Biblio

Ransomware attacks are taking advantage of the ongoing pandemics and attacking the vulnerable systems in business, health sector, education, insurance, bank, and government sectors. Various approaches have been proposed to combat ransomware, but the dynamic nature of malware writers often bypasses the security checkpoints. There are commercial tools available in the market for ransomware analysis and detection, but their performance is questionable. This paper aims at proposing an AI-based ransomware detection framework and designing a detection tool (AIRaD) using a combination of both static and dynamic malware analysis techniques. Dynamic binary instrumentation is done using PIN tool, function call trace is analyzed leveraging Cuckoo sandbox and Ghidra. Features extracted at DLL, function call, and assembly level are processed with NLP, association rule mining techniques and fed to different machine learning classifiers. Support vector machine and Adaboost with J48 algorithms achieved the highest accuracy of 99.54% with 0.005 false-positive rates for a multi-level combined term frequency approach.

Account data of electrical power system is the link of all businesses in the whole life cycle of equipment. It is of great significance to improve the data quality of power equipment account data for improving the information level of power enterprises. In the past, there was only the error correction technology to check whether it was empty and whether it contained garbled code. The error correction technology for same field of the same kind of power equipment account data is proposed in this paper. Combined with the characteristics of production business, the possible similar power equipment can be found through the function location type and other fields of power equipment account data. Based on the principle of search scoring, the horizontal comparison is used to search and score in turn. Finally, the potential spare parts and existing data quality are identified according to the scores. And judge whether it is necessary to carry out inspection maintenance.

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is one of the most common techniques to exploit software vulnerabilities. Although many solutions to defend against ROP attacks have been proposed, they still have various drawbacks, such as requiring additional information (source code, debug symbols, etc.), increasing program running cost, and causing program instability. In this paper, we propose a method: using static analysis and binary patch technology to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction. According to this method, we implemented the AT- ROP tool in a Linux 64-bit system environment. Compared to existing tools, it clears the parameter registers when the function returns. As a result, it makes the binary to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction without having to obtain the source code of the binary. We use the binary challenges in the CTF competition and the binary programs commonly used in the Linux environment to experiment. It turns out that AT-ROP can make the binary program have the ability to defend against ROP attacks based on return instruction with a small increase in the size of the binary program and without affecting its normal execution.

In the past decades, learning an effective distance metric between pairs of instances has played an important role in the classification and retrieval task, for example, the person identification or malware retrieval in the IoT service. The core motivation of recent efforts focus on improving the metric forms, and already showed promising results on the various applications. However, such models often fail to produce a reliable metric on the ambiguous test set. It happens mainly due to the sampling process of the training set, which is not representative of the distribution of the negative samples, especially the examples that are closer to the boundary of different categories (also called hard negative samples). In this paper, we focus on addressing such problems and propose an adaptive margin deep adversarial metric learning (AMDAML) framework. It exploits numerous common negative samples to generate potential hard (adversarial) negatives and applies them to facilitate robust metric learning. Apart from the previous approaches that typically depend on the search or data augmentation to find hard negative samples, the generation of adversarial negative instances could avoid the limitation of domain knowledge and constraint pairs' amount. Specifically, in order to prevent over fitting or underfitting during the training step, we propose an adaptive margin loss that preserves a flexible margin between the negative (include the adversarial and original) and positive samples. We simultaneously train both the adversarial negative generator and conventional metric objective in an adversarial manner and learn the feature representations that are more precise and robust. The experimental results on practical data sets clearly demonstrate the superiority of AMDAML to representative state-of-the-art metric learning models.

While backtracking analysis has been successful in assisting the investigation of complex security attacks, it faces a critical dependency explosion problem. To address this problem, security analysts currently need to tune backtracking analysis manually with different case-specific heuristics. However, existing systems fail to fulfill two important system requirements to achieve effective backtracking analysis. First, there need flexible abstractions to express various types of heuristics. Second, the system needs to be responsive in providing updates so that the progress of backtracking analysis can be frequently inspected, which typically involves multiple rounds of manual tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel system, APTrace, to meet both of the above requirements. As we demonstrate in the evaluation, security analysts can effectively express heuristics to reduce more than 99.5% of irrelevant events in the backtracking analysis of real-world attack cases. To improve the responsiveness of backtracking analysis, we present a novel execution-window partitioning algorithm that significantly reduces the waiting time between two consecutive updates (especially, 57 times reduction for the top 1% waiting time).

