Biblio

With the rapid progression of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and especially of Internet of Things (IoT), the conventional electrical grid is transformed into a new intelligent paradigm, known as Smart Grid (SG). SG provides significant benefits both for utility companies and energy consumers such as the two-way communication (both electricity and information), distributed generation, remote monitoring, self-healing and pervasive control. However, at the same time, this dependence introduces new security challenges, since SG inherits the vulnerabilities of multiple heterogeneous, co-existing legacy and smart technologies, such as IoT and Industrial Control Systems (ICS). An effective countermeasure against the various cyberthreats in SG is the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), informing the operator timely about the possible cyberattacks and anomalies. In this paper, we provide an anomaly-based IDS especially designed for SG utilising operational data from a real power plant. In particular, many machine learning and deep learning models were deployed, introducing novel parameters and feature representations in a comparative study. The evaluation analysis demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed IDS and the improvement due to the suggested complex data representation.

Security refers to precautions designed to shield the availability and integrity of information exchanged among the digital global community. Information safety measure typically protects the virtual facts from unauthorized sources to get a right of entry to, disclosure, manipulation, alteration or destruction on both hardware and software technologies. According to an evaluation through experts operating in the place of information safety, some of the new cyber-attacks are keep on emerging in all the business processes. As a stop result of the analyses done, it's been determined that although the level of risk is not excessive in maximum of the attacks, it's far a severe risk for important data and the severity of those attacks is prolonged. Prior safety structures has been established to monitor various cyber-threats, predominantly using a gadget processed data or alerts for showing each deterministic and stochastic styles. The principal finding for deterministic patterns in cyber- attacks is that they're neither unbiased nor random over the years. Consequently, the quantity of assaults in the past helps to monitor the range of destiny attacks. The deterministic styles can often be leveraged to generate moderately correct monitoring.

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.

Blockchain technology has brought a huge paradigm shift in multiple industries, by integrating distributed ledger, smart contracts and consensus protocol under the same roof. Notable applications of blockchain include cryptocurrencies and large-scale multi-party transaction management systems. The latter fits very well into the domain of manufacturing and supply chain management for Integrated Circuits (IC), which, despite several advanced technologies, is vulnerable to malicious practices, such as overproduction, IP piracy and deleterious design modification to gain unfair advantages. To combat these threats, researchers have proposed several ideas like hardware metering, design obfuscation, split manufacturing and watermarking. In this paper, we show, how these issues can be complementarily dealt with using blockchain technology coupled with identity-based encryption and physical unclonable functions, for improved resilience against certain adversarial motives. As part of our proposed blockchain protocol, titled `BLIC', we propose an authentication mechanism to secure both active and passive IC transactions, and a composite consensus protocol designed for IC supply chains. We also present studies on the security, scalability, privacy and anonymity of the BLIC protocol.

Attackers can leverage several techniques to compromise computer networks, ranging from sophisticated malware to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that target the application layer. Application layer DDoS attacks, such as Slow Read, are implemented with just enough traffic to tie up CPU or memory resources causing web and application servers to go offline. Such attacks can mimic legitimate network requests making them difficult to detect. They also utilize less volume than traditional DDoS attacks. These low volume attack methods can often go undetected by network security solutions until it is too late. In this paper, we explore the use of machine learners for detecting Slow Read DDoS attacks on web servers at the application layer. Our approach uses a generated dataset based upon Netflow data collected at the application layer on a live network environment. Our Netflow data uses the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) standard providing significant flexibility and features. These Netflow features can process and handle a growing amount of traffic and have worked well in our previous DDoS work detecting evasion techniques. Our generated dataset consists of real-world network data collected from a production network. We use eight different classifiers to build Slow Read attack detection models. Our wide selection of learners provides us with a more comprehensive analysis of Slow Read detection models. Experimental results show that the machine learners were quite successful in identifying the Slow Read attacks with a high detection and low false alarm rate. The experiment demonstrates that our chosen Netflow features are discriminative enough to detect such attacks accurately.

