Biblio
Traditional deception-based cyber defenses often undertake reactive strategies that utilize decoy systems or services for attack detection and information gathering. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these defense mechanisms has been largely constrained by the low decoy fidelity, the poor scalability of decoy platform, and the static decoy configurations, which allow the attackers to identify and bypass the deployed decoys. In this paper, we develop a decoy-enhanced defense framework that can proactively protect critical servers against targeted remote attacks through deception. To achieve both high fidelity and good scalability, our system follows a hybrid architecture that separates lightweight yet versatile front-end proxies from back-end high-fidelity decoy servers. Moreover, our system can further invalidate the attackers' reconnaissance through dynamic proxy address shuffling. To guarantee service availability, we develop a transparent connection translation strategy to maintain existing connections during shuffling. Our evaluation on a prototype implementation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in defeating attacker reconnaissance and shows that it only introduces small performance overhead.
Building lightweight security for low-cost pervasive devices is a major challenge considering the design requirements of a small footprint and low power consumption. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a promising technology to provide a low-cost authentication for such devices. By exploiting intrinsic manufacturing process variations, PUFs are able to generate unique and apparently random chip identifiers. Strong-PUFs represent a variant of PUFs that have been suggested for lightweight authentication applications. Unfortunately, many of the Strong-PUFs have been shown to be susceptible to modelling attacks (i.e., using machine learning techniques) in which an adversary has access to challenge and response pairs. In this study, we propose an obfuscation technique during post-processing of Strong-PUF responses to increase the resilience against machine learning attacks. We conduct machine learning experiments using Support Vector Machines and Artificial Neural Networks on two Strong-PUFs: a 32-bit Arbiter-PUF and a 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF. The predictability of the 32-bit Arbiter-PUF is reduced to $\approx$ 70% by using an obfuscation technique. Combining the obfuscation technique with 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF helps to reduce the predictability to $\approx$ 64%. More reduction in predictability has been observed in an XOR Arbiter-PUF because this PUF architecture has a good uniformity. The area overhead with an obfuscation technique consumes only 788 and 1080 gate equivalents for the 32-bit Arbiter-PUF and 2-XOR 32-bit Arbiter-PUF, respectively.
Use of digital token - which certifies the bearer's rights to some kind of products or services - is quite common nowadays for its convenience, ease of use and cost-effectiveness. Many of such digital tokens, however, are produced with software alone, making them vulnerable to forgery, including alteration and duplication. For a more secure safeguard for both token owner's right and service provider's accountability, digital tokens should be tamper-resistant as much as possible in order for them to withstand physical attacks as well. In this paper, we present a rights management system that leverages tamper-resistant digital tokens created by hardware-software collaboration in our eTRON architecture. The system features the complete life cycle of a digital token from generation to storage and redemption. Additionally, it provides a secure mechanism for transfer of rights in a peer-to-peer manner over the Internet. The proposed system specifies protocols for permissible manipulation on digital tokens, and subsequently provides a set of APIs for seamless application development. Access privileges to the tokens are strictly defined and state-of-the-art asymmetric cryptography is used for ensuring their confidentiality. Apart from the digital tokens being physically tamper-resistant, the protocols involved in the system are proven to be secure against attacks. Furthermore, an authentication mechanism is implemented that invariably precedes any operation involving the digital token in question. The proposed system presents clear security gains compared to existing systems that do not take tamper-resistance into account, and schemes that use symmetric key cryptography.
The data accessibility anytime and anywhere is nowadays the key feature for information technology enabled by the ubiquitous network system for huge applications. However, security and privacy are perceived as primary obstacles to its wide adoption when it is applied to the end user application. When sharing sensitive information, personal s' data protection is the paramount requirement for the security and privacy to ensure the trustworthiness of the service provider. To this end, this paper proposes communication security protocol to achieve data protection when a user is sending his sensitive data to the network through gateway. We design a cipher content and key exchange computation process. Finally, the performance analysis of the proposed scheme ensure the honesty of the gateway service provider, since the user has the ability to control who has access to his data by issuing a cryptographic access credential to data users.
There is a long-standing need for improved cybersecurity through automation of attack signature detection, classification, and response. In this paper, we present experimental test bed results from an implementation of autonomic control plane feedback based on the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) framework. This test bed modeled the building blocks for a proposed zero trust cloud data center network. We present test results of trials in which identity management with automated threat response and packet-based authentication were combined with dynamic management of eight distinct network trust levels. The log parsing and orchestration software we created work alongside open source log management tools to coordinate and integrate threat response from firewalls, authentication gateways, and other network devices. Threat response times are measured and shown to be a significant improvement over conventional methods.
