Biblio

The IFDS algorithm can be compute-and memoryintensive for some large programs, often running for a long time (more than expected) or terminating prematurely after some time and/or memory budgets have been exhausted. In the latter case, the corresponding IFDS data-flow analyses may suffer from false negatives and/or false positives. To improve this, we introduce a sparse alternative to the traditional IFDS algorithm. Instead of propagating the data-flow facts across all the program points along the program’s (interprocedural) control flow graph, we propagate every data-flow fact directly to its next possible use points along its own sparse control flow graph constructed on the fly, thus reducing significantly both the time and memory requirements incurred by the traditional IFDS algorithm. In our evaluation, we compare FLOWDROID, a taint analysis performed by using the traditional IFDS algorithm, with our sparse incarnation, SPARSEDROID, on a set of 40 Android apps selected. For the time budget (5 hours) and memory budget (220GB) allocated per app, SPARSEDROID can run every app to completion but FLOWDROID terminates prematurely for 9 apps, resulting in an average speedup of 22.0x. This implies that when used as a market-level vetting tool, SPARSEDROID can finish analyzing these 40 apps in 2.13 hours (by issuing 228 leak warnings) while FLOWDROID manages to analyze only 30 apps in the same time period (by issuing only 147 leak warnings).

Dynamic Taint Analysis (DTA) technique has been developed for analysis and understanding behavior of Android applications and privacy policy enforcement. Meanwhile, implicit information flows (IIFs) are major concern of security researchers because IIFs can evade DTA technique easily and give attackers an advantage over the researchers. Some researchers suggested approaches to the issue and developed analysis systems supporting privacy policy enforcement against IIF-accompanied attacks; however, there is still no effective technique of comprehensive analysis and privacy policy enforcement against IIF-accompanied attacks. In this paper, we propose an IIF detection technique to enforce privacy policy against IIF-accompanied attacks in Android applications. We developed a new analysis tool, called Smalien, that can discover data leakage caused by IIF-contained information flows as well as explicit information flows. We demonstrated practicability of Smalien by applying it to 16 IIF tricks from ScrubDroid and two IIF tricks from DroidBench. Smalien enforced privacy policy successfully against all the tricks except one trick because the trick loads code dynamically from a remote server at runtime, and Smalien cannot analyze any code outside of a target application. The results show that our approach can be a solution to the current attacker-superior situation.

Graph pattern matching is one of the most fundamental problems in graph database and is associated with a wide spectrum of applications. Due to its computational intensiveness, researchers have primarily devoted their efforts to improving the performance of the algorithm while constraining the graphs to have singular labels on vertices (edges) or no label. Whereas in practice graphs are typically associated with rich properties, thus the main focus in the industry is instead on powerful query languages that can express a sufficient number of pattern matching scenarios. We demo PatMat in this work to glue together the academic efforts on performance and the industrial efforts on expressiveness. To do so, we leverage the state-of-the-art join-based algorithms in the distributed contexts and Cypher query language - the most widely-adopted declarative language for graph pattern matching. The experiments demonstrate how we are capable of turning complex Cypher semantics into a distributed solution with high performance.

In software engineering practice, evaluating and selecting the software testing tools that best fit the project at hand is an important and challenging task. In scientific studies of software engineering, practitioner evaluations and beliefs have recently gained interest, and some studies suggest that practitioners find beliefs of peers more credible than empirical evidence. To study how software practitioners evaluate testing tools, we applied online opinion surveys (n=89). We analyzed the reliability of the opinions utilizing Krippendorff's alpha, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and coefficients of variation (CV). Negative binomial regression was used to evaluate the effect of demographics. We find that opinions towards a specific tool can be conflicting. We show how increasing the number of respondents improves the reliability of the estimates measured with ICC. Our results indicate that on average, opinions from seven experts provide a moderate level of reliability. From demographics, we find that technical seniority leads to more negative evaluations. To improve the understanding, robustness, and impact of the findings, we need to conduct further studies by utilizing diverse sources and complementary methods.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in digital wallets for a multitude of use cases including online banking, cryptocurrency, and digital identity management. Digital wallets play a pivotal role in the secure management of cryptographic keys and credentials, and for providing certain identity management services. In this paper, we examine a proof-of-concept digital wallet in the context of Self-Sovereign Identity and provide a practical decentralized key recovery solution using Shamir's secret sharing scheme and Hyperledger Indy distributed ledger technology.

