Biblio

With the developments in deep learning, the security of neural networks against vulnerabilities has become one of the most urgent research topics in deep learning. There are many types of security countermeasures. Adversarial examples and their defense methods, in particular, have been well-studied in recent years. An adversarial example is designed to make neural networks misclassify or produce inaccurate output. Audio adversarial examples are a type of adversarial example where the main target of attack is a speech-to-text transcription neural network. In this study, we propose a new defense method against audio adversarial examples for the speech-to-text transcription neural networks. It is difficult to determine whether an input waveform data representing the sound of voice is an audio adversarial example. Therefore, the main framework of the proposed defense method is based on a sandbox approach. To evaluate the proposed defense method, we used actual audio adversarial examples that were created on Deep Speech, which is a speech-to-text transcription neural network. We confirmed that our defense method can identify audio adversarial examples to protect speech-to-text systems.

With the development of technology, the massive malware become the major challenge to current computer security. In our work, we implemented a malware detection system using deep learning on API calls. By means of cuckoo sandbox, we extracted the API calls sequence of malicious programs. Through filtering and ordering the redundant API calls, we extracted the valid API sequences. Compared with GRU, BGRU, LSTM and SimpleRNN, we evaluated the BLSTM on the massive datasets including 21,378 samples. The experimental results demonstrate that BLSTM has the best performance for malware detection, reaching the accuracy of 97.85%.

Cryptographically cloud computing may be an innovative safe cloud computing design. Cloud computing may be a huge size dispersed computing model that ambitious by the economy of the level. It integrates a group of inattentive virtualized animatedly scalable and managed possessions like computing control storage space platform and services. External end users will approach to resources over the net victimization fatal particularly mobile terminals, Cloud's architecture structures are advances in on-demand new trends. That are the belongings are animatedly assigned to a user per his request and hand over when the task is finished. So, this paper projected biometric coding to boost the confidentiality in Cloud computing for biometric knowledge. Also, this paper mentioned virtualization for Cloud computing also as statistics coding. Indeed, this paper overviewed the safety weaknesses of Cloud computing and the way biometric coding will improve the confidentiality in Cloud computing atmosphere. Excluding this confidentiality is increased in Cloud computing by victimization biometric coding for biometric knowledge. The novel approach of biometric coding is to reinforce the biometric knowledge confidentiality in Cloud computing. Implementation of identification mechanism can take the security of information and access management in the cloud to a higher level. This section discusses, however, a projected statistics system with relation to alternative recognition systems to date is a lot of advantageous and result oriented as a result of it does not work on presumptions: it's distinctive and provides quick and contact less authentication. Thus, this paper reviews the new discipline techniques accustomed to defend methodology encrypted info in passing remote cloud storage.

With the popularity of online social networks, social recommendations that rely on one’s social connections to make personalized recommendations have become possible. This introduces vulnerabilities for an adversarial party to compromise the recommendations for users by utilizing their social connections. In this paper, we propose the targeted poisoning attack on the factorization-based social recommender system in which the attacker aims to promote an item to a group of target users by injecting fake ratings and social connections. We formulate the optimal poisoning attack as a bi-level program and develop an efficient algorithm to find the optimal attacking strategy. We then evaluate the proposed attacking strategy on real-world dataset and demonstrate that the social recommender system is sensitive to the targeted poisoning attack. We find that users in the social recommender system can be attacked even if they do not have direct social connections with the attacker.

Efficiently searchable and easily deployable encryption schemes enable an untrusted, legacy service such as a relational database engine to perform searches over encrypted data. The ease with which such schemes can be deployed on top of existing services makes them especially appealing in operational environments where encryption is needed but it is not feasible to replace large infrastructure components like databases or document management systems. Unfortunately all previously known approaches for efficiently searchable and easily deployable encryption are vulnerable to inference attacks where an adversary can use knowledge of the distribution of the data to recover the plaintext with high probability. We present a new efficiently searchable, easily deployable database encryption scheme that is provably secure against inference attacks even when used with real, low-entropy data. We implemented our constructions in Haskell and tested databases up to 10 million records showing our construction properly balances security, deployability and performance.

