Biblio

The intelligent cyber-physical system (CPS) has been applied in various fields, covering multiple critical infras-tructures and human daily life support areas. CPS Security is a major concern and of critical importance, especially the security of the intelligent control component. Side-channel analysis (SCA) is the common threat exploiting the weaknesses in system operation to extract information of the intelligent CPS. However, existing literature lacks the systematic theo-retical analysis of the side-channel attacks on the intelligent CPS, without the ability to quantify and measure the leaked information. To address these issues, we propose the SCA-based model extraction attack on intelligent CPS. First, we design an efficient and novel SCA-based model extraction framework, including the threat model, hierarchical attack process, and the multiple micro-space parallel search enabled weight extraction algorithm. Secondly, an information theory-empowered analy-sis model for side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS is built. We propose a mutual information-based quantification method and derive the capacity of side-channel attacks on intelligent CPS, formulating the amount of information leakage through side channels. Thirdly, we develop the theoretical bounds of the leaked information over multiple attack queries based on the data processing inequality and properties of entropy. These convergence bounds provide theoretical means to estimate the amount of information leaked. Finally, experimental evaluation, including real-world experiments, demonstrates the effective-ness of the proposed SCA-based model extraction algorithm and the information theory-based analysis method in intelligent CPS.

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are used in several domains such as Transportation, Manufacturing, Defense and Power Generation and Distribution. ICSs deal with complex physical systems in order to achieve an industrial purpose with operational safety. Security has not been taken into account by design in these systems that makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks.In this paper, we rely on existing public ICS datasets as well as on the existing literature of Machine Learning (ML) applications for anomaly detection in ICSs in order to improve detection scores. To perform this purpose, we propose a systematic framework, relying on established ML algorithms and suitable data preprocessing methods, which allows us to quickly get efficient, and surprisingly, better results than the literature. Finally, some recommendations for future public ICS dataset generations end this paper, which would be fruitful for improving future attack detection models and then protect new ICSs designed in the next future.

In high-performance computing (HPC), scientific applications often manage a massive amount of data using I/O libraries. These libraries provide convenient data model abstractions, help ensure data portability, and, most important, empower end users to improve I/O performance by tuning configurations across multiple layers of the HPC I/O stack. We propose SCTuner, an autotuner integrated within the I/O library itself to dynamically tune both the I/O library and the underlying I/O stack at application runtime. To this end, we introduce a statistical benchmarking method to profile the behaviors of individual supercomputer I/O subsystems with varied configurations across I/O layers. We use the benchmarking results as the built-in knowledge in SCTuner, implement an I/O pattern extractor, and plan to implement an online performance tuner as the SCTuner runtime. We conducted a benchmarking analysis on the Summit supercomputer and its GPFS file system Alpine. The preliminary results show that our method can effectively extract the consistent I/O behaviors of the target system under production load, building the base for I/O autotuning at application runtime.

The critical nature of smart grids (SGs) attracts various network attacks and malicious manipulations. Existent SG solutions are less capable of ensuring secure and trustworthy operation. This is due to the large-scale nature of SGs and reliance on network protocols for trust management. A particular example of such severe attacks is the false data injection (FDI). FDI refers to a network attack, where meters' measurements are manipulated before being reported in such a way that the energy system takes flawed decisions. In this paper, we exploit the secure nature of blockchains to construct a data management framework based on public blockchain. Our framework enables trustworthy data storage, verification, and exchange between SG components and decision-makers. Our proposed system enables miners to invest their computational power to verify blockchain transactions in a fully distributed manner. The mining logic employs machine learning (ML) techniques to identify the locations of compromised meters in the network, which are responsible for generating FDI attacks. In return, miners receive virtual credit, which may be used to pay their electric bills. Our design circumvents single points of failure and intentional FDI attempts. Our numerical results compare the accuracy of three different ML-based mining logic techniques in two scenarios: focused and distributed FDI attacks for different attack levels. Finally, we proposed a majority-decision mining technique for the practical case of an unknown FDI attack level.

