Biblio

The Internet of Things (IoT) relies on sensor devices to measure real-world phenomena in order to provide IoT services. The sensor readings are shared with multiple entities, such as IoT services, other IoT devices or other third parties. The collected data may be sensitive and include personal information. To protect the privacy of the users, the data needs to be protected through an encryption algorithm. For sharing cryptographic cipher-texts with a group of users Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is well suited, as it does not require to create group keys. However, the creation of ABE cipher-texts is slow when executed on resource constraint devices, such as IoT sensors. In this paper, we present a modification of an ABE scheme, which not only allows to encrypt data efficiently using ABE but also reduces the size of the cipher-text, that must be transmitted by the sensor. We also show how our modification can be used to realise an instantaneous key revocation mechanism.

The emergence of novel technologies and high speed networks has enabled a continually generation of huge volumes of data that should be stored and processed. These big data have allowed the emergence of new forms of complex attacks whose resolution represents a big challenge. Different methods and tools are developed to deal with this issue but definite detection is still needed since various features are not considered and tracing back an attack remains a timely activity. In this context, we propose an investigation framework that allows the reconstruction of complex attack scenarios based on huge volume of data. This framework used a temporal conceptual graph to represent the big data and the dependency between them in addition to the tracing back of the whole attack scenario. The selection of the most probable attack scenario is assisted by a developed decision model based on hybrid neural network that enables the real time classification of the possible attack scenarios using RBF networks and the convergence to the most potential attack scenario within the support of an Elman network. The efficiency of the proposed framework has been illustrated for the global attack reconstruction process targeting a smart city where a set of available services are involved.

In this paper, we use machine learning, namely an artificial neural network to determine what are the chances that Facebook friend request is authentic or not. We also outline the classes and libraries involved. Furthermore, we discuss the sigmoid function and how the weights are determined and used. Finally, we consider the parameters of the social network page which are utmost important in the provided solution.

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is a rapidly developing field which has evolved in direct response to exponential growth in cyber related crimes and attacks. CTI supports Communication and Information System (CIS)Security in order to bolster defenses and aids in the development of threat models that inform an organization's decision making process. In a military organization like NATO, CTI additionally supports Cyberspace Operations by providing the Commander with essential intelligence about the adversary, their capabilities and objectives while operating in and through cyberspace. There have been many contributions to the CTI field; a noteworthy contribution is the ATT&CK® framework by the Mitre Corporation. ATT&CK® contains a comprehensive list of adversary tactics and techniques linked to custom or publicly known Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) which aids an analyst in the characterization of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). The ATT&CK® framework also demonstrates possibility of supporting an organization with linking observed tactics and techniques to specific APT behavior, which may assist with adversary characterization and identification, necessary steps towards attribution. The NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCI Agency) have been experimenting with the use of deception techniques (including decoys) to increase the collection of adversary related data. The collected data is mapped to the tactics and techniques described in the ATT&CK® framework, in order to derive evidence to support adversary characterization; this intelligence is pivotal for the Commander to support mission planning and determine the best possible multi-domain courses of action. This paper describes the approach, methodology, outcomes and next steps for the conducted experiments.

We present Diana, an embodied agent who is aware of her own virtual space and the physical space around her. Using video and depth sensors, Diana attends to the user's gestures, body language, gaze and (soon) facial expressions as well as their words. Diana also gestures and emotes in addition to speaking, and exists in a 3D virtual world that the user can see. This produces symmetric and shared perception, in the sense that Diana can see the user, the user can see Diana, and both can see the virtual world. The result is an embodied agent that begins to develop the conceit that the user is interacting with a peer rather than a program.

Identity management is an essential cornerstone of securing online services. Service provisioning relies on correct and valid attributes of a digital identity. Therefore, the identity provider is a trusted third party with a specific trust requirement towards a verified attribute supply. This trust demand implies a significant dependency on users and service providers. We propose a novel attribute aggregation method to reduce the reliance on one identity provider. Trust in an attribute is modelled as a combined assurance of several identity providers based on probability distributions. We formally describe the proposed aggregation model. The resulting trust model is implemented in a gateway that is used for authentication with self-sovereign identity solutions. Thereby, we devise a service provider specific web of trust that constitutes an intermediate approach bridging a global hierarchical model and a locally decentralized peer to peer scheme.

Software defined networks represent a new centralized network abstraction that aims to ease configuration and facilitate applications and services deployment to manage the upper layers. However, SDN faces several challenges that slow down its implementation such as security which represents one of the top concerns of SDN experts. Indeed, SDN inherits all security matters from traditional networks and suffers from some additional vulnerability due to its centralized and unique architecture. Using traditional security devices and solutions to mitigate SDN threats can be very complicated and can negatively effect the networks performance. In this paper we propose a study that measures the impact of using some well-known security solution to mitigate intrusions on SDN's performances. We will also present an algorithm named KPG-MT adapted to SDN architecture that aims to mitigate threats such as a Man in the Middle, Deny of Services and malware-based attacks. An implementation of our algorithm based on multiple attacks' scenarios and mitigation processes will be made to prove the efficiency of the proposed framework.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are state-of-the-art communication environments that offer various applications with distinct requirements. However, security in CPS is a nonnegotiable concept, since without a proper security mechanism the applications of CPS may risk human lives, the privacy of individuals, and system operations. In this paper, we focus on PHY-layer security approaches in CPS to prevent passive eavesdropping attacks, and we propose an integration of physical layer operations to enhance security. Thanks to the McEliece cryptosystem, error injection is firstly applied to information bits, which are encoded with the forward error correction (FEC) schemes. Golay and Hamming codes are selected as FEC schemes to satisfy power and computational efficiency. Then obtained codewords are transmitted across reliable intermediate relays to the legitimate receiver. As a performance metric, the decoding frame error rate of the eavesdropper is analytically obtained for the fragmentary existence of significant noise between relays and Eve. The simulation results validate the analytical calculations, and the obtained results show that the number of low-quality channels and the selected FEC scheme affects the performance of the proposed model.

