Biblio

As modern web browsers gain new and increasingly powerful features the importance of impact assessments of the new functionality becomes crucial. A web privacy impact assessment of a planned web browser feature, the Ambient Light Sensor API, indicated risks arising from the exposure of overly precise information about the lighting conditions in the user environment. The analysis led to the demonstration of direct risks of leaks of user data, such as the list of visited websites or exfiltration of sensitive content across distinct browser contexts. Our work contributed to the creation of web standards leading to decisions by browser vendors (i.e. obsolescence, non-implementation or modification to the operation of browser features). We highlight the need to consider broad risks when making reviews of new features. We offer practically-driven high-level observations lying on the intersection of web security and privacy risk engineering and modeling, and standardization. We structure our work as a case study from activities spanning over three years.

Technology is advancing rapidly and with this advancement, it has become apparent that it is nearly impossible to not leave a digital trace when committing a crime. As evidenced by multiple cases handled by law enforcement, Fitbit data has proved to be useful when determining the validity of alibis and in piecing together the timeline of a crime scene. In our paper, experiments testing the accuracy and reliability of GPS-tracked activities logged by the Fitbit Alta tracker and Ionic smartwatch are conducted. Potential indicators of manipulated or altered GPS-tracked activities are identified to help guide digital forensic investigators when handling such Fitbit data as evidence.

This paper presents a proximity coupled wideband wearable antenna operating between 4.71 GHz and 5.81 GHz with 5.2 GHz as centre frequency for biomedical telemetry applications in ISM band (IEEE 802.11 Standard). Two layers of different flexible substrate materials, ethylene-vinyl acetate and felt make the design mechanically stable. Bandwidth improvement is achieved by introducing two slots on elliptical ground plane. Highest gain of 3.72 dB and front to back ratio (FBR) of 6.55 is obtained in the given frequency band. The dimensions of antenna have been optimized to have desired bandwidth of 1100 MHz (\$\textbackslashtextbackslashsimeq\$21%). The specific absorption rate (SAR) value is 1.12 \$W/Kg\$ for 1 g of human body tissue. Both simulated and measured results are presented for the structure.

Digital connectivity is fundamental to the health care system to deliver safe and effective care. However, insecure connectivity could be a major threat to patient safety and privacy (e.g., in August 2017, FDA recalled 465,000 pacemakers because of discovering security flaws). Although connecting a patient's pacemaker to the Internet has many advantages for monitoring the patient, this connectivity opens a new door for cyber-attackers to steal the patient data or even control the pacemaker or damage it. Therefore, patients are forced to choose between connectivity and security. This paper presents a framework for secure and private communications between wearable medical devices and patient monitoring systems. The primary objective of this research is twofold, first to identify and analyze the communication vulnerabilities, second, to develop a framework for combating unauthorized access to data through the compromising of computer security. Specifically, hiding targets from cyber-attackers could prevent our system from future cyber-attacks. This is the most effective way to stop cyber-attacks in their first step.

In today's world privacy is paramount in everyone's life. Alongside the growth of IoT (Internet of things), wearable devices are becoming widely popular for real-time user monitoring and wise service support. However, in contrast with the traditional short-range communications, these resource-scanty devices face various vulnerabilities and security threats during the course of interactions. Hence, designing a security solution for these devices while dealing with the limited communication and computation capabilities is a challenging task. In this work, PUF (Physical Unclonable Function) and lightweight cryptographic parameters are used together for performing two-way authentication between wearable devices and smartphone, while the simultaneous verification is performed by providing yoking-proofs to the Cloud Server. At the end, it is shown that the proposed scheme satisfies many security aspects and is flexible as well as lightweight.

The developments made in IoT applications have made wearable devices a popular choice for collecting user data to monitor this information and provide intelligent service support. Since wearable devices are continuously collecting and transporting a user's sensitive data over the network, there exist increased security challenges. Moreover, wearable devices lack the computation capabilities in comparison to traditional short-range communication devices. In this paper, authors propounded a Yoking Proof based remote Authentication scheme for Cloud-aided Wearable devices (YPACW) which takes PUF and cryptographic functions and joins them to achieve mutual authentication between the wearable devices and smartphone via a cloud server, by performing the simultaneous verification of these devices, using the established yoking-proofs. Relative to Liu et al.'s scheme, YPACW provides better results with the reduction of communication and processing cost significantly.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system paradigm that recently introduced, which includes different smart devices and applications, especially, in smart cities, e.g.; manufacturing, homes, and offices. To improve their awareness capabilities, it is attractive to add more sensors to their framework. In this paper, we propose adding a new sensor as a wearable sensor connected wirelessly with a neural network located on the base station (WSNB). WSNB enables the added sensor to refine their labels through active learning. The new sensors achieve an average accuracy of 93.81%, which is 4.5% higher than the existing method, removing human support and increasing the life cycle for the sensors by using neural network approach in the base station.

