Biblio

Tunnel approach to the security and privacy aspects of communication networks has been an issue since the inception of networking technologies. Neither the technology nor the regulatory and legal frame works proactively play a significant role towards addressing the ever escalating security challenges. As we have move to ubiquitous computing paradigm where information secrecy and privacy is coupled with new challenges of human to machine and machine to machine interfaces, a transformational model for security should be visited. This research is attempted to highlight the peripheral view of IoT based miniature device security paradigm with focus on standardization, regulations, user adaptation, software and applications, low computing resources and power consumption, human to machine interface and privacy.

Existing consumer devices represent the most pervasive computational platform available, but their inherently decentralized nature poses significant challenges for distributed computing adoption. In particular, device owners must willingly cooperate in collective deployments even while others may intentionally work to maliciously disrupt that cooperation. Public, cooperative systems benefit from low barriers to entry improving scalability and adoption, but simultaneously increase risk exposure to adversarial threats via promiscuous participant adoption. In this work, I aim to facilitate widespread adoption of cooperative systems by discussing the unique security and operational challenges of these systems, and highlighting several novel approaches that mitigate these disadvantages.

The Edward Snowden data breach of 2013 clearly illustrates the damage that insiders can do to an organization. An insider's knowledge of an organization allows them legitimate access to the systems where valuable information is stored. Because they belong within an organizations security perimeter, an insider is inherently difficult to detect and prevent information leakage. To counter this, proactive measures must be deployed to limit the ability of an insider to steal information. Email monitoring at the edge is can easily be monitored for large file exaltation. However, USB drives are ideally suited for large-scale file extraction in a covert manner. This work discusses a process for disabling write-access to USB drives while allowing read-access. Allowing read-access for USB drives allows an organization to adapt to the changing security posture of the organization. People can still bring USB devices into the organization and read data from them, but exfiltration is more difficult.

The contemporary IC supply chain depends heavily on third-party intellectual property (3PIP) that is integrated to in-house designs. As the correctness of such 3PIPs should be verified before integration, one important challenge for 3PIP vendors is proving the functionality of their designs while protecting the privacy of circuit implementations. In this work, we present Pythia that employs zero-knowledge proofs to enable vendors convince integrators about the functionality of a circuit without disclosing its netlist. Pythia automatically encodes netlists into zero knowledge-friendly format, evaluates them on different inputs, and proves correctness of outputs. We evaluate Pythia using the ISCAS'85 benchmark suite.

Similar to other digital assets, deep neural network (DNN) models could suffer from piracy threat initiated by insider and/or outsider adversaries due to their inherent commercial value. DNN watermarking is a promising technique to mitigate this threat to intellectual property. This work focuses on black-box DNN watermarking, with which an owner can only verify his ownership by issuing special trigger queries to a remote suspicious model. However, informed attackers, who are aware of the watermark and somehow obtain the triggers, could forge fake triggers to claim their ownerships since the poor robustness of triggers and the lack of correlation between the model and the owner identity. This consideration calls for new watermarking methods that can achieve better trade-off for addressing the discrepancy. In this paper, we exploit frequency domain image watermarking to generate triggers and build our DNN watermarking algorithm accordingly. Since watermarking in the frequency domain is high concealment and robust to signal processing operation, the proposed algorithm is superior to existing schemes in resisting fraudulent claim attack. Besides, extensive experimental results on 3 datasets and 8 neural networks demonstrate that the proposed DNN watermarking algorithm achieves similar performance on functionality metrics and better performance on security metrics when compared with existing algorithms.

