Biblio

Today's extensive use of Internet creates huge volumes of data by users in both client and server sides. Normally users don't want to store all the data in local as well as keep archive in the server. For some unwanted data, such as trash, cache and private data, needs to be deleted periodically. Explicit deletion could be applied to the local data, while it is a troublesome job. But there is no transparency to users on the personal data stored in the server. Since we have no knowledge of whether they're cached, copied and archived by the third parties, or sold by the service provider. Our research seeks to provide an automatic data sanitization system to make data could be self-destructing. Specifically, we give data a life cycle, which would be erased automatically when at the end of its life, and the destroyed data cannot be recovered by any effort. In this paper, we present FlashGhost, which is a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of cryptography techniques with the frequent colliding hash table. In this system, data will be unreadable and rendered unrecoverable by overwriting multiple times after its validity period has expired. Besides, the system reliability is enhanced by threshold cryptography. We also present a mathematical model and verify it by a number of experiments, which demonstrate theoretically and experimentally our system is practical to use and meet the data auto-sanitization goal described above.

Mobile military networks are uniquely challenging to build and maintain, because of their wireless nature and the unfriendliness of the environment, resulting in unreliable and capacity limited performance. Currently, most tactical networks implement TCP/IP, which was designed for fairly stable, infrastructure-based environments, and requires sophisticated and often application-specific extensions to address the challenges of the communication scenario. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a clean slate networking approach that does not depend on stable connections to retrieve information and naturally provides support for node mobility and delay/disruption tolerant communications - as a result it is particularly interesting for tactical applications. However, despite ICN seems to offer some structural benefits for tactical environments over TCP/IP, a number of challenges including naming, security, performance tuning, etc., still need to be addressed for practical adoption. This document, prepared within NATO IST-161 RTG, evaluates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption.

Phishing is a security attack to acquire personal information like passwords, credit card details or other account details of a user by means of websites or emails. Phishing websites look similar to the legitimate ones which make it difficult for a layman to differentiate between them. As per the reports of Anti Phishing Working Group (APWG) published in December 2018, phishing against banking services and payment processor was high. Almost all the phishy URLs use HTTPS and use redirects to avoid getting detected. This paper presents a focused literature survey of methods available to detect phishing websites. A comparative study of the in-use anti-phishing tools was accomplished and their limitations were acknowledged. We analyzed the URL-based features used in the past to improve their definitions as per the current scenario which is our major contribution. Also, a step wise procedure of designing an anti-phishing model is discussed to construct an efficient framework which adds to our contribution. Observations made out of this study are stated along with recommendations on existing systems.

The underlying or core technology of Bitcoin cryptocurrency has become a blessing for human being in this era. Everything is gradually changing to digitization in this today's epoch. Bitcoin creates virtual money using Blockchain that's become popular over the world. Blockchain is a shared public ledger, and it includes all transactions which are confirmed. It is almost impossible to crack the hidden information in the blocks of the Blockchain. However, there are certain security and technical challenges like scalability, privacy leakage, selfish mining, etc. which hampers the wide application of Blockchain. In this paper, we briefly discuss this emerging technology namely Blockchain. In addition, we extrapolate in-depth insight on Blockchain technology.

This paper explores using chaos-based cryptography for transmitting multimedia data, mainly speech and voice messages, over public communication channels, such as the internet. The secret message to be transmitted is first converted into a one-dimensional time series, that can be cast in a digital/binary format. The main feature of the proposed technique is mapping the two levels of every corresponding bit of the time series into different multiple chaotic orbits, using a simple encryption function. This one-to-many mapping robustifies the encryption technique and makes it resilient to crypto-analysis methods that rely on associating the energy level of the signal into two binary levels, using return map attacks. A chaotic nonautonomous Duffing oscillator is chosen to implement the suggested technique, using three different parameters that are assumed unknown at the receiver side. Synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver and reconstructing the secret message, at the receiver side, is done using a Lyapunov-based adaptive technique. Achieving stable operation, tuning the required control gains, as well as effective utilization of the bandwidth of the public communication channel are investigated. Two different case studies are presented; the first one deals with text that can be expressed as 8-bit ASCII code, while the second one corresponds to an analog acoustic signal that corresponds to the voice associated with pronouncing a short sentence. Advantages and limitation of the proposed technique are highlighted, while suggesting extensions to other multimedia signals, along with their required additional computational effort.