The giant network of Internet of Things establishes connections between smart devices and people, with protocols to collect and share data. While the data is expanding at a fast pace in this era of Big Data, there are growing concerns about security and privacy policies. In the current Internet of Things ecosystems, at the intersection of the Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cybersecurity lies the subject that attracts the most attention. In aiding users in getting an adequate understanding, this paper introduces HackerNets, an interactive visualization for emerging topics in the crossing of IoT, Big Data, and Cybersecurity over time. To demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of HackerNets, we apply and evaluate the technique on the dataset from the social media platform.

Cyber insurance is a viable method for cyber risk transfer. However, the cyber insurance faces critical challenges, the most important of which is lack of statistical data. In this paper, we proposed an incentive model considering monitoring signals for cybersecurity information haring based on the principal-agent theory. We studied the effect of monitoring signals on increasing the rationality of the incentive contract and reducing moral hazard in the process of cybersecurity information sharing, and analyzed factors influencing the effectiveness of the incentive contract. We show that by introducing monitoring signals, the insurer can collect more information about the effort level of the insured, and encourage the insured to share cybersecurity information based on the information sharing output and monitoring signals of the effort level, which can not only reduce the blindness of incentive to the insured in the process of cybersecurity information sharing, but also reduce moral hazard.

With cybersecurity situation more and more complex, data-driven security has become indispensable. Numerous cybersecurity data exists in textual sources and data analysis is difficult for both security analyst and the machine. To convert the textual information into structured data for further automatic analysis, we extract cybersecurity-related entities and propose a self-attention-based neural network model for the named entity recognition in cybersecurity. Considering the single word feature not enough for identifying the entity, we introduce CNN to extract character feature which is then concatenated into the word feature. Then we add the self-attention mechanism based on the existing BiLSTM-CRF model. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model on the labelled dataset and obtain a better performance than the previous entity extraction model.

We analyze expert review and student performance data to evaluate the validity of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) for assessing student knowledge of core cybersecurity concepts after a first course on the topic. A panel of 12 experts in cybersecurity reviewed the CCI, and 142 students from six different institutions took the CCI as a pilot test. The panel reviewed each item of the CCI and the overwhelming majority rated every item as measuring appropriate cybersecurity knowledge. We administered the CCI to students taking a first cybersecurity course either online or proctored by the course instructor. We applied classical test theory to evaluate the quality of the CCI. This evaluation showed that the CCI is sufficiently reliable for measuring student knowledge of cybersecurity and that the CCI may be too difficult as a whole. We describe the results of the expert review and the pilot test and provide recommendations for the continued improvement of the CCI.

To address cybersecurity, this author proposed recently the approach of formulating it in symmetric dual-space and dual-system. This paper further explains this concept, beginning with symmetric Maxwell Equation (ME) and Fourier Transform (FT). The approach appears to be a powerful solution, with wide applications ranging from Electronic Warfare (EW) to 5G Mobile, etc.

This paper considers one of the methods of efficient allocation of limited resources in special-purpose devices (sensors) to monitor complex network unit cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity education and training have gained increasing attention in all sectors due to the prevalence and quick evolution of cyberattacks. A variety of platforms and systems have been proposed and developed to accommodate the growing needs of hands-on cybersecurity practice. However, those systems are either lacking sufficient flexibility (e.g., tied to a specific virtual computing service provider, little customization support) or difficult to scale. In this work, we present a cloud-based platform named EZSetup for hands-on cybersecurity practice at scale and our experience of using it in class. EZSetup is customizable and cloud-agnostic. Users can create labs through an intuitive Web interface and deploy them onto one or multiple clouds. We have used NSF funded Chameleon cloud and our private OpenStack cloud to develop, test and deploy EZSetup. We have developed 14 network and security labs using the tool and included six labs in an undergraduate network security course in spring 2019. Our survey results show that students have very positive feedback on using EZSetup and computing clouds for hands-on cybersecurity practice.

For complex technical objects the research of cybersecurity problems should take into account both physical and information properties of the object. The paper considers a hybrid model that unifies information and physical models and may be used as a tool for countering cyber threats and for cybersecurity risk assessment at the design and operational stage of an object's lifecycle.

A successful Smart Grid system requires purpose-built security architecture which is explicitly designed to protect customer data confidentiality. In addition to the investment on electric power infrastructure for protecting the privacy of Smart Grid-related data, entities need to actively participate in the NIST interoperability framework process; establish policies and oversight structure for the enforcement of cyber security controls of the data through adoption of security best practices, personnel training, cyber vulnerability assessments, and consumer privacy audits.

