Biblio

We propose an information-theoretical method of attribution of literary texts, developed within the framework of information theory and mathematical statistics. Using the proposed method, the following two problems of disputed authorship in Russian and Soviet literature were investigated: i) the problem of false attribution of some novels to Nekrasov and ii) the problem of dubious attribution of two novels to Bulgakov. The research has shown the high efficiency of the data-compression method for attribution of literary texts.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients’ end. This creates significant overhead for the patient, who must authorize every access of their health record. It is also not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization.

In a collaboration with the Georgia Peanut Commission’s Education Center and museum in Georgia, USA, we developed an augmented reality app to guide visitors through the museum and offer immersive educational information about the artifacts, exhibits, and artwork displayed therein. Notably, our augmented reality system applies the First Order Motion Model for Image Animation to several portraits of individuals influential to the Georgia peanut industry to provide immersive animated narration and monologue regarding their contributions to the peanut industry. [4]

The deployment of DER with smart-inverter functionality is increasing the controllable assets on power distribution networks and, consequently, the cyber-physical attack surface. Within this work, we consider the use of reinforcement learning as an online controller that adjusts DER Volt/Var and Volt/Watt control logic to mitigate network voltage unbalance. We specifically focus on the case where a network-aware cyber-physical attack has compromised a subset of single-phase DER, causing a large voltage unbalance. We show how deep reinforcement learning successfully learns a policy minimizing the unbalance, both during normal operation and during a cyber-physical attack. In mitigating the attack, the learned stochastic policy operates alongside legacy equipment on the network, i.e. tap-changing transformers, adjusting optimally predefined DER control-logic.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have the potential to improve road safety and reduce traffic congestion by enhancing sharing of messages about road conditions. Communication in VANETs depends upon a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that checks for message confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. One challenge that the PKI infrastructure does not eliminate is the possibility of malicious vehicles mounting a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. We present a scheme that combines statistical modeling and machine learning techniques to detect and prevent blackhole attacks in a VANET environment.Simulation results demonstrate that on average, our model produces an Area Under The Curve (ROC) and Receiver Operating Characteristics (AUC) score of 96.78% which is much higher than a no skill ROC AUC score and only 3.22% away from an ideal ROC AUC score. Considering all the performance metrics, we show that the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gradient Boosting classifier are more accurate and perform consistently better under various circumstances. Both have an accuracy of over 98%, F1-scores of over 95%, and ROC AUC scores of over 97%. Our scheme is robust and accurate as evidenced by its ability to identify and prevent blackhole attacks. Moreover, the scheme is scalable in that addition of vehicles to the network does not compromise its accuracy and robustness.

The increase in online activity during the COVID 19 pandemic has generated a surge in network traffic capable of expanding the scope of DDoS attacks. Cyber criminals can now afford to launch massive DDoS attacks capable of degrading the performances of conventional machine learning based IDS models. Hence, there is an urgent need for an effective DDoS attack detective model with the capacity to handle large magnitude of DDoS attack traffic. This study proposes a deep learning based DDoS attack detection system using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). The proposed model was evaluated on UNSW-NB15 and NSL-KDD intrusion datasets, whereby twenty-three (23) and twenty (20) attack features were extracted from UNSW-NB15 and NSL-KDD, respectively using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The results from the proposed model show significant improvement when compared with results from some conventional machine learning techniques such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) with accuracies of 94.28% and 90.59% on both datasets, respectively. Furthermore, comparative analysis of LSTM with other deep learning results reported in literature justified the choice of LSTM among its deep learning peers in detecting DDoS attacks over a network.

Nowadays, Denial of Service (DOS) is a significant cyberattack that can happen on the Internet. This attack can be taken place with more than one attacker that in this case called Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). The attackers endeavour to make the resources (server & bandwidth) unavailable to legitimate traffic by overwhelming resources with malicious traffic. An appropriate security module is needed to discriminate the malicious flows with high accuracy to prevent the failure resulting from a DDOS attack. In this paper, a DDoS attack discriminator will be designed for Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture so that it can be deployed in the POX controller. The simulation results present that the proposed model can achieve an accuracy of about 99.4%which shows an outstanding percentage of improvement compared with Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) approaches.

