Biblio

Smart Grid (SG) is regarded as complex electrical power system due to massive penetration of Renewable Energy Resources and Distribution Generations. The implementation of adjustable speed drives, advance power electronic devices, and electric arc furnaces are incorporated in SG (the transition from conventional power system). Moreover, SG is an advance, automated, controlled, efficient, digital, and intelligent system that ensures pertinent benefits, such as: (a) consumer empowerment, (b) advanced communication infrastructure, (c) user-friendly system, and (d) supports bi-directional power flow. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is key tool for SG deployment and provides key solutions to a vast array of complex SG challenges. This research provides a comprehensive study on DSP interactions within SG. The prominent challenges posed by conventional grid, such as: (a) monitoring and control, (b) Electric Vehicles infrastructure, (c) cyber data injection attack, (d) Demand Response management and (e) cyber data injection attack are thoroughly investigated in this research.

Energy Distribution Grids are considered critical infrastructure, hence the Distribution System Operators (DSOs) have developed sophisticated engineering practices to improve their resilience. Over the last years, due to the "Smart Grid" evolution, this infrastructure has become a distributed system where prosumers (the consumers who produce and share surplus energy through the grid) can plug in distributed energy resources (DERs) and manage a bi-directional flow of data and power enabled by an advanced IT and control infrastructure. This introduces new challenges, as the prosumers possess neither the skills nor the knowledge to assess the risk or secure the environment from cyber-threats. We propose a simple and usable approach based on the Reference Model of Information Assurance & Security (RMIAS), to support the prosumers in the selection of cybesecurity measures. The purpose is to reduce the risk of being directly targeted and to establish collective responsibility among prosumers as grid gatekeepers. The framework moves from a simple risk analysis based on security goals to providing guidelines for the users for adoption of adequate security countermeasures. One of the greatest advantages of the approach is that it does not constrain the user to a specific threat model.

A noble multi-factor authentication (MFA) algorithm is developed for the security enhancement of the Cryptocurrency (CR). The main goal of MFA is to set up extra layer of safeguard while seeking access to a targets such as physical location, computing device, network or database. MFA security scheme requires more than one method for the validation from commutative family of credentials to verify the user for a transaction. MFA can reduce the risk of using single level password authentication by introducing additional factors of authentication. MFA can prevent hackers from gaining access to a particular account even if the password is compromised. The superfluous layer of security introduced by MFA offers additional security to a user. MFA is implemented by using time-based onetime password (TOTP) technique. For logging to any entity with MFA enabled, the user first needs username and password, as a second factor, the user then needs the MFA token to virtually generate a TOTP. It is found that MFA can provide a better means of secured transaction of CR.

In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure physically unclonable function based multi-factor authenticated key exchange (PUF-MAKE). In a PUF-MAKE setting, we suppose two participants; a user and a server. The user keeps multi-factor authenticators and securely holds a PUF-embedded device while the server maintains PUF outputs for authentication. We first study on how to efficiently construct a PUF-MAKE protocol. The main difficulty comes from that it should establish a common key from both multi-factor authenticators and a PUF-embedded device. Our construction is the first secure PUF-MAKE protocol that just needs three communication flows.

Steganography means hiding secrete message in cover object in a way that no suspicious from the attackers, the most popular steganography schemes is image steganography. A very common questions that asked in the field are: 1- what is the embedding scheme used?, 2- where is (location) the secrete messages are embedded?, and 3- how the sender will tell the receiver about the locations of the secrete message?. Here in this paper we are deal with and aimed to answer questions number 2 and 3. We used the popular scheme in image steganography which is least significant bits for embedding in edges positions in color images. After we separate the color images into its components Red, Green, and Blue, then we used one of the components as an index to find the edges, while other one or two components used for embedding purpose. Using this technique we will guarantee the same number and positions of edges before and after embedding scheme, therefore we are guaranteed extracting the secrete message as it's without any loss of secrete messages bits.

Network steganography is a branch of steganography that hides information through packet header manipulation and uses protocols as carriers to hide secret information. Many techniques were already developed using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) headers. Among the schemes in hiding information in the TCP header, the Initial Sequence Number (ISN) field is the most difficult to be detected since this field can have arbitrary values within the requirements of the standard. In this paper, a more undetectable scheme is proposed by increasing the complexity of hiding data in the TCP ISN using dynamic identifiers. The experimental results have shown that using Bayes Net, the proposed scheme outperforms the existing scheme with a low detection accuracy of 0.52%.