In order to realize the sharing of data by multiple users on the blockchain, this paper proposes an attribute-based searchable encryption with verifiable ciphertext scheme via blockchain. The scheme uses the public key algorithm to encrypt the keyword, the attribute-based encryption algorithm to encrypt the symmetric key, and the symmetric key to encrypt the file. The keyword index is stored on the blockchain, and the ciphertext of the symmetric key and file are stored on the cloud server. The scheme uses searchable encryption technology to achieve secure search on the blockchain, uses the immutability of the blockchain to ensure the security of the keyword ciphertext, uses verify algorithm guarantees the integrity of the data on the cloud. When the user's attributes need to be changed or the ciphertext access structure is changed, the scheme uses proxy re-encryption technology to implement the user's attribute revocation, and the authority center is responsible for the whole attribute revocation process. The security proof shows that the scheme can achieve ciphertext security, keyword security and anti-collusion. In addition, the numerical results show that the proposed scheme is effective.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are the systems that detect and block any potential threats (e.g. DDoS attacks) in the network. In this project, we explore the performance of several machine learning techniques when used as parts of an IDS. We experiment with the CICIDS2017 dataset, one of the biggest and most complete IDS datasets in terms of having a realistic background traffic and incorporating a variety of cyber attacks. The techniques we present are applicable to any IDS dataset and can be used as a basis for deploying a real time IDS in complex environments.

Cyber-attacks are becoming more complex & increasing tasks in accurate intrusion detection (ID). Failure to avoid intrusion can reduce the reliability of security services, for example, integrity, Privacy & availability of data. The rapid proliferation of computer networks (CNs) has reformed the perception of network security. Easily accessible circumstances affect computer networks from many threats by hackers. Threats to a network are many & hypothetically devastating. Researchers have recognized an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) up to identifying attacks into a wide variety of environments. Several approaches to intrusion detection, usually identified as Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (SIDS) & Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems (AIDS), were proposed in the literature to address computer safety hazards. This survey paper grants a review of current IDS, complete analysis of prominent new works & generally utilized dataset to evaluation determinations. It also introduces avoidance techniques utilized by attackers to avoid detection. This paper delivers a description of AIDS for attack detection. IDS is an applied research area in artificial intelligence (AI) that uses multiple machine learning algorithms.

In today's society, under the comprehensive arrival of the Internet era, the rapid development of technology has facilitated people's production and life, but it is also a “double-edged sword”, making people's personal information and other data subject to a greater threat of abuse. The unique features of big data technology, such as massive storage, parallel computing and efficient query, have created a breakthrough opportunity for the key technologies of large-scale network security situational awareness. On the basis of big data acquisition, preprocessing, distributed computing and mining and analysis, the big data analysis platform provides information security assurance services to the information system. This paper will discuss the security situational awareness in large-scale network environment and the promotion of big data technology in security perception.

The autonomy of intelligent systems and their safety rely on their ability for local decision making based on collected environmental information. This is even more for cyber-physical systems running safety critical activities. While this intelligence is partial and fragmented, and cognitive techniques are of limited maturity, the decision function must produce results whose validity and scope must be weighted in light of the underlying assumptions, unavoidable uncertainty and hypothetical safety limitation. Besides the cognitive techniques dependability, it is about the assurance level of the decision self-making. Beyond the pure decision-making capabilities of the autonomous intelligent system, we need techniques that guarantee the system assurance required for the intended use. Security mechanisms for cognitive systems may be consequently tightly intricated. We propose a trustworthiness module which is part of the system and its resulting safety. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art regarding the dependability of cognitive techniques, the assurance level definition in this context, and related engineering practices. We elaborate regarding the design of autonomous intelligent systems safety, then we discuss its security design and approaches for the mitigation of safety violations by the cognitive functions.