Software-defined network (SDN) is a network architecture that used to build, design the hardware components virtually. We can dynamically change the settings of network connections. In the traditional network, it's not possible to change dynamically, because it's a fixed connection. SDN is a good approach but still is vulnerable to DDoS attacks. The DDoS attack is menacing to the internet. To prevent the DDoS attack, the machine learning algorithm can be used. The DDoS attack is the multiple collaborated systems that are used to target the particular server at the same time. In SDN control layer is in the center that link with the application and infrastructure layer, where the devices in the infrastructure layer controlled by the software. In this paper, we propose a machine learning technique namely Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect malicious traffic. Our test outcome shows that the Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm provides better accuracy and detection rate.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a revolution in asymmetric key cryptography which is based on the hardness of discrete logarithms. ECC offers lightweight encryption as it presents equal security for smaller keys, and reduces processing overhead. But asymmetric schemes are vulnerable to several cryptographic attacks such as plaintext attacks, known cipher text attacks etc. Frequency analysis is a type of cipher text attack which is a passive traffic analysis scenario, where an opponent studies the frequency or occurrence of single letter or groups of letters in a cipher text to predict the plain text part. Block cipher modes are not used in asymmetric key encryption because encrypting many blocks with an asymmetric scheme is literally slow and CBC propagates transmission errors. Therefore, in this research we present a new approach to defence against frequency analysis in ECC using K-Means clustering to defence against Frequency Analysis. In this proposed methodology, security of ECC against frequency analysis is achieved by clustering the points of the curve and selecting different cluster for encoding a text each time it is encrypted. This technique destroys the regularities in the cipher text and thereby guards against cipher text attacks.

The cipher-text homomorphism encryption algorithm (homomorphic encryption) are used for the cloud safe and to solve the integrity, availability and controllability of information. For homomorphic encryption, we, by Topsnut-gpw technique, design: degree-sequence homomorphisms and their inverses, degree-sequence homomorphic chain, graph-set homomorphism, colored degree-sequence matrices and every-zero Cds-matrix groups, degree-coinciding degree-sequence lattice, degree-joining degree-sequence lattice, as well as degree-sequence lattice homomorphism, since number-based strings made by Topsnut-gpws of topological coding are irreversible, and Topsnut-gpws can realize: one public-key corresponds two or more privatekeys, and more public-key correspond one or more private-keys for asymmetric encryption algorithm.

With the rise of the cloud computing and services, the network environments tend to be more complex and enormous. Security control becomes more and more hard due to the frequent and various access and requests. There are a few techniques to solve the problem which developed separately in the recent years. Network Micro-Segmentation provides the system the ability to keep different parts separated. Zero Trust Model ensures the network is access to trusted users and business by applying the policy that verify and authenticate everything. With the combination of Segmentation and Zero Trust Model, a system will obtain the ability to control the access to organizations' or industrial valuable assets. To implement the cooperation, the paper designs a strategy named light verification to help the process to be painless for the cost of inspection. The strategy was found to be effective from the perspective of the technical management, security and usability.

The ever-evolving computers has its implications on the data and information and the threats that they are exposed to. With the exponential growth of internet, the chances of data breach are highly likely as unauthorized and ill minded users find new ways to get access to the data that they can use for their plans. Most of the systems today have well designed measures that examine the information for any abnormal behavior (Zero Day Attacks) compared to what has been seen and experienced over the years. These checks are done based on a predefined identity (signature) of information. This is being termed as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The concept of IDS revolves around validation of data and/or information and detecting unauthorized access attempts with an intention of manipulating data. High Performance Soft Computing (HPSC) aims to internalize cumulative adoption of traditional and modern attempts to breach data security and expose it to high scale damage and altercations. Our effort in this paper is to emphasize on the multifaceted tactic and rationalize important functionalities of IDS available at the disposal of HPSC.

When location-based services (LBS) are delivered, location data should be protected against honest-but-curious LBS providers, them being quasi-identifiers. One of the existing approaches to achieving this goal is location k-anonymity, which leverages the presence of a trusted party, called location trusted service (LTS), playing the role of anonymizer. A drawback of this approach is that the location trusted service is a single point of failure and traces all the users. Moreover, the protection is completely nullified if a global passive adversary is allowed, able to monitor the flow of messages, as the source of the query can be identified despite location k-anonymity. In this paper, we propose a distributed and hierarchical LTS model, overcoming both the above drawbacks. Moreover, position notification is used as cover traffic to hide queries and multicast is minimally adopted to hide responses, to keep k-anonymity also against the global adversary, thus enabling the possibility that LBS are delivered within social networks.