We propose an efficient and secure two-server password-only remote user authentication protocol for consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones and laptops. Our protocol works on-top of any existing trust model, like Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL). The proposed protocol is secure against dictionary and impersonation attacks.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm which provides the flexibility of programming the network interface as per the need and demand of the user. Software Defined Network (SDN) is independent of vendor specific hardware or protocols and offers the easy extensions in the networking. A customized network as per on user demand facilitates communication control via a single entity i.e. SDN controller. Due to this SDN Controller has become more vulnerable to SDN security attacks and more specifically a single point of failure. It is worth noticing that vulnerabilities were identified because of customized applications which are semi-independent of underlying network infrastructure. No doubt, SDN has provided numerous benefits like breaking vendor lock-ins, reducing overhead cost, easy innovations, increasing programmability among devices, introducing new features and so on. But security of SDN cannot be neglected and it has become a major topic of debate. The communication channel used in SDN is OpenFlow which has made TLS implementation an optional approach in SDN. TLS adoption is important and still vulnerable. This paper focuses on making SDN OpenFlow communication more secure by following extended TLS support and defensive algorithm.

In the last few years, the usage and dependency on web applications and websites has significantly increased across a number of different areas such as online banking, shopping, financial transactions etc. amongst the several other areas. This has even directly multiplied the threat of SQL injection issue. A number of past studies have suggested that SQL injection should be handled as effectively as possible in order to avoid long term threats and dangers. This paper in specific attempts to discuss and evaluate some of the main SQL injection prevention methods.

Typically, in an assessment project for a web application or database with a large scale and scope, tasks required to be performed by a security analyst are such as SQL injection and penetration testing. To carry out these large-scale tasks, the analyst will have to perform 100 or more SQLi penetration tests on one or more target. This makes the process much more complex and much harder to implement. This paper attempts to compare large-scale SQL injections performed with Manual Methods, which is the benchmark, and the proposed SQLiAutoScript Method. The SQLiAutoScript method uses sqlmap as a tool, in combination with sqlmap scripting and logging features, to facilitate a more effective and manageable approach within a large scale of hundreds or thousands of SQL injection penetration tests. Comparison of the test results for both Manual and SQLiAutoScript approaches and their benefits is included in the comparative analysis. The tests were performed over a scope of 24 SQL injection (SQLi) tests that comprises over 100,000 HTTP requests and injections, and within a total testing run-time period of about 50 hours. The scope of testing also covers both SQLiAutoScript and Manual methods. In the SQLiAutoScript method, each SQL injection test has its own sub-folder and files for data such as results (output), progress (traffic logs) and logging. In this way across all SQLi tests, the results, data and details related to SQLi tests are logged, available, traceable, accurate and not missed out. Available and traceable data also facilitates traceability of failed SQLi tests, and higher recovery and reruns of failed SQLi tests to maximize increased attack surface upon the target.

Recent Development in Hardware and Software Technology for the communication email is preferred. But due to the unbidden emails, it affects communication. There is a need for detection and classification of spam email. In this present research email spam detection and classification, models are built. We have used different Machine learning classifiers like Naive Bayes, SVM, KNN, Bagging and Boosting (Adaboost), and Ensemble Classifiers with a voting mechanism. Evaluation and testing of classifiers is performed on email spam dataset from UCI Machine learning repository and Kaggle website. Different accuracy measures like Accuracy Score, F measure, Recall, Precision, Support and ROC are used. The preliminary result shows that Ensemble Classifier with a voting mechanism is the best to be used. It gives the minimum false positive rate and high accuracy.

Emails are the fundamental unit of web applications. There is an exponential growth in sending and receiving emails online. However, spam mail has turned into an intense issue in email correspondence condition. There are number of substance based channel systems accessible to be specific content based filter(CBF), picture based sifting and many other systems to channel spam messages. The existing technological solution consists of a combination of porter stemer algorithm(PSA) and k means clustering which is adaptive in nature. These procedures are more expensive in regard of the calculation and system assets as they required the examination of entire spam message and calculation of the entire substance of the server. These are the channels must additionally not powerful in nature life on the grounds that the idea of spam block mail and spamming changes much of the time. We propose a starting point based spam mail-sifting system benefit, which works considering top head notcher data of the mail message paying little respect to the body substance of the mail. It streamlines the system and server execution by increasing the precision, recall and accuracy than the existing methods. To design an effective and efficient of autonomous and efficient spam detection system to improve network performance from unknown privileged user attacks.

