Biblio

Military networks consist of heterogeneous devices that provide soldiers with real-time terrain and mission intel-ligence. The development of next-generation Software Defined Networks (SDN)-enabled devices is enabling the modernization of traditional military networks. Commonly, traditional military networks take the trustworthiness of devices for granted. How-ever, the recent modernization of military networks introduces cyber attacks such as data and identity spoofing attacks. Hence, it is crucial to ensure the trustworthiness of network traffic to ensure the mission's outcome. This work proposes a Continuous Behavior-based Authentication (CBA) protocol that integrates network traffic analysis techniques to provide robust and efficient network management flow by separating data and control planes in SDN-enabled military networks. The evaluation of the CBA protocol aimed to measure the efficiency of the proposed protocol in realistic military networks. Furthermore, we analyze the overall network overhead of the CBA protocol and its accuracy to detect rogue network traffic data from field devices.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are utilized extensively in critical power grid infrastructures. Modern SCADA systems have been proven to be susceptible to cyber-security attacks and require improved security primitives in order to prevent unwanted influence from an adversarial party. One section of weakness in the SCADA system is the integrity of field level sensors providing essential data for control decisions at a master station. In this paper we propose a lightweight hardware scheme providing inferred authentication for SCADA sensors by combining an analog to digital converter and a permutation generator as a single integrated circuit. Through this method we encode critical sensor data at the time of sensing, so that unencoded data is never stored in memory, increasing the difficulty of software attacks. We show through experimentation how our design stops both software and hardware false data injection attacks occurring at the field level of SCADA systems.

The SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has become ubiquitous in industrial control systems. However, it may be exposed to cyber attack threats when it accesses the Internet. We propose a three-layer IDS (Intrusion Detection System) model, which integrates three main functions: access control, flow detection and password authentication. We use the reliability test system IEEE RTS-79 to evaluate the reliability. The experimental results provide insights into the establishment of the power SCADA system reliability enhancement strategies.

ROS 2 is rapidly becoming a standard in the robotics industry. Built upon DDS as its default communication middleware and used in safety-critical scenarios, adding secu-rity to robots and ROS computational graphs is increasingly becoming a concern. The present work introduces SROS2, a series of developer tools and libraries that facilitate adding security to ROS 2 graphs. Focusing on a usability-centric approach in SROS2, we present a methodology for securing graphs systematically while following the DevSecOps model. We also demonstrate the use of our security tools by presenting an application case study that considers securing a graph using the popular Navigation2 and SLAM Toolbox stacks applied in a TurtieBot3 robot. We analyse the current capabilities of SROS2 and discuss the shortcomings, which provides insights for future contributions and extensions. Ultimately, we present SROS2 as usable security tools for ROS 2 and argue that without usability, security in robotics will be greatly impaired.

The increasing number of vehicles registered demands for safe and secure carparks due to increase in vehicle theft. The current Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems is a single authentication system and hence it is not secure. Therefore, this research has developed a double authentication system by combing ANPR with a Quick Response (QR) code system to create ANPR-DAS that improves the security at a carpark. It has yielded an accuracy of up to 93% and prevents car theft at a car park.

Sometimes we have the need to inject new services in an operational satellite, but as the injection of new codes in equipment that has communication link is a critical process due to the possibility of injection of broke or malicious codes, this document proposes a protocol for the safe injection of code in satellite microcontrollers of the CubeSat’ type. This protocol is based on the use of HMAC with SHA-3 to guarantee integrity and authenticity and is enhanced by the same security measures to mitigate communication link problems and satellite attacks, such as the guarantee of delivery and displacement between communication windows and periods of high processing.

Cloud computing provides customers with enormous compute power and storage capacity, allowing them to deploy their computation and data-intensive applications without having to invest in infrastructure. Many firms use cloud computing as a means of relocating and maintaining resources outside of their enterprise, regardless of the cloud server's location. However, preserving the data in cloud leads to a number of issues related to data loss, accountability, security etc. Such fears become a great barrier to the adoption of the cloud services by users. Cloud computing offers a high scale storage facility for internet users with reference to the cost based on the usage of facilities provided. Privacy protection of a user's data is considered as a challenge as the internal operations offered by the service providers cannot be accessed by the users. Hence, it becomes necessary for monitoring the usage of the client's data in cloud. In this research, we suggest an effective cloud storage solution for accessing patient medical records across hospitals in different countries while maintaining data security and integrity. In the suggested system, multifactor authentication for user login to the cloud, homomorphic encryption for data storage with integrity verification, and integrity verification have all been implemented effectively. To illustrate the efficacy of the proposed strategy, an experimental investigation was conducted.