The intranets in modern organizations are facing severe data breaches and critical resource misuses. By reusing user credentials from compromised systems, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers can move laterally within the internal network. A promising new approach called deception technology makes the network administrator (i.e., defender) able to deploy decoys to deceive the attacker in the intranet and trap him into a honeypot. Then the defender ought to reasonably allocate decoys to potentially insecure hosts. Unfortunately, existing APT-related defense resource allocation models are infeasible because of the neglect of many realistic factors.In this paper, we make the decoy deployment strategy feasible by proposing a game-theoretic model called the APT Deception Game to describe interactions between the defender and the attacker. More specifically, we decompose the decoy deployment problem into two subproblems and make the problem solvable. Considering the best response of the attacker who is aware of the defender’s deployment strategy, we provide an elitist reservation genetic algorithm to solve this game. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deployment strategy compared with other heuristic strategies.

In smart girds, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have to protect data from advanced persistent threats (APTs), which exploit vulnerabilities of the power infrastructures to launch stealthy and targeted attacks. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based APT defense scheme for the control center to choose the detection interval and the number of Central Processing Units (CPUs) allocated to the data concentrators based on the data priority, the size of the collected meter data, the history detection delay, the previous number of allocated CPUs, and the size of the labeled compromised meter data without the knowledge of the attack interval and attack CPU allocation model. The proposed scheme combines deep learning and policy-gradient based actor-critic algorithm to accelerate the optimization speed at the control center, where an actor network uses the softmax distribution to choose the APT defense policy and the critic network updates the actor network weights to improve the computational performance. The advantage function is applied to reduce the variance of the policy gradient. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a performance gain over the benchmarks in terms of the detection delay, data protection level, and utility.

This paper presents a new micro linear actuator design. The North-South (NS) permanent magnet array configuration is assembled as the mobile part. The fixed part is designed to two-phase planar coils with no crossings avoiding interferences between overlapped conductors. The analytical calculation of the permanent magnet array verifies the feasibility of the finite element simulation. And then electromagnetic optimizations based on simulation to maximize the average thrust and minimize thrust ripple. In order to deal with millimeter level structure design, a microfabrication approach is adopted to process the new micro linear actuator in silicon material. The new micro linear actuator is able to perform millimeter level displacement strokes along a single axis in the horizontal plane. The experimental results demonstrate that the new micro linear actuator is capable of delivering variable strokes up to 5 mm with a precision error of 30 μm in position closed loop control and realizes the maximum velocity of 26.62mm/s with maximum error of 4.92%.

This research work consists in to design a system of occupancy simulation in smart homes based on IoT, in order to create configurations within a home that make look like the daily behavior of home inhabitants. Due to the high rate of burglary in uninhabited places, reaching an 9% in average in 2019 in the Chilean case, technologies have been involved with greater emphasis on improving security systems, where the implementation of the Internet of Things will allow rapid action against the intruder detection in those places. The proposed IoT system is based on a motion sensor, actuators as relays and lights, Arduino platform to control system, and a Amazon Echo virtual assistant to interface with inhabitants. The main contribution of this prototype security system is the integration of different IoT (Adafruit, IFTTT) and control platforms (Arduino uno and NodeMCU), virtual assistant (Alexa) and actuators, which has features that can be replicated in larger processes and with a larger number of devices. The results demonstrate that security system create an environment occupied by owners without to be inside home, through sensors and actuators.

Looking at the Smart Grid as a Cyber - Physical system of great complexity, the paper synthesizes the main IT security issues that may arise. Security issues are seen from a hybrid point of view, combining theory of information with system theory. Smart Grid has changed dramatically over the past years. With modern technologies, such as Big Data or Internet of Things (IoT), the Smart Grid is evolving into a more interconnected and dynamic power network model.

Smart grid is the key infrastructure of the country, and its network security is an important link to ensure the national important infrastructure security. SOC as a secure operation mechanism for adaptive and continuous improvement of information security, it is practically significant to address the challenge to the network security of the smart grid. Based on the analysis of the technical characteristics and security of smart grid, and taking a grid enterprise smart grid as an example, we propose the design scheme and implementation plan of smart grid SOC platform. Experimental results show that the platform we designed can meet the performance requirements, it also meets the requirements of real-time storage of behavioral data and provides support for interactive analysis and batch analysis.