Secure naming systems, or more narrowly public key infrastructures (PKIs), form the basis of secure communications over insecure networks. All security guarantees against active attackers come from a trustworthy binding between user-facing names, such as domain names, to cryptographic identities, such as public keys. By offering a secure, distributed ledger with highly decentralized trust, blockchains such as Bitcoin show promise as the root of trust for naming systems with no central trusted parties. PKIs based upon blockchains, such as Namecoin and Blockstack, have greatly improved security and resilience compared to traditional centralized PKIs. Yet blockchain PKIs tend to significantly sacrifice scalability and flexibility in pursuit of decentralization, hindering large-scale deployability on the Internet. We propose Conifer, a novel PKI with an architecture based upon CONIKS, a centralized transparency-based PKI, and Catena, a blockchain-agnostic way of embedding a permissioned log, but with a different lookup strategy. In doing so, Conifer achieves decentralized trust with security at least as strong as existing blockchain-based naming systems, yet without sacrificing the flexibility and performance typically found in centralized PKIs. We also present our reference implementation of Conifer, demonstrating how it can easily be integrated into applications. Finally, we use experiments to evaluate the performance of Conifer compared with other naming systems, both centralized and blockchain-based, demonstrating that it incurs only a modest overhead compared to traditional centralized-trust systems while being far more scalable and performant than purely blockchain-based solutions.

Routers are important devices in the networks that carry the burden of transmitting information among the communication devices on the Internet. If a malicious adversary wants to intercept the information or paralyze the network, it can directly attack the routers and then achieve the suspicious goals. Thus, preventing router security is of great importance. However, router systems are notoriously difficult to understand or diagnose for their inaccessibility and heterogeneity. The common way of gaining access to the router system and detecting the anomaly behaviors is to inspect the router syslogs or monitor the packets of information flowing to the routers. These approaches just diagnose the routers from one aspect but do not consider them from multiple views. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect the anomalies and faults of the routers with multiple information learning. We try to use the routers' information not from the developer's view but from the user' s view, which does not need any expert knowledge. First, we do the offline learning to transform the benign or corrupted user actions into the syslogs. Then, we try to decide whether the input routers' conditions are poor or not with clustering. During the detection phase, we use the distance between the event and the cluster to decide if it is the anomaly event and we can provide the corresponding solutions. We have applied our approach in a university network which contains Cisco, Huawei and Dlink routers for three months. We aligned our experiment with former work as a baseline for comparison. Our approach can gain 89.6% accuracy in detecting the attacks which is 5.1% higher than the former work. The results show that our approach performs in limited time as well as memory usages and has high detection and low false positives.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way we interact with everyday objects. "Smart" devices will reduce energy use, keep our homes safe, and improve our health. However, as recent attacks have shown, these devices also create tremendous security vulnerabilities in our computing networks. Securing all of these devices is a daunting task. In this paper, we argue that IoT device communications should be default-off and desired network communications must be explicitly enabled. Unlike traditional networked applications or devices like a web browser or PC, IoT applications and devices serve narrowly defined purposes and do not require access to all services in the network. Our proposal, Bark, a policy language and runtime for specifying and enforcing minimal access permissions in IoT networks, exploits this fact. Bark phrases access control policies in terms of natural questions (who, what, where, when, and how) and transforms them into transparently enforceable rules for IoT application protocols. Bark can express detailed rules such as "Let the lights see the luminosity of the bedroom sensor at any time" and "Let a device at my front door, if I approve it, unlock my smart lock for 30 seconds" in a way that is presentable and explainable to users. We implement Bark for Wi-Fi/IP and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks and evaluate its efficacy on several example applications and attacks.

