Biblio

Every person using different online services is concerned with the security and privacy for protecting individual information from the intruders. Many authentication systems are available for the protection of individuals' data, and the password authentication system is one of them. Due to the increment of information sharing, internet popularization, electronic commerce transactions, and data transferring, both password security and authenticity have become an essential and necessary subject. But it is also mandatory to ensure the strength of the password. For that reason, all cyber experts recommend intricate password patterns. But most of the time, the users forget their passwords because of those complicated patterns. In this paper, we are proposing a unique algorithm that will generate a strong password, unlike other existing random password generators. This password will he based on the information, i.e. (some words and numbers) provided by the users so that they do not feel challenged to remember the password. We have tested our system through various experiments using synthetic input data. We also have checked our generator with four popular online password checkers to verify the strength of the produced passwords. Based on our experiments, the reliability of our generated passwords is entirely satisfactory. We also have examined that our generated passwords can defend against two password cracking attacks named the "Dictionary attack" and the "Brute Force attack". We have implemented our system in Python programming language. In the near future, we have a plan to extend our work by developing an online free to use user interface. The passwords generated by our system are not only user-friendly but also have achieved most of the qualities of being strong as well as non- crackable passwords.

In this work, we perform security analysis of using an e-mail as a self-service password reset point, and exploit some of the vulnerabilities of e-mail servers' forgotten password reset paths. We perform and illustrate three different attacks on a personal Email account, using a variety of tools such as: public knowledge attainable through social media or public records to answer security questions and execute a social engineering attack, hardware available to the public to perform a man in the middle attack, and free software to perform a brute-force attack on the login of the email account. Our results expose some of the inherent vulnerabilities in using emails as password reset points. The findings are extremely relevant to the security of mobile devices since users' trend has leaned towards usage of mobile devices over desktops for Internet access.

The privacy of people on internet is getting reduced day by day. Data records of many prestigious organizations are getting corrupted due to computer malwares. Computer viruses are becoming more advanced. Hackers are able penetrate into a network and able to manipulate data. In this paper, describes the types of malwares like Trojans, boot sector virus, polymorphic virus, etc., and some of the hacking techniques which include DOS attack, DDoS attack, brute forcing, man in the middle attack, social engineering, information gathering tools, spoofing, sniffing. Counter measures for cyber attacks include VPN, proxy, tor (browser), firewall, antivirus etc., to understand the need of cyber security.

Vehicles are becoming increasingly connected to the outside world. We can connect our devices to the vehicle's infotainment system and internet is being added as a functionality. Therefore, security is a major concern as the attack surface has become much larger than before. Consequently, attackers are creating malware that can infect vehicles and perform life-threatening activities. For example, a malware can compromise vehicle ECUs and cause unexpected consequences. Hence, ensuring the security of connected vehicle software and networks is extremely important to gain consumer confidence and foster the growth of this emerging market. In this paper, we propose a characterization of vehicle malware and a security architecture to protect vehicle from these malware. The architecture uses multiple computational platforms and makes use of the virtualization technique to limit the attack surface. There is a real-time operating system to control critical vehicle functionalities and multiple other operating systems for non-critical functionalities (infotainment, telematics, etc.). The security architecture also describes groups of components for the operating systems to prevent malicious activities and perform policing (monitor, detect, and control). We believe this work will help automakers guard their systems against malware and provide a clear guideline for future research.

In the existing situation, most of the business process are running through web applications. This helps the enterprises to grow their business efficiently which creates a good consumer relationship. But the main problem is that they failed to provide a vulnerable free environment. To overcome this issue in web applications, vulnerability assessment should be made periodically. They are many vulnerability assessment methodologies which occur earlier are not much proactive. So, machine learning is needed to provide a combined solution to determine vulnerability occurrence and percentage of vulnerability occurred in logical web pages. We use Decision Tree and Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) as a collective solution to find either vulnerability occur in web applications and the vulnerability occurred percentage on different logical web pages.

As an inevitable trend of information development of hospitals, Internet hospitals provide a series of convenient online services for patients such as registration, consultation, queuing, payment and medicine pick-up. However, hospitals have to face huge challenges, and deploy an Internet medical care-oriented service security open platform to ensure the security of personal privacy data and avoid malicious attacks from the Internet, so as to prevent illegal stealing of medical data. The service security open platform provides visualized control for the unified and standardized connection process and data access process.

