Biblio

Over recent years, we have seen a significant rise in popularity of autonomous vehicle. Several researches have shown the severity of security threats that autonomous vehicles face -for example, Miller and Valasek (2015) were able to remotely take complete control over a 2014 Jeep Cherokee in a so called "Jeephack" [1]. This paper analyses the threats that the Electrical and Electronic (E/E) architecture of an autonomous vehicle has to face and rank those threats by severity. To achieve this, the Microsoft's STRIDE threat analysis technique was applied and 13 threats were identified. These are sorted by their Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores. Potential mitigation methods are then suggested for the five topmost severe threats.

Visual Analytics uses data visualization techniques for enabling compelling data analysis by engaging graphical and visual portrayal. In the domain of cybersecurity, convincing visual representation of data enables to ascertain valuable observations that allow the domain experts to construct efficient cyberattack mitigation strategies and provide useful decision support. We present a survey of visual analytics tools and methods in the domain of cybersecurity. We explore and discuss Technical Threat Intelligence visualization tools using the Five Question Method. We conclude the analysis of the works using Moody's Physics of Notations, and VIS4ML ontology as a methodological background of visual analytics process. We summarize our analysis as a high-level model of visual analytics for cybersecurity threat analysis.

Machine learning (ML) models are now a key component for many applications. However, machine learning based systems (MLBSs), those systems that incorporate them, have proven vulnerable to various new attacks as a result. Currently, there exists no systematic process for eliciting security requirements for MLBSs that incorporates the identification of adversarial machine learning (AML) threats with those of a traditional non-MLBS. In this research study, we explore the applicability of traditional threat modeling and existing attack libraries in addressing MLBS security in the requirements phase. Using an example MLBS, we examined the applicability of 1) DFD and STRIDE in enumerating AML threats; 2) Microsoft SDL AI/ML Bug Bar in ranking the impact of the identified threats; and 3) the Microsoft AML attack library in eliciting threat mitigations to MLBSs. Such a method has the potential to assist team members, even with only domain specific knowledge, to collaboratively mitigate MLBS threats.

Despite the surging development and utilization of IoT devices, the security of IoT devices is still in infancy. The security pitfalls of IoT devices have made it easy for hackers to take over IoT devices and use them for malicious activities like botnet attacks. With the rampant emergence of IoT devices, botnet attacks are surging. The botnet attacks are not only catastrophic for IoT device users but also for the rest of the world. Therefore, there is a crucial need to identify and mitigate the possible threats in IoT devices during the design phase. Threat modelling is a technique that is used to identify the threats in the earlier stages of the system design activity. In this paper, we propose a threat modelling approach to analyze and mitigate the botnet attacks in an IoT smart home use case. The proposed methodology identifies the development-level and application-level threats in smart home use case using STRIDE and VAST threat modelling methods. Moreover, we reticulate the identified threats with botnet attacks. Finally, we propose the mitigation techniques for all identified threats including the botnet threats.

Quality Critical Decentralised Applications (QC-DApp) have high requirements for system performance and service quality, involve heterogeneous infrastructures (Clouds, Fogs, Edges and IoT), and rely on the trustworthy collaborations among participants of data sources and infrastructure providers to deliver their business value. The development of the QCDApp has to tackle the low-performance challenge of the current blockchain technologies due to the low collaboration efficiency among distributed peers for consensus. On the other hand, the resilience of the Cloud has enabled significant advances in software-defined storage, networking, infrastructure, and every technology; however, those rich programmabilities of infrastructure (in particular, the advances of new hardware accelerators in the infrastructures) can still not be effectively utilised for QCDApp due to lack of suitable architecture and programming model.

Mobile communication technology is developing rapidly, and this is integrated with technologies such as Software Defined Network (SDN), cloud computing, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Network Functions (NFs) are no longer deployed on dedicated hardware devices, while deployed in Virtual Machines (VMs) or containers as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). If VNFs are tampered with or replaced, the communication system will not function properly. Our research is to enhance the security of VNFs using trusted computing technology. By adding Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) to the virtualization platform, the chain of trust extends from the VM operating system to VNFs within the VM. Experimental results prove that the solution can effectively protect the integrity of VNFs from being attacked.

