Biblio

Testing which is an indispensable part of software engineering is itself an art and science which emerged as a discipline over a period. On testing, if defects are found, testers diminish the risk by providing the awareness of defects and solutions to deal with them before release. If testing does not find any defects, testing assure that under certain conditions the system functions correctly. To guarantee that enough testing has been done, major risk areas need to be tested. We have to identify the risks, analyse and control them. We need to categorize the risk items to decide the extent of testing to be covered. Also, Implementation of structured metrics is lagging in software testing. Efficient metrics are necessary to evaluate, manage the testing process and make testing a part of engineering discipline. This paper proposes the usage of risk based testing using FMEA technique and provides an ideal set of metrics which provides a way to ensure effective testing process.

The group key maintenance in MANET is especially risky, because repeated node movement, link breakdown and lower capacity resources. The member movement needs key refreshment to maintain privacy among members. To survive with these characteristics variety of clustering concepts used to subdivide the network. To establish considerably stable and trustable environment fuzzy based trust clustering taken into consideration with Group key management. The nodes with highest trust and energy elected as Cluster Head and it forms cluster in its range. The proposed work analyze secure multicast transmission by implementing Polynomial-based key management in Fuzzy Trust based clustered networks (FTBCA) for secure multicast transmission that protect against both internal and external attackers and measure the performance by injecting attack models.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are generally acknowledged as an extraordinary sort of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). VANETs have seen enormous development in a decade ago, giving a tremendous scope of employments in both military and in addition non-military personnel exercises. The temporary network in the vehicles can likewise build the driver's capability on the road. In this paper, an effective information dispersal approach is proposed which enhances the vehicle-to-vehicle availability as well as enhances the QoS between the source and the goal. The viability of the proposed approach is shown with regards to the noteworthy gets accomplished in the parameters in particular, end to end delay, packet drop ratio, average download delay and throughput in comparison with the existing approaches.

Malware authors are known to reuse existing code, this development process results in software evolution and a sequence of versions of a malware family containing functions that show a divergence from the initial version. This paper proposes the term evolved similarity to account for this gradual divergence of similarity across the version history of a malware family. While existing techniques are able to match functions in different versions of malware, these techniques work best when the version changes are relatively small. This paper introduces the concept of evolved similarity and presents automated Evolved Similarity Techniques (EST). EST differs from existing malware function similarity techniques by focusing on the identification of significantly modified functions in adjacent malware versions and may also be used to identify function similarity in malware samples that differ by several versions. The challenge in identifying evolved malware function pairs lies in identifying features that are relatively invariant across evolved code. The research in this paper makes use of the function call graph to establish these features and then demonstrates the use of these techniques using Zeus malware.

Research in genetic improvement (GI) conventionally focuses on the improvement of software, including the automated repair of bugs and vulnerabilities as well as the refinement of software to increase performance. Eliminating or reducing vulnerabilities using GI has improved the security of benign software, but the growing volume and complexity of malicious software necessitates better analysis techniques that may benefit from a GI-based approach. Rather than focus on the use of GI to improve individual software artifacts, we believe GI can be applied to the tools used to analyze malicious code for its behavior. First, malware analysis is critical to understanding the damage caused by an attacker, which GI-based bug repair does not currently address. Second, modern malware samples leverage complex vectors for infection that cannot currently be addressed by GI. In this paper, we discuss an application of genetic improvement to the realm of automated malware analysis through the use of variable-strength covering arrays.

Network lifetime and energy consumption of sensor nodes have an inversely proportional relationship. Thus, it is important to ensure source location privacy (SLP) routing schemes are energy-efficient. This work performs an experimental evaluation of some existing routing schemes and proposes a new angle-based routing algorithm to modify the schemes. The dynamic route creation process of the modified schemes is characterized by processes which include determination of route and banned regions and computation of control angle and lead factor parameters. Results of the analysis show that the modified schemes are effective at obfuscating the adversaries to provide strong SLP protection. Furthermore, the modified schemes consume relatively lower energy and guarantee longer network lifetime.