Insider attacks is a well-known problem acknowledged as a threat as early as 1980s. The threat is attributed to legitimate users who take advantage of familiarity with the computational environment and abuse their privileges, can easily cause significant damage or losses. In this paper, we present an active defense model and framework of insider threat detection and sense. Firstly, we describe the hierarchical framework which deal with insider threat from several aspects, and subsequently, show a hierarchy-mapping based insider threats model, the kernel of the threats detection, sense and prediction. The experiments show that the model and framework could sense the insider threat in real-time effectively.

In the past, two main approaches for the purpose of authentication, including information-theoretic authentication codes and complexity-theoretic message authentication codes (MACs), were almost independently developed. In this paper, we consider to construct new MACs, which are both computationally secure and information-theoretically secure. Essentially, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs), where artificial noise is used to interfere with the complexity-theoretic MACs and quantization is further employed to facilitate packet-based transmission. With a channel coding formulation of key recovery in the MACs, the generation of standard authentication tags can be seen as an encoding process for the ensemble of codes, where the shared key between Alice and Bob is considered as the input and the message is used to specify a code from the ensemble of codes. Then, we show that artificial noise in ANA-MACs can be well employed to resist the key recovery attack even if the opponent has an unlimited computing power. Finally, a pragmatic approach for the analysis of ANA-MACs is provided, and we show how to balance the three performance metrics, including the completeness error, the false acceptance probability, and the conditional equivocation about the key. The analysis can be well applied to a class of ANA-MACs, where MACs with Rijndael cipher are employed.

Currently, little attention has been carried out to address the feasibility of in-network caching in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) for the design and real-world deployment of future networks. Towards this line, in this paper, we propose a beneficial caching scheme in ICN by storing no more than a specific number of replicas for each content. Particularly, to realize an optimal content distribution for deploying caches in ICN, a content can be cached either partially or as a full-object corresponding to its request arrival rate and data traffic. Also, we employ a utility-based replacement in each content node to keep the most recent and popular content items in the ICN interconnections. The evaluation results show that the proposal improves the cache hit rate and cache diversity considerably, and acts as a beneficial caching approach for network and service providers in ICN. Specifically, the proposed caching mechanism is easy to deploy, robust, and relevant for the content-based providers by enabling them to offer users high Quality of Service (QoS) and gain benefits at the same time.

In recent years, ICN (Information-Centric Networking) has been under the spotlight as a network that mainly focuses on transmitted and received data rather than on the hosts that transmit and receive data. Generally, the communication networks such as ICNs are required to be robust against network failures caused by attacks and disasters. One of the metrics for the robustness of conventional host-centric networks, e.g., TCP/IP network, is reachability between nodes in the network after network failures, whereas the key metric for the robustness of ICNs is content availability. In this paper, we focus on an arbitrary ICN network and derive the content availability for a given probability of node removal. Especially, we analytically obtain the average content availability over an entire network in the case where just a single path from a node to a repository, i.e., contents server, storing contents is available and where multiple paths to the repository are available, respectively. Furthermore, through several numerical evaluations, we investigate the effect of the structure of network topology as well as the pattern and scale of the network failures on the content availability in ICN. Our findings include that, regardless of patterns of network failures, the content availability is significantly improved by caching contents at routers and using multiple paths, and that the content availability is more degraded at cluster-based node removal compared with random node removal.

Computer networks and surging advancements of innovative information technology construct a critical infrastructure for network transactions of business entities. Information exchange and data access though such infrastructure is scrutinized by adversaries for vulnerabilities that lead to cyber-attacks. This paper presents an agent-based system modelling to conceptualize and extract explicit and latent structure of the complex enterprise systems as well as human interactions within the system to determine common vulnerabilities of the entity. The model captures emergent behavior resulting from interactions of multiple network agents including the number of workstations, regular, administrator and third-party users, external and internal attacks, defense mechanisms for the network setting, and many other parameters. A risk-based approach to modelling cybersecurity of a business entity is utilized to derive the rate of attacks. A neural network model will generalize the type of attack based on network traffic features allowing dynamic state changes. Rules of engagement to generate self-organizing behavior will be leveraged to appoint a defense mechanism suitable for the attack-state of the model. The effectiveness of the model will be depicted by time-state chart that shows the number of affected assets for the different types of attacks triggered by the entity risk and the time it takes to revert into normal state. The model will also associate a relevant cost per incident occurrence that derives the need for enhancement of security solutions.