Information level protection standard 2.0 requires trusted verification of system bootstrappers, system programs, etc. of server equipment based on trusted root. According to the requirements of information level protection standard, this paper puts forward a network trusted start-up scheme based on the trusted platform control module to guarantee the security and trust of the server's BIOS firmware, PXE boot file and Linux system file. When publishing BIOS firmware, PXE startup file, Linux system file, the state-secret algorithm SM3 is used to calculate the summary value as the benchmark value, and stored in the trusted platform control module, BIOS firmware, Linux boot file. When the server starts up with PXE, the BIOS firmware is measured by the Trusted Platform Control Module, the BIOS Start Environment Measures PXE Boot File, and the PXE Boot File measures the Linux system file. The trusted platform control module is the trust root level measurement level, the first level of trust level, the trust chain, the implementation of a trusted server operating environment. The method proposed in this paper is tested on the domestic autonomous controllable Sunway server, and the experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper is feasible.

At present, most Trojan detection methods are based on the features of host and code. Such methods have certain limitations and lag. This paper analyzes the network behavior features and network traffic of several typical Trojans such as Zeus and Weasel, and proposes a Trojan traffic detection algorithm based on machine learning. First, model different machine learning algorithms and use Random Forest algorithm to extract features for Trojan behavior and communication features. Then identify and detect Trojans' traffic. The accuracy is as high as 95.1%. Comparing the detection of different machine learning algorithms, experiments show that our algorithm has higher accuracy, which is helpful and useful for identifying Trojan.

Information security provides a set of mechanisms to be implemented in the organisation to protect the disclosure of data to the unauthorised person. Access control is the primary security component that allows the user to authorise the consumption of resources and data based on the predefined permissions. However, the access rules are static in nature, which does not adapt to the dynamic environment includes but not limited to healthcare, cloud computing, IoT, National Security and Intelligence Arena and multi-centric system. There is a need for an additional countermeasure in access decision that can adapt to those working conditions to assess the threats and to ensure privacy and security are maintained. Risk analysis is an act of measuring the threats to the system through various means such as, analysing the user behaviour, evaluating the user trust, and security policies. It is a modular component that can be integrated into the existing access control to predict the risk. This study presents the different techniques and approaches applied for risk analysis in access control. Based on the insights gained, this paper formulates the taxonomy of risk analysis and properties that will allow researchers to focus on areas that need to be improved and new features that could be beneficial to stakeholders.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools provide visibility into sophisticated intrusions by matching system events against known adversarial behaviors. However, current solutions suffer from three challenges: 1) EDR tools generate a high volume of false alarms, creating backlogs of investigation tasks for analysts; 2) determining the veracity of these threat alerts requires tedious manual labor due to the overwhelming amount of low-level system logs, creating a "needle-in-a-haystack" problem; and 3) due to the tremendous resource burden of log retention, in practice the system logs describing long-lived attack campaigns are often deleted before an investigation is ever initiated.This paper describes an effort to bring the benefits of data provenance to commercial EDR tools. We introduce the notion of Tactical Provenance Graphs (TPGs) that, rather than encoding low-level system event dependencies, reason about causal dependencies between EDR-generated threat alerts. TPGs provide compact visualization of multi-stage attacks to analysts, accelerating investigation. To address EDR's false alarm problem, we introduce a threat scoring methodology that assesses risk based on the temporal ordering between individual threat alerts present in the TPG. In contrast to the retention of unwieldy system logs, we maintain a minimally-sufficient skeleton graph that can provide linkability between existing and future threat alerts. We evaluate our system, RapSheet, using the Symantec EDR tool in an enterprise environment. Results show that our approach can rank truly malicious TPGs higher than false alarm TPGs. Moreover, our skeleton graph reduces the long-term burden of log retention by up to 87%.