Most of the security algorithms proposed for the sensor networks such as secure routing, data encryption and authentication, and intrusion detection target protecting the content of the collected data from being exposed to different types of attacks. However, the context of the collected data, such as event occurrence, event time, and event location, is not addressed by these security mechanisms and can still be leaked to the adversaries. Therefore, we propose in this paper a novel and efficient unobservability scheme for source/sink location privacy for wireless multimedia sensor networks. The proposed privacy scheme is based on a cross-layer design between the application and routing layers in order to exploit the multimedia processing technique with multipath routing to hide the event occurrences and locations of important nodes without degrading the network performance. Simulation analysis shows that our proposed scheme satisfies the privacy requirements and has better performance compared to other existing techniques.

Location Privacy breach in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) cannot be controlled by encryption techniques as all the communications are signal based. Signal strength can be analyzed to reveal many routing information. Adversary takes advantage of this and tracks the incoming packet to know the direction of the packet. With the information of location of origin of packets, the Source is also exposed which is generating packets on sensing any object. Thus, the location of subject is exposed. For protecting such privacy breaches, routing schemes are used which create anonymization or diverts the adversary. In this paper, we are using `Dummy' packets that will be inserted into real traffic to confuse the adversary. The dummy packets are such inserted that they encircle the Sink or Base Station. These Dummy packets are send with a value of TTL (Time To Live) field such that they travel only a few hops. Since adversary starts backtracking from the Sink, it will be trapped in the dummy traffic. In our protocol, we are confusing adversary without introducing any delay in packet delivery. Adversary uses two common methods for knowing the source i.e. Traffic Analysis and Back-tracing. Mathematically and experimentally, our proposal is sound for both type of methods. Overhead is also balanced as packets will not live long.

The objective of the work is to provide security to the medical images by embedding medical data (EPR-Electronic Patient Record) along with the image to reduce the bandwidth during communication. Reversible watermarking and Digital Signature itself will provide high security. This application mainly used in tele-surgery (Medical Expert to Medical Expert Communication). Only the authorized medical experts can explore the patients' image because of Kerberos. The proposed work is mainly to restrict the unauthorized access to get the patients'data. So medical image authentication may be achieved without biometric recognition such as finger prints and eye stamps etc. The EPR itself contains the patients' entire history, so after the extraction process Medical expert can able to identify the patient and also the disease information. In future we can embed the EPR inside the medical image after it got encrypted to achieve more security. To increase the authentication, Medical Expert biometric information can be embedded inside the image in the future. Experiments were conducted using more than 500 (512 × 512) image archives in various modalities from the NIH (National Institute of Health) and Aycan sample digital images downloaded from the internet and tests are conducted. Almost in all images with greater than 15000 bits embedding size and got PSNR of 60.4 dB to 78.9 dB with low distortion in received image because of compression, not because of watermarking and average NPCR (Number of Pixels Change Rate) is 98.9 %.

Vehicular ad hoc network is one of most recent research areas to deploy intelligent Transport System. Due to their highly dynamic topology, energy constrained and no central point coordination, routing with minimal delay, minimal energy and maximize throughput is a big challenge. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is new paradigm to improve overall network lifetime. It incorporates dynamic changes with minimal end-end delay, and enhances network intelligence. Along with this, intelligence secure routing is also a major constraint. This paper proposes a novel approach to Energy efficient secured routing protocol for Software Defined Internet of vehicles using Restricted Boltzmann Algorithm. This algorithm is to detect hostile routes with minimum delay, minimum energy and maximum throughput compared with traditional routing protocols.

In our daily lives, the advances of new technology can be used to sustain the development of people across the globe. Particularly, e-government can be the dynamo of the development for the people. The development of technology and the rapid growth in the use of internet creates a big challenge in the administration in both the public and the private sector. E-government is a vital accomplishment, whereas the security is the main downside which occurs in each e-government process. E-government has to be secure as technology grows and the users have to follow the procedures to make their own transactions safe. This paper tackles the challenges and obstacles to enhance the security of information in e-government. Hence to achieve security data hiding techniques are found to be trustworthy. Reversible data hiding (RDH) is an emerging technique which helps in retaining the quality of the cover image. Hence it is preferred over the traditional data hiding techniques. Modification in the existing algorithm is performed for image encryption scheme and data hiding scheme in order to improve the results. To achieve this secret data is split into 20 parts and data concealing is performed on each part. The data hiding procedure includes embedding of data into least significant nibble of the cover image. The bits are further equally distributed in the cover image to obtain the key security parameters. Hence the obtained results validate that the proposed scheme is better than the existing schemes.