The growth in Internet usage has increased the use of electronic services requiring users to register their identity on each service they subscribe to. This has resulted in the prevalence of redundant users data on different services. To protect and regulate access by users to these services identity management systems (IdMs)are put in place. IdMs uses frameworks and standards e.g SAML, OAuth and Shibboleth to manage digital identities of users for identification and authentication process for a service provider. However, current IdMs have not been able to address privacy issues (unauthorised and fine-grained access)that relate to protecting users identity and private data on web services. Many implementations of these frameworks are only concerned with the identification and authentication process of users but not authorisation. They mostly give full control of users digital identities and data to identity and service providers with less or no users participation. This results in a less privacy enhanced solutions that manage users available data in the electronic space. This article proposes a user-centred mandate representation system that empowers resource owners to take full of their digital data; determine and delegate access rights using their mobile phone. Thereby giving users autonomous powers on their resources to grant access to authenticated entities at their will. Our solution is based on the OpenID Connect framework for authorisation service. To evaluate the proposal, we've compared it with some related works and the privacy requirements yardstick outlined in GDPR regulation [1] and [2]. Compared to other systems that use OAuth 2.0 or SAML our solution uses an additional layer of security, where data owner assumes full control over the disclosure of their identity data through an assertion issued from their mobile phones to authorisation server (AS), which in turn issues an access token. This would enable data owners to assert the authenticity of a request, while service providers and requestors also benefit from the correctness and freshness of identity data disclosed to them.

User's digital identity information has privacy and security requirements. Privacy requirements include confidentiality of the identity information itself, anonymity of those who verify and consume a user's identity information and unlinkability of online transactions which involve a user's identity. Security requirements include correctness, ownership assurance and prevention of counterfeits of a user's identity information. Such privacy and security requirements, although conflicting, are critical for identity management systems enabling the exchange of users' identity information between different parties during the execution of online transactions. Addressing all such requirements, without a centralized party managing the identity exchange transactions, raises several challenges. This paper presents a decentralized protocol for privacy preserving exchange of users' identity information addressing such challenges. The proposed protocol leverages advances in blockchain and zero knowledge proof technologies, as the main building blocks. We provide prototype implementations of the main building blocks of the protocol and assess its performance and security.

Future that IoT has to enhance the productivity on healthcare applications.

Phishing websites have long been a serious threat to cyber security. For decades, many researchers have been devoted to developing novel techniques to detect phishing websites automatically. While state-of-the-art solutions can achieve superior performances, they require substantial manual feature engineering and are not adept at detecting newly emerging phishing attacks. Therefore, developing techniques that can detect phishing websites automatically and handle zero-day phishing attacks swiftly is still an open challenge in this area. In this work, we propose PhishingNet, a deep learning-based approach for timely detection of phishing Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Specifically, we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) module to extract character-level spatial feature representations of URLs; meanwhile, we employ an attention-based hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network(RNN) module to extract word-level temporal feature representations of URLs. We then fuse these feature representations via a three-layer CNN to build accurate feature representations of URLs, on which we train a phishing URL classifier. Extensive experiments on a verified dataset collected from the Internet demonstrate that the feature representations extracted automatically are conducive to the improvement of the generalization ability of our approach on newly emerging URLs, which makes our approach achieve competitive performance against other state-of-the-art approaches.

Controllers of security-critical cyber-physical systems, like the power grid, are a very important class of computer systems. Attacks against the control code of a power-grid system, especially zero-day attacks, can be catastrophic. Earlier detection of the anomalies can prevent further damage. However, detecting zero-day attacks is extremely challenging because they have no known code and have unknown behavior. Furthermore, if data collected from the controller is transferred to a server through networks for analysis and detection of anomalous behavior, this creates a very large attack surface and also delays detection. In order to address this problem, we propose Reconstruction Error Distribution (RED) of Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs), and a data-driven defense system based on it. Specifically, we first train a temporal deep learning model, using only normal HPC readings from legitimate processes that run daily in these power-grid systems, to model the normal behavior of the power-grid controller. Then, we run this model using real-time data from commonly available HPCs. We use the proposed RED to enhance the temporal deep learning detection of anomalous behavior, by estimating distribution deviations from the normal behavior with an effective statistical test. Experimental results on a real power-grid controller show that we can detect anomalous behavior with high accuracy (\textbackslashtextgreater99.9%), nearly zero false positives and short (\textbackslashtextless; 360ms) latency.

