Biblio

The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks, emerge as areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.

In this paper, we focuses on an access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). Generally, we firstly propose a decentralized IoT system based on blockchain. Then we establish a secure fine-grained access control strategies for users, devices, data, and implement the strategies with smart contract. To trigger the smart contract, we design different transactions. Finally, we use the multi-index table struct for the access right's establishment, and store the access right into Key-Value database to improve the scalability of the decentralized IoT system. In addition, to improve the security of the system we also store the access records on the blockchain and database.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a consolidated reality. Smart homes are equipped with a growing number of IoT devices that capture more and more information about human beings lives. However, manufacturers paid little or no attention to security, so that various challenges are still in place. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure IoT systems that combines the concept of Security-by-Contract (S×C) with the Fog computing distributed paradigm. We define the pillars of our approach, namely the notions of IoT device contract, Fog node policy and contract-policy matching, the respective life-cycles, and the resulting S×C workflow. To better understand all the concepts of the S×C framework, and highlight its practical feasibility, we use a running case study based on a context-aware system deployed in a real smart home.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are intense and are targeted to major infrastructure, governments and military organizations in each country. There are a lot of mitigations about DDoS, and the concept of Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been able to avoid attacks on websites. However, since the existing CDN system is fundamentally centralized, it may be difficult to prevent DDoS. This paper describes the distributed CDN Schema using Private Blockchain which solves the problem of participation of existing transparent and unreliable nodes. This will explain DDoS mitigation that can be used by military and government agencies.

In past, several Certificate Authority (CA) compromise and subsequent mis-issue of certificate raise the importance of certificate transparency and dynamic trust management for certificates. Certificate Transparency (CT) provides transparency for issued certificates, thus enabling corrective measure for a mis-issued certificate by a CA. However, CT and existing mechanisms cannot convey the dynamic trust state for a certificate. To address this weakness, we propose Smart Contract-assisted PKI (SCP) - a smart contract based PKI extension - to manage dynamic trust network for PKI. SCP enables distributed trust in PKI, provides a protocol for managing dynamic trust, assures trust state of a certificate, and provides a better trust experience for end-users.

The use of technology is increasing nowadays. On the other hand, most governments and legal offices still do not use technology to implement simple things such as signing a document because they still rely on face-to-face to ensure the authenticity of the signatory. Several challenges may come while signing documents online such as, how to authenticate the signing parties and how to ensure that signing parties will not deny their signatures in future? These challenges are addressed by SecureSign system that attach the signatories' identity with their fingerprints. SecureSign was implemented in C\# and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, with integrating fingerprint reader and electronic signature tablet. The SecureSign system achieves the main security goals which are confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation and integrity. It will have an impact on society and business environments positively as it will reduce fraud and forgery, and help in controlling the process of signing either in contracts or confidential papers. SecureSign have Successfully achieved confidentiality by encrypting data using AES algorithm, authentication by using user fingerprint, nonrepudiation by associating the user ID with his fingerprint, and integrity by embedding QR barcode within the document and hashing its content.

Problem: Today, many methods of influencing on personnel in the communication process are available to social engineers and information security specialists, but in practice it is difficult to say which method and why it is appropriate to use one. Criteria and indicators of effective communication are not formalized. Purpose: to formalize the concept of effective communication, to offer a tool for combining existing methods and means of communication, to formalize the purpose of communication. Methods: Use of the terminal model of a control system for a non-stochastic communication object. Results. Two examples demonstrating the possibility of using the terminal model of the communication control system, which allows you to connect tools and methods of communication, justify the requirements for the structure and feedback of communication, select the necessary communication algorithms depending on the observed response of the communication object. Practical significance: the results of the research can be used in planning and conducting effective communication in the process of information protection, in business, in private relationships and in other areas of human activity.

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing exponential scalability. This scalability introduces new challenges regarding management of IoT networks. The question that emerges is how we can trust the constrained infrastructure that shortly is expected to be formed by millions of 'things.' The answer is not to trust. This research introduces Amatista, a blockchain-based middleware for management in IoT. Amatista presents a novel zero-trust hierarchical mining process that allows validating the infrastructure and transactions at different levels of trust. This research evaluates Amatista on Edison Arduino Boards.

Traditional security practices focus on negative incentives that attempt to force compliance through constraints, monitoring, and punishment. This paper describes a missing dimension of most organizations' insider threat defense-one that explicitly considers positive incentives for attracting individuals to act in the interests of the organization. Positive incentives focus on properties of the organizational context of workforce management practices - including those relating to organizational supportiveness, coworker connectedness, and job engagement. Without due attention to the organizational context in which insider threats occur, insider misbehaviors may simply reoccur as a natural response to counterproductive or dysfunctional management practices. A balanced combination of positive and negative incentives can improve employees' relationships with the organization and provide a means for employees to better cope with personal and professional stressors. An insider threat program that balances organizational incentives can become an advocate for the workforce and a means for improving employee work life - a welcome message to employees who feel threatened by programs focused on discovering insider wrongdoing.