With the disconnected nature of some Automatic Test Systems, there is no possibility for a centralized infrastructure of sense and response in Cybersecurity. For scalability, a cost effective onboard approach will be necessary. In smaller companies where connectivity is not a concern, costly commercial solutions will impede the implementation of surveillance and compliance options. In this paper we propose to demonstrate an open source strategy using freely available Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIGs), internet resources, and supporting software stacks, such as OpenScap, HubbleStack, and (ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ElasticStack)) to deliver an affordable solution to this problem. OpenScap will provide tools for managing system security and standards compliance. HubbleStack will be employed to automate compliance via its components: NOVA (an auditing engine), Nebula (osquery integration), Pulsar (event system) and Quasar (reporting system). Our intention is utilize NOVA in conjunction with OpenScap to CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) scan and netstat for open ports and processes. Additionally we will monitor services and status, firewall settings, and use Nebula's integration of Facebook's osquery to detect vulnerabilities by querying the Operating System. Separately we plan to use Pulsar, a fast file integrity manger, to monitor the integrity of critical files such as system, test, and Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) software to ensure the system retains its integrity. All of this will be reported by Quasar, HubbleStack's reporting engine. We will provide situational awareness through the use of the open source Elastic Stack. ElasticSearch is a RESTful search and analytics engine. Logstash is an open source data processing pipeline that enables the ingestion of data from multiple sources sending it through extensible interfaces, in this case ElasticSearch. Kibana supports the visualization of data. Essentially Elastic Stack will be the presentation layer, HubbleStack will be the broker of the data to Elastic Stash, with the other HubbleStack components feeding that data. All of the tools involved are open source in nature, reducing the cost to the overhead required to keep configurations up to date, training on use, and analytics required to review the outputs.

Devices that are connected to the Internet are very interesting to security researchers as are at high risk of being attacked, compromised or otherwise abused. To investigate the root causes of the risks it is necessary to understand what classes of devices are affected in different ways. These devices are heterogeneous, thus making it impractical to classify large sets by applying static rules. We propose improvements for manually labelling training sets using HTTP response features for future classification using a neural network.

To ensure power system operational security, it not only requires security incident detection, but also automated intrusion response and recovery mechanisms to tolerate failures and maintain the system's functionalities. In this paper, we present a design procedure for remedial action schemes (RAS) that improves the power systems resiliency against accidental failures or malicious endeavors such as cyber attacks. A resilience-oriented optimal power flow is proposed, which optimizes the system security instead of the generation cost. To improve its speed for online application, a fast greedy algorithm is presented to narrow the search space. The proposed techniques are computationally efficient and are suitable for online RAS applications in large-scale power systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, there are two case studies with IEEE 24-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems.

Despite their popularity, Security Operation Centers (SOCs) are facing increasing challenges and pressure due to the growing volume, velocity and variety of the IT infrastructure and security data observed on a daily basis. Due to the mixed performance of current technological solutions, e.g. IDS and SIEM, there is an over-reliance on manual analysis of the events by human security analysts. This creates huge backlogs and slow down considerably the resolution of critical security events. Obvious solutions include increasing accuracy and efficiency in the automation of crucial aspects of the SOC workflow, such as the event classification and prioritization. In the current paper, we present a new approach for SOC event classification by identifying a set of new features using graphical analysis and classifying using a deep neural network model. Experimental evaluation using real SOC event log data yields very encouraging results in terms of classification accuracy.

In this paper, we propose a game-attack graph-based risk assessment model for industrial Internet system. Firstly, use non-destructive asset profiling to scan components and devices included in the system and their open services and communication protocols. Further compare the CNVD and CVE to find the vulnerability through the search engine keyword segment matching method, and generate an asset threat list. Secondly, build the attack rule base based on the network information, and model the system using the attribute attack graph. Thirdly, combine the game theory with the idea of the established model. Finally, optimize and quantify the analysis to get the best attack path and the best defense strategy.

Tor's anonymity network is one of the most widely used anonymity networks online, it consists of thousands of routers run by volunteers. Tor preserves the anonymity of its users by relaying the traffic through a number of routers (called onion routers) forming a circuit. The current design of Tor's transport layer suffers from a number of problems affecting the performance of the network. Several researches proposed changes in the transport design in order to eliminate the effect of these problems and improve the performance of Tor's network. In this paper. we propose "QuicTor", an improvement to the transport layer of Tor's network by using Google's protocol "QUIC" instead of TCP. QUIC was mainly developed to eliminate TCP's latency introduced from the handshaking delays and the head-of-line blocking problem. We provide an empirical evaluation of our proposed design and compare it to two other proposed designs, IMUX and PCTCP. We show that QuicTor significantly enhances the performance of Tor's network.

With the growth of the number of smart devices the range of fields where they are used is growing too, and it is essential to protect the communication between them. In addition to data integrity and confidentiality, for which standard mechanisms exists, a security service that may also be required is anonymity, allowing entities to communicate with each other in such a way that no third party knows that they are the participants of a certain message exchange. In this paper we propose a mechanism for creating anonymous communications using MQTT protocol. The design of our solution is based on dynamic broker bridging mechanism and allows clients to subscribe and to publish to a topic remaining incognito.