Machine-learning solutions are successfully adopted in multiple contexts but the application of these techniques to the cyber security domain is complex and still immature. Among the many open issues that affect security systems based on machine learning, we concentrate on adversarial attacks that aim to affect the detection and prediction capabilities of machine-learning models. We consider realistic types of poisoning and evasion attacks targeting security solutions devoted to malware, spam and network intrusion detection. We explore the possible damages that an attacker can cause to a cyber detector and present some existing and original defensive techniques in the context of intrusion detection systems. This paper contains several performance evaluations that are based on extensive experiments using large traffic datasets. The results highlight that modern adversarial attacks are highly effective against machine-learning classifiers for cyber detection, and that existing solutions require improvements in several directions. The paper paves the way for more robust machine-learning-based techniques that can be integrated into cyber security platforms.

DNS based domain name resolution has been known as one of the most fundamental Internet services. In the meanwhile, DNS cache poisoning attacks also have become a critical threat in the cyber world. In addition to Kaminsky attacks, the falsified data from the compromised authoritative DNS servers also have become the threats nowadays. Several solutions have been proposed in order to prevent DNS cache poisoning attacks in the literature for the former case such as DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions), however no effective solutions have been proposed for the later case. Moreover, due to the performance issue and significant workload increase on DNS cache servers, DNSSEC has not been deployed widely yet. In this work, we propose an advanced detection method against DNS cache poisoning attacks using machine learning techniques. In the proposed method, in addition to the basic 5-tuple information of a DNS packet, we intend to add a lot of special features extracted based on the standard DNS protocols as well as the heuristic aspects such as “time related features”, “GeoIP related features” and “trigger of cached DNS data”, etc., in order to identify the DNS response packets used for cache poisoning attacks especially those from compromised authoritative DNS servers. In this paper, as a work in progress, we describe the basic idea and concept of our proposed method as well as the intended network topology of the experimental environment while the prototype implementation, training data preparation and model creation as well as the evaluations will belong to the future work.

This Work-In-Progress Paper for the Innovative Practice Category presents a novel experiment in active learning of cybersecurity. We introduced a new workshop on hacking for an existing science-popularizing program at our university. The workshop participants, 28 teenagers, played a cybersecurity game designed for training undergraduates and professionals in penetration testing. Unlike in learning environments that are simplified for young learners, the game features a realistic virtual network infrastructure. This allows exploring security tools in an authentic scenario, which is complemented by a background story. Our research aim is to examine how young players approach using cybersecurity tools by interacting with the professional game. A preliminary analysis of the game session showed several challenges that the workshop participants faced. Nevertheless, they reported learning about security tools and exploits, and 61% of them reported wanting to learn more about cybersecurity after the workshop. Our results support the notion that young learners should be allowed more hands-on experience with security topics, both in formal education and informal extracurricular events.

The search for alternative delivery modes to teaching has been one of the pressing concerns of numerous educational institutions. One key innovation to improve teaching and learning is e-learning which has undergone enormous improvements. From its focus on text-based environment, it has evolved into Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) which provide more stimulating and immersive experiences among learners and educators. An example of VLEs is the virtual world which is an emerging educational platform among universities worldwide. One very interesting topic that can be taught using the virtual world is cybersecurity. Simulating cybersecurity in the virtual world may give a realistic experience to students which can be hardly achieved by classroom teaching. To date, there are quite a number of studies focused on cybersecurity awareness and cybersecurity behavior. But none has focused looking into the effect of digital simulation in the virtual world, as a new educational platform, in the cybersecurity attitude of the students. It is in this regard that this study has been conducted by designing simulation in the virtual world lessons that teaches the five aspects of cybersecurity namely; malware, phishing, social engineering, password usage and online scam, which are the most common cybersecurity issues. The study sought to examine the effect of this digital simulation design in the cybersecurity knowledge and attitude of the students. The result of the study ascertains that students exposed under simulation in the virtual world have a greater positive change in cybersecurity knowledge and attitude than their counterparts.