Public key infrastructure (PKI) is the foundation and core of network security construction. Blockchain (BC) has many technical characteristics, such as decentralization, impossibility of being tampered with and forged, which makes it have incomparable advantages in ensuring information credibility, security, traceability and other aspects of traditional technology. In this paper, a method of constructing PKI certificate system based on permissioned BC is proposed. The problems of multi-CA mutual trust, poor certificate configuration efficiency and single point failure in digital certificate system are solved by using the characteristics of BC distribution and non-tampering. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of identity privacy on BC, this paper proposes a privacy-aware PKI system based on permissioned BCs. This system is an anonymous digital certificate publishing scheme., which achieves the separation of user registration and authorization, and has the characteristics of anonymity and conditional traceability, so as to realize to protect user's identity privacy. The system meets the requirements of certificate security and anonymity, reduces the cost of CA construction, operation and maintenance in traditional PKI technology, and improves the efficiency of certificate application and configuration.

The concept of cyber-physical production systems is highly discussed amongst researchers and industry experts, however, the implementation options for these systems rely mainly on obsolete technologies. Despite the fact that the blockchain is most often associated with cryptocurrency, it is fundamentally wrong to deny the universality of this technology and the prospects for its application in other industries. For example, in the insurance sector or in a number of identity verification services. This article discusses the deployment of the CPPS backbone network based on the Ethereum private blockchain system. The structure of the network is described as well as its interaction with the help of smart contracts, based on the consumption of cryptocurrency for various operations.

If, as most experts agree, the mathematical basis of major blockchain systems is (probably if not provably) sound, why do they have a bad reputation? Human misbehavior (such as failed Bitcoin exchanges) accounts for some of the issues, but there are also deeper and more interesting vulnerabilities here. These include design faults and code-level implementation defects, ecosystem issues (such as wallets), as well as approaches such as the "51% attack" all of which can compromise the integrity of blockchain systems. With particular attention to the emerging non-financial applications of blockchain technology, this paper demonstrates the kinds of attacks that are possible and provides suggestions for minimizing the risks involved.

Recently, digital transactions in real estate, insurance, etc. have become popular, and researchers are actively studying digital signatures as a method for distinguishing individuals. However, existing digital signature systems have different methods for making signatures depending on the platform and device, and because they are used on platforms owned by corporations, they have the disadvantage of being highly platform-dependent and having low software extensibility. Therefore, in this paper we have analyzed existing digital signature systems and designed a heterogeneous integrated digital signature system which has per-user contract management features and can guarantee platform independence and increase the ease of software extension and maintenance by using a browser environment.

The rise of big data age in the Internet has led to the explosive growth of data size. However, trust issue has become the biggest problem of big data, leading to the difficulty in data safe circulation and industry development. The blockchain technology provides a new solution to this problem by combining non-tampering, traceable features with smart contracts that automatically execute default instructions. In this paper, we present a credible big data sharing model based on blockchain technology and smart contract to ensure the safe circulation of data resources.

Blockchain is an integrated technology to ensure keeping record and process transactions with decentralized manner. It is thought as the foundation of future decentralized ecosystem, and collects much attention. However, the maturity of this technology including security of the fundamental protocol and its applications is not enough, thus we need more research on the security evaluation and verification of Blockchain technology This tutorial explains the current status of the security of this technology, its security layers and possibility of application of formal analysis and verification.

Recent years have witnessed the trend of increasingly relying on distributed infrastructures. This increased the number of reported incidents of security breaches compromising users' privacy, where third parties massively collect, process and manage users' personal data. Towards these security and privacy challenges, we combine hierarchical identity based cryptographic mechanisms with emerging blockchain infrastructures and propose a blockchain-based data usage auditing architecture ensuring availability and accountability in a privacy-preserving fashion. Our approach relies on the use of auditable contracts deployed in blockchain infrastructures. Thus, it offers transparent and controlled data access, sharing and processing, so that unauthorized users or untrusted servers cannot process data without client's authorization. Moreover, based on cryptographic mechanisms, our solution preserves privacy of data owners and ensures secrecy for shared data with multiple service providers. It also provides auditing authorities with tamper-proof evidences for data usage compliance.

We present cryptocurrency-based lottery protocols that do not require any collateral from the players. Previous protocols for this task required a security deposit that is O(N2) times larger than the bet amount, where N is the number of players. Our protocols are based on a tournament bracket construction, and require only O(logN) rounds. Our lottery protocols thus represent a significant improvement, both because they allow players with little money to participate, and because of the time value of money. The Ethereum-based implementation of our lottery is highly efficient. The Bitcoin implementation requires an O(2N) off-chain setup phase, which demonstrates that the expressive power of the scripting language can have important implications. We also describe a minimal modification to the Bitcoin protocol that would eliminate the exponential blowup.