With technology at our fingertips waiting to be exploited, the past decade saw the revolutionizing Human Computer Interactions. The ease with which a user could interact was the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of a sales team. Human Computer Interactions have many underlying parameters like Data Visualization and Presentation as some to deal with. With the race, on for better and faster presentations, evolved many frameworks to be widely used by all software developers. As the need grew for user friendly applications, more and more software professionals were lured into the front-end sophistication domain. Application frameworks have evolved to such an extent that with just a few clicks and feeding values as per requirements we are able to produce a commercially usable application in a few minutes. These frameworks generate quantum lines of codes in minutes which leaves a contrail of bugs to be discovered in the future. We have also succumbed to the benchmarking in Software Quality Metrics and have made ourselves comfortable with buggy software's to be rectified in future. The exponential evolution in the cyber domain has also attracted attackers equally. Average human awareness and knowledge has also improved in the cyber domain due to the prolonged exposure to technology for over three decades. As the attack sophistication grows and zero day attacks become more popular than ever, the suffering end users only receive remedial measures in spite of the latest Antivirus, Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems installed. We designed a software to display the complete services and applications running in users Operating System in the easiest perceivable manner aided by Computer Graphics and Data Visualization techniques. We further designed a study by empowering the fence sitter users with tools to actively participate in protecting themselves from threats. The designed threats had impressions from the complete threat canvas in some form or other restricted to systems functioning. Network threats and any sort of packet transfer to and from the system in form of threat was kept out of the scope of this experiment. We discovered that end users had a good idea of their working environment which can be used exponentially enhances machine learning for zero day threats and segment the unmarked the vast threat landscape faster for a more reliable output.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID devices are essential parts of the new information technology generation. They are mostly characterized by their limited power and computing resources. In order to ensure their security under computing and power constraints, a number of lightweight cryptography algorithms has emerged. This paper outlines the performance analysis of six lightweight blocks crypto ciphers with different structures - LED, PRESENT, HIGHT, LBlock, PICCOLO and TWINE on a LEON3 open source processor. We have implemented these crypto ciphers on the FPGA board using the C language and the LEON3 processor. Analysis of these crypto ciphers is evaluated after considering various benchmark parameters like throughput, execution time, CPU performance, AHB bandwidth, Simulator performance, and speed. These metrics are tested with different key sizes provided by each crypto algorithm.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a consolidated reality. Smart homes are equipped with a growing number of IoT devices that capture more and more information about human beings lives. However, manufacturers paid little or no attention to security, so that various challenges are still in place. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure IoT systems that combines the concept of Security-by-Contract (S×C) with the Fog computing distributed paradigm. We define the pillars of our approach, namely the notions of IoT device contract, Fog node policy and contract-policy matching, the respective life-cycles, and the resulting S×C workflow. To better understand all the concepts of the S×C framework, and highlight its practical feasibility, we use a running case study based on a context-aware system deployed in a real smart home.

A permissioned blockchain platform comes with numerous assurances such as transaction confidentiality and system scalability to several organizations. Most permissioned blockchains rely on a Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI)as cryptographic tools to provide security services such as identity authentication and data confidentiality. Using PKI to validate transactions includes validating digital certificates of endorsement peers which creates an overhead in the system. Because public-key operations are computationally intensive, they limit the scalability of blockchain applications. Due to a large modulus size and expensive modular exponentiation operations, public-key operations such as RSA become slower than polynomial-based schemes, which involve a smaller modulus size and a less smaller number of modular multiplications. For instance, the 2048-bit RSA is approximately 15,728 times slower than a polynomial with a degree of 50 and 128-bit modulus size. In this paper, we propose a lightweight polynomial-based key management scheme in the context of a permissioned blockchain. Our scheme involves computationally less intensive polynomial evaluation operations such as additions and multiplications that result in a faster processing compared with public-key schemes. In addition, our proposed solution reduces the overhead of processing transactions and improves the system scalability. Security and performance analysis are provided in the paper.