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) have become popular in the healthcare industry recently because of its lowcost, high-throughput, and portability. Users can execute the experiments on biochips with high resolution, and the biochips market therefore grows significantly. However, malicious attackers exploit Intellectual Property (IP) piracy and Trojan attacks to gain illegal profits. The conventional approaches present defense mechanisms that target either IP piracy or Trojan attacks. In practical, DMFBs may suffer from the threat of being attacked by these two attacks at the same time. This paper presents a comprehensive security system to protect DMFBs from IP piracy and Trojan attacks. We propose an authentication mechanism to protect IP and detect errors caused by Trojans with CCD cameras. By our security system, we could generate secret keys for authentication and determine whether the bioassay is under the IP piracy and Trojan attacks. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our security system without overhead of the bioassay completion time.

To enhance the programmability and flexibility of network and service management, the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is gaining growing attention by academia and industry. Motivated by its success in wired networks, researchers have recently started to embrace SDN towards developing next generation wireless networks such as Software-Defined Internet of Vehicles (SD-IoV). As the SD-IoV evolves, new security threats would emerge and demand attention. And since the core of the SD-IoV would be the control plane, it is highly vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks. In this work, we investigate the impact of DDoS attacks on the controllers in a SD-IoV environment. Through experimental evaluations, we highlight the drastic effects DDoS attacks could have on a SD-IoV in terms of throughput and controller load. Our results could be a starting point to motivate further research in the area of SD-IoV security and would give deeper insights into the problems of DDoS attacks on SD-IoV.

Internet of Vehicles are the important part of Intelligence Traffic Systems (ITS), which are essential for the national security and economy development. The impact assessment for cyberattacks in the IoV protection is of great theoretical and practical significance. Most of the researchers in this field pay attention on the attack impact on a vehicle, and the seldom investigate the impact on the whole system which combines all the vehicles as a whole integration. To tackle this problem, a cyber-physical interaction model based impact assessment of cyberattacks is presented. In this approach, the operation of IoV is modeled from the cyberphysical interaction perspective, and then the propagating process from cyber layer to physical layer is investigated. Based on above model, the impact assessment of cyberattacks on IoV is realized quantitatively. Finally, a simulation on an IoV is conducted to verify the effectiveness of this approach.

In the context of the rapid technological progress, the cyber-threats become a serious challenge that requires immediate and continuous action. As cybercrime poses a permanent and increasing threat, governments, corporate and individual users of the cyber-space are constantly struggling to ensure an acceptable level of security over their assets. Maliciousness on the cyber-space spans identity theft, fraud, and system intrusions. This is due to the benefits of cyberspace-low entry barriers, user anonymity, and spatial and temporal separation between users, make it a fertile field for deception and fraud. Numerous, supervised and unsupervised, techniques have been proposed and used to identify fraudulent transactions and activities that deviate from regular patterns of behaviour. For instance, neural networks and genetic algorithms were used to detect credit card fraud in a dataset covering 13 months and 50 million credit card transactions. Unsupervised methods, such as clustering analysis, have been used to identify financial fraud or to filter fake online product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites. Blockchain technology has demonstrated its feasibility and relevance in e-commerce. Its use is now being extended to new areas, related to electronic government. The technology appears to be the most appropriate in areas that require storage and processing of large amounts of protected data. The question is what can blockchain technology do and not do to fight malicious online activity?

In the process of diagnosing the culture of information security in an organization, it is considered two methods, the first one is the application of an ISCA (Information Security Culture Assessment) survey questionnaire and the second one based on social engineering techniques such as phishing, answering the question, How can a diagnosis be made effectively of the level of information security culture within an organization? with the objective of determining which of the two methods is the most effective and realistic for the diagnosis of the information security culture. This helps to understand and have a real and complete perception of the behavior and reaction of the users against the attacks of threat actors who make use of persuasion and manipulation tactics in order to obtain confidential or sensitive information. A description of these two methods is applied to a case study (public university). As a result, it is obtained that it is not enough to perform a diagnosis based on questionnaires because they can be relatively subjective in the sense of the way in which users respond to questions or statements. Evidence of controlled social engineering attacks that demonstrate in more detail the real behavior of users should be considered. Based on this more complete knowledge, appropriate strategies can be formulated for the change or strengthening of the security culture that ultimately contributes to the purpose of protecting information assets.