Social networks are highly preferred to express opinions, share information, and communicate with others on arbitrary topics. However, the downside is that many cybercriminals are leveraging social networks for cyber-crime. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the important social networks which can grant the anonymity to users by allowing them to connect channels without sign-up process. Therefore, IRC has been the playground of hackers and anonymous users for various operations such as hacking, cracking, and carding. Hence, it is urgent to study effective methods which can identify the authors behind the IRC messages. In this paper, we design an autonomic IRC monitoring system, performing recursive deep learning for classifying threat levels of messages and develop a novel author verification approach with one-class classification with deep autoencoder neural networks. The experimental results show that our approach can successfully perform effective author verification for IRC users.

Cloud-assisted Internet of Vehicles (IoV)which merges the advantages of both cloud computing and Internet of Things that can provide numerous online services, and bring lots of benefits and conveniences to the connected vehicles. However, the security and privacy issues such as confidentiality, access control and driver privacy may prevent it from being widely utilized for message dissemination. Existing attribute-based message encryption schemes still bring high computational cost to the lightweight vehicles. In this paper, we introduce a secure and privacy-preserving dissemination scheme for warning message in cloud-assisted IoV. Firstly, we adopt attribute-based encryption to protect the disseminated warning message, and present a verifiable encryption and decryption outsourcing construction to reduce the computational overhead on vehicles. Secondly, we present a conditional privacy preservation mechanism which utilizes anonymous identity-based signature technique to ensure anonymous vehicle authentication and message integrity checking, and also allows the trusted authority to trace the real identity of malicious vehicle. We further achieve batch verification to improve the authentication efficiency. The analysis indicate that our scheme gains more security properties and reduces the computational overhead on the vehicles.

Hiding contents of users' messages has been successfully addressed before, while anonymization of message senders remains a challenge since users do not usually trust ISPs and messaging application providers. To resolve this challenge, several solutions have been proposed so far. Among them, the Dining Cryptographers network protocol (DC-net) provides the strongest anonymity guarantees. However, DC-net suffers from two critical issues that makes it impractical, i.e., (1) collision possibility and (2) vulnerability against disruptions. Apart from that, we noticed a third critical issue during our investigation. (3) DC-net users can be deanonymized after they publish at least three messages. We name this problem the short stability issue and prove that anonymity is provided only for a few cycles of message publishing. As far as we know, this problem has not been identified in the previous research works. In this paper, we propose Harmonized and Stable DC-net (HSDC-net), a self-organizing protocol for anonymous communications. In our protocol design, we first resolve the short stability issue and obtain SDC-net, a stable extension of DC-net. Then, we integrate the Slot Reservation and Disruption Management sub-protocols into SDC-net to overcome the collision and security issues, respectively. The obtained HSDC-net protocol can also be integrated into blockchain-based cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to mix multiple transactions (belonging to different users) into a single transaction in such a way that the source of each payment is unknown. This preserves privacy of blockchain users. Our prototype implementation shows that HSDC-net achieves low latencies that makes it a practical protocol.

In 2008, 3GPP proposed the Long Term Evolution (LTE) in version 8. The standard is used in high-speed wireless communication standard for mobile terminal in telecommunication. It supports subscribers to access internet via specific base station after authentication. These authentication processes were defined in standard TS33.401 and TS33.102 by 3GPP. Authenticated processing standard inherits the authentication and key agreement protocol in RFC3310 and has been changed into authenticated scheme suitable for LTE. In the origin LTE authenticated scheme, subscribers need to transfer its International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) with plaintext. The IMSI might be intercepted and traced by fake stations. In this work, we propose a new scheme with a pseudo IMSI so that fake stations cannot get the real IMSI and trace the subscriber. The subscriber can keep anonymous and be confirmed by the base station for the legality. The pseudo identity is unlinkable to the subscriber. Not only does the proposed scheme enhance the security but also it just has some extra costs for signature generation and verification as compared to the original scheme.

Air-gapped computers are hermetically isolated from the Internet to eliminate any means of information leakage. In this paper we present HOTSPOT - a new type of airgap crossing technique. Signals can be sent secretly from air-gapped computers to nearby smartphones and then on to the Internet - in the form of thermal pings. The thermal signals are generated by the CPUs and GPUs and intercepted by a nearby smartphone. We examine this covert channel and discuss other work in the field of air-gap covert communication channels. We present technical background and describe thermal sensing in modern smartphones. We implement a transmitter on the computer side and a receiver Android App on the smartphone side, and discuss the implementation details. We evaluate the covert channel and tested it in a typical work place. Our results show that it possible to send covert signals from air-gapped PCs to the attacker on the Internet through the thermal pings. We also propose countermeasures for this type of covert channel which has thus far been overlooked.