A digital certificate is by far the most widely used artifact to establish secure electronic communication over the Internet. It certifies to its user that the public key encapsulated in it is associated with the subject of the certificate. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is responsible to create, store, distribute, and revoke digital certificates. To establish a secure communication channel two unfamiliar entities rely on a common certificate issuer (a part of PKI) that vouches for both entities' certificates - thus authenticating each other via public keys listed in each other's certificates. Therefore, PKIs act as a trusted third party for two previously unfamiliar entities. Certificates are static data structures, their revocation status must be checked before usage; this step inadvertently involves a PKI for every secure channel establishment - leading to privacy violations of relying parties. As PKIs act as trust anchors for their subjects, any inadvertent event or malfeasance in PKI setup breaches the trust relationship leading to identity theft. Alternative PKI trust models, like PGP and SPKI, have been proposed but with limited deployment. With several retrofitting amendments to the prevalent X.509 standard, the standard has been serving its core objective of entity authentication but with modern requirements of contextual authentication, it is falling short to accommodate the evolving requirements. With the advent of blockchain as a trust management protocol, the time has come to rethink flexible alternatives to PKI core functionality; keeping in mind the modern-day requirements of contextual authentication-cum-authorization, weighted trust anchors, privacy-preservation, usability, and cost-efficient key management. In this paper, we assess this technology's complementary role in modern-day evolving security requirements. We discuss the feasibility of re-engineering PKIs with the help of blockchains, and identity networks.

With the development of 5G networking technology on the Internet of Vehicle (IoV), there are new opportunities for numerous cyber-attacks, such as in-vehicle attacks like hijacking occurrences and data theft. While numerous attempts have been made to protect against the potential attacks, there are still many unsolved problems such as developing a fine-grained access control system. This is reflected by the granularity of security as well as the related data that are hosted on these platforms. Among the most notable trends is the increased usage of smart devices, IoV, cloud services, emerging technologies aim at accessing, storing and processing data. Most popular authentication protocols rely on knowledge-factor for authentication that is infamously known to be vulnerable to subversions. Recently, the zero-trust framework has drawn huge attention; there is an urgent need to develop further the existing Continuous Authentication (CA) technique to achieve the zero-trustiness framework. In this paper, firstly, we develop the static authentication process and propose a secured protocol to generate the smart key for user to unlock the vehicle. Then, we proposed a novel and secure continuous authentication system for IoVs. We present the proof-of-concept of our CA scheme by building a prototype that leverages the commodity fingerprint sensors, NFC, and smartphone. Our evaluations in real-world settings demonstrate the appropriateness of CA scheme and security analysis of our proposed protocol for digital key suggests its enhanced security against the known attack-vector.

Nowadays, the messaging system is one of the most popular mobile applications, and therefore the authentication between clients is essential. Various kinds of such mobile applications are using encryption-based security protocols, but they are facing many security threat issues. It clearly defines the necessity for a trustful security procedure. Therefore, a blockchain-based messaging system could be an alternative to this problem. That is why, we have developed a secured peer-to-peer messaging system supported by blockchain. This proposed mechanism provides data security among the users. In a blockchain-based framework, all the information can be verified and controlled automatically and all the transactions are recorded that have been created already. In our paper, we have explained how the users can communicate through a blockchain-based messaging system that can maintain a secured network. We explored why blockchain would improve communication security in this post, and we proposed a model architecture for blockchain-based messaging that retains the performance and security of data stored on the blockchain. Our proposed architecture is completely decentralized and enables users to send and receive messages in an acceptable and secure manner.