The age of the wireless network already advances to the fifth generation (5G) era. With software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), various scenarios can be implemented in the 5G network. Cloud computing, for example, is one of the important application scenarios for implementing SDN/NFV solutions. The emerging container technologies, such as Docker, can provide more agile service provisioning than virtual machines can do in cloud environments. It is a trend that virtual network functions (VNFs) tend to be deployed in the form of containers. The services provided by clouds can be formed by service function chaining (SFC) consisting of containerized VNFs. Nevertheless, the challenges and limitation regarding SFCs are reported in the literature. Various network services are bound to rely heavily on these novel technologies, however, the development of related technologies often emphasizes functions and ignores security issues. One noticeable issue is the SFC integrity. In brief, SFC integrity concerns whether the paths that traffic flows really pass by and the ones of service chains that are predefined are consistent. In order to examine SFC integrity in the cloud-native environment of 5G network, we propose a framework that can be integrated with NFV management and orchestration (MANO) in this work. The core of this framework is the anomaly detection mechanism for SFC integrity. The learning algorithm of our mechanism is based on extreme learning machine (ELM). The proposed mechanism is evaluated by its performance such as the accuracy of our ELM model. This paper concludes with discussions and future research work.

Deep learning methods are increasingly becoming solutions to complex problems, including the search for anomalies. While fully-connected and convolutional neural networks have already found their application in classification problems, their applicability to the problem of detecting anomalies is limited. In this regard, it is proposed to use autoencoders, previously used only in problems of reducing the dimension and removing noise, as a method for detecting anomalies in the industrial control system. A new method based on autoencoders is proposed for detecting anomalies in the operation of industrial control systems (ICS). Several neural networks based on auto-encoders with different architectures were trained, and the effectiveness of each of them in the problem of detecting anomalies in the work of process control systems was evaluated. Auto-encoders can detect the most complex and non-linear dependencies in the data, and as a result, can show the best quality for detecting anomalies. In some cases, auto-encoders require fewer machine resources.

To reduce cost and ease maintenance, industrial control systems (ICS) have adopted Ethernetbased interconnections that integrate operational technology (OT) systems with information technology (IT) networks. This integration has made these critical systems vulnerable to attack. Security solutions tailored to ICS environments are an active area of research. Anomalybased network intrusion detection systems are well-suited for these environments. Often these systems must be optimized for their specific environment. In prior work, we introduced a method for assessing the impact of various anomaly-based network IDS settings on security. This paper reviews the experimental outcomes when we applied our method to a full-scale ICS test bed using actual attacks. Our method provides new and valuable data to operators enabling more informed decisions about IDS configurations.

This paper proposes AERFAD, an anomaly detection method based on the autoencoder and the random forest, for solving the credit card fraud detection problem. The proposed AERFAD first utilizes the autoencoder to reduce the dimensionality of data and then uses the random forest to classify data as anomalous or normal. Large numbers of credit card transaction data of European cardholders are applied to AEFRAD to detect possible frauds for the sake of performance evaluation. When compared with related methods, AERFAD has relatively excellent performance in terms of the accuracy, true positive rate, true negative rate, and Matthews correlation coefficient.

The article looks at information risk concepts, how it is assessed, web application vulnerabilities and how to identify them. A prototype web application vulnerability scanner has been developed with a function of information risk assessment based on fuzzy logic. The software developed is used in laboratory sessions on data protection discipline.

Due to geographical locations of Indonesia, some technology such as hydro and solar photovoltaics are very attractive to be used and developed. Distribution Energy Resources (DER) is the appropriate schemes implemented to achieve optimal operation respecting the location and capacity of the plant. The Gorontalo sub-system network was chosen as a case study considering both of micro-hydro and PV as contributed to supply the grid. The needs of a smart electrical system are required to improve reliability, power quality, and adaptation to any circumstances during DER application. While the topology was changing over time, intermittent of DER output and bidirectional power flow can be overcome with smart grid systems. In this study, an automation algorithm has been conducted to aid the engineers in solving the protection problems caused by DER implementation. The Protection Security Assessment (PSA) method is used to evaluate the state of the protection system. Determine the relay settings using an adaptive rule-based method on expert systems. The application with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed to make user easier to get the specific relay settings and locations which are sensitive, fast, reliable, and selective.