Security research has made extensive use of exhaustive Internet-wide scans over the recent years, as they can provide significant insights into the overall state of security of the Internet, and ZMap made scanning the entire IPv4 address space practical. However, the IPv4 address space is exhausted, and a switch to IPv6, the only accepted long-term solution, is inevitable. In turn, to better understand the security of devices connected to the Internet, including in particular Internet of Things devices, it is imperative to include IPv6 addresses in security evaluations and scans. Unfortunately, it is practically infeasible to iterate through the entire IPv6 address space, as it is 2ˆ96 times larger than the IPv4 address space. Therefore, enumeration of active hosts prior to scanning is necessary. Without it, we will be unable to investigate the overall security of Internet-connected devices in the future. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to enumerate an active part of the IPv6 address space by walking DNSSEC-signed IPv6 reverse zones. Subsequently, by scanning the enumerated addresses, we uncover significant security problems: the exposure of sensitive data, and incorrectly controlled access to hosts, such as access to routing infrastructure via administrative interfaces, all of which were accessible via IPv6. Furthermore, from our analysis of the differences between accessing dual-stack hosts via IPv6 and IPv4, we hypothesize that the root cause is that machines automatically and by default take on globally routable IPv6 addresses. This is a practice that the affected system administrators appear unaware of, as the respective services are almost always properly protected from unauthorized access via IPv4. Our findings indicate (i) that enumerating active IPv6 hosts is practical without a preferential network position contrary to common belief, (ii) that the security of active IPv6 hosts is currently still lagging behind the security state of IPv4 hosts, and (iii) that unintended IPv6 connectivity is a major security issue for unaware system administrators.

Many governments organizations in Libya have started transferring traditional government services to e-government. These e-services will benefit a wide range of public. However, deployment of e-government bring many new security issues. Attackers would take advantages of vulnerabilities in these e-services and would conduct cyber attacks that would result in data loss, services interruptions, privacy loss, financial loss, and other significant loss. The number of vulnerabilities in e-services have increase due to the complexity of the e-services system, a lack of secure programming practices, miss-configuration of systems and web applications vulnerabilities, or not staying up-to-date with security patches. Unfortunately, there is a lack of study being done to assess the current security level of Libyan government websites. Therefore, this study aims to assess the current security of 16 Libyan government websites using penetration testing framework. In this assessment, no exploits were committed or tried on the websites. In penetration testing framework (pen test), there are four main phases: Reconnaissance, Scanning, Enumeration, Vulnerability Assessment and, SSL encryption evaluation. The aim of a security assessment is to discover vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. We also conducted a Content Analysis phase for all websites. In this phase, we searched for security and privacy policies implementation information on the government websites. The aim is to determine whether the websites are aware of current accepted standard for security and privacy. From our security assessment results of 16 Libyan government websites, we compared the websites based on the number of vulnerabilities found and the level of security policies. We only found 9 websites with high and medium vulnerabilities. Many of these vulnerabilities are due to outdated software and systems, miss-configuration of systems and not applying the latest security patches. These vulnerabilities could be used by cyber hackers to attack the systems and caused damages to the systems. Also, we found 5 websites didn't implement any SSL encryption for data transactions. Lastly, only 2 websites have published security and privacy policies on their websites. This seems to indicate that these websites were not concerned with current standard in security and privacy. Finally, we classify the 16 websites into 4 safety categories: highly unsafe, unsafe, somewhat unsafe and safe. We found only 1 website with a highly unsafe ranking. Based on our finding, we concluded that the security level of the Libyan government websites are adequate, but can be further improved. However, immediate actions need to be taken to mitigate possible cyber attacks by fixing the vulnerabilities and implementing SSL encryption. Also, the websites need to publish their security and privacy policy so the users could trust their websites.