This study was conducted in order to assess the E-security behavior of students in a large higher educational institutions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Specifically, it sought to determine the current state of students' E-security behavior in the aspects of malware, password usage, data handling, phishing, social engineering, and online scam. An E- Security Behavior Survey Instrument (EBSI) was used to determine the status of security behavior of the participants in doing their computing activities. To complement the survey tool, focus group discussions were conducted to elicit specific experiences and insights of the participants relative to E-security. The results of the study shows that the overall E-security behavior among students in higher education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moderately favorable. Specifically, the investigation reveals that the students favorably behave when it comes to phishing, social engineering, and online scam. However, they uncertainly behave on malware issues, password usage, and data handling.

The human side of cyber is fundamentally important to understanding and improving cyber operations. With the exception of Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises, cyber testing and experimentation tends to ignore the human attacker. While traditional CTF events include a deeply rooted human component, they rarely aim to measure human performance, cognition, or psychology. We argue that CTF is not sufficient for measuring these aspects of the human; instead, we examine the value in performing red team behavioral and cognitive testing in a large-scale, controlled human-subject experiment. In this paper we describe the pros and cons of performing this type of experimentation and provide detailed exposition of the data collection and experimental controls used during a recent cyber deception experiment-the Tularosa Study. Finally, we will discuss lessons learned and how our experiences can inform best practices in future cyber operations studies of human behavior and cognition.

Capturing the patterns in adversarial movement can provide valuable information regarding how the adversaries progress through cyberattacks. This information can be further employed for making comparisons and interpretations of decision making of the adversaries. In this study, we propose a framework based on concepts of social networks to characterize and compare the patterns, variations and shifts in the movements made by an adversarial team during a real-time cybersecurity exercise. We also explore the possibility of movement association with the skill sets using topological sort networks. This research provides preliminary insight on adversarial movement complexity and linearity and decision-making as cyberattacks unfold.

Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing the behavior of human and financial market. Cognitive hacking leverages the influence of social media to spread deceptive information with an intent to gain abnormal profits illegally or to cause losses. Measuring the information content in financial social media can be useful for identifying these attacks. In this paper, we developed an approach to identifying social media features that correlate with abnormal returns of the stocks of companies vulnerable to be targets of cognitive hacking. To test the approach, we collected price data and 865,289 social media messages on four technology companies from July 2017 to June 2018, and extracted features that contributed to abnormal stock movements. Preliminary results show that terms that are simple, motivate actions, incite emotion, and uses exaggeration are ranked high in the features of messages associated with abnormal price movements. We also provide selected messages to illustrate the use of these features in potential cognitive hacking attacks.

Smart Grid cyber-security sounds to be a critical issue, because of widespread development of information technology. To achieve secure and reliable operation, the complexity of human automation interaction (HAI) necessitates more sophisticated and intelligent methodologies. In this paper, an adaptive autonomy fuzzy expert system is developed using gradient descent algorithm to determine the Level of Automation (LOA), based on the changing of Performance Shaping Factors (PSF). These PSFs indicate the effects of environmental conditions on the performance of HAI. The major advantage of this method is that the fuzzy rule or membership function can be learnt without changing the form of the fuzzy rule in conventional fuzzy control. Because of data shortage, Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) technique is applied for assessing how the results of proposed system generalizes to the new contingency situations. The expert system database is extracted from superior experts' judgments. In order to regard the importance of each PSF, weighted rules are also considered. In addition, some new environmental conditions are introduced that has not been seen before. Nine scenarios are discussed to reveal the performance of the proposed system. Results confirm that the presented fuzzy expert system can effectively calculates the proper LOA even in the new contingency situations.