We use discrete-time adaptive control theory to design a novel false data injection (FDI) attack against automatic generation control (AGC), a critical system that maintains a power grid at its requisite frequency. FDI attacks can cause equipment damage or blackouts by falsifying measurements in the streaming sensor data used to monitor the grid's operation. Compared to prior work, the proposed attack (i) requires less knowledge on the part of the attacker, such as correctly forecasting the future demand for power; (ii) is stealthier in its ability to bypass standard methods for detecting bad sensor data and to keep the false sensor readings near historical norms until the attack is well underway; and (iii) can sustain the frequency excursion as long as needed to cause real-world damage, in spite of AGC countermeasures. We validate the performance of the proposed attack on realistic 37-bus and 118-bus setups in PowerWorld, an industry-strength power system simulator trusted by real-world operators. The results demonstrate the attack's improved stealthiness and effectiveness compared to prior work.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a subcategory of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that allows vehicles to communicate with other vehicles and static roadside infrastructure. However, the integration of cyber and physical systems introduce many possible points of attack that make VANET vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we implemented a machine learning-based intrusion detection system that identifies False Data Injection (FDI) attacks on a vehicular network. A co-simulation framework between MATLAB and NS-3 is used to simulate the system. The intrusion detection system is installed in every vehicle and processes the information obtained from the packets sent by other vehicles. The packet is classified into either trusted or malicious using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The comparison of the performance of the system is evaluated in different scenarios using the following metrics: classification rate, attack detection rate, false positive rate, and detection speed. Simulation results show that the SVM-based IDS is able to provide high accuracy detection, low false positive rate, consequently improving the traffic congestion in the simulated highway.

The growing complexity of server architectures, which incorporate several components with state, has necessitated rigorous assessment of the security risk both during design and operation. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to model the security risk of servers by mapping their architectures to graphs. This allows us to leverage tools from computational graph theory, which we combine with probability theory for deriving quantitative metrics for risk assessment. Probability of attack is derived for server components, with prior probabilities assigned based on knowledge of existing vulnerabilities and countermeasures. The resulting analysis is further used to compute measures of impact and exploitability of attack. The proposed methods are demonstrated on two open-source server designs with different architectures.

We propose and numerically demonstrate a novel secure key distribution scheme based on the chaos synchronization of two semiconductor lasers (SLs) subject to symmetrical double chaotic injections, which are outputted by two mutually-coupled semiconductor lasers. The results show that high quality chaos synchronization can be observed between two local SLs with suitable injection strength and identical injection time delays for Alice and Bob. On the basis of satisfactory chaos synchronization and a post-processing technology, identical secret keys for Alice and Bob are successfully generated with bit error ratio (BER) below the HD-FEC threshold of $^\textrm-3\$$\$.

Current cryptographic solutions used in information technologies today like Transport Layer Security utilize algorithms with underlying computationally difficult problems to solve. With the ongoing research and development of quantum computers, these same computationally difficult problems become solvable within reasonable (polynomial) time. The emergence of large-scale quantum computers would put the integrity and confidentiality of today’s data in jeopardy. It then becomes urgent to develop, implement, and test a new suite of cybersecurity measures against attacks from a quantum computer. This paper explores, understands, and evaluates this new category of cryptosystems as well as the many tradeoffs among them. All the algorithms submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for standardization can be categorized into three major categories, each relating to the new underlying hard problem: namely error code correcting, algebraic lattices (including ring learning with errors), and supersingular isogenies. These new mathematical hard problems have shown to be resistant to the same type of quantum attack. Utilizing hardware clock cycle registers, the work sets up the benchmarks of the four Round 3 NIST algorithms in two environments: cloud computing and embedded system. As expected, there are many tradeoffs and advantages in each algorithm for applications. Saber and Kyber are exceedingly fast but have larger ciphertext size for transmission over a wire. McEliece key size and key generation are the largest drawbacks but having the smallest ciphertext size and only slightly decreased performance allow a use case where key reuse is prioritized. NTRU finds a middle ground in these tradeoffs, being better than McEliece performance wise and better than Kyber and Saber in ciphertext size allows for a use case of highly varied environments, which need to value speed and ciphertext size equally. Going forward, the benchmarking system developed could be applied to digital signature, another vital aspect to a cryptosystem.

The convergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing is due to the practical necessity for providing broader services to extensive user in distinct environments. However, cloud computing has numerous constraints for applications that require high-mobility and high latency, notably in adversarial situations (e.g. battlefields). These limitations can be elevated to some extent, in a fog computing model because it covers the gap between remote data-center and edge device. Since, the fog nodes are usually installed in remote areas, therefore, they impose the design of fool proof safety solution for a fog-based setting. Thus, to ensure the security and privacy of fog-based environment, numerous schemes have been developed by researchers. In the recent past, Jia et al. (Wireless Networks, DOI: 10.1007/s11276-018-1759-3) designed a fog-based three-party scheme for healthcare system using bilinear. They claim that their scheme can withstand common security attacks. However, in this work we investigated their scheme and show that their scheme has different susceptibilities such as revealing of secret parameters, and fog node impersonation attack. Moreover, it lacks the anonymity of user anonymity and has inefficient login phase. Consequently, we have suggestion with some necessary guidelines for attack resilience that are unheeded by Jia et al.

Fog computing extends the capability of cloud services to support latency sensitive applications. Adding fog computing nodes in proximity to a data generation/ actuation source can support data analysis tasks that have stringent deadline constraints. We introduce a real time, security-aware scheduling algorithm that can execute over a fog environment [1 , 2] . The applications we consider comprise of: (i) interactive applications which are less compute intensive, but require faster response time; (ii) computationally intensive batch applications which can tolerate some delay in execution. From a security perspective, applications are divided into three categories: public, private and semi-private which must be hosted over trusted, semi-trusted and untrusted resources. We propose the architecture and implementation of a distributed orchestrator for fog computing, able to combine task requirements (both performance and security) and resource properties.

Business's strength arises from the strength of its supply chain. Therefore, a proper supply chain management is vital for business continuity. One of the most challenging parts of SCM is the contract negotiation, and one main aspect of the negotiation is to know the risk associated with each range of quantity agreed on. Currently Managers assess the quantity to be supplied based on a binary way of either full or 0 supply, This paper aims to assess the corresponding quantities risks of the suppliers on a multilayer basis. The proposed approach uses fuzzy logic as an artificial intelligence tool that would develop the verbal terms of managers into numbers to be dealt with. A company that produces fresh frozen vegetables and fruits in Egypt who faces the problem of getting the required quantities from the suppliers with a fulfilment rate of 33% was chosen to apply the proposed model. The model allowed the managers to have full view of risk in their supply chain effectively and decide their needed capacity as well as the negotiation terms with both suppliers and customers. Future work should be the use of more data in the fuzzy database and implement the proposed methodology in an another industry.

Trust along digitalized supply chains is challenged by the aspect that monitoring equipment may not be trustworthy or unreliable as respective measurements originate from potentially untrusted parties. To allow for dynamic relationships along supply chains, we propose a blockchain-backed supply chain monitoring architecture relying on trusted hardware. Our design provides a notion of secure end-to-end sensing of interactions even when originating from untrusted surroundings. Due to attested checkpointing, we can identify misinformation early on and reliably pinpoint the origin. A blockchain enables long-term verifiability for all (now trustworthy) IoT data within our system even if issues are detected only after the fact. Our feasibility study and cost analysis further show that our design is indeed deployable in and applicable to today’s supply chain settings.

Plagiarism checkers have been widely used to verify the authenticity of dissertation/project submissions. However, when non-verbatim plagiarism or online examinations are considered, this practice is not the best solution. In this work, we propose a better authentication system for online examinations that analyses the submitted text's stylometry for a match of writing pattern of the author by whom the text was submitted. The writing pattern is analyzed over many indicators (i.e., features of one's writing style). This model extracts 27 such features and stores them as the writing pattern of an individual. Stylometric Analysis is a better approach to verify a document's authorship as it doesn't check for plagiarism, but verifies if the document was written by a particular individual and hence completely shuts down the possibility of using text-convertors or translators. This paper also includes a brief comparative analysis of some simpler algorithms for the same problem statement. These algorithms yield results that vary in precision and accuracy and hence plotting a conclusion from the comparison shows that the best bet to tackle this problem is through Artificial Neural Networks.

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a physical-layer-based approach for enhancing wireless communication network security. A well-done SEI method can be widely applied in identifying the individual wireless communication device. In this paper, we propose a novel specific emitter identification method based on variational mode decomposition and histogram of oriented gradient (VMD-HOG). The signal is decomposed into specific temporal modes via VMD and HOG features are obtained from the time-frequency spectrum of temporal modes. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated both in single hop and relaying scenarios and under three channels with the number of emitters varying. Results depict that our proposed method provides great identification performance for both simulated signals and realistic data of Zigbee devices and outperforms the two existing methods in identification accuracy and computational complexity.

