Biblio

Over the years, false news has polluted the online media landscape across the world. In this “post-truth” era, the narratives created by false news have now come into fruition through dismantled democracies, disbelief in science, and hyper-polarized societies. Despite increased efforts in fact-checking & labeling, strengthening detection systems, de-platforming powerful users, promoting media literacy and awareness of the issue, false news continues to be spread exponentially. This study models the behaviors of both the victims of false news and the platform in which it is spread— through the system dynamics methodology. The model was used to develop a policy design by evaluating existing and proposed solutions. The results recommended actively countering confirmation bias, restructuring social networking sites’ recommendation algorithms, and increasing public trust in news organizations.

Speech recognition technology has been applied to all aspects of our daily life, but it faces many security issues. One of the major threats is the adversarial audio examples, which may tamper the recognition results of the acoustic speech recognition system (ASR). In this paper, we propose an adversarial detection framework to detect adversarial audio examples. The method is based on the transformer self-attention mechanism. Spectrogram features are extracted from the audio and divided into patches. Position information are embedded and then fed into transformer encoder. Experimental results show that the method achieves good performance with the detection accuracy of above 96.5% under the white-box attacks and blackbox attacks, and noisy circumstances. Even when detecting adversarial examples generated by the unknown attacks, it also achieves satisfactory results.

Connected devices are being deployed at a steady rate, providing services like data collection. Pervasive applications rely on those edge devices to seamlessly provide services to users. To connect applications and edge devices, using a middleware has been a popular approach. The research is active on the subject as there are many open challenges. The secure management of the edge devices and the security of the middleware are two of them. As security is a crucial requirement for pervasive environment, we propose a middleware architecture easing the secure use of edge devices for pervasive applications, while supporting the heterogeneity of communication protocols and the dynamism of devices. Because of the heterogeneity in protocols and security features, not all edge devices are equally secure. To allow the pervasive applications to gain control over this heterogeneous security, we propose a model to describe edge devices security. This model is accessible by the applications through our middleware. To validate our work, we developed a demonstrator of our middleware and we tested it in a concrete scenario.

Security evaluation can be performed using a variety of analysis methods, such as attack trees, attack graphs, threat propagation models, stochastic Petri nets, and so on. These methods analyze the effect of attacks on the system, and estimate security attributes from different perspectives. However, they require information from experts in the application domain for properly capturing the key elements of an attack scenario: i) the attack paths a system could be subject to, and ii) the different characteristics of the possible adversaries. For this reason, some recent works focused on the generation of low-level security models from a high-level description of the system, hiding the technical details from the modeler.In this paper we build on an existing ontology framework for security analysis, available in the ADVISE Meta tool, and we extend it in two directions: i) to cover the attack patterns available in the CAPEC database, a comprehensive dictionary of known patterns of attack, and ii) to capture all the adversaries’ profiles as defined in the Threat Agent Library (TAL), a reference library for defining the characteristics of external and internal threat agents ranging from industrial spies to untrained employees. The proposed extension supports a richer combination of adversaries’ profiles and attack paths, and provides guidance on how to further enrich the ontology based on taxonomies of attacks and adversaries.

Internet of Things (IoT) connects various nodes such as sensor devices. For users from foreign networks, their direct access to the data of sensor devices is restricted because of security threats. Therefore, a ticket-based authentication scheme was proposed, which can mutually authenticate a mobile device and a sensor device. This scheme with new features fills a gap in IoT authentication, but the scheme has not been verified formally. Hence, it is important to study the security and reliability of the scheme from the perspective of formal methods.In this paper, we model this scheme using Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Considering the possibility of key leakage caused by security threats in IoT networks, we also build models where one of the keys used in the scheme is leaked. With the model checker Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), we verify four properties (deadlock freedom, data availability, data security, and data authenticity) and find that the scheme cannot satisfy the last two properties with key leakage. Thus, we propose two improved models. The verification results show that the first improved model can guarantee data security, and the second one can ensure both data security and data authenticity.