With the ever-increasing number of smart home devices, the issues related to these environments are also growing. With an ever-growing attack surface, there is no standard way to protect homes and their inhabitants from new threats. The inhabitants are rarely aware of the increased security threats that they are exposed to and how to manage them. To tackle this problem, we propose a solution based on segmented architectures similar to the ones used in industrial systems. In this approach, the smart home is segmented into various levels, which can broadly be categorised into an inner level and external level. The external level is protected by a firewall that checks the communication from/to the Internet to/from the external devices. The internal level is protected by an additional firewall that filters the information and the communications between the external and the internal devices. This segmentation guarantees a trusted environment among the entities of the internal network. In this paper, we propose an adaptive trust model that checks the behaviour of the entities and in case the entities violate trust rules they can be put in quarantine or banned from the network.

In this paper, we design NETHCF, a line-rate in-network system for filtering spoofed traffic. NETHCF leverages the opportunity provided by programmable switches to design a novel defense against spoofed IP traffic, and it is highly efficient and adaptive. One key challenge stems from the restrictions of the computational model and memory resources of programmable switches. We address this by decomposing the HCF system into two complementary components-one component for the data plane and another for the control plane. We also aggregate the IP-to-Hop-Count (IP2HC) mapping table for efficient memory usage, and design adaptive mechanisms to handle end-to-end routing changes, IP popularity changes, and network activity dynamics. We have built a prototype on a hardware Tofino switch, and our evaluation demonstrates that NETHCF can achieve line-rate and adaptive traffic filtering with low overheads.

IoT is evolving as a combination of interconnected devices over a particular network. In the proposed paper, we discuss about the security of IoT system in the wireless devices. IoT security is the platform in which the connected devices over the network are safeguarded over internet of things framework. Wireless devices play an eminent role in this kind of networks since most of the time they are connected to the internet. Accompanied by major users cannot ensure their end to end security in the IoT environment. However, connecting these devices over the internet via using IoT increases the chance of being prone to the serious issues that may affect the system and its data if they are not protected efficiently. In the proposed paper, the security of IoT in wireless devices will be enhanced by using ECC. Since the issues related to security are becoming common these days, an attempt has been made in this proposed paper to enhance the security of IoT networks by using ECC for wireless devices.

The characteristics of decentralization, tamper-resistance and transaction anonymity of blockchain can resolve effectively the problems in traditional intellectual property such as the difficulty of electronic obtaining for evidence, the high cost and low compensation when safeguarding the copyrights. Blockchain records the information through encryption algorithm, removes the third party, and stores the information in all nodes to prevent the information from being tampered with, so as to realize the protection of intellectual property. Starting from the bottom layer of blockchain, this paper expounds in detail the characteristics and the technical framework of blockchain. At the same time, according to the existing problems in transaction throughput, time delay and resource consumption of blockchain system, optimization mechanisms such as cross-chain and proof of stake are analyzed. Finally, combined with the characteristics of blockchain technology and existing application framework, this paper summarizes the existing problems in the industry and forecasts the development trend of intellectual property based on blockchain technology.

Increased use of secure chat and voice/ video apps has transformed the social life. While the benefits and facilitations are seemingly limitless, so are the asscoiacted vulnerabilities and threats. Besides ensuring confidentiality requirements for common users, known facts of non-readable contents over the network make these apps more attractive for criminals. Though access to contents of cryptograhically secure sessions is not possible, network forensics of secure apps can provide interesting information which can be of great help during criminal invetigations. In this paper, we presented a novel framework of profiling the secure chat and voice/ video calling apps which can be employed to extract hidden patterns about the app, information of involved parties, activities of chatting, voice/ video calls, status indications and notifications while having no information of communication protocol of the app and its security architecture. Signatures of any secure app can be developed though our framework and can become base of a large scale solution. Our methodology is considered very important for different cases of criminal investigations and bussiness intelligence solutions for service provider networks. Our results are applicable to any mobile platform of iOS, android and windows.

Software Engineering is a field of new challenges every day. With every passing day, new technologies emerge. There was an era of web Applications, but the time has changed and most of the web Applications are available as Mobile Applications as well. The Mobile Applications are either android based or iOS based. To deliver error free, secure and reliable Application, it is necessary to test the Applications properly. Software testing is a phase of software development life cycle, where we test an Application in all aspects. Nowadays different type of tools are available for testing an Application automatically but still we have too many challenges for applying test cases on a given Application. In this paper the authors will discuss the challenges of automation of test cases for a Mobile based payment Application.

This paper presents a detailed analysis of some relevant security features of iOS and Android -the two most popular operating systems for mobile devices- from the perspective of user privacy. In particular, permissions that can be modified at run time on these platforms are analyzed. Additionally, a framework is introduced for permission analysis, a hybrid mobile application that can run on both iOS and Android. The framework, which can be extended, places special emphasis on the relationship between the user's privacy and the permission system.