Fog computing is a new distributed computing paradigm that extends the cloud to the network edge. Fog computing aims at improving quality of service, data access, networking, computation and storage. However, the security and privacy issues persist, even if many cloud solutions were proposed. Indeed, Fog computing introduces new challenges in terms of security and privacy, due to its specific features such as mobility, geo-distribution and heterogeneity etc. Blockchain is an emergent concept bringing efficiency in many fields. In this paper, we propose a new access control scheme based on blockchain technology for the fog computing with fault tolerance in the context of the Internet of Things. Blockchain is used to provide secure management authentication and access process to IoT devices. Each network entity authenticates in the blockchain via the wallet, which allows a secure communication in decentralized environment, hence it achieves the security objectives. In addition, we propose to establish a secure connection between the users and the IoT devices, if their attributes satisfy the policy stored in the blockchain by smart contract. We also address the blockchain transparency problem by the encryption of the users attributes both in the policy and in the request. An authorization token is generated if the encrypted attributes are identical. Moreover, our proposition offers higher scalability, availability and fault tolerance in Fog nodes due to the implementation of load balancing through the Min-Min algorithm.

Recently, deep neural network technology has been developed and used in various fields. The image recognition model can be used for automatic safety checks at the electric factory. However, as the deep neural network develops, the importance of security increases. A poisoning attack is one of security problems. It is an attack that breaks down by entering malicious data into the training data set of the model. This paper generates adversarial data that modulates feature values to different targets by manipulating less RGB values. Then, poisoning attacks in one of the image recognition models, the show and tell model. Then use autoencoder to defend adversarial data.

With the development of globalization, more and more enterprises are involved in the supply chain network with increasingly complex structure. In this paper, enterprises and relations in the logistics network are abstracted as nodes and edges of the complex network. A graph model for a supply chain network to specified industry is constructed, and the Neo4j graph database is employed to store the graph data. This paper uses the theoretical research tool of complex network to model and analyze the supply chain, and designs a supply chain network evaluation system which include static and dynamic measurement indexes according to the statistical characteristics of complex network. In this paper both the static and dynamic resilience characteristics of the the constructed supply chain network are evaluated from the perspective of complex network. The numeric experimental simulations are conducted for validation. This research has practical and theoretical significance for enterprises to make strategies to improve the anti-risk capability of supply chain network based on logistics network information.

In this paper, the privacy preserving average consensus problem of multi-agent systems with strongly connected and weight balanced graph is considered. In most existing consensus algorithms, the agents need to exchange their state information, which leads to the disclosure of their initial states. This might be undesirable because agents' initial states may contain some important and sensitive information. To solve the problem, we propose a novel distributed algorithm, which can guarantee average consensus and meanwhile preserve the agents' privacy. This algorithm assigns some additive perturbation signals on the communication edges and these perturbations signals will be added to original true states for information exchanging. This ensures that direct disclosure of initial states can be avoided. Then a rigid analysis of our algorithm's privacy preserving performance is provided. For any individual agent in the network, we present a necessary and sufficient condition under which its privacy is preserved. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated by a numerical simulation.

In decision-making problems, the actions of an agent may reveal sensitive information that drives its decisions. For instance, a corporation's investment decisions may reveal its sensitive knowledge about market dynamics. To prevent this type of information leakage, we introduce a policy synthesis algorithm that protects the privacy of the transition probabilities in a Markov decision process. We use differential privacy as the mathematical definition of privacy. The algorithm first perturbs the transition probabilities using a mechanism that provides differential privacy. Then, based on the privatized transition probabilities, we synthesize a policy using dynamic programming. Our main contribution is to bound the "cost of privacy," i.e., the difference between the expected total rewards with privacy and the expected total rewards without privacy. We also show that computing the cost of privacy has time complexity that is polynomial in the parameters of the problem. Moreover, we establish that the cost of privacy increases with the strength of differential privacy protections, and we quantify this increase. Finally, numerical experiments on two example environments validate the established relationship between the cost of privacy and the strength of data privacy protections.