Naval vessels infrastructures are evolving towards increasingly connected and automatic systems. Such accelerated complexity boost to search for more adapted and useful navigation devices may be at odds with cybersecurity, making necessary to develop adapted analysis solutions for experts. This paper introduces a novel process to visualize and analyze naval Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) using oriented graphs, considering operational constraints, to represent physical and functional connections between multiple components of CPS. Rapid prototyping of interconnected components is implemented in a semi-automatic manner by defining the CPS’s digital and physical systems as nodes, along with system variables as edges, to form three layers of an oriented graph, using the open-source Neo4j software suit. The generated multi-layer graph can be used to support cybersecurity analysis, like attacks simulation, anomaly detection and propagation estimation, applying existing or new algorithms.

Today's companies are increasingly relying on Internet of Everything (IoE) to modernize their operations. The very complexes characteristics of such system expose their applications and their exchanged data to multiples risks and security breaches that make them targets for cyber attacks. The aim of our work in this paper is to provide an cybersecurity strategy whose objective is to prevent and anticipate threats related to the IoE. An economic approach is used in order to help to take decisions according to the reduction of the risks generated by the non definition of the appropriate levels of security. The considered problem have been resolved by exploiting a combinatorial optimization approach with a practical case of knapsack. We opted for a bi-objective modeling under uncertainty with a constraint of cardinality and a given budget to be respected. To guarantee a robustness of our strategy, we have also considered the criterion of uncertainty by taking into account all the possible threats that can be generated by a cyber attacks over IoE. Our strategy have been implemented and simulated under MATLAB environement and its performance results have been compared to those obtained by NSGA-II metaheuristic. Our proposed cyber security strategy recorded a clear improvment of efficiency according to the optimization of the security level and cost parametrs.

Cyber-Physical System(CPS) is now a new evolutional morphology of embedded systems. With features of merging computation and physical processes together, the traditional verification and simulation methods have being challenged recently. After analyzed the state-of-art of related research, a new simulation environment is studied according to the characters of a special autonomous cyber-physical system-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, and designed to be scene-driven, modeling and reconfigurable. In this environment, a novel CPS-in-loop architecture, which can support simulations under different customized scenes, is studied firstly to ensure its opening and flexibility. And as another foundation, some dynamics models of CPS and atmospheric ones of relative sensors are introduced to simulate the motion of CPS and the change of its posture. On the basis above, the reconfigurable scene-driven mechanisms that are Based on hybrid events are mainly excogitated. Then, different scenes can be configured in terms of special verification requirements, and then each scene will be decomposed into a spatio-temporal event sequence and scheduled by a scene executor. With this environment, not only the posture of CPS, but also the autonomy of its behavior can be verified and observed. It will be meaningful for the design of such autonomous CPS.

Magnetic soft robots are increasingly popular as they provide many advantages such as miniaturization and tetherless control that are ideal for applications inside the human body or in previously inaccessible locations.While non-magnetic elastomers have been extensively characterized and modelled for optimizing the fabrication of soft robots, a systematic material characterization of their magnetic counterparts is still missing. In this paper, commonly employed magnetic materials made out of Ecoflex™ 00-30 and Dragon Skin™ 10 with different concentrations of NdFeB microparticles were mechanically and magnetically characterized. The magnetic materials were evaluated under uniaxial tensile testing and their behavior analyzed through linear and hyperelastic model comparison. To determine the corresponding magnetic properties, we present a method to determine the magnetization vector, and magnetic remanence, by means of a force and torque load cell and large reference permanent magnet; demonstrating a high level of accuracy. Furthermore, we study the influence of varied magnitude impulse magnetizing fields on the resultant magnetizations. In combination, by applying improved, material-specific mechanical and magnetic properties to a 2-segment discrete magnetic robot, we show the potential to reduce simulation errors from 8.5% to 5.4%.

When modeling information security systems (ISS), the vast majority of works offer various models of threats to the object of protection (threat trees, Petri nets, etc.). However, ISS is not only a mean to prevent threats or reduce damage from their implementation, but also other components - the qualifications of employees responsible for IS, the internal climate in the team, the company's position on the market, and many others. The article considers the cognitive model of the state of the information security system of an average organization. The model is a weighted oriented graph, its' vertices are standard elements of the organization's information security system. The most significant factors affecting the condition of information security of the organization are identified based on the model. Influencing these factors is providing the most effect if IS level.