The early discovery of security bugs in JavaScript (JS) engines is crucial for protecting Internet users from adversaries abusing zero-day vulnerabilities. Browser vendors, bug bounty hunters, and security researchers have been eager to find such security bugs by leveraging state-of-the-art fuzzers as well as their domain expertise. They report a bug when observing a crash after executing their JS test since a crash is an early indicator of a potential bug. However, it is difficult to identify whether such a crash indeed invokes security bugs in JS engines. Thus, unskilled bug reporters are unable to assess the security severity of their new bugs with JS engine crashes. Today, this classification of a reported security bug is completely manual, depending on the verdicts from JS engine vendors. We investigated the feasibility of applying various machine learning classifiers to determine whether an observed crash triggers a security bug. We designed and implemented CRScope, which classifies security and non-security bugs from given crash-dump files. Our experimental results on 766 crash instances demonstrate that CRScope achieved 0.85, 0.89, and 0.93 Area Under Curve (AUC) for Chakra, V8, and SpiderMonkey crashes, respectively. CRScope also achieved 0.84, 0.89, and 0.95 precision for Chakra, V8, and SpiderMonkey crashes, respectively. This outperforms the previous study and existing tools including Exploitable and AddressSanitizer. CRScope is capable of learning domain-specific expertise from the past verdicts on reported bugs and automatically classifying JS engine security bugs, which helps improve the scalable classification of security bugs.

Collaboration between humans and machines does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.

In recent years, cyber attack techniques are increasingly sophisticated, and blocking the attack is more and more difficult, even if a kind of counter measure or another is taken. In order for a successful handling of this situation, it is crucial to have a prediction of cyber attacks, appropriate precautions, and effective utilization of cyber intelligence that enables these actions. Malicious hackers share various kinds of information through particular communities such as the dark web, indicating that a great deal of intelligence exists in cyberspace. This paper focuses on forums on the dark web and proposes an approach to extract forums which include important information or intelligence from huge amounts of forums and identify traits of each forum using methodologies such as machine learning, natural language processing and so on. This approach will allow us to grasp the emerging threats in cyberspace and take appropriate measures against malicious activities.

Aiming at the composite uncertainty characteristics and high-dimensional data stream characteristics of the evaluation index with both ambiguity and randomness, this paper proposes a emergency severity assessment method for cluster supply chain based on cloud fuzzy clustering algorithm. The summary cloud model generation algorithm is created. And the multi-data fusion method is applied to the cloud model processing of the evaluation indexes for high-dimensional data stream with ambiguity and randomness. The synopsis data of the emergency severity assessment indexes are extracted. Based on time attenuation model and sliding window model, the data stream fuzzy clustering algorithm for emergency severity assessment is established. The evaluation results are rationally optimized according to the generalized Euclidean distances of the cluster centers and cluster microcluster weights, and the severity grade of cluster supply chain emergency is dynamically evaluated. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the clustering accuracy and reduces the operation time, as well as can provide more accurate theoretical support for the early warning decision of cluster supply chain emergency.

The data collected by IoT devices is of great value, which makes people urgently need a secure device key management strategy to protect their data. Existing works introduce the blockchain technology to transfer the responsibility of key management from the trusted center in the traditional key management strategy to the devices, thus eliminating the trust crisis caused by excessive dependence on third parties. However, the lightweight implementation of IoT devices limits the ability to resist side channel attacks, causing the private key to be exposed and subject to masquerading attacks. Accordingly, we strengthen the original blockchain based key management scheme to defend against key exposure attack. On the one hand, we introduce two hash functions to bind transactions in the blockchain to legitimate users. On the other hand, we design a secure key exchange protocol for identifying and exchanging access keys between legitimate users. Security analysis and performance show that the proposed scheme improves the robustness of the network with small storage and communication overhead increments.

A hierarchical key management scheme for mobile agents in e-medicine system enables users, such as patients, doctors, nurses and health visitors, to conveniently and securely access a remote hierarchical medical database system via public networks. Efficient hierarchical key management schemes do not require heavy computations even if the hierarchical structure has too many levels and participants. Chen et al. recently developed a hierarchical key management scheme with date-constraint for mobile agents. The key management scheme of Chen et al. is based the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem and allows each secret key to be partnered with a validity period by using one-way hash chains. However, the scheme of Chen et al. fails to execute correctly, violates authenticated key security, and requires hundreds of hash functional operations. This investigation discusses these limitations, and proposes an efficient date-constraint hierarchical key management scheme for mobile agents in e-medicine system, which provides a fast key validation and expiration check phase to rapidly check whether the secret keys are valid and time-expired or not. The proposed key management scheme not only provides more security properties and rapidly checks the validation of secret keys, but also reduces the computational cost..

While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency transfer, any successful attacks can lead to money loss or even financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on the overflow attacks in Ethereum, mainly because they widely rooted in many smart contracts and comparatively easy to exploit. We have developed EasyFlow, an overflow detector at Ethereum Virtual Machine level. The key insight behind EasyFlow is a taint analysis based tracking technique to analyze the propagation of involved taints. Specifically, EasyFlow can not only divide smart contracts into safe contracts, manifested overflows, well-protected overflows and potential overflows, but also automatically generate transactions to trigger potential overflows. In our preliminary evaluation, EasyFlow managed to find potentially vulnerable Ethereum contracts with little runtime overhead. A demo video of EasyFlow is at https://youtu.be/QbUJkQI0L6o.

