Biblio

Network security has become an important issue in our work and life. Hackers' attack mode has been upgraded from normal attack to APT( Advanced Persistent Threat, APT) attack. The key of APT attack chain is the penetration and intrusion of active directory, which can not be completely detected via the traditional IDS and antivirus software. Further more, lack of security protection of existing solutions for domain control aggravates this problem. Although researchers have proposed methods for domain attack detection, many of them have not yet been converted into effective market-oriented products. In this paper, we analyzes the common domain intrusion methods, various domain related attack behavior characteristics were extracted from ATT&CK matrix (Advanced tactics, techniques, and common knowledge) for analysis and simulation test. Based on analyzing the log file generated by the attack, the domain attack detection rules are established and input into the analysis engine. Finally, the available domain intrusion detection system is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that the network attack detection method based on the analysis of domain attack behavior can analyze the log file in real time and effectively detect the malicious intrusion behavior of hackers , which could facilitate managers find and eliminate network security threats immediately.

Social engineering attacks are well known attacks in the cyberspace and relatively easy to try and implement because no technical knowledge is required. In various online environments such as business domains where customers talk through a chat service with employees or in social networks potential hackers can try to manipulate other people by employing social attacks against them to gain information that will benefit them in future attacks. Thus, we have used a number of natural language processing steps and a machine learning algorithm to identify potential attacks. The proposed method has been tested on a semi-synthetic dataset and it is shown to be both practical and effective.

Software defined network (SDN) is an emerging network architecture. Its control logic and forwarding logic are separated. SDN has the characteristics of centralized management, which makes it easier for malicious attackers to use the security vulnerabilities of SDN networks to implement distributed denial Service (DDoS) attack. Information entropy is a kind of lightweight DDoS early detection method. This paper proposes a DDoS attack detection method in SDN networks based on φ-entropy. φ-entropy can adjust related parameters according to network conditions and enlarge feature differences between normal and abnormal traffic, which can make it easier to detect attacks in the early stages of DDoS traffic formation. Firstly, this article demonstrates the basic properties of φ-entropy, mathematically illustrates the feasibility of φ-entropy in DDoS detection, and then we use Mini-net to conduct simulation experiments to compare the detection effects of DDoS with Shannon entropy.

Cloud-hosted applications are prone to targeted attacks such as DDoS, advanced persistent threats, cryptojacking which threaten service availability. Recently, methods for threat information sharing and defense require co-operation and trust between multiple domains/entities. There is a need for mechanisms that establish distributed trust to allow for such a collective defense. In this paper, we present a novel threat intelligence sharing and defense system, namely “DefenseChain”, to allow organizations to have incentive-based and trustworthy co-operation to mitigate the impact of cyber attacks. Our solution approach features a consortium Blockchain platform to obtain threat data and select suitable peers to help with attack detection and mitigation. We propose an economic model for creation and sustenance of the consortium with peers through a reputation estimation scheme that uses `Quality of Detection' and `Quality of Mitigation' metrics. Our evaluation experiments with DefenseChain implementation are performed on an Open Cloud testbed with Hyperledger Composer and in a simulation environment. Our results show that the DefenseChain system overall performs better than state-of-the-art decision making schemes in choosing the most appropriate detector and mitigator peers. In addition, we show that our DefenseChain achieves better performance trade-offs in terms of metrics such as detection time, mitigation time and attack reoccurence rate. Lastly, our validation results demonstrate that our DefenseChain can effectively identify rational/irrational service providers.