The complexity and ubiquity of modern computing systems is a fertile ground for anomalies, including security and privacy breaches. In this paper, we propose a new methodology that addresses the practical challenges to implement anomaly detection approaches. Specifically, it is challenging to define normal behavior comprehensively and to acquire data on anomalies in diverse cloud environments. To tackle those challenges, we focus on anomaly detection approaches based on system performance signatures. In particular, performance signatures have the potential of detecting zero-day attacks, as those approaches are based on detecting performance deviations and do not require detailed knowledge of attack history. The proposed methodology leverages an analytical performance model and experimentation, and allows to control the rate of false positives in a principled manner. The methodology is evaluated using the TPCx-V workload, which was profiled during a set of executions using resource exhaustion anomalies that emulate the effects of anomalies affecting system performance. The proposed approach was able to successfully detect the anomalies, with a low number of false positives (precision 90%-98%).

A physical protection system (PPS) integrates people, procedures, and equipment for the protection of assets or facilities against theft, sabotage, or other malevolent intruder attacks. In this paper we focus on the architecture modeling of PPS to support the communication among stakeholders, analysis and guiding the systems development activities. A common practice for modeling architecture is by using an architecture framework that defines a coherent set of viewpoints. Existing systems engineering modeling approaches appear to be too general and fail to address the domain-specific aspects of PPSs. On the other hand, no dedicated architecture framework approach has been provided yet to address the specific concerns of PPS. In this paper, we present an architecture framework for PPS (PPSAF) that has been developed in a real industrial context focusing on the development of multiple PPSs. The architecture framework consists of six coherent set of viewpoints including facility viewpoint, threats and vulnerabilities viewpoint, deterrence viewpoint, detection viewpoint, delay viewpoint, and response viewpoint. We illustrate the application of the architecture framework for the design of a PPS architecture of a building.

Cloud service has the computing characteristics of self-organizing strain on demand, which is prone to failure or loss of responsibility in its extensive application. In the prediction or accountability of this, the modeling of cloud service structure becomes an insurmountable priority. This paper reviews the modeling of cloud service network architecture. It mainly includes: Firstly, the research status of cloud service structure modeling is analyzed and reviewed. Secondly, the classification of time-varying structure of cloud services and the classification of time-varying structure modeling methods are summarized as a whole. Thirdly, it points out the existing problems. Finally, for cloud service accountability, research approach of time-varying structure modeling is proposed.

Cloud-based cyber-physical systems, like vehicle and intelligent transportation systems, are now attracting much more attentions. These systems usually include large-scale distributed sensor networks covering various components and producing enormous measurement data. Lots of modeling languages are put to use for describing cyber-physical systems or its aspects, bringing contribution to the development of cyber-physical systems. But most of the modeling techniques only focuse on software aspect so that they could not exactly express the whole cloud-based cyber-physical systems, which require appropriate views and tools in its design; but those tools are hard to be used under systemic or object-oriented methods. For example, the widest used modeling language, UML, could not fulfil the above design's requirements by using the foremer's standard form. This paper presents a method designing the cloud-based cyber-physical systems with AADL, by which we can analyse, model and apply those requirements on cloud platforms ensuring QoS in a relatively highly extensible way at the mean time.

Safety and security of complex critical infrastructures are very important for economic, environmental and social reasons. The complexity of these systems introduces difficulties in the identification of safety and security risks that emerge from interdisciplinary interactions and dependencies. The discovery of safety and security design weaknesses late in the design process and during system operation can lead to increased costs, additional system complexity, delays and possibly undesirable compromises to address safety and security weaknesses.