In order to develop safety-reliable standards for IoT (Internet of Things) networks, appropriate tools for their verification are needed. Among them there is a group of tools based on automated symbolic analysis. Such a tool is Tamarin software. Its usage for creating formal proofs of security protocols correctness has been presented in this paper using the simple example of an exchange of messages with asynchronous encryption between two agents. This model can be used in sensor networks or IoT e.g. in TLS protocol to provide a mechanism for secure cryptographic key exchange.

In smart cities, data privacy and security issues of Electronic Health Record(EHR) are grabbing importance day by day as cyber attackers have identified the weaknesses of EHR platforms. Besides, health insurance companies interacting with the EHRs play a vital role in covering the whole or a part of the financial risks of a patient. Insurance companies have specific policies for which patients have to pay them. Sometimes the insurance policies can be altered by fraudulent entities. Another problem that patients face in smart cities is when they interact with a health organization, insurance company, or others, they have to prove their identity to each of the organizations/companies separately. Health organizations or insurance companies have to ensure they know with whom they are interacting. To build a platform where a patient's personal information and insurance policy are handled securely, we introduce an application of blockchain to solve the above-mentioned issues. In this paper, we present a solution for the healthcare system that will provide patient privacy and transparency towards the insurance policies incorporating blockchain. Privacy of the patient information will be provided using cryptographic tools.

Mobile peer-to-peer network (MP2P) attracts increasing attentions due to the ubiquitous use of mobile communication and huge success of peer-to-peer (P2P) mode. However, open p2p mode makes nodes tend to be selfish, and the scarcity of resources in mobile nodes aggravates this problem, thus the nodes easily express a non-complete cooperative (NCC) attitude. Therefore, an identification of non-complete cooperative nodes and a corresponding trust routing scheme are proposed for MP2P in this paper. The concept of octant is firstly introduced to build a trust model which analyzes nodes from three dimensions, namely direct trust, internal state and recommendation reliability, and then the individual non-complete cooperative (INCC) nodes can be identified by the division of different octants. The direct trust monitors nodes' external behaviors, and the consideration of internal state and recommendation reliability contributes to differentiate the subjective and objective non-cooperation, and mitigate the attacks about direct trust values respectively. Thus, the trust model can identify various INCC nodes accurately. On the basis of identification of INCC nodes, cosine similarity method is applied to identify collusive non-complete cooperate (CNCC) nodes. Moreover, a trust routing scheme based on the identification of NCC nodes is presented to reasonably deal with different kinds of NCC nodes. Results from extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that this proposed identification and routing scheme have better performances, in terms of identification precision and packet delivery fraction than current schemes respectively.

This paper presents an initial architecture to manage End-to-End Network Slices which, once deployed, are associated with Security Service Level Agreement(s) to increase the security on the virtual deployed resources and create End-to-End Secure Network Slices. Moreover, the workflows regarding the Network Slicing provisioning and the whole SSLA Lifecycle management is detailed.

Today, authentication and non-repudiation of actions are essential requirements for almost all mobile services. In this respect, various common identity systems (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Apple ID and many other) based on OpenID Connect protocol have been introduced that support easier password management for users, and reduce potential risks by securing the service provider and the user. With the widespread use of the Internet, smartphones can offer many services with rich content. The use of common identity systems on mobile devices with a high security level is becoming a more important requirement. At this point, MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) have a significant potential and capability for providing common identity services. The existing solutions based on Mobile Connect standard provide generally low level of assurance. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for a common identity system that provide higher level of assurance and security for service providers. This study presents a multi-factor authentication mechanism called TrustedID system that is based on Mobile Connect and OpenID Connect standards, and ensures higher level of assurance. The proposed system aims to use three identity factors of the user in order to access sensitive mobile services on the smartphone. The proposed authentication system will support improvement of new value-added services and also support the development of mobile ecosystem.