Internet of Things (IoT) can create the world with the integration of the physical things with the seamlessly network of information purposely to give a sophisticated and smart service for human life. A variety of threats and attacks to IoT object, however, can lead to the misuse of data or information to the IoT objects. One of the attacks is On-off Attack in which the attacker acts not only as an object with a good manner by sending the valid trust value but also sometimes as a bad object by sending invalid one. To respond this action, there is a need for the object security to such attacks. Here the writer used the Trustworthiness Management as a method to cope with this attack. Trustworthiness Management can use the aspect of trust value security as a reference for detecting an attack to the object. In addition, with the support of security system using the authentication provided by MQTT, it is expected that it can provide an additional security. The approach used in this research was the test on On-Off Attack detection directly to the object connected to the network. The results of the test were then displayed on the webpage made using PHP and MySQL database as the storage of the values sent by the object to the server. The test on the On-off Attack detection was successfully conducted with the success level of 100% and the execution to detection took 0.5518318 seconds. This then showed that Trustworthiness Management can be used as one of the methods to cope with On-off Attack.

Consensus-based distributed microgrid energy management system is one of the most used distributed control strategies in the microgrid area. To improve its cybersecurity, the system needs to evaluate the trustworthiness of the participating agents in addition to the conventional cryptography efforts. This paper proposes a novel augmented reputation metric to evaluate the agents' trustworthiness in a distributed fashion. The proposed metric adopts a novel augmentation method to substantially improve the trust evaluation and attack detection performance under three typical difficult-to-detect attack patterns. The proposed metric is implemented and validated on a real-time HIL microgrid testbed.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) are being deployed for multiple life critical activities such as self-driving cars, drones, and industries. However, the security has been persistently neglected, especially the image flows incoming from camera robots. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of robot cameras using ROS. We points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over the flows incoming from the robot cameras. Furthermore, we propose an intrusion detection system to detect abnormal flows. Our defense approach is based on images comparisons and unsupervised anomaly detection method. We experiment our approach on robot cameras embedded on a self-driving car.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are generally acknowledged as an extraordinary sort of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). VANETs have seen enormous development in a decade ago, giving a tremendous scope of employments in both military and in addition non-military personnel exercises. The temporary network in the vehicles can likewise build the driver's capability on the road. In this paper, an effective information dispersal approach is proposed which enhances the vehicle-to-vehicle availability as well as enhances the QoS between the source and the goal. The viability of the proposed approach is shown with regards to the noteworthy gets accomplished in the parameters in particular, end to end delay, packet drop ratio, average download delay and throughput in comparison with the existing approaches.

This paper mainly focuses on presenting a novel attack detection system to thread out the risk issues in IoT. The presented attack detection system links the interconnection of DevOps as it creates the correlation between development and IT operations. Further, the presented attack detection model ensures the operational security of different applications. In view of this, the implemented system incorporates two main stages named Proposed Feature Extraction process and Classification. The data from every application is processed with the initial stage of feature extraction, which concatenates the statistical and higher-order statistical features. After that, these extracted features are supplied to classification process, where determines the presence of attacks. For this classification purpose, this paper aims to deploy the optimized Deep Belief Network (DBN), where the activation function is tuned optimally. Furthermore, the optimal tuning is done by a renowned meta-heuristic algorithm called Lion Algorithm (LA). Finally, the performance of proposed work is compared and proved over other conventional methods.

Recent years have seen an increase in the data usage in cars, particularly as they become more autonomous and connected. With the rise in data use have come concerns about automotive cyber-security. An in-vehicle network shown to be particularly vulnerable is the Controller Area Network (CAN), which is the communication bus used by the car's safety critical and performance critical components. Cyber attacks on the CAN have been demonstrated, leading to research to develop attack detection and attack prevention systems. Such research requires representative attack demonstrations and data for testing. Obtaining this data is problematical due to the expense, danger and impracticality of using real cars on roads or tracks for example attacks. Whilst CAN simulators are available, these tend to be configured for testing conformance and functionality, rather than analysing security and cyber vulnerability. We therefore adapt a leading, industry-standard, CAN simulator to incorporate a core set of cyber attacks that are representative of those proposed by other researchers. Our adaptation allows the user to configure the attacks, and can be added easily to the free version of the simulator. Here we describe the simulator and, after reviewing the attacks that have been demonstrated and discussing their commonalities, we outline the attacks that we have incorporated into the simulator.