Trust is an important topic in today's interconnected world. Breaches of trust in today's systems has had profound effects upon us all, and they are very difficult and costly to fix especially when caused by flaws in the system's architecture. Trust modeling can expose these types of issues, but modeling trust in complex multi-tiered system architectures can be very difficult. Often experts have differing views of trust and how it applies to systems within their domain. This work presents a graph-based modeling methodology that normalizes the application of trust across disparate system domains allowing the modeling of complex intersystem trust relationships. An algorithm is proposed that applies graph theory to model, validate and evaluate trust in system architectures. Also, it provides the means to apply metrics to compare and prioritize the effectiveness of trust management in system and component architectures. The results produced by the algorithm can be used in conjunction with systems engineering processes to ensure both trust and the efficient use of resources.

SDN (Software Defined Network) with multiple controllers draws more attention for the increasing scale of the network. The architecture can handle what SDN with single controller is not able to address. In order to understand what this architecture can accomplish and face precisely, we analyze it with formal methods. In this paper, we apply CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) to model the routing service of SDN under HyperFlow architecture based on OpenFlow protocol. By using model checker PAT (Process Analysis Toolkit), we verify that the models satisfy three properties, covering deadlock freeness, consistency and fault tolerance.

Experimentation tools facilitate exploration of Tor performance and security research problems and allow researchers to safely and privately conduct Tor experiments without risking harm to real Tor users. However, researchers using these tools configure them to generate network traffic based on simplifying assumptions and outdated measurements and without understanding the efficacy of their configuration choices. In this work, we design a novel technique for dynamically learning Tor network traffic models using hidden Markov modeling and privacy-preserving measurement techniques. We conduct a safe but detailed measurement study of Tor using 17 relays (\textasciitilde2% of Tor bandwidth) over the course of 6 months, measuring general statistics and models that can be used to generate a sequence of streams and packets. We show how our measurement results and traffic models can be used to generate traffic flows in private Tor networks and how our models are more realistic than standard and alternative network traffic generation\textasciitildemethods.

Industrial control systems are changing from monolithic to distributed and interconnected architectures, entering the era of industrial IoT. One fundamental issue is that security properties of such distributed control systems are typically only verified empirically, during development and after system deployment. We propose a novel modelling framework for the security verification of distributed industrial control systems, with the goal of moving towards early design stage formal verification. In our framework we model industrial IoT infrastructures, attack patterns, and mitigation strategies for countering attacks. We conduct model checking-based formal analysis of system security through scenario execution, where the analysed system is exposed to attacks and implement mitigation strategies. We study the applicability of our framework for large systems using a scalability analysis.

The interconnection of networks between several techno-socio-economic sectors such as energy, transport, and communication, questions the manageability and resilience of the digital society. System interdependencies alter the fundamental dynamics that govern isolated systems, which can unexpectedly trigger catastrophic instabilities such as cascading failures. This paper envisions a general-purpose, yet simple prototyping of self-management software systems that can turn system interdependencies from a cause of instability to an opportunity for higher resilience. Such prototyping proves to be challenging given the highly interdisciplinary scope of interdependent networks. Different system dynamics and organizational constraints such as the distributed nature of interdependent networks or the autonomy and authority of system operators over their controlled infrastructure perplex the design for a general prototyping approach, which earlier work has not yet addressed. This paper contributes such a modular design solution implemented as an open source software extension of SFINA, the Simulation Framework for Intelligent Network Adaptations. The applicability of the software artifact is demonstrated with the introduction of a novel self-healing mechanism for interdependent power networks, which optimizes power flow exchanges between a damaged and a healer network to mitigate power cascading failures. Results show a significant decrease in the damage spread by self-healing synergies, while the degree of interconnectivity between the power networks indicates a tradeoff between links survivability and load served. The contributions of this paper aspire to bring closer several research communities working on modeling and simulation of different domains with an economic and societal impact on the resilience of real-world interdependent networks.

