithm based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with an efficient style has been presented. The main idea of this design is to use number of forecast keying methods to reduce the overall clock pulses required depended to key searching operation by utilizes on-chip BRAMs (block RAMs) of FPGA for maximizing the total number of key searching unit with taking into account the highest clock rate. Depending on scheme, 32 key searching units and main controller will be used in one Xilinx XC3S1600E-4 FPGA device, all these units working in parallel and each unit will be searching in a specific range of keys, by comparing the current result with the well-known cipher text if its match the found flag signal will change from 0 to 1 and the main controller will receive this signal and stop the searching operation. This scheme operating at 128-MHz clock frequency and gives us key searching speed of 7.7 × 106 keys/sec. Testing all possible keys (40-bits length), requires only around 39.5h.

Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional network active security threat model that cannot continuously control the threat process, a network active security threat model based on offensive and defensive differential game is constructed. The attack and defense differential game theory is used to define the parameters of the network active security threat model, on this basis, the network security target is determined, the network active security threat is identified by the attack defense differential equation, and finally the network active security threat is quantitatively evaluated, thus construction of network active security threat model based on offensive and defensive differential game is completed. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional network active security threat model, the proposed model is more feasible in the attack and defense control of the network active security threat process, and can achieve the ideal application effect.

The authors carry out the analysis of the process of modeling threats to information security of automated process control systems. Basic principles of security threats model formation are considered. The approach to protection of automated process control systems based on the Shtakelberg game in a strategic form was modeled. An abstract mathematical model of information security threats to automated process control systems was developed. A formalized representation of a threat model is described, taking into account an intruder's potential. Presentation of the process of applying the described threat model in the form of a continuous Deming-Shewhart cycle is proposed.

In this paper, we study system security against Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). APTs are stealthy and persistent but APTs interact with system and introduce information flows in the system as data-flow and control-flow commands. Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a promising detection mechanism against APTs which taints suspicious input sources in the system and performs online security analysis when a tainted information is used in unauthorized manner. Our objective in this paper is to model DIFT that handle data-flow and conditional branches in the program that arise from control-flow commands. We use game theoretic framework and provide the first analytical model of DIFT with data-flow and conditional-branch tracking. Our game model which is an undiscounted infinite-horizon stochastic game captures the interaction between APTs and DIFT and the notion of conditional branching. We prove that the best response of the APT is a maximal reachability probability problem and provide a polynomial-time algorithm to find the best response by solving a linear optimization problem. We formulate the best response of the defense as a linear optimization problem and show that an optimal solution to the linear program returns a deterministic optimal policy for the defense. Since finding Nash equilibrium for infinite-horizon undiscounted stochastic games is computationally difficult, we present a nonlinear programming based polynomial-time algorithm to find an E-Nash equilibrium. Finally, we perform experimental analysis of our algorithm on real-world data for NetRecon attack augmented with conditional branching.

Dynamometer cards can reflect different down-hole working conditions of sucker rod pumping wells. It has great significances to realize multiple fault diagnosis for actual oilfield production. In this paper, the extension theory is used to build a matter-element model to describe the fault diagnosis problem of the sucker rod pumping wells. The correlation function is used to calculate the correlation degree between the diagnostic fault and many standard fault types. The diagnosed sample and many possible fault types are divided into different combinations according to the correlation degree; the F-statistics of each combination is calculated and the “unbiased transformation” is used to find the mean of interval vectors. Larger F-statistics means greater differences within the faults classification; and the minimum F-statistics reflects the real multiple fault types. Case study shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Through time inference attacks, adversaries fingerprint SDN controllers, estimate switches flow-table size, and perform flow state reconnaissance. In fact, timing a SDN and analyzing its results can expose information which later empowers SDN resource-consumption or saturation attacks. In the real world, however, launching such attacks is not easy. This is due to some challenges attackers may encounter while attacking an actual SDN deployment. These challenges, which are not addressed adequately in the related literature, are investigated in this paper. Accordingly, practical solutions to mitigate such attacks are also proposed. Discussed challenges are clarified by means of conducting extensive experiments on an actual cloud data center testbed. Moreover, mitigation schemes have been implemented and examined in details. Experimental results show that proposed countermeasures effectively block time inference attacks.

Numerous IoT applications, like building automation or process control of industrial sites, exist today. These applications inherently have a strong connection to the physical world. Hence, IT security threats cannot only cause problems like data leaks but also safety issues which might harm people. Attacks on IT systems are not only performed by outside attackers but also insiders like administrators. For this reason, we present ongoing work on a Byzantine fault tolerant configuration management system (CMS) that provides control over administrators, restrains their rights, and enforces separation of concerns. We reach this goal by conducting a configuration management process that requires multi-party authorization for critical configurations to prevent individual malicious administrators from performing undesired actions. Only after a configuration has been authorized by multiple experts, it is applied to the targeted devices. For the whole configuration management process, our CMS guarantees accountability and traceability. Lastly, our system is tamper-resistant as we leverage Hyperledger Fabric, which provides a distributed execution environment for our CMS and a blockchain-based distributed ledger that we use to store the configurations. A beneficial side effect of this approach is that our CMS is also suitable to manage configurations for infrastructure shared across different organizations that do not need to trust each other.