For controllers of Software Defined Network (SDN), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are still the simplest and most effective way to attack. Aiming at this problem, a real-time DDoS detection attack method for SDN controller is proposed. The method first uses the entropy to detect whether the flow is abnormal. After the abnormal warning is issued, the flow entry of the OpenFlow switch is obtained, and the DDoS attack feature in the SDN environment is analyzed to extract important features related to the attack. The BiLSTM-RNN neural network algorithm is used to train the data set, and the BiLSTM model is generated to classify the real-time traffic to realize the DDoS attack detection. Experiments show that, compared with other methods, this method can efficiently implement DDoS attack traffic detection and reduce controller overhead in SDN environment.

Hardware security is a critical concern in design and fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs). Contemporary hardware threats comprise tens of advance invasive and non-invasive attacks for compromising security of modern ICs. Numerous attack-specific countermeasures against the individual threats have been proposed, trading power, area, speed, and design complexity of a system for security. These typical overheads combined with strict performance requirements in advanced technology nodes and high complexity of modern ICs often make the codesign of multiple countermeasures impractical. In this paper, on-chip distribution networks are exploited for detecting those hardware security threats that require non-invasive, yet physical interaction with an operating device-under-attack (e.g., measuring equipment for collecting sensitive information in side-channel attacks). With the proposed approach, the effect of the malicious physical interference with the device-under-attack is captured in the form of on-chip voltage variations and utilized for detecting malicious activity in the compromised device. A machine learning (ML) security IC is trained to predict system security based on sensed variations of signals within on-chip distribution networks. The trained ML ICs are distributed on-chip, yielding a robust and high-confidence security network on-chip. To halt an active attack, a variety of desired counteractions can be executed in a cost-effective manner upon the attack detection. The applicability and effectiveness of these security networks is demonstrated in this paper with respect to power, timing, and electromagnetic analysis attacks.

With the rapid proliferation of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, many security challenges could be introduced at low-end routers. Misbehaving routers affect the availability of the networks by dropping packets selectively and rejecting data forwarding services. Although existing Reputation Management (RM) systems are useful in identifying misbehaving routers, the centralized nature of the RM center has the risk of one-point failure. The emerging blockchain techniques, with the inherent decentralized consensus mechanism, provide a promising method to reduce this one-point failure risk. By adopting the distributed consensus mechanism, we propose a blockchain-based reputation management system in IoT networks to overcome the limitation of centralized router RM systems. The proposed solution utilizes the blockchain technique as a decentralized database to store router reports for calculating reputation of each router. With the proposed reputation calculation mechanism, the reliability of each router would be evaluated, and the malicious misbehaving routers with low reputations will be blacklisted and get isolated. More importantly, we develop an optimized group mining process for blockchain technique in order to improve the efficiency of block generation and reduce the resource consumption. The simulation results validate the distributed blockchain-based RM system in terms of attacks detection and system convergence performance, and the comparison result of the proposed group mining process with existing blockchain models illustrates the applicability and feasibility of the proposed works.

The Named Data Network (NDN) is a promising network paradigm for content distribution based on caching. However, it may put consumer privacy at risk, as the adversary may identify the content, the name and the signature (namely a certificate) through side-channel timing responses from the cache of the routers. The adversary may identify the content name and the consumer node by distinguishing between cached and un- cached contents. In order to mitigate the timing attack, effective countermeasure methods have been proposed by other authors, such as random caching, random freshness, and probabilistic caching. In this work, we have implemented a timing attack scenario to evaluate the efficiency of these countermeasures and to demonstrate how the adversary can be detected. For this goal, a brute force timing attack scenario based on a real topology was developed, which is the first brute force attack model applied in NDN. Results show that the adversary nodes can be effectively distinguished from other legitimate consumers during the attack period. It is also proposed a multi-level mechanism to detect an adversary node. Through this approach, the content distribution performance can be mitigated against the attack.