In many scenarios, Internet connectivity may not be available. In such situations, device-to-device (D2D) communication may be utilized to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) network among mobile users in the vicinity. However, this raises a fundamental question as is how to ensure secure communication in such an infrastructure-less network. In this paper, we present an approach that enables connectivity between mobile devices in the vicinity and supports secure communication between users in Internet-isolated locations. Specifically, the proposed solution uses Wi-Fi Aware for establishing a P2P network and the mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) protocol to provide mutually authenticated and encrypted message transfer. Besides, a novel decentralized peer authentication (DPA) scheme compatible with Wi-Fi Aware and TLS is proposed, which enables peers to verify other peers to join the network. A proof-of-concept instant messaging application has been developed to test the proposed DPA scheme and to evaluate the performance of the proposed overall approach. Experimental results, which validate the proposed solution, are presented with findings and limitations discussed.

With the advent of technology and owing to mankind’s reliance on technology, it is of utmost importance to safeguard people’s data and their identity. Biometrics have for long played an important role in providing that layer of security ranging from small scale uses such as house locks to enterprises using them for confidentiality purposes. In this paper we will provide an insight into behavioral biometrics that rely on identifying and measuring human characteristics or behavior. We review different types of behavioral parameters such as keystroke dynamics, gait, footstep pressure signals and more.

We propose TaintLock, a lightweight dynamic scan data authentication and encryption scheme that performs per-pattern authentication and encryption using taint and signature bits embedded within the test pattern. To prevent IP theft, we pair TaintLock with truly random logic locking (TRLL) to ensure resilience against both Oracle-guided and Oracle-free attacks, including scan deobfuscation attacks. TaintLock uses a substitution-permutation (SP) network to cryptographically authenticate each test pattern using embedded taint and signature bits. It further uses cryptographically generated keys to encrypt scan data for unauthenticated users dynamically. We show that it offers a low overhead, non-intrusive secure scan solution without impacting test coverage or test time while preventing IP theft.

Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.

To restrict unauthorized access to the data of the website. Most of the web-based systems nowadays require users to verify themselves before accessing the website is authentic information. In terms of security, it is very important to take different security measures for the protection of the authentic data of the website. However, most of the authentication systems which are used on the web today have several security flaws. This document is based on the security of the previous schemes. Compared to the previous approaches, this “spoofed proof stateless session model” method offers superior security assurance in a scenario in which an attacker has unauthorized access to the data of the website. The various protocol models are being developed and implemented on the web to analyze the performance. The aim was to secure the authentic database backups of the website and prevent them from SQL injection attacks by using the read-only properties for the database. This limits potential harm and provides users with reasonable security safeguards when an attacker has an unauthorized read-only access to the website's authentic database. This scheme provides robustness to the disclosure of authentic databases. Proven experimental results show the overheads due to the modified authentication method and the insecure model.

Software vulnerabilities threaten the security of computer system, and recently more and more loopholes have been discovered and disclosed. For the detected vulnerabilities, the relevant personnel will analyze the vulnerability characteristics, and combine the vulnerability scoring system to determine their severity level, so as to determine which vulnerabilities need to be dealt with first. In recent years, some characteristic description-based methods have been used to predict the severity level of vulnerability. However, the traditional text processing methods only grasp the superficial meaning of the text and ignore the important contextual information in the text. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative method, called BERT-CNN, which combines the specific task layer of Bert with CNN to capture important contextual information in the text. First, we use Bert to process the vulnerability description and other information, including Access Gained, Attack Origin and Authentication Required, to generate the feature vectors. Then these feature vectors of vulnerabilities and their severity levels are input into a CNN network, and the parameters of the CNN are gotten. Next, the fine-tuned Bert and the trained CNN are used to predict the severity level of a vulnerability. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with 91.31% on F1-score.

Security is of vital importance in wireless industrial communication systems. When spoofing attacking has occurred, leading to economic losses or even safety accidents. So as to address the concern, existing approaches mainly rely on traditional cryptographic algorithms. However, these methods cannot meet the needs of short delay and lightweight. In this paper, we propose a CSI-based PHY-layer security authentication scheme to detect spoofing detection. The main idea takes advantage of the uncorrelated nature of wireless channels to the identification of spoofing nodes in the physical layer. We demonstrate a MIMO-OFDM based spoofing detection prototype in industrial environments. Firstly, utilizing Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRPs) to establish MIMO-OFDM communication systems is presented. Secondly, our proposed security scheme of CSI-based PHY-layer authentication is demonstrated. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach has been verified via attack experiments.