Wearable technology, such as Fitbit devices, log a user's daily activities, heart rate, calories burned, step count, and sleep activity. This information is valuable to digital forensic investigators as it may serve as evidence to a crime, to either support a suspect's innocence or guilt. It is important for an investigator to find and analyze every piece of data for accuracy and integrity; however, there is no standard for conducting a forensic investigation for wearable technology. In this paper, we conduct a forensic analysis of two different Fitbit devices using open-source tools. It is the responsibility of the investigator to show how the data was obtained and to ensure that the data was not modified during the analysis. This paper will guide investigators in understanding what data is collected by a Fitbit device (specifically the Ionic smartwatch and Alta tracker), how to handle Fitbit devices, and how to extract and forensically analyze said devices using open-source tools, Autopsy Sleuth Kit and Bulk Extractor Viewer.

Security has become a major concern for women, children and even elders in every walk of their life. Women are getting assaulted and molested, children are getting kidnapped, elder citizens are also facing many problems like robbery, etc. In this paper, a smart security solution called smart wearable device system is implemented using the Raspberry Pi3 for enhancing the safety and security of women/children. It works as an alert as well as a security system. It provides a buzzer alert alert to the people who are nearby to the user (wearing the smart device). The system uses Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate the user, sends the location of the user through SMS to the emergency contact and police using the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) / General Radio Packet Service (GPRS) technology. The device also captures the image of the assault and surroundings of the user or victim using USB Web Camera interfaced to the device and sends it as an E-mail alert to the emergency contact soon after the user presses the panic button present on Smart wearable device system.

Child security in the school campus is most important in building a good society. In and around the world the children are abused and killed also in sometimes by the people those who are not in good attitude in the school campus. To track and resolve such issues an enhanced security feature system is required. Hence in this paper an enhanced version of security system for children is proposed by using `Wearable Sensors'. In this proposed method two wearable sensors nodes such as `Staff Node' and `Student Node' are paired by using `Bluetooth' communication technology and Smart Watch technology is also used to communicate the Security Center or Processing Node for tracking them about their location and whether the two nodes are moved away from the classroom. If the child node is not moving for a long period then it may be notified by the center and they will inform the security officers near to the place. This proposed method may satisfy the need of school management about the staff movements with students and the behavior of students to avoid unexpected issues.

Discovering the potential vulnerabilities in software plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of computer system. This paper proposes a method that can assist security auditors with the analysis of source code. When security auditors identify new vulnerabilities, our method can be adopted to make a list of recommendations that may have the same vulnerabilities for the security auditors. Our method relies on graph representation to automatically extract the mode of PDG(program dependence graph, a structure composed of control dependence and data dependence). Besides, it can be applied to the vulnerability extrapolation scenario, thus reducing the amount of audit code. We worked on an open-source vulnerability test set called Juliet. According to the evaluation results, the clustering effect produced is satisfactory, so that the feature vectors extracted by the Graph2Vec model are applied to labeling and supervised learning indicators are adopted to assess the model for its ability to extract features. On a total of 12,000 small data sets, the training score of the model can reach up to 99.2%, and the test score can reach a maximum of 85.2%. Finally, the recommendation effect of our work is verified as satisfactory.

With the progressive development of web applications and the urgent requirement of web security, vulnerability scanner has been particularly emphasized, which is regarded as a fundamental component for web security assurance. Various scanners are developed with the intention of that discovering the possible vulnerabilities in advance to avoid malicious attacks. However, most of them only focus on the vulnerability detection with single target, which fail in satisfying the efficiency demand of users. In this paper, an effective web vulnerability scanner that integrates the information collection with the vulnerability detection is proposed to verify whether the target web application is vulnerable or not. The experimental results show that, by guiding the detection process with the useful collected information, our tool achieves great web vulnerability detection capability with a large scanning scope.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is a essential subset of the Internet of Things (IoT). Secure access to communication network systems by M2M devices requires the support of a secure and efficient anonymous authentication protocol. The Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) scheme in Trustworthy Computing is a verified security protocol. However, the existing defense system uses a static architecture. The “mimic defense” strategy is characterized by active defense, which is not effective against continuous detection and attack by the attacker. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Mimic-DAA scheme that incorporates mimic defense to establish an active defense scheme. Multiple heterogeneous and redundant actuators are used to form a DAA verifier and optimization is scheduled so that the behavior of the DAA verifier unpredictable by analysis. The Mimic-DAA proposed in this paper is capable of forming a security mechanism for active defense. The Mimic-DAA scheme effectively safeguard the unpredictability, anonymity, security and system-wide security of M2M communication networks. In comparison with existing DAA schemes, the scheme proposed in this paper improves the safety while maintaining the computational complexity.