The privacy issue in data publication is critical and has been extensively studied. However, most of the existing works assume the data to be published is independent, i.e., the correlation among data is neglected. The correlation is unavoidable in data publication, which universally manifests intrinsic correlations owing to social, behavioral, and genetic relationships. In this paper, we investigate the privacy concern of data publication where deterministic and probabilistic correlations are considered, respectively. Specifically, (ε,δ)-multi-dimensional data-privacy (MDDP) is proposed to quantify the correlated data privacy. It characterizes the disclosure probability of the published data being jointly estimated with the correlation under a given accuracy. Then, we explore the effects of deterministic correlations on privacy disclosure. For deterministic correlations, it is shown that the successful disclosure rate with correlations increases compared to the one without knowing the correlation. Meanwhile, a closed-form solution of the optimal disclosure probability and the strict bound of privacy disclosure gain are derived. Extensive simulations on a real dataset verify our analytical results.

Intelligenta transportation is an important part of urban development. The core of realizing intelligent transportation is to master the urban road condition. This system processes the video of dashcam based on the Panoptic Segmentation network and adds a tracking module based on the comparison of front and rear frames and KM algorithm. The system mainly includes the following parts: embedded device, Panoptic Feature Pyramid Network, cloud server and Web site.

The paper proposes a formal approach for parsing grammatical derivations in the context of the principle of semantic compositionality by defining a mapping between Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG) and Multi Entity Bayesian Network (MEBN) theory, which is a first-order logic for modelling probabilistic knowledge bases. The principle of semantic compositionality states that meaning of compound expressions is dependent on meanings of constituent expressions forming the compound expression. Typical pattern analysis applications focus on syntactic patterns ignoring semantic patterns governing the domain in which pattern analysis is attempted. The paper introduces the concepts and terminologies of the mapping between PCFG and MEBN theory. Further the paper outlines a modified version of CYK parser algorithm for parsing PCFG derivations driven by MEBN. Using Kullback- Leibler divergence an outline for proving properness and consistency of the PCFG mapped with MEBN is discussed.

For a class of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), we address the problem of performing computations over the cloud without revealing private information about the structure and operation of the system. We model CPSs as a collection of input-output dynamical systems (the system operation modes). Depending on the mode the system is operating on, the output trajectory is generated by one of these systems in response to driving inputs. Output measurements and driving inputs are sent to the cloud for processing purposes. We capture this "processing" through some function (of the input-output trajectory) that we require the cloud to compute accurately - referred here as the trajectory utility. However, for privacy reasons, we would like to keep the mode private, i.e., we do not want the cloud to correctly identify what mode of the CPS produced a given trajectory. To this end, we distort trajectories before transmission and send the corrupted data to the cloud. We provide mathematical tools (based on output-regulation techniques) to properly design distorting mechanisms so that: 1) the original and distorted trajectories lead to the same utility; and the distorted data leads the cloud to misclassify the mode.

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is expected to be resilient to more than one type of adversary. In this paper, we consider a CPS that has to satisfy a linear temporal logic (LTL) objective in the presence of two kinds of adversaries. The first adversary has the ability to tamper with inputs to the CPS to influence satisfaction of the LTL objective. The interaction of the CPS with this adversary is modeled as a stochastic game. We synthesize a controller for the CPS to maximize the probability of satisfying the LTL objective under any policy of this adversary. The second adversary is an eavesdropper who can observe labeled trajectories of the CPS generated from the previous step. It could then use this information to launch other kinds of attacks. A labeled trajectory is a sequence of labels, where a label is associated to a state and is linked to the satisfaction of the LTL objective at that state. We use differential privacy to quantify the indistinguishability between states that are related to each other when the eavesdropper sees a labeled trajectory. Two trajectories of equal length will be differentially private if they are differentially private at each state along the respective trajectories. We use a skewed Kantorovich metric to compute distances between probability distributions over states resulting from actions chosen according to policies from related states in order to quantify differential privacy. Moreover, we do this in a manner that does not affect the satisfaction probability of the LTL objective. We validate our approach on a simulation of a UAV that has to satisfy an LTL objective in an adversarial environment.