The use of green energy is becoming increasingly more important in today's world. Therefore, the use of electric vehicles (EVs) is proving to be the best choice for the environment in terms of public and personal transportation. As the electric vehicles are battery powered, their management becomes very important because using batteries beyond their safe operating area can be dangerous for the entire vehicle and the person onboard. To maintain the safety and reliability of the battery, it is necessary to implement the functionalities of continuous cell monitoring and evaluation, charge control and cell balancing in battery management systems (BMS). This paper presents the development of platform software required for the implementation of these functionalities. This platform is based on a digital signal processing platform which is a master-slave structure. Serial communication technology is adopted between master and slave. This system allows easier controllability and expandability.

DNA cryptography becomes a burgeoning new area of study along with the fast-developing of DNA computing and modern cryptography. Point-doubling, point-addition and point-multiplication are three fundamental point-operations to construct encryption protocols in some cryptosystem over mathematical curves such as elliptic curves and conic curves. This paper proposes a DNA computing model to calculate point-doubling in conic curves cryptosystem over finite held GF(2n). By decomposing and rearranging the computing steps of point-doubling, the assembly process could be fulfilled by using 8 different types of computation tiles performing different functions with 1097 encoding ways. This model could also figure out point-multiplication if its coefficient is 2k. The assembly time complexity is 2kn+n-k-1, and the space complexity is k2n2+kn2-k2n.

Local differential privacy (LDP), where users randomly perturb their inputs to provide plausible deniability of their data without the need for a trusted party, has been adopted recently by several major technology organizations, including Google, Apple and Microsoft. This tutorial aims to introduce the key technical underpinnings of these deployed systems, to survey current research that addresses related problems within the LDP model, and to identify relevant open problems and research directions for the community.

The strength of an anonymity system depends on the number of users. Therefore, User eXperience (UX) and usability of these systems is of critical importance for boosting adoption and use. To this end, we carried out a study with 19 non-expert participants to investigate how users experience routine Web browsing via the Tor Browser, focusing particularly on encountered problems and frustrations. Using a mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approach to study one week of naturalistic use of the Tor Browser, we uncovered a variety of UX issues, such as broken Web sites, latency, lack of common browsing conveniences, differential treatment of Tor traffic, incorrect geolocation, operational opacity, etc. We applied this insight to suggest a number of UX improvements that could mitigate the issues and reduce user frustration when using the Tor Browser.

Traditional firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems(IDS) and network analytics tools extensively use the `flow' connection concept, consisting of five `tuples' of source and destination IP, ports and protocol type, for classification and management of network activities. By analysing flows, information can be obtained from TCP/IP fields and packet content to give an understanding of what is being transferred within a single connection. As networks have evolved to incorporate more connections and greater bandwidth, particularly from ``always on'' IoT devices and video and data streaming, so too have malicious network threats, whose communication methods have increased in sophistication. As a result, the concept of the 5 tuple flow in isolation is unable to detect such threats and malicious behaviours. This is due to factors such as the length of time and data required to understand the network traffic behaviour, which cannot be accomplished by observing a single connection. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes the use of additional, two tuple and single tuple flow types to associate multiple 5 tuple communications, with generated metadata used to profile individual connnection behaviour. This proposed approach enables advanced linking of different connections and behaviours, developing a clearer picture as to what network activities have been taking place over a prolonged period of time. To demonstrate the capability of this approach, an expert system rule set has been developed to detect the presence of a multi-peered ZeuS botnet, which communicates by making multiple connections with multiple hosts, thus undetectable to standard IDS systems observing 5 tuple flow types in isolation. Finally, as the solution is rule based, this implementation operates in realtime and does not require post-processing and analytics of other research solutions. This paper aims to demonstrate possible applications for next generation firewalls and methods to acquire additional information from network traffic.

We investigate how to protect features corresponding to personal information using homomorphic encryption when matching people in several camera views. Homomorphic encryption can compute a distance between features without decryption. Thus, our method is able to use a computing server on a public network while protecting personal information. To apply homomorphic encryption, our method uses linear quantization to represent each element of the feature as integers. Experimental results show that there is no significant difference in the accuracy of person re-identification with or without homomorphic encryption and linear quantization.