Converging Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) in modern factories remains a challenging task. Several approaches such as Cloud, Fog or Edge computing aim to provide possible solutions for bridging OT that requires strict real-time processing with IT that targets computing functionality. In this context, this paper contributes to ongoing Fog computing research by presenting three industrial use cases with a specific focus on consolidation of functionality. Each use case exemplifies scenarios on how to use the computational resources closer to the edge of the network provided by a Fog Computing Platform (FCP). All use-cases utilize the same proposed FCP, which allows drawing a set of requirements on future FCPs, e.g. hardware, virtualization, security, communication and resource management. The central element of the FCP is the Fog Node (FN), built upon commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore processors (MCPs) and virtualization support. Resource management tools, advanced security features and state of the art communication protocols complete the FCP. The paper concludes by outlining future research challenges by comparing the proposed FCP with the identified requirements.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-less networks that are mainly used for establishing communication during the situation where wired network fails. Security related information collection is a fundamental part of the identification of attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). A node should find accessible routes to remaining nodes for information assortment and gather security related information during route discovery for choosing secured routes. During data communication, malicious nodes enter the network and cause disturbances during data transmission and reduce the performance of the system. In this manuscript, a Time Interval Based Blockchain Model (TIBBM) for security related information assortment that identifies malicious nodes in the MANET is proposed. The proposed model builds the Blockchain information structure which is utilized to distinguish malicious nodes at specified time intervals. To perform a malicious node identification process, a Network Block Monitoring Node (NBMN) is selected after route selection and this node will monitor the blocks created by the nodes in the routing table. At long last, NBMN node understands the location of malicious nodes by utilizing the Blocks created. The proposed model is compared with the traditional malicious node identification model and the results show that the proposed model exhibits better performance in malicious node detection.

The article focuses on the application of existing provisions of the automata and graph theories to solving the problem of testing software and hardware data security tools (DST). The software and hardware DST, unlike software ones, include hardware components that implement key security functions, while preventing from using a number of testing methods and tools. In addition to the possibility of applying a particular known testing method or tool to software and hardware DST, what remains acute is the problem of ensuring completeness and optimality of such testing. The developers of various DST do not often have a clear understanding of when they can stop testing and whether the test results allow them to talk about its completeness. Accordingly, testing of DST is often spontaneous, and the developer does not understand whether all the security functions have been tested, whether all the states and all possible sets of parameters have been tested, and whether testing is being carried out in the optimal way. To eliminate these shortcomings, the authors of the article propose to use a mathematical approach based on the theories of automata and graphs to solve the problem of testing software and hardware DST, which can be also used for other software and hardware, as well as software tools and systems. Applying this approach in practice, it is possible to confirm or reject the possibility of ensuring completeness of testing a specific data security tool, as well as identifying specific measures to ensure completeness and optimality of testing.

Conversational agents (CAs), often referred to as chatbots, are being widely deployed within existing commercial frameworks and online service websites. As society moves further into incorporating data rich systems, like the internet of things (IoT), into daily life, it is expected that conversational agents will take on an increasingly important role to help users manage these complex systems. In this, the concept of personality is becoming increasingly important, as we seek for more human-friendly ways to interact with these CAs. In this work a conceptual framework is proposed that considers how existing standard psychological and persona models could be mapped to different kinds of CA functionality outside of strictly dialogue. As CAs become more diverse in their abilities, and more integrated with different kinds of systems, it is important to consider how function can be impacted by the design of agent personality, whether intentionally designed or not. Based on this framework, derived archetype classes of CAs are presented as starting points that can hopefully aid designers, developers, and the curious, into thinking about how to work toward better CA personality development.

Established research on pair programming reveals benefits, including increasing communication, creativity, self-efficacy, and promoting gender inclusivity. However, research has reported limitations such as finding a compatible partner, scheduling sessions between partners, and resistance to pairing. Further, pairings can be affected by predispositions to negative stereotypes. These problems can be addressed by replacing one human member of the pair with a conversational agent. To investigate the design space of such a conversational agent, we conducted a controlled remote pair programming study. Our analysis found various creative problem-solving strategies and differences in conversational styles. We further analyzed the transferable strategies from human-human collaboration to human-agent collaboration by conducting a Wizard of Oz study. The findings from the two studies helped us gain insights regarding design of a programmer conversational agent. We make recommendations for researchers and practitioners for designing pair programming conversational agent tools.