Secure by design is an approach to developing secure software systems from the ground up. In such approach, the alternate security tactics are first thought, among them, the best are selected and enforced by the architecture design, and then used as guiding principles for developers. Thus, design flaws in the architecture of a software system mean that successful attacks could result in enormous consequences. Therefore, secure by design shifts the main focus of software assurance from finding security bugs to identifying architectural flaws in the design. Current research in software security has been neglecting vulnerabilities which are caused by flaws in a software architecture design and/or deteriorations of the implementation of the architectural decisions. In this paper, we present the concept of Common Architectural Weakness Enumeration (CAWE), a catalog which enumerates common types of vulnerabilities rooted in the architecture of a software and provides mitigation techniques to address them. The CAWE catalog organizes the architectural flaws according to known security tactics. We developed an interactive web-based solution which helps designers and developers explore this catalog based on architectural choices made in their project. CAWE catalog contains 224 weaknesses related to security architecture. Through this catalog, we aim to promote the awareness of security architectural flaws and stimulate the security design thinking of developers, software engineers, and architects.
With the advances in the areas of mobile computing and wireless communications, V2X systems have become a promising technology enabling deployment of applications providing road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment. Due to their increasing popularity, V2X networks have become a major target for attackers, making them vulnerable to security threats and network conditions, and thus affecting the safety of passengers, vehicles and roads. Existing research in V2X does not effectively address the safety, security and performance limitation threats to connected vehicles, as a result of considering these aspects separately instead of jointly. In this work, we focus on the analysis of the tradeoffs between safety, security and performance of V2X systems and propose a dynamic adaptability approach considering all three aspects jointly based on application needs and context to achieve maximum safety on the roads using an Internet of vehicles. Experiments with a simple V2V highway scenario demonstrate that an adaptive safety/security approach is essential and V2X systems have great potential for providing low reaction times.
Authentication and encryption within an embedded system environment using cameras, sensors, thermostats, autonomous vehicles, medical implants, RFID, etc. is becoming increasing important with ubiquitious wireless connectivity. Hardware-based authentication and encryption offer several advantages in these types of resource-constrained applications, including smaller footprints and lower energy consumption. Bitstring and key generation implemented with Physical Unclonable Functions or PUFs can further reduce resource utilization for authentication and encryption operations and reduce overall system cost by eliminating on-chip non-volatile-memory (NVM). In this paper, we propose a dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) strategy for implementing both authentication and encryption using a PUF for bitstring and key generation on FPGAs as a means of optimizing the utilization of the limited area resources. We show that the time and energy penalties associated with DPR are small in modern SoC-based architectures, such as the Xilinx Zynq SoC, and therefore, the overall approach is very attractive for emerging resource-constrained IoT applications.
Lots of traditional embedded systems can be called closed systems in that they do not connect and communicate with systems or devices outside of the entities they are embedded, and some part of these systems are designed based on proprietary protocols or standards. Open embedded systems connect and communicate with other systems or devices through the Internet or other networks, and are designed based on open protocols and standards. This paper discusses two types of security challenges facing open embedded systems: the security of the devices themselves that host embedded systems, and the security of information collected, processed, communicated, and consumed by embedded systems. We also discuss solution techniques to address these challenges.
Because of the nature of vehicular communications, security is a crucial aspect, involving the continuous development and analysis of the existing security architectures and punctual theoretical and practical aspects that have been proposed and are in need of continuous updates and integrations with newer technologies. But before an update, a good knowledge of the current aspects is mandatory. Identifying weaknesses and anticipating possible risks of vehicular communication networks through a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) represent an important aspect of the security analysis process and a valuable step in finding efficient security solutions for all kind of problems that might occur in these systems.
Conventional cyber defenses require continual maintenance: virus, firmware, and software updates; costly functional impact tests; and dedicated staff within a security operations center. The conventional defenses require access to external sources for the latest updates. The whitelisted system, however, is ideally a system that can sustain itself freed from external inputs. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), have the following unique traits: digital commands are physically observable and verifiable; possible combinations of commands are limited and finite. These CPS traits, combined with a trust anchor to secure an unclonable digital identity (i.e., digitally unclonable function [DUF] - Patent Application \#15/183,454; CodeLock), offers an excellent opportunity to explore defenses built on whitelisting approach called “Trustworthy Design Architecture (TDA).” There exist significant research challenges in defining what are the physically verifiable whitelists as well as the criteria for cyber-physical traits that can be used as the unclonable identity. One goal of the project is to identify a set of physical and/or digital characteristics that can uniquely identify an endpoint. The measurements must have the properties of being reliable, reproducible, and trustworthy. Given that adversaries naturally evolve with any defense, the adversary will have the goal of disrupting or spoofing this process. To protect against such disruptions, we provide a unique system engineering technique, when applied to CPSs (e.g., nuclear processing facilities, critical infrastructures), that will sustain a secure operational state without ever needing external information or active inputs from cybersecurity subject-matter experts (i.e., virus updates, IDS scans, patch management, vulnerability updates). We do this by eliminating system dependencies on external sources for protection. Instead, all internal co- munication is actively sealed and protected with integrity, authenticity and assurance checks that only cyber identities bound to the physical component can deliver. As CPSs continue to advance (i.e., IoTs, drones, ICSs), resilient-maintenance free solutions are needed to neutralize/reduce cyber risks. TDA is a conceptual system engineering framework specifically designed to address cyber-physical systems that can potentially be maintained and operated without the persistent need or demand for vulnerability or security patch updates.
Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) are usually deployed in human-hostile environments. Such architectures raise a challenge to data protection for two main reasons. First, sensors have limited capacities in terms of performance and memory, so not all cryptographic mechanisms can be applied. Moreover, the measurements cannot be immediately gathered, so they have to be kept inside the devices until a mobile sink comes to collect them. This paper introduces a new method for secure and resilient data protection inside UWSN. It is based on a lightweight fragmentation scheme that transforms data collected by a sensor into multiple secure fragments that are distributed over sensor's neighboring nodes in a way that only a certain amount of these fragments is required for data recovery. Moreover, data security is reinforced by the use of a dynamic key refreshed after each visit of the mobile sink. Authentication and integrity information are dispersed within the fragments to protected data from active attacks. Homomorphic properties of the algorithm allow to significantly reduce storage space inside the nodes. Performance and empirical security evaluation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a good trade-off between performance, data protection and memory occupation.
Life-cycle management of stateful VNF services is a complicated task, especially when automated resiliency and scaling should be handled in a secure manner, without service degradation. We present FlowSNAC, a resilient and scalable VNF service for user authentication and service deployment. FlowSNAC consists of both stateful and stateless components, some of that are SDN-based and others that are NFVs. We describe how it adapts to changing conditions by automatically updating resource allocations through a series of intermediate steps of traffic steering, resource allocation, and secure state transfer. We conclude by highlighting some of the lessons learned during implementation, and their wider consequences for the architecture of SDN/NFV management and orchestration systems.
Security issues in vehicular communication have become a huge concern to safeguard increasing applications. A group signature is one of the popular authentication approaches for VANETs (Vehicular ad hoc networks) which can be implemented to secure the vehicular communication. However, securely distributing group keys to fast-moving vehicular nodes is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management protocol for group signature based authentication, where a group is extended to a domain with multiple road side units. Our scheme not only provides a secure way to deliver group keys to vehicular nodes, but also ensures security features. The experiment results show that our key distribution scheme is a scalable, efficient and secure solution to vehicular networking.
Security challenges are the most important obstacles for the advancement of IT-based on-demand services and cloud computing as an emerging technology. Lack of coincidence in identity management models based on defined policies and various security levels in different cloud servers is one of the most challenging issues in clouds. In this paper, a policy- based user authentication model has been presented to provide a reliable and scalable identity management and to map cloud users' access requests with defined polices of cloud servers. In the proposed schema several components are provided to define access policies by cloud servers, to apply policies based on a structural and reliable ontology, to manage user identities and to semantically map access requests by cloud users with defined polices. Finally, the reliability and efficiency of this policy-based authentication schema have been evaluated by scientific performance, security and competitive analysis. Overall, the results show that this model has met defined demands of the research to enhance the reliability and efficiency of identity management in cloud computing environments.
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices perform security-critical operations and deal with sensitive information in the IoT-based systems. Therefore, the increased deployment of smart devices will make them targets for cyber attacks. Adversaries can perform malicious actions, leak private information, and track devices' and their owners' location by gaining unauthorized access to IoT devices and networks. However, conventional security protocols are not primarily designed for resource constrained devices and therefore cannot be applied directly to IoT systems. In this paper, we propose Boot-IoT - a privacy-preserving, lightweight, and scalable security scheme for limited resource devices. Boot-IoT prevents a malicious device from joining an IoT network. Boot-IoT enables a device to compute a unique identity for authentication each time the device enters a network. Moreover, during device to device communication, Boot-IoT provides a lightweight mutual authentication scheme that ensures privacy-preserving identity usages. We present a detailed analysis of the security strength of BootIoT. We implemented a prototype of Boot-IoT on IoT devices powered by Contiki OS and provided an extensive comparative analysis of Boot-IoT with contemporary authentication methods. Our results show that Boot-IoT is resource efficient and provides better scalability compared to current solutions.