The spatial-temporal random variation characteristics of underwater acoustic channel make the difference among the underwater acoustic communication network link channels, which make network performance difficult to predict. In order to better understand the fluctuation and difference of network link channel, we analyze the measured channel data of five links in the Qiandao Lake underwater acoustic communication network experiment. This paper first estimates impulse response, spread function, power delay profile and Doppler power spectrum of the time-varying channel in a short detection time, and compares the time-frequency energy distribution characteristics of each link channel. Then, we statistically analyze the discreteness of the signal to noise ratio, multipath spread and Doppler spread parameter distributions for a total of145 channels over a long observation period. The results show that energy distribution structure and fading fluctuation scale of each link channel in underwater acoustic communication network are obviously different.

The growing internet-based services such as banking and shopping have brought both ease to human's lives and challenges in user identity authentication. Different methods have been investigated for user authentication such as retina, finger print, and face recognition. This study introduces a photoplethysmogram (PPG) based user identity authentication relying on textural features extracted from time-frequency image. The PPG signal is segmented into segments and each segment is transformed into time-frequency domain using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Then, the textural features are extracted from the time-frequency images using Haralick's method. Finally, a classifier is employed for identity authentication purposes. The proposed system achieved an average accuracy of 99.14% and 99.9% with segment lengths of one and tweeny seconds, respectively, using random forest classifier.

The accurate classification of WiFi-based activity patterns is still an open problem and is critical to detect behavior for non-visualization applications. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses WiFi-based IQ data and short-time Fourier transform (STFT) time-frequency images to automatically and accurately classify human activities. The offsets features, calculated from time-domain values and one-dimensional principal component analysis (1D-PCA) values and two-dimensional principal component analysis (2D-PCA) values, are applied as features to input the classifiers. The machine learning methods such as the bagging, boosting, support vector machine (SVM), random forests (RF) as the classifier to output the performance. The experimental data validate our proposed method with 15000 experimental samples from five categories of WiFi signals (empty, marching on the spot, rope skipping, both arms rotating;singlearm rotating). The results show that the method companying with the RF classifier surpasses the approach with alternative classifiers on classification performance and finally obtains a 62.66% classification rate, 85.06% mean accuracy, and 90.67% mean specificity.

An effective response against information security violations in the technical systems remains relevant challenge nowadays, when their number, complexity, and the level of possible losses are growing. The violation can be caused by the set of the intruder's consistent actions. In the area of countermeasure selection for a proactive and reactive response against security violations, there are a large number of techniques. The techniques based on graph models seem to be promising. These models allow representing the set of actions caused the violation. Their advantages include the ability to forecast violations for timely decision-making on the countermeasures, as well as the ability to analyze and consider the coverage of countermeasures in terms of steps caused the violation. The paper proposes and describes a decision support method for responding against information security violations in the technical systems based on the graph models, as well as the developed models, including the countermeasure model and the graph representing the set of actions caused the information security violation.

The fundamental limits of high-current conduction and response of metal conductors to large, fast current pulses are of interest to high-speed fuses, exploding wires and foils, and magnetically driven dynamic material property and inertial confinement fusion experiments. A collaboration between the University of Nevada, Reno, University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Laboratory has fielded an electrically thick (R 400-μm \textbackslashtextgreater skin-depth) cylindrical metal rod platform in a Z-pinch configuration driven by the Sandia 100-ns, 900-kA Mykonos linear transformer driver 1 . Photonic Doppler velocimetry (PDV) measuring the expansion velocity of the uncoated surface of aluminum rods 2 was used to benchmark equation of state (EOS) and electrical conductivity models used in magnetohydrodynamics simulations using the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) code FLAG 3 . The metal surface was found to expand along the liquid-vapor coexistence curve in density-temperature space for 90 ns of the rod’s expansion for both tabular EOSs with Van der Waals loops and with Maxwell constructions under the vapor dome. As the slope of the coexistence curve varies across EOS models, the metal surface in simulation was found to heat and expand at different rates depending on the model used. The expansion velocities associated with EOS models were then compared against the PDV data to validate the EOS used in simulations of similar systems. Here, the most recent aluminum EOS (SESAME 93722) 4 was found to drive a simulated velocity that best compared with the experimental data due to its relatively steep coexistence curve and high critical point.