5G network slicing plays a key role in the smart grid business. The existing authentication schemes for 5G slicing in smart grids require high computing costs, so they are time-consuming and do not fully consider the security of authentication. Aiming at the application scenario of 5G smart grid, this paper proposes an identity-based lightweight secondary authentication scheme. Compared with other well-known methods, in the protocol interaction of this paper, both the user Ui and the grid server can authenticate each other's identities, thereby preventing illegal users from pretending to be identities. The grid user Ui and the grid server can complete the authentication process without resorting to complex bilinear mapping calculations, so the computational overhead is small. The grid user and grid server can complete the authentication process without transmitting the original identification. Therefore, this scheme has the feature of anonymous authentication. In this solution, the authentication process does not require infrastructure such as PKI, so the deployment is simple. Experimental results show that the protocol is feasible in practical applications

FPGA bitstream protection schemes are often the first line of defense for secure hardware designs. In general, breaking the bitstream encryption would enable attackers to subvert the confidentiality and infringe on the IP. Or breaking the authenticity enables manipulating the design, e.g., inserting hardware Trojans. Since FPGAs see widespread use in our interconnected world, such attacks can lead to severe damages, including physical harm. Recently we [1] presented a surprising attack — Starbleed — on Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs, tricking an FPGA into acting as a decryption oracle. For their UltraScale(+) series, Xilinx independently upgraded the security features to AES-GCM, RSA signatures, and a periodic GHASH-based checksum to validate the bitstream during decryption. Hence, UltraScale(+) devices were considered not affected by Starbleed-like attacks [2], [1].We identified novel security weaknesses in Xilinx UltraScale(+) FPGAs if configured outside recommended settings. In particular, we present four attacks in this situation: two attacks on the AES encryption and novel GHASH-based checksum and two authentication downgrade attacks. As a major contribution, we show that the Starbleed attack is still possible within the UltraScale(+) series by developing an attack against the GHASH-based checksum. After describing and analyzing the attacks, we list the subtle configuration changes which can lead to security vulnerabilities and secure configurations not affected by our attacks. As Xilinx only recommends configurations not affected by our attacks, users should be largely secure. However, it is not unlikely that users employ settings outside the recommendations, given the rather large number of configuration options and the fact that Security Misconfiguration is among the leading top 10 OWASP security issues. We note that these security weaknesses shown in this paper had been unknown before.

Aiming at the prevention of information security risk in protection and control of smart substation, a multi-level security defense method of substation based on data aggregation and convolution neural network (CNN) is proposed. Firstly, the intelligent electronic device(IED) uses "digital certificate + digital signature" for the first level of identity authentication, and uses UKey identification code for the second level of physical identity authentication; Secondly, the device group of the monitoring layer judges whether the data report is tampered during transmission according to the registration stage and its own ID information, and the device group aggregates the data using the credential information; Finally, the convolution decomposition technology and depth separable technology are combined, and the time factor is introduced to control the degree of data fusion and the number of input channels of the network, so that the network model can learn the original data and fused data at the same time. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively save communication overhead, ensure the reliable transmission of messages under normal and abnormal operation, and effectively improve the security defense ability of smart substation.

The vehicle-to-grid (V2G) network has a clear advantage in terms of economic benefits, and it has grabbed the interest of powergrid and electric vehicle (EV) consumers. Many V2G techniques, at present, for example, use bilinear pairing to execute the authentication scheme, which results in significant computational costs. Furthermore, in the existing V2G techniques, the system master key is issued independently by the third parties, it is vulnerable to leaking if the third party is compromised by an attacker. This paper presents an efficient and secure anonymous authentication scheme for V2G networks to overcome this issue we use a lightweight authentication system for electric vehicles and smart grids. In the proposed technique, the keys are generated by the trusted authority after the successful registration of EVs in the trusted authority and the dispatching center. The suggested scheme not only enhances the verification performance of V2G networks and also protects against inbuilt hackers.