The complete digitization of telecommunications allows new attack scenarios, which have not been possible with legacy phone technologies before. The reason is that physical access to legacy phone technologies was necessary. Regarding internet-based communication like voice over the internet protocol (VoIP), which can be established between random nodes, eavesdropping can happen everywhere and much easier. Additionally, injection of undesirable communication like SPAM or SPIT in digital networks is simpler, too. Encryption is not sufficient because it is also necessary to know which participants are talking to each other. For that reason, the research project INTEGER has been started with the main goals of providing secure authentication and integrity of a VoIP communication by using a digital signature. The basis of this approach is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) which works as a hardware-based trusted anchor. The TPM will be used inside of wireless IP devices with VoIP softphones. The question is if it is possible to fulfill the main goals of the project in wireless scenarios with Wi-Fi technologies. That is what this contribution aims to clarify.

In the computer based solutions of the problems in today's world; if the problem has a high complexity value, different requirements can be addressed such as necessity of simultaneous operation of many computers, the long processing times for the operation of algorithms, and computers with hardware features that can provide high performance. For this reason, it is inevitable to use a computer based on quantum physics in the near future in order to make today's cryptosystems unsafe, search the servers and other information storage centers on internet very quickly, solve optimization problems in the NP-hard category with a very wide solution space and analyze information on large-scale data processing and to process high-resolution image for artificial intelligence applications. In this study, an examination of quantum approaches and quantum computers, which will be widely used in the near future, was carried out and the areas in which such innovation can be used was evaluated. Malicious or non-malicious use of quantum computers with this capacity, the advantages and disadvantages of the high performance which it provides were examined under the head of security, the effect of this recent technology on the existing security systems was investigated.

In the context of emerging applications such as IoT, an RFID framework that can dynamically incorporate, identify, and seamlessly regulate the RFID tags is considered exciting. Earlier RFID frameworks developed using the older web technologies were limited in their ability to provide complete information about the RFID tags and their respective locations. However, the new and emerging web technologies have transformed this scenario and now framework can be developed to include all the required flexibility and security for seamless applications such as monitoring of RFID tags. This paper revisits and proposes a generic scenario of an RFID framework built using latest web technology and demonstrates its ability to customize using an application for tracking of personal user objects. This has been shown that the framework based on newer web technologies can be indeed robust, uniform, unified, and integrated.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are engineered systems seamlessly integrating computational algorithms and physical components. CPS advances offer numerous benefits to domains such as health, transportation, smart homes and manufacturing. Despite these advances, the overall cybersecurity posture of CPS devices remains unclear. In this paper, we provide knowledge on how to improve CPS resiliency by evaluating and comparing the accuracy, and scalability of two popular vulnerability assessment tools, Nessus and OpenVAS. Accuracy and suitability are evaluated with a diverse sample of pre-defined vulnerabilities in Industrial Control Systems (ICS), smart cars, smart home devices, and a smart water system. Scalability is evaluated using a large-scale vulnerability assessment of 1,000 Internet accessible CPS devices found on Shodan, the search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT). Assessment results indicate several CPS devices from major vendors suffer from critical vulnerabilities such as unsupported operating systems, OpenSSH vulnerabilities allowing unauthorized information disclosure, and PHP vulnerabilities susceptible to denial of service attacks.

Public cloud data storage services were considered as a potential alternative to store low-cost digital data in the short term. They are offered by different providers on the Internet. Some providers offer limited free plans for the users who are starting the service. However, data security concern arises when data stored are considered as a valuable asset. This study explores the usage of secret sharing scheme: Rabin's IDA and Shamir's SSA to implement a tool called dCloud for file protection stored in public cloud storage in a seamless way. It addresses data security by hiding its complexities when targeting ordinary non-technical users. The secret key is automatically generated by dCloud in a secure random way on Rabin's IDA. Shamir's SSA completes the process through dispersing the key into each of Rabin's IDA output files. Moreover, the Hash value of the original file is added to each of those output files to confirm the integrity of the file during reconstruction. Besides, the authentication key is used to communicate with all of the defined service providers during storage and reconstruction as well. It is stored into local secure key-store. By having a key to access the key-store, an ordinary non-technical user will be able to use dCloud to store and retrieve targeted file within defined public cloud storage services securely.