Vulnerabilities in privileged software layers have been exploited with severe consequences. Recently, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) based technologies have emerged as a promising approach since they claim strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees regardless of the trustworthiness of the underlying system software. In this paper, we consider one of the most prominent TEE technologies, referred to as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Despite many formal approaches, there is still a lack of formal proof of some critical processes of Intel SGX, such as remote attestation. To fill this gap, we propose a fully automated, rigorous, and sound formal approach to specify and verify the Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID)-based remote attestation in Intel SGX under the assumption that there are no side-channel attacks and no vulnerabilities inside the enclave. The evaluation indicates that the confidentiality of attestation keys is preserved against a Dolev-Yao adversary in this technology. We also present a few of the many inconsistencies found in the existing literature on Intel SGX attestation during formal specification.

Security has always been one of the main concerns in the field of computer architecture and cloud computing. Cache-based side-channel attacks pose a threat to almost all existing architectures and cloud computing. Especially in the public cloud, the cache is shared among multiple tenants, and cache attacks can make good use of this to extract information. Cache side-channel attacks are a problem to be solved for security, in which how to accurately detect cache side-channel attacks has been a research hotspot. Because the cache side-channel attack does not require the attacker to physically contact the target device and does not need additional devices to obtain the side channel information, the cache-side channel attack is efficient and hidden, which poses a great threat to the security of cryptographic algorithms. Based on the AES algorithm, this paper uses hardware performance counters to obtain the features of different cache events under Flush + Reload, Prime + Probe, and Flush + Flush attacks. Firstly, the random forest algorithm is used to filter the cache features, and then the support vector machine algorithm is used to model the system. Finally, high detection accuracy is achieved under different system loads. The detection accuracy of the system is 99.92% when there is no load, the detection accuracy is 99.85% under the average load, and the detection accuracy under full load is 96.57%.

This article describes attacks methods, vectors and technics used by threat actors during pandemic situations in the world. Identifies common targets of threat actors and cyber-attack tactics. The article analyzes cybersecurity challenges and specifies possible solutions and improvements in cybersecurity. Defines cybersecurity controls, which should be taken against analyzed attack vectors.

Blockchain is being pursued by a growing number of people with its characteristics of openness, transparency, and decentralization. At the same time, how to secure privacy protection in such an open and transparent ledger is an urgent issue to be solved for deep study. Therefore, this paper proposes a protocol based on Secure multi-party computation, which can merge and sign different transaction messages under the anonymous condition by using Pedersen commitment and Schnorr Signature. Through the rationality proof and security analysis, this paper demonstrates the private transaction is safe under the semi-honest model. And its computational cost is less than the equivalent multi-signature model. The research has made some innovative contributions to the privacy computing theory.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems are currently being prepared for real-world deployment, but they face strong opposition over privacy concerns. Position beacon messages are the main culprit, being broadcast in cleartext and pseudonymously signed up to 10 times per second. So far, no practical solutions have been proposed to encrypt or anonymously authenticate V2V messages. We propose two cryptographic innovations that enhance the privacy of V2V communication. As a core contribution, we introduce zone-encryption schemes, where vehicles generate and authentically distribute encryption keys associated to static geographic zones close to their location. Zone encryption provides security against eavesdropping, and, combined with a suitable anonymous authentication scheme, ensures that messages can only be sent by genuine vehicles, while adding only 224 Bytes of cryptographic overhead to each message. Our second contribution is an authentication mechanism fine-tuned to the needs of V2V which allows vehicles to authentically distribute keys, and is called dynamic group signatures with attributes. Our instantiation features unlimited locally generated pseudonyms, negligible credential download-and-storage costs, identity recovery by a trusted authority, and compact signatures of 216 Bytes at a 128-bit security level.

In recent years, cross-domain roaming through Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, and the number of roaming users has increased dramatically. It is essential to authenticate users belonging to different institutes to ensure network privacy and security. Existing systems, such as eduroam, have centralized and hierarchical structure on indorse accounts that create privacy and security issues. We have proposed UniRoam, a blockchain-based cross-domain authentication scheme that provides accountability and anonymity without any trusted authority. Unlike traditional centralized approaches, UniRoam provides access authentication for its servers and users to provide anonymity and accountability without any privacy leakage issues efficiently. By using the sovrin identifier as an anonymous identity, we integrate our system with Hyperledger and Intel SGX to authenticate users that preserves both anonymity and trust when the user connects to the network. Therefore, UniRoam is highly “faulted-tolerant” to deal with different attacks and provides an effective solution that can be deployed easily in different environments.