Cloud computing is significantly reshaping the computing industry built around core concepts such as virtualization, processing power, connectivity and elasticity to store and share IT resources via a broad network. It has emerged as the key technology that unleashes the potency of Big Data, Internet of Things, Mobile and Web Applications, and other related technologies; but it also comes with its challenges - such as governance, security, and privacy. This paper is focused on the security and privacy challenges of cloud computing with specific reference to user authentication and access management for cloud SaaS applications. The suggested model uses a framework that harnesses the stateless and secure nature of JWT for client authentication and session management. Furthermore, authorized access to protected cloud SaaS resources have been efficiently managed. Accordingly, a Policy Match Gate (PMG) component and a Policy Activity Monitor (PAM) component have been introduced. In addition, other subcomponents such as a Policy Validation Unit (PVU) and a Policy Proxy DB (PPDB) have also been established for optimized service delivery. A theoretical analysis of the proposed model portrays a system that is secure, lightweight and highly scalable for improved cloud resource security and management.
The size of counterfeiting activities is increasing day by day. These activities are encountered especially in electronics market. In this paper, a countermeasure against counterfeiting on intellectual properties (IP) on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) is proposed. FPGA vendors provide bitstream ciphering as an IP security solution such as battery-backed or non-volatile FPGAs. However, these solutions are secure as long as they can keep decryption key away from third parties. Key storage and key transfer over unsecure channels expose risks for these solutions. In this work, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have been used for key generation. Generating a key from a circuit in the device solves key transfer problem. Proposed system goes through different phases when it operates. Therefore, partial reconfiguration feature of FPGAs is essential for feasibility of proposed system.
The trend in computing is towards the use of FPGAs to improve performance at reduced costs. An indication of this is the adoption of FPGAs for data centre and server application acceleration by notable technological giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Baidu. The continued protection of Intellectual Properties (IPs) on the FPGA has thus become both more important and challenging. To facilitate IP security, FPGA vendors have provided bitstream authentication and encryption. However, advancements in FPGA programming technology have engendered a bitstream manipulation technique like partial bitstream relocation (PBR), which is promising in terms of reducing bitstream storage cost and facilitating adaptability. Meanwhile, encrypted bitstreams are not amenable to PBR. In this paper, we present three methods for performing encrypted PBR with varying overheads of resources and time. These methods ensure that PBR can be applied to bitstreams without losing the protection of IPs.
Today's mobile applications increasingly rely on communication with a remote backend service to perform many critical functions, including handling user-specific information. This implies that some form of authentication should be used to associate a user with their actions and data. Since schemes involving tedious account creation procedures can represent "friction" for users, many applications are moving toward alternative solutions, some of which, while increasing usability, sacrifice security. This paper focuses on a new trend of authentication schemes based on what we call "device-public" information, which consists of properties and data that any application running on a device can obtain. While these schemes are convenient to users, since they require little to no interaction, they are vulnerable by design, since all the needed information to authenticate a user is available to any app installed on the device. An attacker with a malicious app on a user's device could easily hijack the user's account, steal private information, send (and receive) messages on behalf of the user, or steal valuable virtual goods. To demonstrate how easily these vulnerabilities can be weaponized, we developed a generic exploitation technique that first mines all relevant data from a victim's phone, and then transfers and injects them into an attacker's phone to fool apps into granting access to the victim's account. Moreover, we developed a dynamic analysis detection system to automatically highlight problematic apps. Using our tool, we analyzed 1,000 popular applications and found that 41 of them, including the popular messaging apps WhatsApp and Viber, were vulnerable. Finally, our work proposes solutions to this issue, based on modifications to the Android API.
In this paper, we explore the usage of printed tags to authenticate products. Printed tags are a cheap alternative to RFID and other tag based systems and do not require specialized equipment. Due to the simplistic nature of such printed codes, many security issues like tag impersonation, server impersonation, reader impersonation, replay attacks and denial of service present in RFID based solutions need to be handled differently. We propose a cost-efficient scheme based on static tag based hash chains to address these security threats. We analyze the security characteristics of this scheme and compare it to other product authentication schemes that use RFID tags. Finally, we show that our proposed statically printed QR codes can be at least as secure as RFID tags.
Smart Card has complications with validation and transmission process. Therefore, by using peeping attack, the secret code was stolen and secret filming while entering Personal Identification Number at the ATM machine. We intend to develop an authentication system to banks that protects the asset of user's. The data of a user is to be ensured that secure and isolated from the data leakage and other attacks Therefore, we propose a system, where ATM machine will have a QR code in which the information's are encrypted corresponding to the ATM machine and a mobile application in the customer's mobile which will decrypt the encoded QR information and sends the information to the server and user's details are displayed in the ATM machine and transaction can be done. Now, the user securely enters information to transfer money without risk of peeping attack in Automated Teller Machine by just scanning the QR code at the ATM by mobile application. Here, both the encryption and decryption technique are carried out by using Triple DES Algorithm (Data Encryption Standard).