Cryptographic channels aim to enable authenticated and confidential communication over the Internet. The general understanding seems to be that providing security in the sense of authenticated encryption for every (unidirectional) point-to-point link suffices to achieve this goal. As recently shown (in FSE17/ToSC17), however, the security properties of the unidirectional links do not extend, in general, to the bidirectional channel as a whole. Intuitively, the reason for this is that the increased interaction in bidirectional communication can be exploited by an adversary. The same applies, a fortiori, in a multi-party setting where several users operate concurrently and the communication develops in more directions. In the cryptographic literature, however, the targeted goals for group communication in terms of channel security are still unexplored. Applying the methodology of provable security, we fill this gap by defining exact (game-based) authenticity and confidentiality goals for broadcast communication, and showing how to achieve them. Importantly, our security notions also account for the causal dependencies between exchanged messages, thus naturally extending the bidirectional case where causal relationships are automatically captured by preserving the sending order. On the constructive side we propose a modular and yet efficient protocol that, assuming only point-to-point links between users, leverages (non-cryptographic) broadcast and standard cryptographic primitives to a full-fledged broadcast channel that provably meets the security notions we put forth.

The communication security issue is of great importance and should not be ignored in backbone optical networks which is undergoing the evolution toward software defined networks (SDN). With the aim to solve this problem, this paper conducts deep analysis into the security challenge of software defined optical networks (SDON) and proposes a so-called security-enhanced signaling scheme of SDON. The proposed scheme makes full advantage of current OpenFIow protocol with some necessary extensions and security improvement, by combining digital signatures and message feedback with efficient PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) in signaling procedure of OpenFIow interaction. Thus, this security-enhanced signaling procedure is also designed in details to make sure the end-to-end trusted service connection. Simulation results show that this proposed approach can greatly improve the security level of large-scale optical network for Energy Internet services with better performance in term of connection success rate performance.

Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a research hotspot in the field of network security. Moving Target Network Defense (MTND) is the implementation of MTD at network level. Numerous related works have been proposed in the field of MTND. In this paper, we focus on the scope and area of MTND, systematically present the recent representative progress from four aspects, including IP address and port mutation, route mutation, fingerprint mutation and multiple mutation, and put forward the future development directions. Several new perspectives and elucidations on MTND are rendered.

Todays analyzing web weaknesses and vulnerabilities in order to find security attacks has become more urgent. In case there is a communication contrary to the system security policies, a covert channel has been created. The attacker can easily disclosure information from the victim's system with just one public access permission. Covert timing channels, unlike covert storage channels, do not have memory storage and they draw less attention. Different methods have been proposed for their identification, which generally benefit from the shape of traffic and the channel's regularity. In this article, an entropy-based detection method is designed and implemented. The attacker can adjust the amount of channel entropy by controlling measures such as changing the channel's level or creating noise on the channel to protect from the analyst's detection. As a result, the entropy threshold is not always constant for detection. By comparing the entropy from different levels of the channel and the analyst, we conclude that the analyst must investigate traffic at all possible levels.

Algorithms are used to develop, analyzing, and applying in the computer field and used for developing new application. It is used for finding solutions to any problems in different condition. It transforms the problems into algorithmic ones on which standard algorithms are applied. Day by day Scholarly Digital documents are increasing. AlgorithmSeer is a search engine used for searching algorithms. The main aim of it provides a large algorithm database. It is used to automatically encountering and take these algorithms in this big collection of documents that enable algorithm indexing, searching, discovery, and analysis. An original set to identify and pull out algorithm representations in a big collection of scholarly documents is proposed, of scale able techniques used by AlgorithmSeer. Along with this, particularly important and relevant textual content can be accessed the platform and highlight portions by anyone with different levels of knowledge. In support of lectures and self-learning, the highlighted documents can be shared with others. But different levels of learners cannot use the highlighted part of text at same understanding level. The problem of guessing new highlights of partially highlighted documents can be solved by us.