Most of the swarm optimization techniques are inspired by the characteristics as well as behaviour of flock of birds whereas Artificial Bee Colony is based on the foraging characteristics of the bees. However, certain problems which are solved by ABC do not yield desired results in-terms of performance. ABC is a new devised swarm intelligence algorithm and predominately employed for optimization of numerical problems. The main reason for the success of ABC algorithm is that it consists of feature such as fathomable and flexibility when compared to other swarm optimization algorithms and there are many possible applications of ABC. Cloud computing has their limitation in their application and functionality. The cloud computing environment experiences several security issues such as Dos attack, replay attack, flooding attack. In this paper, an effective classifier is proposed based on Artificial Bee Colony for cloud computing. It is evident in the evaluation results that the proposed classifier achieved a higher accuracy rate.

Reproducible experimental work is a vital part of the scientific method. It is a concern that is often, however, overlooked in modern computational intelligence research. Scientific research within the areas of programming language theory and mathematics have made advances that are directly applicable to the research areas of evolutionary and swarm intelligence. Through the use of functional programming and the established abstractions that functional programming provides, it is possible to define the elements of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms as compositional computations. These compositional blocks then compose together to allow the declarations of an algorithm, whilst considering the declaration as a "sub-program". These sub-programs may then be executed at a later time and provide the blueprints of the computation. Storing experimental results within a robust data-set file format, which is widely supported by analysis tools, provides additional flexibility and allows different analysis tools to access datasets in the same efficient manner. This paper presents an open-source software library for evolutionary and swarm-intelligence algorithms which allows the type-safe, compositional, monadic and functional declaration of algorithms while tracking and managing effects (e.g. usage of a random number generator) that directly influences the execution of an algorithm.

The integrity of information and services is one of the more evident concerns in the world of global information security, due to the fact that it has economic repercussions on the digital industry. For this reason, big companies spend a lot of money on systems that protect them against cyber-attacks like Denial of Service attacks. In this article, we will use all the attributes of the data-set NSL-KDD to train and test a Support Vector Machine model. This model will then be applied to a method of feature selection to obtain the most relevant attributes within the aforementioned data-set and train the model again. The main goal is comparing the results obtained in both instances of training and validate which was more efficient.

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) is a growing paradigm in the Machine Learning (ML) landscape. More and more ML models are being uploaded to the cloud and made accessible from all over the world. Creating good ML models, however, can be expensive and the used data is often sensitive. Recently, Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) protocols for MLaaS have been proposed, which protect sensitive user data and ML models at the expense of substantially higher computation and communication than plaintext evaluation. In this paper, we show that for a subset of ML models used in MLaaS, namely Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Support Vector Regression Machines (SVRs) which have found many applications to classifying multimedia data such as texts and images, it is possible for adversaries to passively extract the private models even if they are protected by SMPC, using known and newly devised model extraction attacks. We show that our attacks are not only theoretically possible but also practically feasible and cheap, which makes them lucrative to financially motivated attackers such as competitors or customers. We perform model extraction attacks on the homomorphic encryption-based protocol for privacy-preserving SVR-based indoor localization by Zhang et al. (International Workshop on Security 2016). We show that it is possible to extract a highly accurate model using only 854 queries with the estimated cost of \$0.09 on the Amazon ML platform, and our attack would take only 7 minutes over the Internet. Also, we perform our model extraction attacks on SVM and SVR models trained on publicly available state-of-the-art ML datasets.

Implementations of ARX ciphers are hoped to have some intrinsic side channel resilience owing to the specific choice of cipher components: modular addition (A), rotation (R) and exclusive-or (X). Previous work has contributed to this understanding by developing theory regarding the side channel resilience of components (pioneered by the early works of Prouff) as well as some more recent practical investigations by Biryukov et al. that focused on lightweight cipher constructions. We add to this work by specifically studying ARX-boxes both mathematically as well as practically. Our results show that previous works' reliance on the simplistic assumption that intermediates independently leak (their Hamming weight) has led to the incorrect conclusion that the modular addition is necessarily the best target and that ARX constructions are therefore harder to attack in practice: we show that on an ARM M0, the best practical target is the exclusive or and attacks succeed with only tens of traces.

End-user programmable intelligent agents that can learn new tasks and concepts from users' explicit instructions are desired. This paper presents our progress on expanding the capabilities of such agents in the areas of task applicability, task generalizability, user intent disambiguation and support for IoT devices through our multi-modal approach of combining programming by demonstration (PBD) with learning from natural language instructions. Our future directions include facilitating better script reuse and sharing, and supporting greater user expressiveness in instructions.