The paper describes modification of the ATA (Attack Tree Analysis) technique for assessment of instrumentation and control systems (ICS) dependability (reliability, availability and cyber security) called AvTA (Availability Tree Analysis). The techniques FMEA, FMECA and IMECA applied to carry out preliminary semi-formal and criticality oriented analysis before AvTA based assessment are described. AvTA models combine reliability and cyber security subtrees considering probabilities of ICS recovery in case of hardware (physical) and software (design) failures and attacks on components casing failures. Successful recovery events (SREs) avoid corresponding failures in tree using OR gates if probabilities of SRE for assumed time are more than required. Case for dependability AvTA based assessment (model, availability function and technology of decision-making for choice of component and system parameters) for smart building ICS (Building Automation Systems, BAS) is discussed.

Cloud use for High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) is increasing. The data are transferred to the cloud and usually left there even after the data being processed. There is security concern for such data being left online. We propose secure staging system to prepare not only data but also computing platform for processing the data dynamically just while the data is processed. The data plane of the secure staging system has dynamic reconfigurability with several lower-than-IP-layer partitioning mechanisms. The control plane consists of a scheduler and a resource provisioner working together to reconfigure the partitioning in the data plane dynamically. A field trial system is deployed for treating secure data in dental school to be processed in the computer center with the location distance of 1km. The system shows high score in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) evaluation.

Industrial Internet-of-Things has been touted as the next revolution in the industrial domain, offering interconnectivity, independence, real-time operation, and self-optimization. Integration of smart systems, however, bridges the gap between information and operation technology, creating new avenues for attacks from the cyber domain. The dismantling of this air-gap, in conjunction with the devices' long lifespan -in the range of 20-30 years-, motivates us to bring the attention of the community to emerging advanced persistent threats. We demonstrate a threat that bridges the air-gap by leaking data from memory to analog peripherals through Direct Memory Access (DMA), delivered as a firmware modification through the supply chain. The attack automatically adapts to a target device by leveraging the Device Tree and resides solely in the peripherals, completely transparent to the main CPU, by judiciously short-circuiting specific components. We implement this attack on a commercial Programmable Logic Controller, leaking information over the available LEDs. We evaluate the presented attack vector in terms of stealthiness, and demonstrate no observable overhead on both CPU performance and DMA transfer speed. Since traditional anomaly detection techniques would fail to detect this firmware trojan, this work highlights the need for industrial control system-appropriate techniques that can be applied promptly to installed devices.

Runtime memory vulnerabilities, especially present in widely used languages as C and C++, are exploited by attackers to corrupt code pointers and hijack the execution flow of a program running on a target system to force it to behave abnormally. This is the principle of modern Code Reuse Attacks (CRAs) and of famous attack paradigms as Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) and Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP), which have defeated the previous defenses against malicious code injection such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is a promising approach to protect against such runtime attacks. Recently, many CFI solutions have been proposed, with both hardware and software implementations. But how can a defense based on complying with a graph calculated a priori efficiently deal with something unpredictable as exceptions and interrupt requests? The present paper focuses on this dichotomy by analysing some of the CFI-based defenses and showing how the unexpected trigger of an interrupt and the sudden execution of an Interrupt Service Routine (ISR) can circumvent them.

The main purpose of this paper is to solve the problem of quantitative and qualitative evaluation of network security. Referring to the relevant network security situation assessment algorithms, and by means of advanced artificial intelligence deep learning technology, to build a network security Indication System based on Cyber Range, and optimize the guidance model of deep learning technology.

The paper considers data security and privacy issues in intelligent transportation systems which involve data streams coming out from individual vehicles to road side units. In this environment, there are issues in regards to the scalability of key management and computation limitations at the edge of the network. To address these issues, we suggest the formation of groups in the vehicular layer, where a group leader is assigned to communicate with group members and the road side unit. We propose a lightweight permutation mechanism for preserving the confidentiality and privacy of sensory data.

The orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm is a commonly used algorithm for recovering K-sparse signals x ∈ ℝn from linear model y = Ax, where A ∈ ℝm×n is a sensing matrix. A fundamental question in the performance analysis of OMP is the characterization of the probability that it can exactly recover x for random matrix A. Although in many practical applications, in addition to the sparsity, x usually also has some additional property (for example, the nonzero entries of x independently and identically follow the Gaussian distribution), none of existing analysis uses these properties to answer the above question. In this paper, we first show that the prior distribution information of x can be used to provide an upper bound on \textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbarx\textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbar21/\textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbarx\textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbar22, and then explore the bound to develop a better lower bound on the probability of exact recovery with OMP in K iterations. Simulation tests are presented to illustrate the superiority of the new bound.