With the continuous development of edge computing, the application scope of mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) is constantly increasing. The distributed nature of edge computing can transmit data at the edge of processing to meet the needs of low latency. The trustworthiness of the third-party platform will affect the level of privacy protection, because managers of the platform may disclose the information of workers. Anonymous servers also belong to third-party platforms. For unreal third-party platforms, this paper recommends that workers first use the localized differential privacy mechanism to interfere with the real location information, and then upload it to an anonymous server to request services, called the localized differential anonymous privacy protection mechanism (LDNP). The two privacy protection mechanisms further enhance privacy protection, but exacerbate the loss of service quality. Therefore, this paper proposes to give corresponding compensation based on the authenticity of the location information uploaded by workers, so as to encourage more workers to upload real location information. Through comparative experiments on real data, the LDNP algorithm not only protects the location privacy of workers, but also maintains the availability of data. The simulation experiment verifies the effectiveness of the incentive mechanism.

This paper argues that the security management of the robot supply chain would preferably focus on Sino-US relations and technical bottlenecks based on a comprehensive security analysis through open-source intelligence and data mining of associated discourses. Through the lens of the newsboy model and game theory, this study reconstructs the risk appraisal model of the robot supply chain and rebalances the process of the Sino-US competition game, leading to the prediction of China's strategic movements under the supply risks. Ultimately, this paper offers a threefold suggestion: increasing the overall revenue through cost control and scaled expansion, resilience enhancement and risk prevention, and outreach of a third party's cooperation for confrontation capabilities reinforcement.

The increase of size, capabilities, and speed of FPGAs enables the shared usage of reconfigurable resources by multiple applications and even operating systems. While research on FPGA virtualization in HPC-datacenters and cloud is already well advanced, it is a rather new concept for embedded systems. The necessity for FPGA virtualization of embedded systems results from the trend to integrate multiple environments into the same hardware platform. As multiple guest operating systems with different requirements, e.g., regarding real-time, security, safety, or reliability share the same resources, the focus of research lies on isolation under the constraint of having minimal impact on the overall system. Drivers for this development are, e.g., computation intensive AI-based applications in the automotive or medical field, embedded 5G edge computing systems, or the consolidation of electronic control units (ECUs) on a centralized MPSoC with the goal to increase reliability by reducing complexity. This survey outlines key concepts of hypervisor-based virtualization of embedded reconfigurable systems. Hypervisor approaches are compared and classified into FPGA-based hypervisors, MPSoC-based hypervisors and hypervisors for distributed embedded reconfigurable systems. Strong points and limitations are pointed out and future trends for virtualization of embedded reconfigurable systems are identified.

The semaphore mechanism is an important part of the embedded operating system. Therefore, it is very necessary to ensure its safety. Traditional software testing methods are difficult to ensure 100% coverage of the program. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a formal verfication method which proves the correctness of the program theoretically. This paper proposes a proof framework based on the theorem proof tool Coq: modeling the semaphore mechanism, extracting important properties from the requirement documents, and finally verifying that the semaphore mechanism can meet these properties, which means the correctness of the semaphore mechanism is proved and also illustrates the feasibility of the verification framework proposed in this paper, which lays a foundation for the verification of other modules of operating systems.

Mobile embedded terminals widely applied in individual lives, but its security threats become more and more serious. Malicious attacker can steal sensitive information such as user’s phonebook, credit card information by instrumenting malicious programs, or compromising vulnerable software. Against these problems, this paper proposes a scheme for trusted protection system on the embedded platform. The system uses SM algorithms and hardware security chip as the root of trust to establish security mechanisms, including trusted boot of system image, trusted monitoring of the system running environment, disk partition encryption and verification, etc. These security mechanisms provide comprehensive protection to embedded system boot, runtime and long-term storage devices. This paper introduces the architecture and principles of the system software, design system security functions and implement prototype system for protection of embedded OS. The experiments results indicates the promotion of embedded system security and the performance test shows that encryption performance can meet the practical application.