With rapid growth of network size and complexity, network defenders are facing more challenges in protecting networked computers and other devices from acute attacks. Traffic visualization is an essential element in an anomaly detection system for visual observations and detection of distributed DoS attacks. This paper presents an interactive visualization system called TVis, proposed to detect both low-rate and highrate DDoS attacks using Heron's triangle-area mapping. TVis allows network defenders to identify and investigate anomalies in internal and external network traffic at both online and offline modes. We model the network traffic as an undirected graph and compute triangle-area map based on incidences at each vertex for each 5 seconds time window. The system triggers an alarm iff the system finds an area of the mapped triangle beyond the dynamic threshold. TVis performs well for both low-rate and high-rate DDoS detection in comparison to its competitors.

Cross site scripting (XSS) attack is one of the attacks on the web. It brings session hijack with HTTP cookies, information collection with fake HTML input form and phishing with dummy sites. As a countermeasure of XSS attack, machine learning has attracted a lot of attention. There are existing researches in which SVM, Random Forest and SCW are used for the detection of the attack. However, in the researches, there are problems that the size of data set is too small or unbalanced, and that preprocessing method for vectorization of strings causes misclassification. The highest accuracy of the classification was 98% in existing researches. Therefore, in this paper, we improved the preprocessing method for vectorization by using word2vec to find the frequency of appearance and co-occurrence of the words in XSS attack scripts. Moreover, we also used a large data set to decrease the deviation of the data. Furthermore, we evaluated the classification results with two procedures. One is an inappropriate procedure which some researchers tend to select by mistake. The other is an appropriate procedure which can be applied to an attack detection filter in the real environment.

QR codes are the means to offer more direct and instant access to information. However, QR codes have shown their deficiency, being a very powerful attack vector, for example, to execute phishing attacks. In this study, we have proposed a solution that allows controlling access to the information offered by QR codes. Through a scanner designed in APP Inventor which has been called XSStudent, a system has been built that analyzes the URLs obtained and compares them with a previously trained system. This study was executed by means of a controlled attack to the users of the university who through a flyer with a QR code and a fictional link accessed an infected page with JavaScript code that allowed a successful cross-site scripting attack. The results indicate that 100% of the users are vulnerable to this type of attacks, so also, with our proposal, an attack executed in the universities using the Beef software would be totally blocked.

As the technology is growing rapidly, the development of systems and software are becoming more complex. For this reason, the security of software and web applications become more vulnerable. In the last two decades, the use of internet application and security hacking activities are on top of the glance. The organizations are having the biggest challenge that how to secure their web applications from the rapidly increasing cyber threats because the organization can't compromise the security of their sensitive information. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing techniques may help organizations to find security loopholes. The weakness can be the asset for the attacker if the organizations are not aware of this. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing helps an organization to cover the security loopholes and determine their security arrangements are working as per defined policies or not. To cover the tracks and mitigate the threats it is necessary to install security patches. This paper includes the survey on the current vulnerabilities, determination of those vulnerabilities, the methodology used for determination, tools used to determine the vulnerabilities to secure the organizations from cyber threat.

A cooperative network defense is one approach to fend off large-scale Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. In this regard, the Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS) is a multi-domain, blockchain-based, cooperative DDoS defense system, where each Autonomous System (AS) is taking part in the defense alliance. Each AS can exchange attack information about ongoing attacks via the Ethereum blockchain. However, the currently operational implementation of BloSS is not interactive or visualized, but the DDoS mitigation is automated. In realworld defense systems, a human cybersecurity analyst decides whether a DDoS threat should be mitigated or not. Thus, this work presents the design of a security management dashboard for BloSS, designed for interactive use by cyber security analysts.

The number of phishing attacks has increased in Latin America, exceeding the operational skills of cybersecurity analysts. The cognitive security application proposes the use of bigdata, machine learning, and data analytics to improve response times in attack detection. This paper presents an investigation about the analysis of anomalous behavior related with phishing web attacks and how machine learning techniques can be an option to face the problem. This analysis is made with the use of an contaminated data sets, and python tools for developing machine learning for detect phishing attacks through of the analysis of URLs to determinate if are good or bad URLs in base of specific characteristics of the URLs, with the goal of provide realtime information for take proactive decisions that minimize the impact of an attack.