This paper presents a case study on the use and implementation of the Qualified Digital Signature. Problematics such as the degree of use, security and authenticity of Qualified Digital Signature and the publication and dissemination of documents signed in digital format are analyzed. In order to support the case study, a methodology was adopted that included interviews with municipalities that are part of the Intermunicipal Community of the region of Leiria and a computer application was developed that allowed to analyze the documents available in the institutional websites of the municipalities, the ones that were digitally signed. The results show that institutional websites are already providing documentation with Qualified Digital Signature and that the level of trust and authenticity regarding their use is considered to be mostly very positive.

We propose a novel visualization technique (Eagle-Eye) for intrusion detection, which visualizes a host as a commu- nity of system call traces in two-dimensional space. The goal of EagleEye is to visually cluster the system call traces. Although human eyes can easily perceive anomalies using EagleEye view, we propose two different methods called SAM and CPM that use the concept of data depth to help administrators distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviors. Our experimental results conducted on Australian Defence Force Academy Linux Dataset (ADFA-LD), which is a modern system calls dataset that includes new exploits and attacks on various programs, show EagleEye's efficiency in detecting diverse exploits and attacks.

Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing the behavior of human and financial market. Cognitive hacking leverages the influence of social media to spread deceptive information with an intent to gain abnormal profits illegally or to cause losses. Measuring the information content in financial social media can be useful for identifying these attacks. In this paper, we developed an approach to identifying social media features that correlate with abnormal returns of the stocks of companies vulnerable to be targets of cognitive hacking. To test the approach, we collected price data and 865,289 social media messages on four technology companies from July 2017 to June 2018, and extracted features that contributed to abnormal stock movements. Preliminary results show that terms that are simple, motivate actions, incite emotion, and uses exaggeration are ranked high in the features of messages associated with abnormal price movements. We also provide selected messages to illustrate the use of these features in potential cognitive hacking attacks.

Model validation, though a process that's continuous and complex, establishes confidence in the soundness and usefulness of a model. Making sure that the model behaves similar to the modes of behavior seen in real systems, allows the builder of said model to assure accumulation of confidence in the model and thus validating the model. While doing this, the model builder is also required to build confidence from a target audience in the model through communicating to the bases. The basis of the system dynamics model validation, both in general and in the field of cyber security, relies on a casual loop diagram of the system being agreed upon by a group of experts. Model validation also uses formal quantitative and informal qualitative tools in addition to the validation techniques used by system dynamics. Amongst others, the usefulness of a model, in a user's eyes, is a valid standard by which we can evaluate them. To validate our system dynamics cyber security model, we used empirical structural and behavior tests. This paper describes tests of model structure and model behavior, which includes each test's purpose, the ways the tests were conducted, and empirical validation results using a proof-of-concept cyber security model.

The new instrumentation and control (I&C) systems of the nuclear power plants (NPPs) improve the ability to operate the plant enhance the safety and performance of the NPP. However, they bring a new type of threat to the NPP's industry-cyber threat. The early fault diagnostic system (EDS) is one of the decision support systems that might be used online during the operation stage. The EDS aim is to prevent the incident/accident evolution by a timely troubleshooting process during any plant operational modes. It means that any significative deviation of plant parameters from normal values is pointed-out to plant operators well before reaching any undesired threshold potentially leading to a prohibited plant state, together with the cause that has generated the deviation. The paper lists the key benefits using the EDS to counter the cyber threat and proposes the framework for cybersecurity assessment using EDS during the operational stage.