This paper provides an approach to the detection of information security breaches in automated process control systems (APCS), which consists in forecasting multivariate time series formed from the values of the operating parameters of the end system devices. Using an experimental model of water treatment, a comparison was made of the forecasting results for the parameters characterizing the operation of the entire model, and for the parameters characterizing the flow of individual subprocesses implemented by the model. For forecasting, GRU-neural network training was performed.

Edge computing requires a flexible choice of data-processing and rapidly computation performed at the edge of networks. We proposed an edge computing platform with container-based virtualization technology. In the platform, data-processing instances are modularized and deployed to edge nodes suitable for user requirements with keeping the data-processing flows within wide area network. This paper reports the platform controller and the process modules implemented to realize the secure and flexible edge computing platform.

As technology is developing exponentially and the world is moving towards automation, the resources have to be transferred through the internet which requires routers to connect networks and forward bundles (information). Due to the vulnerability of routers the data and resources have been hacked. The vulnerability of routers is due to minimum authentication to the network shared, some technical attacks on routers, leaking of passwords to others, single passwords. Based on the study, the solution is to maximize authentication of the router by embedding an application that monitors the user entry based on MAC address of the device, the password is frequently changed and that encrypted password is sent to a user and notifies the admin about the changes. Thus, these routers provide high-level security to the forward data through the internet.

The rapid evolution of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services transforms the conventional electrical grid into a new paradigm called Smart Grid (SG). Even though SG brings significant improvements, such as increased reliability and better energy management, it also introduces multiple security challenges. One of the main reasons for this is that SG combines a wide range of heterogeneous technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices as well as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. The latter are responsible for monitoring and controlling the automatic procedures of energy transmission and distribution. Nevertheless, the presence of these systems introduces multiple vulnerabilities because their protocols do not implement essential security mechanisms such as authentication and access control. In this paper, we focus our attention on the security issues of the IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) protocol, which is widely utilized in the European energy sector. In particular, we provide a SCADA threat model based on a Coloured Petri Net (CPN) and emulate four different types of cyber attacks against IEC-104. Last, we used AlienVault's risk assessment model to evaluate the risk level that each of these cyber attacks introduces to our system to confirm our intuition about their severity.

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are becoming increasingly susceptible to cyber-physical attacks on both physical and cyber layers of critical information infrastructure. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) have been widely used as a structured method to prioritize all possible vulnerable areas (failure modes) for design review of security of information systems. However, traditional RPN based FMEA has some inherent problems. Besides, there is a lacking of application of FMEA for security in SCADAs under vague and uncertain environment. Thus, the main purpose of this study was to propose a new evaluation model, which not only intends to recover above mentioned problems, but also intends to evaluate, prioritize and correct security risk of SCADA system's threat modes. A numerical case study was also conducted to demonstrate that the proposed new evaluation model is not only capable of addressing FMEA's inherent problems but also is best suited for a semi-quantitative high level analysis of a secure SCADA's failure modes in the early design phases.

The growing trend toward information technology increases the amount of data travelling over the network links. The problem of detecting anomalies in data streams has increased with the growth of internet connectivity. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new concept of computer networking that can adapt and support these growing trends. However, the centralized nature of the SDN design is challenged by the need for an efficient method for traffic monitoring against traffic anomalies caused by misconfigured devices or ongoing attacks. In this paper, we propose a new model for traffic behavior monitoring that aims to ensure trusted communication links between the network devices. The main objective of this model is to confirm that the behavior of the traffic streams matches the instructions provided by the SDN controller, which can help to increase the trust between the SDN controller and its covered infrastructure components. According to our preliminary implementation, the behavior monitoring unit is able to read all traffic information and perform a validation process that reports any mismatching traffic to the controller.

In enterprise environments, the amount of managed assets and vulnerabilities that can be exploited is staggering. Hackers' lateral movements between such assets generate a complex big data graph, that contains potential hacking paths. In this vision paper, we enumerate risk-reduction security requirements in large scale environments, then present the Agile Security methodology and technologies for detection, modeling, and constant prioritization of security requirements, agile style. Agile Security models different types of security requirements into the context of an attack graph, containing business process targets and critical assets identification, configuration items, and possible impacts of cyber-attacks. By simulating and analyzing virtual adversary attack paths toward cardinal assets, Agile Security examines the business impact on business processes and prioritizes surgical requirements. Thus, handling these requirements backlog that are constantly evaluated as an outcome of employing Agile Security, gradually increases system hardening, reduces business risks and informs the IT service desk or Security Operation Center what remediation action to perform next. Once remediated, Agile Security constantly recomputes residual risk, assessing risk increase by threat intelligence or infrastructure changes versus defender's remediation actions in order to drive overall attack surface reduction.