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing system parameters to improve detection of attacks in control systems. Specifically, we study control systems which are vulnerable to integrity attacks on sensors and actuators. We aim to defend against strong model aware adversaries that can read and modify all sensors and actuators. Previous work has proposed a moving target defense for detecting integrity attacks on control systems. Here, an authenticating subsystem with time-varying dynamics coupled to the original plant is introduced. Due to this coupling, an attack on the original system will affect the authenticating subsystem and in turn be revealed by a set of sensors measuring the extended plant. Moreover, the time-varying dynamics of the extended plant act as a moving target, preventing an adversary from developing an effective adaptive attack strategy. Previous work has failed to consider the design of the time-varying system matrices and as such provides little in terms of guidelines for implementation in real systems. This paper proposes two optimization problems for designing these matrices. The first designs the auxiliary actuators to maximize detection performance while the second designs the coupling matrices to maximize system estimation performance. Numerical examples are presented that validate our approach.

As opposed to a traditional power grid, a smart grid can help utilities to save energy and therefore reduce the cost of operation. It also increases reliability of the system In smart grids the quality of monitoring and control can be adequately improved by incorporating computing and intelligent communication knowledge. However, this exposes the system to false data injection (FDI) attacks and the system becomes vulnerable to intrusions. Therefore, it is important to detect such false data injection attacks and provide an algorithm for the protection of system against such attacks. In this paper a comparison between three FDI detection methods has been made. An H2 control method has then been proposed to detect and control the false data injection on a 12th order model of a smart grid. Disturbances and uncertainties were added to the system and the results show the system to be fully controllable. This paper shows the implementation of a feedback controller to fully detect and mitigate the false data injection attacks. The controller can be incorporated in real life smart grid operations.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary idea to realize software-driven network with the separation of control and data planes. In essence, SDN addresses the problems faced by the traditional network architecture; however, it may as well expose the network to new attacks. Among other attacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are hard to contain in such software-based networks. Existing DDoS mitigation techniques either lack in performance or jeopardize the accuracy of the attack detection. To fill the voids, we propose in this paper a machine learning-based DDoS mitigation technique for SDN. First, we create a model for DDoS detection in SDN using NSL-KDD dataset and then after training the model on this dataset, we use real DDoS attacks to assess our proposed model. Obtained results show that the proposed technique equates favorably to the current techniques with increased performance and accuracy.

The emergence of Software Defined Network (SDN) and its promises in networking technology has gotten every stakeholder excited. However, it is believed that every technological development comes with its own challenges of which the most prominent in this case is security. This paper presents a real time detection of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the SDN and a control method based on the sFlow mitigation technology. sFlow analyses samples of packets collected from the network traffic and generates handling rules to be sent to the controller in case of an attack detection. The implementation was done by emulating the network in Mininet which runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) and it was shown that the proposed method effectively detects and mitigates DDoS attacks.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are eminent type of Mobile ad hoc Networks. The network created in VANETs is quite prone to security problem. In this work, a new mechanism is proposed to study the security of VANETs against DDoS attack. The proposed mechanism focuses on distributed denial of service attacks. The main idea of the paper is to detect the DDoS attack and mitigate it. The work consists of two stages, initially attack topology and network congestion is created. The second stage is to detect and mitigate the DDoS attack. The existing method is compared with the proposed method for mitigating DDoS attacks in VANETs. The existing solutions presented by the various researchers are also compared and analyzed. The solution for such kind of problem is provided which is used to detect and mitigate DDoS attack by using greedy approach. The network environment is created using NS-2. The results of simulation represent that the proposed approach is better in the terms of network packet loss, routing overhead and network throughput.