Smart Grid cyber-security sounds to be a critical issue, because of widespread development of information technology. To achieve secure and reliable operation, the complexity of human automation interaction (HAI) necessitates more sophisticated and intelligent methodologies. In this paper, an adaptive autonomy fuzzy expert system is developed using gradient descent algorithm to determine the Level of Automation (LOA), based on the changing of Performance Shaping Factors (PSF). These PSFs indicate the effects of environmental conditions on the performance of HAI. The major advantage of this method is that the fuzzy rule or membership function can be learnt without changing the form of the fuzzy rule in conventional fuzzy control. Because of data shortage, Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) technique is applied for assessing how the results of proposed system generalizes to the new contingency situations. The expert system database is extracted from superior experts' judgments. In order to regard the importance of each PSF, weighted rules are also considered. In addition, some new environmental conditions are introduced that has not been seen before. Nine scenarios are discussed to reveal the performance of the proposed system. Results confirm that the presented fuzzy expert system can effectively calculates the proper LOA even in the new contingency situations.

Cyber-event-triggered power grid blackout compels utility operators to intensify cyber-aware and physics-constrained recovery and restoration process. Recently, coordinated cyber attacks on the Ukrainian grid witnessed such a cyber-event-triggered power system blackout. Various cyber-physical system (CPS) testbeds have attempted with multitude designs to analyze such interdependent events and evaluate remedy measures. However, resource constraints and modular integration designs have been significant barriers while modeling large-scale grid models (scalability) and multi-grid isolated models (concurrency) under a single real-time execution environment for the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) CPS security testbeds. This paper proposes a meticulous design and effective modeling for simulating large-scale grid models and multi-grid isolated models in a HIL realtime digital simulator environment integrated with industry-grade hardware and software systems. We have used our existing HIL CPS security testbed to demonstrate scalability by the realtime performance of a Texas-2000 bus US synthetic grid model and concurrency by the real-time performance of simultaneous ten IEEE-39 bus grid models and an IEEE-118 bus grid model. The experiments demonstrated significant results by 100% realtime performance with zero overruns, low latency while receiving and executing control signals from SEL Relays via IEC-61850 protocol and low latency while computing and transmitting grid data streams including stability measures via IEEE C37.118 synchrophasor data protocol to SEL Phasor Data Concentrators.

Matrix factorization (MF) has been proved to be an effective approach to build a successful recommender system. However, most current MF-based recommenders cannot obtain high prediction accuracy due to the sparseness of user-item matrix. Moreover, these methods suffer from the scalability issues when applying on large-scale real-world tasks. To tackle these issues, in this paper a social regularization method called TrustRSNMF is proposed that incorporates the social trust information of users in nonnegative matrix factorization framework. The proposed method integrates trust statements along with user-item ratings as an additional information source into the recommendation model to deal with the data sparsity and cold-start issues. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a number of experiments are performed on two real-world datasets. The obtained results demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

Nowadays, trust and reputation models are used to build a wide range of trust-based security mechanisms and trust-based service management applications on the Internet of Things (IoT). Considering trust as a single unit can result in missing important and significant factors. We split trust into its building-blocks, then we sort and assign weight to these building-blocks (trust metrics) on the basis of its priorities for the transaction context of a particular goal. To perform these processes, we consider trust as a multi-criteria decision-making problem, where a set of trust worthiness metrics represent the decision criteria. We introduce Entropy-based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (EFAHP) as a trust model for selecting a trustworthy service provider, since the sense of decision making regarding multi-metrics trust is structural. EFAHP gives 1) fuzziness, which fits the vagueness, uncertainty, and subjectivity of trust attributes; 2) AHP, which is a systematic way for making decisions in complex multi-criteria decision making; and 3) entropy concept, which is utilized to calculate the aggregate weights for each service provider. We present a numerical illustration in trust-based Service Oriented Architecture in the IoT (SOA-IoT) to demonstrate the service provider selection using the EFAHP Model in assessing and aggregating the trust scores.