In this century, the demand for energy is increasing daily, and the need for energy resources has become urgent and inevitable. New ways of generating energy, such as renewable resources that depend on many sources, including the sun and wind energy will contribute to the future of humankind largely and effectively. These renewable sources are facing major challenges that cannot be ignored which also require more researches on appropriate solutions . This has led to the emergence of a new type of network user called prosumer, which causes new challenges such as the intermittent nature of renewable. Smart grids have emerged as a solution to integrate these distributed energy sources. It also provides a mechanism to maintain safety and security for power supply networks. The main idea of smart grids is to facilitate local production and consumption By customers and consumers.Distributed ledger technology (DLT) or Block-chain technology has evolved dramatically since 2008 that coincided with the birth of its first application Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency. This innovation led to sparked in the digital revolution, which provides decentralization, security, and democratization of information storage and transfer systems across numerous sectors/industries. Block-chain can be applied for the sake of the durability and safety of energy systems. In this paper, we will propose a new distributed framework that provides protection based on block-chain technology for energy systems to enhance self-defense capability against those cyber-attacks.

In this paper, our aim is to detect illegal spectrum access behaviors. Firstly, we detect whether the channel is busy, and then if it is busy, recognizing whether there are illegal users. To get closer to the actual situation, we consider a more general scenario where multiple users are authorized to work on the same channel under certain interference control strategies, and build it as a ternary hypothesis test model using the generalized multi-hypothesis Neyman-Pearson criterion. Considering the various potential combination of multiple authorized users, the spectrum detection process utilizes a two-step detector. We adopt the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) and the Rao test to detect illegal spectrum access behaviors. What is more, the Wald test is proposed which has a compromise between computational complexity and performance. The relevant formulas of the three detection schemes are derived. Finally, comprehensive and in-depth simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed detection scheme that it has the best detection performance under different authorized sample numbers and different performance constraints. Besides, we illustrate the probability of detection of illegal behaviors under different parameters of illegal behaviors and different sets of AUs' states under the Wald test.

This paper studies the security issue of a gossip-based distributed projected gradient (DPG) algorithm, when it is applied for solving a decentralized multi-agent optimization. It is known that the gossip-based DPG algorithm is vulnerable to insider attacks because each agent locally estimates its (sub)gradient without any supervision. This work leverages the convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform the detection and localization of the insider attackers. Compared to the previous work, CNN can learn appropriate decision functions from the original state information without preprocessing through artificially designed rules, thereby alleviating the dependence on complex pre-designed models. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CNN-based approach can effectively improve the performance of detecting and localizing malicious agents, as compared with the conventional pre-designed score-based model.

This project addresses a classic employment law question in Canada and elsewhere using machine learning approach: how do we know whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor? This is a central issue for self-represented litigants insofar as these two legal categories entail very different rights and employment protections. In this interdisciplinary research study, we collaborated with the Conflict Analytics Lab to develop machine learning models aimed at determining whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. We present a number of supervised learning models including a neural network model that we implemented using data labeled by law researchers and compared the accuracy of the models. Our neural network model achieved an accuracy rate of 91.5%. A critical discussion follows to identify the key features in the data that influence the accuracy of our models and provide insights about the case outcomes.

Engineering drawings such as Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams contain a vast amount of text data which is essential to identify shapes, pipeline activities, tags, amongst others. These diagrams are often stored in undigitised format, such as paper copy, meaning the information contained within the diagrams is not readily accessible to inspect and use for further data analytics. In this paper, we make use of the benefits of recent deep learning advances by selecting models for both text detection and text recognition, and apply them to the digitisation of text from within real world complex engineering diagrams. Results show that 90% of text strings were detected including vertical text strings, however certain non text diagram elements were detected as text. Text strings were obtained by the text recognition method for 86% of detected text instances. The findings show that whilst the chosen Deep Learning methods were able to detect and recognise text which occurred in simple scenarios, more complex representations of text including those text strings located in close proximity to other drawing elements were highlighted as a remaining challenge.

Neural Network Physical Unclonable Function (NN-PUF) has been proposed for the secure implementation of Edge AI. This study evaluates the tamper resistance of NN-PUF against machine learning attacks. The machine learning attack in this study learns CPRs using deep learning. As a result of the evaluation experiment, the machine learning attack predicted about 82% for CRPs. Therefore, this study revealed that NN-PUF is vulnerable to machine learning attacks.