Energy Distribution Grids are considered critical infrastructure, hence the Distribution System Operators (DSOs) have developed sophisticated engineering practices to improve their resilience. Over the last years, due to the "Smart Grid" evolution, this infrastructure has become a distributed system where prosumers (the consumers who produce and share surplus energy through the grid) can plug in distributed energy resources (DERs) and manage a bi-directional flow of data and power enabled by an advanced IT and control infrastructure. This introduces new challenges, as the prosumers possess neither the skills nor the knowledge to assess the risk or secure the environment from cyber-threats. We propose a simple and usable approach based on the Reference Model of Information Assurance & Security (RMIAS), to support the prosumers in the selection of cybesecurity measures. The purpose is to reduce the risk of being directly targeted and to establish collective responsibility among prosumers as grid gatekeepers. The framework moves from a simple risk analysis based on security goals to providing guidelines for the users for adoption of adequate security countermeasures. One of the greatest advantages of the approach is that it does not constrain the user to a specific threat model.

Context: Managing technical debt (TD) associated with external cybersecurity attacks on an organization can significantly improve decisions made when prioritizing which security weaknesses require attention. Whilst source code vulnerabilities can be found using static analysis techniques, malicious external attacks expose the vulnerabilities of a system at runtime and can sometimes remain hidden for long periods of time. By mapping malicious attack tactics to the consequences of weaknesses (i.e. exploitable source code vulnerabilities) we can begin to understand and prioritize the refactoring of the source code vulnerabilities that cause the greatest amount of technical debt on a system. Goal: To establish an approach that maps common external attack tactics to system weaknesses. The consequences of a weakness associated with a specific attack technique can then be used to determine the technical debt principal of said violation; which can be measured in terms of loss of business rather than source code maintenance. Method: We present a position study that uses Jaccard similarity scoring to examine how 11 malicious attack tactics can relate to Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs). Results: We conduct a study to simulate attacks, and generate dependency graphs between external attacks and the technical consequences associated with CWEs. Conclusion: The mapping of cyber security attacks to weaknesses allows operational staff (SecDevOps) to focus on deploying appropriate countermeasures and allows developers to focus on refactoring the vulnerabilities with the greatest potential for technical debt.

Computer security has gained more and more attention in a public over the last years, since computer systems are suffering from significant and increasing security threats that cause security breaches by exploiting software vulnerabilities. The most efficient way to ensure the system security is to patch the vulnerable system before a malicious attack occurs. Besides the commonly-used push-type patch management, the pull-type patch management is also adopted. The main issues in the pull-type patch management are two-fold; when to check the vulnerability information and when to apply a patch? This paper considers the security patch management for a virtual machine (VM) based intrusion tolerant system (ITS), where the system undergoes the patch management with a periodic vulnerability checking strategy, and evaluates the system security from the availability aspect. A composite stochastic reward net (SRN) model is applied to capture the attack behavior of adversary and the defense behaviors of system. Two availability measures; interval availability and point-wise availability are formulated to quantify the system security via phase expansion. The proposed approach and metrics not only enable us to quantitatively assess the system security, but also provide insights on the patch management. In numerical experiments, we evaluate effects of the intrusion rate and the number of vulnerability checking on the system security.

By accurately measuring risk for enterprise networks, attack graphs allow network defenders to understand the most critical threats and select the most effective countermeasures. This paper describes substantial enhancements to the NetSPA attack graph system required to model additional present-day threats (zero-day exploits and client-side attacks) and countermeasures (intrusion prevention systems, proxy firewalls, personal firewalls, and host-based vulnerability scans). Point-to-point reachability algorithms and structures were extensively redesigned to support "reverse" reachability computations and personal firewalls. Host-based vulnerability scans are imported and analyzed. Analysis of an operational network with 84 hosts demonstrates that client-side attacks pose a serious threat. Experiments on larger simulated networks demonstrated that NetSPA's previous excellent scaling is maintained. Less than two minutes are required to completely analyze a four-enclave simulated network with more than 40,000 hosts protected by personal firewalls.