The automotive Controller Area Network (CAN) allows Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to communicate with each other and control various vehicular functions such as engine and braking control. Consequently CAN and ECUs are high priority targets for hackers. As CAN implementation details are held as proprietary information by vehicle manufacturers, it can be challenging to decode and correlate CAN messages to specific vehicle operations. To understand the precise meanings of CAN messages, reverse engineering techniques that are time-consuming, manually intensive, and require a physical vehicle are typically used. This work aims to address the process of reverse engineering CAN messages for their functionality by creating a machine learning classifier that analyzes messages and determines their relationship to other messages and vehicular functions. Our work examines CAN traffic of different vehicles and standards to show that it can be applied to a wide arrangement of vehicles. The results show that the function of CAN messages can be determined without the need to manually reverse engineer a physical vehicle.

For cyber-physical systems (CPS), ensuring process and data security is critically important since the corresponding infrastructure needs to have high operational efficiency with no downtime. There are many techniques available that make communications in CPS environments secure - such as enabling traffic encryption between sensors and the computers processing the sensor's data, incorporating message authentication codes to achieve integrity, etc. However, most of these techniques are dependent on some form of symmetric or asymmetric cryptographic algorithms like AES and RSA. These algorithms are under threat because of the emerging quantum computing paradigm: with quantum computing, these encryption algorithms can be potentially broken. It is therefore desirable to explore the use of quantum cryptography - which cannot be broken by quantum computing - for securing the classical communications infrastructure deployed in CPS. In this paper, we discuss possible consequences of this option. We also explain how quantum computers can help even more: namely, they can be used to maximize the system's security where scalability is never a constraint, and to ensure we are not wasting time cycles on communicating and processing irrelevant information.

True Random number Generator (TRNG) is critical for secure communications. In this work, we explain in details regarding our recent solution on TRNG using random telegraph noise (RTN) including the benefits and the disadvantages. Security check is performed using the NIST randomness tests for both the RTN-based TRNG and various conventional pseudo random umber generator. The newly-proposed design shows excellent randomness, power consumption, low design complexity, small area and high speed, making it a suitable candidate for future cryptographically secured applications within the internet of things.

We re-use a polarization-multiplexed I/Q modulator to acquire the quantum randomness of its seed laser light for the purpose of quantum random number generation. We obtain 9×104 256-bit AES keys/second after randomness extraction. Time-interleaved random number generation is demonstrated for PM-QPSK transmission.

Recommender systems (RSs) are intelligent systems to help e-commerce users to find their preferred items among millions of available items by considering the profiles of both users and items. These systems need to predict the unknown ratings and then recommend a set of high rated items. Among the others, Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a successful recommendation approach and has been utilized in many real-world systems. CF methods seek to predict missing ratings by considering the preferences of those users who are similar to the target user. A major task in Collaborative Filtering is to identify an accurate set of users and employing them in the rating prediction process. Most of the CF-based methods suffer from the cold-start issue which arising from an insufficient number of ratings in the prediction process. This is due to the fact that users only comment on a few items and thus CF methods faced with a sparse user-item matrix. To tackle this issue, a new collaborative filtering method is proposed that has a trust-aware strategy. The proposed method employs the trust relationships of users as additional information to help the CF tackle the cold-start issue. To this end, the proposed integrated trust relationships in the prediction process by using the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The proposed method has four main steps. The aim of the first step is ranking users based on their similarities to the target user. This step uses trust relationships and the available rating values in its process. Then in the second step, graph clustering methods are used to cluster the trust graph to group similar users. In the third step, the users are weighted based on their similarities to the target users. To this end, an ACO process is employed on the users' graph. Finally, those of top users with high similarity to the target user are used in the rating prediction process. The superiority of our method has been shown in the experimental results in comparison with well-known and state-of-the-art methods.