The ever rising attacks on IT infrastructure, especially on networks has become the cause of anxiety for the IT professionals and the people venturing in the cyber-world. There are numerous instances wherein the vulnerabilities in the network has been exploited by the attackers leading to huge financial loss. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of the most indirect security attack on computer networks. Many active computer bots or zombies start flooding the servers with requests, but due to its distributed nature throughout the Internet, it cannot simply be terminated at server side. Once the DDoS attack initiates, it causes huge overhead to the servers in terms of its processing capability and service delivery. Though, the study and analysis of request packets may help in distinguishing the legitimate users from among the malicious attackers but such detection becomes non-viable due to continuous flooding of packets on servers and eventually leads to denial of service to the authorized users. In the present research, we propose traffic flow and flow count variable based prevention mechanism with the difference in homogeneity. Its simplicity and practical approach facilitates the detection of DDoS attack at the early stage which helps in prevention of the attack and the subsequent damage. Further, simulation result based on different instances of time has been shown on T-value including generation of simple and harmonic homogeneity for observing the real time request difference and gaps.

Denial-of-Service attack (DoS attack) is an attack on network in which an attacker tries to disrupt the availability of network resources by overwhelming the target network with attack packets. In DoS attack it is typically done using a single source, and in a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS attack), like the name suggests, multiple sources are used to flood the incoming traffic of victim. Typically, such attacks use vulnerabilities of Domain Name System (DNS) protocol and IP spoofing to disrupt the normal functioning of service provider or Internet user. The attacks involving DNS, or attacks exploiting vulnerabilities of DNS are known as DNS based DDOS attacks. Many of the proposed DNS based DDoS solutions try to prevent/mitigate such attacks using some intelligent non-``network layer'' (typically application layer) protocols. Utilizing the flexibility and programmability aspects of Software Defined Networks (SDN), via this proposed doctoral research it is intended to make underlying network intelligent enough so as to prevent DNS based DDoS attacks.

The installation of a protection system can provide protection by either deterring or stopping an attacker. Both modes of effectiveness-deterring and stopping-are uncertain. Some have guessed that deterrence plays a much bigger role than stopping force. The force of deterrence should therefore be of considerable interest, especially if its effect could be estimated and incorporated into a larger risk analysis and business case for developing and buying new systems, but nowhere has it been estimated quantitatively. The effect of one type of deterrence, namely, influencing an attacker's choice of targets-or target shifting, biasing an attacker away from some targets toward others-is assessed quantitatively here using a game-theoretic approach. It is shown that its positive effects are significant. It features as a force multiplier on the order of magnitude or more, even for low-performance security countermeasures whose effectiveness may be compromised somewhat, of necessity, in order to keep the number of false alarms serviceably low. The analysis furthermore implies that there are certain minimum levels of stopping performance that a protection should provide in order to avoid attracting the choice of attackers (under deterrence). Nothing in the analysis argues for complacency in security. Developers must still design the best affordable systems. The analysis enters into the middle ground of security, between no protection and impossibly perfect protection. It counters the criticisms that some raise about lower-level, affordable, sustainable measures that security providers naturally gravitate toward. Although these measures might in some places be defeated in ways that a non-expert can imagine, the measures are not for that reason irresponsible or to be dismissed. Their effectiveness can be much greater than they first appear.

Advances in our understanding of the nature of cognition in its myriad forms (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive) displayed in all living beings (cellular organisms, animals, plants, and humans) and new theories of information, info-computation and knowledge are throwing light on how we should build software systems in the digital universe which mimic and interact with intelligent, sentient and resilient beings in the physical universe. Recent attempts to infuse cognition into computing systems to push the boundaries of Church-Turing thesis have led to new computing models that mimic biological systems in encoding knowledge structures using both algorithms executed in stored program control machines and neural networks. This paper presents a new model and implements an application as hierarchical named network composed of microservices to create a managed process workflow by enabling dynamic configuration and reconfiguration of the microservice network. We demonstrate the resiliency, efficiency and scaling of the named microservice network using a novel edge cloud platform by Platina Systems. The platform eliminates the need for Virtual Machine overlay and provides high performance and low-latency with L3 based 100 GbE network and SSD support with RDMA and NVMeoE. The hierarchical named microservice network using Kubernetes provisioning stack provides all the cloud features such as elasticity, autoscaling, self-repair and live-migration without reboot. The model is derived from a recent theoretical framework for unification of different models of computation using "Structural Machines.'' They are shown to simulate Turing machines, inductive Turing machines and also are proved to be more efficient than Turing machines. The structural machine framework with a hierarchy of controllers managing the named service connections provides dynamic reconfiguration of the service network from browsers to database to address rapid fluctuations in the demand for or the availability of resources without having to reconfigure IP address base networks.