In vehicular cyber-physical systems, the mounted cameras on the vehicles, together with the fixed roadside cameras, can produce pictorial data for multiple purposes. In this process, ensuring the security and privacy of vehicles while guaranteeing efficient data transmission among vehicles is critical. This motivates us to propose a trusted anonymous authentication scheme for vehicular cyber-physical systems and Internet-of-Things. Our scheme is designed based on a three-tier architecture which contains cloud layer, fog layer, and user layer. It utilizes bilinear-free certificateless signcryption to realize a secure and trusted anonymous authentication efficiently. We verify its effectiveness through theoretical analyses in terms of correctness, security, and efficiency. Furthermore, our simulation results demonstrate that the communication overhead, the computation overhead, and the packet loss rate of the proposed scheme are significantly better than those of the state-of-the-art techniques. Particularly, the proposed scheme can speed up the computation process at least 10× compared to all the state-of-the-art approaches.

Nowadays, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have never been treated so seriously before. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has played an important role currently in STEM. Under the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis, coronavirus disease across over the world we are living in. Every government seek advices from scientist before making their strategic plan. Most of countries collect data from hospitals (and care home and so on in the society), carried out data analysis, using formula to make some AI models, to predict the potential development patterns, in order to make their government strategy. AI security become essential. If a security attack make the pattern wrong, the model is not a true prediction, that could result in thousands life loss. The potential consequence of this non-accurate forecast would be even worse. Therefore, take security into account during the forecast AI modelling, step-by-step data governance, will be significant. Cyber security should be applied during this kind of prediction process using AI deep learning technology and so on. Some in-depth discussion will follow.AI security impact is a principle concern in the world. It is also significant for both nature science and social science researchers to consider in the future. In particular, because many services are running on online devices, security defenses are essential. The results should have properly data governance with security. AI security strategy should be up to the top priority to influence governments and their citizens in the world. AI security will help governments' strategy makers to work reasonably balancing between technologies, socially and politics. In this paper, strategy related challenges of AI and Security will be discussed, along with suggestions AI cyber security and politics trade-off consideration from an initial planning stage to its near future further development.

Since being launched in 2014, Alexa, Amazon's versatile cloud-based voice service, is now active in over 100 million households worldwide [1]. Alexa's user-friendly, personalized vocal experience offers customers a more natural way of interacting with cutting-edge technology by allowing the ability to directly dictate commands to the assistant. Now in the present year, the Alexa service is more accessible than ever, available on hundreds of millions of devices from not only Amazon but third-party device manufacturers. Unfortunately, that success has also been the source of concern and controversy. The success of Alexa is based on its effortless usability, but in turn, that has led to a lack of sufficient security. This paper surveys various attacks against Amazon Alexa ecosystem including attacks against the frontend voice capturing and the cloud backend voice command recognition and processing. Overall, we have identified six attack surfaces covering the lifecycle of Alexa voice interaction that spans several stages including voice data collection, transmission, processing and storage. We also discuss the potential mitigation solutions for each attack surface to better improve Alexa or other voice assistants in terms of security and privacy.

The security of wireless network devices has received widespread attention, but most existing schemes cannot achieve fine-grained device identification. In practice, the security vulnerabilities of a device are heavily depending on its model and firmware version. Motivated by this issue, we propose a universal, extensible and device-independent framework called SCAFFISD, which can provide fine-grained identification of wireless routers. It can generate access rules to extract effective information from the router admin page automatically and perform quick scans for known device vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, SCAFFISD can identify rogue access points (APs) in combination with existing detection methods, with the purpose of performing a comprehensive security assessment of wireless networks. We implement the prototype of SCAFFISD and verify its effectiveness through security scans of actual products.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have an economic and operational interest in detecting malicious network activity relating to their subscribers. However, it is unclear what kind of traffic data an ISP has available for cyber-security research, and under which legal conditions it can be used. This paper gives an overview of the challenges posed by legislation and of the data sources available to a European ISP. DNS and NetFlow logs are identified as relevant data sources and the state of the art in anonymization and fingerprinting techniques is discussed. Based on legislation, data availability and privacy considerations, a practically applicable anonymization policy is presented.

Over the years, a number of vulnerability scoring frameworks have been proposed to characterize the severity of known vulnerabilities in software-dependent systems. These frameworks provide security metrics to support decision-making in system development and security evaluation and assurance activities. When used in this context, it is imperative that these security metrics be sound, meaning that they can be consistently measured in a reproducible, objective, and unbiased fashion while providing contextually relevant, actionable information for decision makers. In this paper, we evaluate the soundness of the security metrics obtained via several vulnerability scoring frameworks. The evaluation is based on the Method for DesigningSound Security Metrics (MDSSM). We also present several recommendations to improve vulnerability scoring frameworks to yield more sound security metrics to support the development of secure software-dependent systems.