Through the widespread use of information technologies, institutions have started to offer most of their services electronically. The best example of this is e-government. Since institutions provide their services to the electronic environment, the quality of the services they provide increases and their access to services becomes easier. Since personal information can be verified with inter-agency information sharing systems, wrong or unfair transactions can be prevented. Since information sharing between institutions is generally done through web services, protection of personal data transmitted via web services is of great importance. There are comprehensive national and international regulations on the protection of personal data. According to these regulations, protection of personal data shared between institutions is a legal obligation; protection of personal data is an issue that needs to be handled comprehensively. This study, protection of personal data shared between institutions through web services against software developers is discussed. With a proposed application, it is aimed to take a new security measure for the protection of personal data. The proposed application consists of a web interface prepared using React and Java programming languages and rest services that provide anonymization of personal data.

As the worldwide demand for cybersecurity-trained professionals continues to grow, the need to understand and define what cybersecurity education really means at the college or university level. Given the relative infancy of these efforts to define undergraduate cybersecurity programs, the panelists will present different perspectives on how such programs can be structured. They will then engage with the audience to explore additional viewpoints on cybersecurity, and work toward a shared understanding of undergraduate cybersecurity programs.

Recently, several cross-layer protocols have been designed for vehicular networks to optimize data dissemination by ensuring internal communications between routing and MAC layers. In this context, a cross-layer protocol, called TDMA-aware Routing Protocol for Multi-hop communications (TRPM), was proposed in order to efficiently select a relay node based on time slot scheduling information obtained from the MAC layer. However, due to the constant evolution of cyber-attacks on the routing and MAC layers, data dissemination in vehicular networks is vulnerable to several types of attack. In this paper, we identify the different attack models that can disrupt the cross-layer operation of the TRPM protocol and assess their impact on performance through simulation. Several new vulnerabilities related to the MAC slot scheduling process are identified. Exploiting of these vulnerabilities would lead to severe channel capacity wastage where up to half of the free slots could not be reserved.

This paper presents a proximity coupled wideband wearable antenna operating between 4.71 GHz and 5.81 GHz with 5.2 GHz as centre frequency for biomedical telemetry applications in ISM band (IEEE 802.11 Standard). Two layers of different flexible substrate materials, ethylene-vinyl acetate and felt make the design mechanically stable. Bandwidth improvement is achieved by introducing two slots on elliptical ground plane. Highest gain of 3.72 dB and front to back ratio (FBR) of 6.55 is obtained in the given frequency band. The dimensions of antenna have been optimized to have desired bandwidth of 1100 MHz (\$\textbackslashtextbackslashsimeq\$21%). The specific absorption rate (SAR) value is 1.12 \$W/Kg\$ for 1 g of human body tissue. Both simulated and measured results are presented for the structure.

Optical wireless communications (OWC) and its potential to solve physical layer security (PLS) issues are becoming important research areas in 6G communications systems. In this paper, an overview of PLS in visible light communications (VLC), is presented. Then, two new PLS techniques based on generalized space shift keying (GSSK) modulation with spatial constellation design (SCD) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cooperative relaying are introduced. In the first technique, the PLS of the system is enhanced by the appropriate selection of a precoding matrix for randomly activated light emitting diodes (LEDs). With the aid of a legitimate user's (Bob's) channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter (CSIT), the bit error ratio (BER) of Bob is minimized while the BER performance of the potential eavesdroppers (Eves) is significantly degraded. In the second technique, superposition coding with uniform signaling is used at the transmitter and relays. The design of secure beamforming vectors at the relay nodes along with NOMA techniques is used to enhance PLS in a VLC system. Insights gained from the improved security levels of the proposed techniques are used to discuss how PLS can be further improved in future generation communication systems by using VLC.