Tracing and integrating security requirements throughout the development process is a key challenge in security engineering. In socio-technical systems, security requirements for the organizational and technical aspects of a system are currently dealt with separately, giving rise to substantial misconceptions and errors. In this paper, we present a model-based security engineering framework for supporting the system design on the organizational and technical level. The key idea is to allow the involved experts to specify security requirements in the languages they are familiar with: business analysts use BPMN for procedural system descriptions; system developers use UML to design and implement the system architecture. Security requirements are captured via the language extensions SecBPMN2 and UMLsec. We provide a model transformation to bridge the conceptual gap between SecBPMN2 and UMLsec. Using UMLsec policies, various security properties of the resulting architecture can be verified. In a case study featuring an air traffic management system, we show how our framework can be practically applied.

Customers need to know how reliable a new release is, and whether or not the new release has substantially different, either better or worse, reliability than the one currently in production. Customers are demanding quantitative evidence, based on pre-release metrics, to help them decide whether or not to upgrade (and thereby offer new features and capabilities to their customers). Finding ways to estimate future reliability performance is not easy - we have evaluated many prerelease development and test metrics in search of reliability predictors that are sufficiently accurate and also apply to a broad range of software products. This paper describes a successful model that has resulted from these efforts, and also presents both a functional extension and a further conceptual simplification of the extended model that enables us to better communicate key release information to internal stakeholders and customers, without sacrificing predictive accuracy or generalizability. Work remains to be done, but the results of the original model, the extended model, and the simplified version are encouraging and are currently being applied across a range of products and releases. To evaluate whether or not these early predictions are accurate, and also to compare releases that are available to customers, we use a field software reliability assessment mechanism that incorporates two types of customer experience metrics: field bug encounters normalized by usage, and field bug counts, also normalized by usage. Our 'release-overrelease' strategy combines the 'maturity assessment' component (i.e., estimating reliability prior to release to the field) and the 'reliability assessment' component (i.e., gauging actual reliability after release to the field). This overall approach enables us to both predict reliability and compare reliability results for recent releases for a product.

Given the growing sophistication of cyber attacks, designing a perfectly secure system is not generally possible. Quantitative security metrics are thus needed to measure and compare the relative security of proposed security designs and policies. Since the investigation of security breaches has shown a strong impact of human errors, ignoring the human user in computing these metrics can lead to misleading results. Despite this, and although security researchers have long observed the impact of human behavior on system security, few improvements have been made in designing systems that are resilient to the uncertainties in how humans interact with a cyber system. In this work, we develop an approach for including models of user behavior, emanating from the fields of social sciences and psychology, in the modeling of systems intended to be secure. We then illustrate how one of these models, namely general deterrence theory, can be used to study the effectiveness of the password security requirements policy and the frequency of security audits in a typical organization. Finally, we discuss the many challenges that arise when adopting such a modeling approach, and then present our recommendations for future work.

Sophisticated cyber attacks by state-sponsored and criminal actors continue to plague government and industrial infrastructure. Intuitively, partitioning cyber systems into survivable, intrusion tolerant compartments is a good idea. This prevents witting and unwitting insiders from moving laterally and reaching back to their command and control (C2) servers. However, there is a lack of artifacts that can predict the effectiveness of this approach in a realistic setting. We extend earlier work by relaxing simplifying assumptions and providing a new attacker-facing metric. In this article, we propose new closed-form mathematical models and a discrete time simulation to predict three critical statistics: probability of compromise, probability of external host compromise and probability of reachback. The results of our new artifacts agree with one another and with previous work, which suggests they are internally valid and a viable method to evaluate the effectiveness of cyber zone defense.

Network systems, such as transportation systems and water supply systems, play important roles in our daily life and industrial production. However, a variety of disruptive events occur during their life time, causing a series of serious losses. Due to the inevitability of disruption, we should not only focus on improving the reliability or the resistance of the system, but also pay attention to the ability of the system to response timely and recover rapidly from disruptive events. That is to say we need to pay more attention to the resilience. In this paper, we describe two resilience models, quotient resilience and integral resilience, to measure the final recovered performance and the performance cumulative process during recovery respectively. Based on these two models, we implement the optimization of the system recovery strategies after disruption, focusing on the repair sequence of the damaged components and the allocation scheme of resource. The proposed research in this paper can serve as guidance to prioritize repair tasks and allocate resource reasonably.