We introduce a new defense mechanism for stochastic control systems with control objectives, to enhance their resilience before the detection of any attacks. To this end, we cautiously design the outputs of the sensors that monitor the state of the system since the attackers need the sensor outputs for their malicious objectives in stochastic control scenarios. Different from the defense mechanisms that seek to detect infiltration or to improve detectability of the attacks, the proposed approach seeks to minimize the damage of possible attacks before they actually have even been detected. We, specifically, consider a controlled Gauss-Markov process, where the controller could have been infiltrated into at any time within the system's operation. Within the framework of game-theoretic hierarchical equilibrium, we provide a semi-definite programming based algorithm to compute the optimal linear secure sensor outputs that enhance the resiliency of control systems prior to attack detection.

Code reuse techniques can circumvent existing security measures. For example, attacks such as Return Oriented Programming (ROP) use fragments of the existing code base to create an attack. Since this code is already in the system, the Data Execution Prevention methods cannot prevent the execution of this reorganised code. Existing software-based Control Flow Integrity can prevent this attack, but the overhead is enormous. Most of the improved methods utilise reduced granularity in exchange for a small performance overhead. Hardware-based detection also faces the same performance overhead and accuracy issues. Benefit from HPC's large-area loading on modern CPU chips, we propose a detection method based on the monitoring of hardware performance counters, which is a lightweight system-level detection for malicious code execution to solve the restrictions of other software and hardware security measures, and is not as complicated as Control Flow Integrity.

For sharing resources using ad hoc communication MANET are quite effective and scalable medium. MANET is a distributed, decentralized, dynamic network with no fixed infrastructure, which are self- organized and self-managed. Achieving high security level is a major challenge in case of MANET. Layered architecture is one of the ways for handling security challenges, which enables collection and analysis of data from different security dimensions. This work proposes a novel multi-layered outlier detection algorithm using hierarchical similarity metric with hierarchical categorized data. Network performance with and without the presence of outlier is evaluated for different quality-of-service parameters like percentage of APDR and AT for small (100 to 200 nodes), medium (200 to 1000 nodes) and large (1000 to 3000 nodes) scale networks. For a network with and without outliers minimum improvements observed are 9.1 % and 0.61 % for APDR and AT respectively while the maximum improvements of 22.1 % and 104.1 %.

Technological developments in the energy sector while offering new business insights, also produces complex data. In this study, the relationship between smart grid and big data approaches have been investigated. After analyzing where the big data techniques and technologies are used in which areas of smart grid systems, the big data technologies used to detect attacks on smart grids have been focused on. Big data analytics produces efficient solutions, but it is more critical to choose which algorithm and metric. For this reason, an application prototype has been proposed using big data approaches to detect attacks on smart grids. The algorithms with high accuracy were determined as 92% with Random Forest and 87% with Decision Tree.

Modern distributed systems are characterized by complex deployment designed to ensure high availability through replication and diversity, to tolerate the presence of failures and to limit the possibility of successful compromising. However, software is not free from bugs that generate vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker through multiple steps. This paper presents an attack-graph based multi-step attack detector aiming at detecting a possible on-going attack early enough to take proper countermeasures through; a Visualization interfaced with the described attack detector presents the security operator with the relevant pieces of information, allowing a better comprehension of the network status and providing assistance in managing attack situations (i.e., reactive analysis mode). We first propose an architecture and then we present the implementation of each building block. Finally, we provide an evaluation of the proposed approach aimed at highlighting the existing trade-off between accuracy of the detection and detection time.

In this paper, an novel active safety monitoring system is constructed for a class of nonlinear discrete-time systems. The considered nonlinear system is subjected to unknown inputs, external disturbances, and possible unknown deception attacks, simultaneously. In order to secure the safety of control systems, an active attack estimator composed of state/output estimator, attack detector and attack/attacker action estimator is constructed to monitor the system running status. The analysis and synthesis of attack estimator is performed in the H∞performance optimization manner. The off-line calculation and on-line application of active attack estimator are summarized simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed results is finally verified by an numerical example.