Recent advances in machine learning enable wider applications of prediction models in cyber-physical systems. Smart grids are increasingly using distributed sensor settings for distributed sensor fusion and information processing. Load forecasting systems use these sensors to predict future loads to incorporate into dynamic pricing of power and grid maintenance. However, these inference predictors are highly complex and thus vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Moreover, the adversarial attacks are synthetic norm-bounded modifications to a limited number of sensors that can greatly affect the accuracy of the overall predictor. It can be much cheaper and effective to incorporate elements of security and resilience at the earliest stages of design. In this paper, we demonstrate how to analyze the security and resilience of learning-based prediction models in power distribution networks by utilizing a domain-specific deep-learning and testing framework. This framework is developed using DeepForge and enables rapid design and analysis of attack scenarios against distributed smart meters in a power distribution network. It runs the attack simulations in the cloud backend. In addition to the predictor model, we have integrated an anomaly detector to detect adversarial attacks targeting the predictor. We formulate the stealthy adversarial attacks as an optimization problem to maximize prediction loss while minimizing the required perturbations. Under the worst-case setting, where the attacker has full knowledge of both the predictor and the detector, an iterative attack method has been developed to solve for the adversarial perturbation. We demonstrate the framework capabilities using a GridLAB-D based power distribution network model and show how stealthy adversarial attacks can affect smart grid prediction systems even with a partial control of network.

The mass integration and deployment of intelligent technologies within critical commercial, industrial and public environments have a significant impact on business operations and society as a whole. Though integration of these critical intelligent technologies pose serious embedded security challenges for technology manufacturers which are required to be systematically approached, in-line with international security regulations.This paper establish security foundation for such intelligent technologies by deriving embedded security requirements to realise the core security functions laid out by international security authorities, and proposing microarchitectural characteristics to establish cyber resilience in embedded systems. To bridge the research gap between embedded and operational security domains, a detailed review of existing embedded security methods, microarchitectures and design practises is presented. The existing embedded security methods have been found ad-hoc, passive and strongly rely on building and maintaining trust. To the best of our knowledge to date, no existing embedded security microarchitecture or defence mechanism provides continuity of data stream or security once trust has broken. This functionality is critical for embedded technologies deployed in critical infrastructure to enhance and maintain security, and to gain evidence of the security breach to effectively evaluate, improve and deploy active response and mitigation strategies. To this end, the paper proposes three microarchitectural characteristics that shall be designed and integrated into embedded architectures to establish, maintain and improve cyber resilience in embedded systems for next-generation critical infrastructure.

To increase security and to offer user experiences according to the requirements of a hyper-connected world, modern vehicles are integrating complex electronic systems, being transformed into systems of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). While a great diversity of heterogeneous hardware and software components must work together and control in real-time crucial functionalities, cybersecurity for the automotive sector is still in its infancy. This paper provides an analysis of the most common vulnerabilities and risks of connected vehicles, using a real example based on industrial and market-ready technologies. Several components have been implemented to inject and simulate multiple attacks, which enable security services and mitigation actions to be developed and validated.

With the development of IoT, smart health has significantly improved the quality of people's life. A large amount of smart health monitoring system has been proposed, which provides an opportunity for timely and efficient diagnosis. Nevertheless, most of them ignored the impact of environment on patients' health. Due to the openness of the communication channel, data security and privacy preservation are crucial problems to be solved. In this work, an environment aware privacy-preserving authentication protocol based on the fuzzy extractor and elliptic curve cryptography (ecc) is designed for health monitoring system with mutual authentication and anonymity. Edge computing unit can authenticate all environmental sensors at one time. Fuzzy synthetic evaluation model is utilized to evaluate the environment equality with the patients' temporal health index (THI) as an assessment factor, which can help to predict the appropriate environment. The session key is established for secure communication based on the predicted result. Through security analysis, the proposed protocol can prevent common attacks. Moreover, performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol is applicable for resource-limited smart devices in edge computing health monitoring system.

Benchmarking is an important measure for companies to investigate their performance and to increase efficiency. As companies usually are reluctant to provide their key performance indicators (KPIs) for public benchmarks, privacy-preserving benchmarking systems are required. In this paper, we present an enhanced privacy-preserving benchmarking protocol, which we implemented and evaluated based on the real-world scenario of product cost optimisation. It is based on homomorphic encryption and enables cloud-based KPI comparison, providing a variety of statistical measures. The theoretical and empirical evaluation of our benchmarking system underlines its practicability.