Question Answering system(QA) plays an increasingly important role in the Internet age. The proportion of using the QA is getting higher and higher for the Internet users to obtain knowledge and solve problems, especially in the modern agricultural filed. However, the answer quality in QA varies widely due to the agricultural expert's level. Answer quality assessment is important. Due to the lexical gap between questions and answers, the existing approaches are not quite satisfactory. A practical approach RCAS is proposed to rank the candidate answers, which utilizes the support sets to reduce the impact of lexical gap between questions and answers. Firstly, Similar questions are retrieved and support sets are produced with their high-quality answers. Based on the assumption that high quality answers would also have intrinsic similarity, the quality of candidate answers are then evaluated through their distance from the support sets. Secondly, Different from the existing approaches, previous knowledge from similar question-answer pairs are used to bridge the straight lexical and semantic gaps between questions and answers. Experiments are implemented on approximately 0.15 million question-answer pairs about agriculture, dietetics and food from Yahoo! Answers. The results show that our approach can rank the candidate answers more precisely.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a contemporary concept for connecting the existing things in our environment with the Internet for a sake of making the objects information are accessible from anywhere and anytime to support a modern life style based on the Internet. With the rapid development of the IoT technologies and widely spreading in most of the fields such as buildings, health, education, transportation and agriculture. Thus, the IoT applications require increasing data collection from the IoT devices to send these data to the applications or servers which collect or analyze the data, so it is a very important to secure the data and ensure that do not reach a malicious adversary. This paper reviews some attacks in the IoT applications and the security weaknesses in the IoT environment. In addition, this study presents the challenges of IoT in terms of hardware, network and software. Moreover, this paper summarizes and points to some attacks on the smart car, smart home, smart campus, smart farm and healthcare.

Industrial control systems (ICS) are systems used in critical infrastructures for supervisory control, data acquisition, and industrial automation. ICS systems have complex, component-based architectures with many different hardware, software, and human factors interacting in real time. Despite the importance of security concerns in industrial control systems, there has not been a comprehensive study that examined common security architectural weaknesses in this domain. Therefore, this paper presents the first in-depth analysis of 988 vulnerability advisory reports for Industrial Control Systems developed by 277 vendors. We performed a detailed analysis of the vulnerability reports to measure which components of ICS have been affected the most by known vulnerabilities, which security tactics were affected most often in ICS and what are the common architectural security weaknesses in these systems. Our key findings were: (1) Human-Machine Interfaces, SCADA configurations, and PLCs were the most affected components, (2) 62.86% of vulnerability disclosures in ICS had an architectural root cause, (3) the most common architectural weaknesses were “Improper Input Validation”, followed by “Im-proper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation” and “Improper Authentication”, and (4) most tactic-related vulnerabilities were related to the tactics “Validate Inputs”, “Authenticate Actors” and “Authorize Actors”.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is the most mature proposal of the Information Centric Networking paradigm, a clean-slate approach for the Future Internet. Although NDN was designed to tackle security issues inherent to IP networks natively, newly introduced security attacks in its transitional phase threaten NDN's practical deployment. Therefore, a security monitoring plane for NDN is indispensable before any potential deployment of this novel architecture in an operating context by any provider. We propose an approach for the monitoring and anomaly detection in NDN nodes leveraging Bayesian Network techniques. A list of monitored metrics is introduced as a quantitative measure to feature the behavior of an NDN node. By leveraging the hypothesis testing theory, a micro detector is developed to detect whenever the metric significantly changes from its normal behavior. A Bayesian network structure that correlates alarms from micro detectors is designed based on the expert knowledge of the NDN specification and the NFD implementation. The relevance and performance of our security monitoring approach are demonstrated by considering the Content Poisoning Attack (CPA), one of the most critical attacks in NDN, through numerous experiment data collected from a real NDN deployment.

Information centric network (ICN) based Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) network has drawn growing attentions in recent years. The distributed network architecture brings new security problems, especially the identity security problem. Because of the cloud platform deployed on the edge of the MEC network, multiple channel attributes can be easily obtained and processed. Thus this paper proposes a multiple channel attributes based spoofing detection mechanism. To further reduce the complexity, we also propose an improved clustering algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed spoofing detection method can provide near-optimal performance with extremely low complexity.