Cloud-centric cognitive cellular networks utilize dynamic spectrum access and opportunistic network access technologies as a means to mitigate spectrum crunch and network demand. However, furnishing a carrier with personally identifiable information for user setup increases the risk of profiling in cognitive cellular networks, wherein users seek secondary access at various times with multiple carriers. Moreover, network access provisioning - assertion, authentication, authorization, and accounting - implemented in conventional cellular networks is inadequate in the cognitive space, as it is neither spontaneous nor scalable. In this paper, we propose a privacy-enhancing user identity management system using blockchain technology which places due importance on both anonymity and attribution, and supports end-to-end management from user assertion to usage billing. The setup enables network access using pseudonymous identities, hindering the reconstruction of a subscriber's identity. Our test results indicate that this approach diminishes access provisioning duration by up to 4x, decreases network signaling traffic by almost 40%, and enables near real-time user billing that may lead to approximately 3x reduction in payments settlement time.

In the process of big data analysis and processing, a key concern blocking users from storing and processing their data in the cloud is their misgivings about the security and performance of cloud services. There is an urgent need to develop an approach that can help each cloud service provider (CSP) to demonstrate that their infrastructure and service behavior can meet the users' expectations. However, most of the prior research work focused on validating the process compliance of cloud service without an accurate description of the basic service behaviors, and could not measure the security capability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to verify cloud service security conformance called CloudSec, which reduces the description gap between the cloud provider and customer through modeling cloud service behaviors (CloudBeh Model) and security SLA (SecSLA Model). These models enable a systematic integration of security constraints and service behavior into cloud while using UPPAAL to check the conformance, which can not only check CloudBeh performance metrics conformance, but also verify whether the security constraints meet the SecSLA. The proposed approach is validated through case study and experiments with a cloud storage service based on OpenStack, which illustrates CloudSec approach effectiveness and can be applied in real cloud scenarios.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to include billions of pervasive and mission-critical sensors and actuators connected to the (public) Internet. This network of smart devices is expected to generate and have access to vast amounts of information, creating unique opportunities for novel applications but, at the same time raising significant privacy and security concerns that impede its further adoption and development. In this paper, we explore the potential of a blockchain-assisted information distribution system for the IoT. We identify key security requirements of such a system and we discuss how they can be satisfied using blockchains and smart contracts. Furthermore, we present a preliminary design of the system and we identify enabling technologies.

Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network of untrusted participants. It enables new forms of distributed software architectures, where components can find agreements on their shared states without trusting a central integration point or any particular participating components. Considering the blockchain as a software connector helps make explicitly important architectural considerations on the resulting performance and quality attributes (for example, security, privacy, scalability and sustainability) of the system. Based on our experience in several projects using blockchain, in this paper we provide rationales to support the architectural decision on whether to employ a decentralized blockchain as opposed to other software solutions, like traditional shared data storage. Additionally, we explore specific implications of using the blockchain as a software connector including design trade-offs regarding quality attributes.

Security in cloud environments is always considered an issue, due to the lack of control over leased resources. In this paper, we present a solution that offers security-as-a-service by relying on Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLAs) as a means to represent the security features to be granted. In particular, we focus on a security mechanism that is automatically configured and activated in an as-a-service fashion in order to protect cloud resources against DoS attacks. The activities reported in this paper are part of a wider work carried out in the FP7-ICT programme project SPECS, which aims at building a framework offering Security-as-a-Service using an SLA-based approach. The proposed approach founds on the adoption of SPECS Services to negotiate, to enforce and to monitor suitable security metrics, chosen by cloud customers, negotiated with the provider and included in a signed Security SLA.

The perception of lack of control over resources deployed in the cloud may represent one of the critical factors for an organization to decide to cloudify or not their own services. Furthermore, in spite of the idea of offering security-as-a-service, the development of secure cloud applications requires security skills that can slow down the adoption of the cloud for nonexpert users. In the recent years, the concept of Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLA) is assuming a key role in the provisioning of cloud resources. This paper presents the SPECS framework, which enables the development of secure cloud applications covered by a Security SLA. The SPECS framework offers APIs to manage the whole Security SLA life cycle and provides all the functionalities needed to automatize the enforcement of proper security mechanisms and to monitor userdefined security features. The development process of SPECS applications offering security-enhanced services is illustrated, presenting as a real-world case study the provisioning of a secure web server.

We study a quantity-flexibility supply contract between a manufacturer and a retailer in two periods. The retailer can get a low wholesale price within a fixed quantity and adjust the quantity at the end of the first period. The retailer can adjust the order quantities after the first period based on updated inventory status by paying a higher per-unit price for the incremental units or obtaining a buyback price per-unit for the returning units. By developing a two-period dynamic programming model in this paper, we first obtain an optimal replenishment strategy for the retailer when the manufacturer's price scheme is known. Then we derive an proper pricing scheme for the manufacturer by assuming that the supply chain is coordinated. The numerical results show some managerial insights by comparing this coordination scheme with Stackelberg game.

We propose a methodology for architecture exploration for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) based on an iterative, optimization-based approach, where a discrete architecture selection engine is placed in a loop with a continuous sizing engine. The discrete optimization routine proposes a candidate architecture to the sizing engine. The sizing routine optimizes over the continuous parameters using simulation to evaluate the physical models and to monitor the requirements. To decrease the number of simulations, we show how balance equations and conservation laws can be leveraged to prune the discrete space, thus achieving significant reduction in the overall runtime. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology on an industrial case study, namely an aircraft environmental control system, showing more than one order of magnitude reduction in optimization time.