As the voucher for identity, digital certificates and the public key infrastructure (PKI) system have always played a vital role to provide the authentication services. In recent years, with the increase in attacks on traditional centralized PKIs and the extensive deployment of blockchains, researchers have tried to establish blockchain-based secure decentralized PKIs and have made significant progress. Although blockchain enhances security, it brings new problems in scalability due to the inherent limitations of blockchain’s data structure and consensus mechanism, which become much severe for the massive access in the era of 5G and B5G. In this paper, we propose ScalaCert to mitigate the scalability problems of blockchain-based PKIs by utilizing redactable blockchain for "on-cert" revocation. Specifically, we utilize the redactable blockchain to record revocation information directly on the original certificate ("on-cert") and remove additional data structures such as CRL, significantly reducing storage overhead. Moreover, the combination of redactable and consortium blockchains brings a new kind of attack called deception of versions (DoV) attack. To defend against it, we design a random-block-node-check (RBNC) based freshness check mechanism. Security and performance analyses show that ScalaCert has sufficient security and effectively solves the scalability problem of the blockchain-based PKI system.

As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered businesses and their workforces into new scales of remote work, vital security concerns arose surrounding remote access. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) also plays a growing role in the ability of companies to support remote workforces. As more enterprises embrace concepts of zero trust in their network security posture, access control policy management problems become a more significant concern as it relates to BYOD security enforcement. This BYOD security policy must enable work from home, but enterprises have a vested interest in maintaining the security of their assets. Therefore, the BYOD security policy must strike a balance between access, security, and privacy, given the personal device use. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of enabling zero trust in BYOD use cases. We present a BYOD policy specification to enable the zero trust access control known as BYOZ. Accompanying this policy specification, we have designed a network architecture to support enterprise zero trust BYOD use cases through the novel incorporation of continuous authentication & authorization enforcement. We evaluate our architecture through a demo implementation of BYOZ and demonstrate how it can meet the needs of existing enterprise networks using BYOD.

In recent times, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become state of the art for communication in Multiprocessor System-on-Chip due to the existing scalability issues in this area. However, these systems are exposed to security threats such as extraction of secret information. Therefore, the need for secure communication arises in such environments. In this work, we present a communication protocol based on authenticated encryption with recovery mechanisms to establish secure end-to-end communication between the NoC nodes. In addition, a selected key agreement approach required for secure communication is implemented. The security functionality is located in the network adapter of each processing element. If data is tampered with or deleted during transmission, recovery mechanisms ensure that the corrupted data is retransmitted by the network adapter without the need of interference from the processing element. We simulated and implemented the complete system with SystemC TLM using the NoC simulation platform PANACA. Our results show that we can keep a high rate of correctly transmitted information even when attackers infiltrated the NoC system.

KYC or Know Your Customer is the procedure to verify the individuality of its consumers & evaluating the possible dangers of illegitimate trade relations. A few problems with the existing KYC manual process are that it is less secure, time-consuming and expensive. With the advent of Blockchain technology, its structures such as consistency, security, and geographical diversity make them an ideal solution to such problems. Although marketing solutions such as KYC-chain.co, K-Y-C. The legal right to enable blockchain-based KYC authentication provides a way for documents to be verified by a trusted network participant. This project uses an ETHereum based Optimised KYC Block-chain system with uniform A-E-S encryption and compression built on the LZ method. The system publicly verifies a distributed encryption, is protected by cryptography, operates by pressing the algorithm and is all well-designed blockchain features. The suggested scheme is a novel explanation based on Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain technology that would cut KYC authentication process expenses of organisations & decrease the regular schedule for completion of the procedure whilst becoming easier for clients. The largest difference in the system in traditional methods is the full authentication procedure is performed in just no time for every client, regardless of the number of institutions you desire to be linked to. Furthermore, since DLT is employed, validation findings may be securely distributed to consumers, enhancing transparency. Based on this method, a Proof of Concept (POC) is produced with Ethereum's API, websites as endpoints and the android app as the front office, recognising the viability and efficacy of this technique. Ultimately, this strategy enhances consumer satisfaction, lowers budget overrun & promotes transparency in the customer transport network.