Machine learning techniques help to understand underlying patterns in datasets to develop defense mechanisms against cyber attacks. Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) technique is a machine learning technique used in detecting attack vs. benign data. However, it is difficult to construct any effective model when there are imbalances in the dataset that prevent proper classification of attack samples in data. In this research, we use UGR'16 dataset to conduct data wrangling initially. This technique helps to prepare a test set from the original dataset to train the neural network model effectively. We experimented with a series of inputs of varying sizes (i.e. 10000, 50000, 1 million) to observe the performance of the MLP neural network model with distribution of features over accuracy. Later, we use Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model that produces samples of different attack labels (e.g. blacklist, anomaly spam, ssh scan) for balancing the dataset. These samples are generated based on data from the UGR'16 dataset. Further experiments with MLP neural network model shows that a balanced attack sample dataset, made possible with GAN, produces more accurate results than an imbalanced one.

Modern industrial control systems (ICS) act as victims of cyber attacks more often in last years. These cyber attacks often can not be detected by classical information security methods. Moreover, the consequences of cyber attack's impact can be catastrophic. Since cyber attacks leads to appearance of anomalies in the ICS and technological equipment controlled by it, the task of intrusion detection for ICS can be reformulated as the task of industrial process anomaly detection. This paper considers the applicability of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the field of industrial processes anomaly detection. Existing approaches for GANs usage in the field of information security (such as anomaly detection in network traffic) were described. It is proposed to use the BiGAN architecture in order to detect anomalies in the industrial processes. The proposed approach has been tested on Secure Water Treatment Dataset (SWaT). The obtained results indicate the prospects of using the examined method in practice.

The interface permits the client to scan for a subjective utility on the Play Store; the authorizations posting and the protection arrangement are then routinely recovered, on all events imaginable. The client has then the capability of choosing an interesting authorization, and a posting of pertinent sentences are separated with the guide of the privateer's inclusion and introduced to them, alongside a right depiction of the consent itself. Such an interface allows the client to rapidly assess the security-related dangers of an Android application, by utilizing featuring the pertinent segments of the privateer's inclusion and by introducing helpful data about shrewd authorizations. A novel procedure is proposed for the assessment of privateer's protection approaches with regards to Android applications. The gadget actualized widely facilitates the way toward understanding the security ramifications of placing in 1/3 birthday celebration applications and it has just been checked in a situation to feature troubling examples of uses. The gadget is created in light of expandability, and correspondingly inclines in the strategy can without trouble be worked in to broaden the unwavering quality and adequacy. Likewise, if your application handles non-open or delicate individual information, it would be ideal if you also allude to the extra necessities in the “Individual and Sensitive Information” territory underneath. These Google Play necessities are notwithstanding any prerequisites endorsed by method for material security or data assurance laws. It has been proposed that, an individual who needs to perform the establishment and utilize any 1/3 festival application doesn't perceive the significance and which methods for the consents mentioned by method for an application, and along these lines sincerely gives all the authorizations as a final product of which unsafe applications furthermore get set up and work their malevolent leisure activity in the rear of the scene.

Ransomware have observed a steady growth over the years with several concerning trends that indicate efficient, targeted attacks against organizations and individuals alike. These opportunistic attackers indiscriminately target both public and private sector entities to maximize gain. In this article, we highlight the criticality of key management in ransomware's cryptosystem in order to facilitate building effective solutions against this threat. We introduce the ransomware kill chain to elucidate the path our adversaries must take to attain their malicious objective. We examine current solutions presented against ransomware in light of this kill chain and specify which constraints on ransomware are being violated by the existing solutions. Finally, we present the notion of memory attacks against ransomware's key management and present our initial experiments with dynamically extracting decryption keys from real-world ransomware. Results of our preliminary research are promising and the extracted keys were successfully deployed in subsequent data decryption.