In this paper, we propose a power allocation scheme in order to improve both secure and reliable performance in the wireless two-hop threshold-selection decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks, which is so crucial to set a threshold value related the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the source signal at relay nodes for perfect decoding. We adapt the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) receiving SNR from the direct and relaying paths both at the destination and at the eavesdropper. Particularly worth mentioning is that the closed expression form of outage probability and intercept probability is driven, which can quantify the security and reliability, respectively. We also make endeavors to utilize a metric to tradeoff the security and the reliability (SRT) and find out the relevance between them in the balanced case. But beyond that, in the pursuit of tradeoff performance, power allocation tends to depend on the threshold value. In other words, it provides a new method optimizing total power to the source and the relay by the threshold value. The results are obtained from analysis, confirmed by simulation, and predicted by artificial neural networks (ANNs), which is trained with back propagation (BP) algorithm, and thus the feasibility of the proposed method is verified.

The new switching architecture of the neural networks was proposed. The switching neural networks consist of the neurons and the switchers. The goal is to reduce expenses on the artificial neural network design and training. For realization of complex models, algorithms and methods of management the neural networks of the big size are required. The number of the interconnection links “everyone with everyone” grows with the number of neurons. The training of big neural networks requires the resources of supercomputers. Time of training of neural networks also depends on the number of neurons in the network. Switching neural networks are divided into fragments connected by the switchers. Training of switcher neuron network is provided by fragments. On the basis of switching neural networks the devices of associative memory were designed with the number of neurons comparable to the human brain.

The code length and rate of length-compatible polar codes can be adaptively adjusted and changed because of the special coding structure. In this paper, we propose a method to construct length-compatible polar codes by employing physical layer encryption technology. The deletion way of frozen bits and generator matrix are random, which makes polar codes more flexible and safe. Simulation analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can not only effectively improve the performance of length-compatible polar codes but also realize the physical layer security encryption of the system.

Cybersecurity of the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, which is the key component of the cyber-physical systems (CPS), is facing big challenges and will affect the reliability of the smart grid. System reliability can be influenced by various cyber threats. In this paper, the reliability of the electric power system considering different cybersecurity issues in the SCADA system is analyzed by using Semi-Markov Process (SMP) and mean time-to-compromise (MTTC). External and insider attacks against the SCADA system are investigated with the SMP models and the results are compared. The system reliability is evaluated by reliability indexes including loss of load probability (LOLP) and expected energy not supplied (EENS) through Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS). The lurking threats of the cyberattacks are also analyzed in the study. Case studies were conducted on the IEEE Reliability Test System (RTS-96). The results show that with the increase of the MTTCs of the cyberattacks, the LOLP values decrease. When insider attacks are considered, both the LOLP and EENS values dramatically increase owing to the decreased MTTCs. The results provide insights into the establishment of the electric power system reliability enhancement strategies.

This work considers the trade-off between security and performance when revealing partial information about encrypted data computed on. The focus of our work is on information revealed through control flow side-channels when executing programs on encrypted data. We use quantitative information flow to measure security, running time to measure performance and program transformation techniques to alter the trade-off between the two. Combined with information flow policies, we perform a policy-aware security and performance trade-off (PASAPTO) analysis. We formalize the problem of PASAPTO analysis as an optimization problem, prove the NP-hardness of the corresponding decision problem and present two algorithms solving it heuristically. We implemented our algorithms and combined them with the Dataflow Authentication (DFAuth) approach for outsourcing sensitive computations. Our DFAuth Trade-off Analyzer (DFATA) takes Java Bytecode operating on plaintext data and an associated information flow policy as input. It outputs semantically equivalent program variants operating on encrypted data which are policy-compliant and approximately Pareto-optimal with respect to leakage and performance. We evaluated DFATA in a commercial cloud environment using Java programs, e.g., a decision tree program performing machine learning on medical data. The decision tree variant with the worst performance is 357% slower than the fastest variant. Leakage varies between 0% and 17% of the input.