An approach for effective regression test selection is proposed, which minimizes the resource usage and amount of time required for complete testing of new features. Provided are the details of the analysis of hashing algorithms used during implementation in-depth review of the software, together with the results achieved during the testing process.

With the increasing interest in studying Automated Driving System (ADS)-equipped vehicles through simulation, there is a growing need for comprehensive and agile middleware to provide novel Virtual Analysis (VA) functions of ADS-equipped vehicles towards enabling a reliable representation for pre-deployment test. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Universal Cyber-physical systems Environment for Federation (UCEF) is such a VA environment. It provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) capable of ensuring synchronized interactions across multiple simulation platforms such as LabVIEW, OMNeT++, Ricardo IGNITE, and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. UCEF can aid engineers and researchers in understanding the impact of different constraints associated with complex cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this work UCEF is used to produce a simulated Operational Domain Design (ODD) for ADS-equipped vehicles where control (drive cycle/speed pattern), sensing (obstacle detection, traffic signs and lights), and threats (unusual signals, hacked sources) are represented as UCEF federates to simulate a drive cycle and to feed it to vehicle dynamics simulators (e.g. OpenModelica or Ricardo IGNITE) through the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI). In this way we can subject the vehicle to a wide range of scenarios, collect data on the resulting interactions, and analyze those interactions using metrics to understand trustworthiness impact. Trustworthiness is defined here as in the NIST Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems, and is comprised of system reliability, resiliency, safety, security, and privacy. The goal of this work is to provide an example of an experimental design strategy using Fractional Factorial Design for statistically assessing the most important safety metrics in ADS-equipped vehicles.

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks become the important security threat of the IoT. Characteristics of IoT, such as large quantities and simple function, which have easily caused the IoT devices or servers to be attacked and be turned into botnets for launching DDoS attacks. In this paper, we use software-defined networking (SDN) to develop moving target defense (MTD) architecture that increases uncertainty because of ever changing attack surface. In addition, we deploy SDN-based honeypots to mimic IoT devices, luring attackers and malwares. Finally, experimental results show that combination of MTD and SDN-based honeypots can effectively hide network asset from scanner and defend against DDoS attacks in IoT.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has recently become one of the highly active research areas for wireless networking. Since VANET is a multi-hop wireless network with very high mobility and intermittent connection lifetime, it is important to effectively handle the data dissemination issue in this rapidly changing environment. However, the existing TCP/IP implementation may not fit into such a highly dynamic environment because the nodes in the network must often perform rerouting due to their inconsistency of connectivity. In addition, the drivers in the vehicles may want to acquire some data, but they do not know the address/location of such data storage. Hence, the named data networking (NDN) approach may be more desirable here. The NDN architecture is proposed for the future Internet, which focuses on the delivering mechanism based on the message contents instead of relying on the host addresses of the data. In this paper, a new protocol named roadside unit (RSU) assisted of named data network (RA-NDN) is presented. The RSU can operate as a standalone node [standalone RSU (SA-RSU)]. One benefit of deploying SA-RSUs is the improved network connectivity. This study uses the NS3 and SUMO software packages for the network simulator and traffic simulator software, respectively, to verify the performance of the RA-NDN protocol. To reduce the latency under various vehicular densities, vehicular transmission ranges, and number of requesters, the proposed approach is compared with vehicular NDN via a real-world data set in the urban area of Sathorn road in Bangkok, Thailand. The simulation results show that the RA-NDN protocol improves the performance of ad hoc communications with the increase in data received ratio and throughput and the decrease in total dissemination time and traffic load.

Content centric networking (CCN) where content/named data as the first entity has become one of the most promising architectures for the future Internet. To achieve better security, the Interest NACK mechanism is introduced into CCN; however, it has not attracted enough attention and most of the CCN architectures do not embed Interest NACK until now. This study focuses on analysing the urgency of implementing Interest NACK into CCN, by designing a novel network threat named advanced interest flooding attack (AIFA) to attack CCN, which can not only exhaust the pending interest table (PIT) resource of each involved router just as normal interest flooding attack (IFA), but also keep each PIT entry unexpired until it finishes, making it harder to detect and more harmful when compared with the normal IFA. Specifically, the damage of AIFA on CCN architecture with and without Interest NACK is evaluated and analysed, compared with normal IFA, and then the urgency of implementing Interest NACK is highlighted.

This article shows the analogy between natural language texts and quantum-like systems on the example of the Bell test calculating. The applicability of the well-known Bell test for texts in Russian is investigated. The possibility of using this test for the text separation on the topics corresponding to the user query in information retrieval system is shown.

Moving target defense (MTD) is becoming popular with the advancements in Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. With centralized management through SDN, changing the network attributes such as routes to escape from attacks is simple and fast. Yet, the available alternate routes are bounded by the network topology, and a persistent attacker that continuously perform the reconnaissance can extract the whole link-map of the network. To address this issue, we propose to use virtual shadow networks (VSNs) by applying Network Function Virtualization (NFV) abilities to the network in order to deceive attacker with the fake topology information and not reveal the actual network topology and characteristics. We design this approach under a formal framework for Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks and apply it to the recently emerged indirect DDoS attacks, namely Crossfire, for evaluation. The results show that attacker spends more time to figure out the network behavior while the costs on the defender and network operations are negligible until reaching a certain network size.

This paper provides an approach to the detection of information security breaches in automated process control systems (APCS), which consists in forecasting multivariate time series formed from the values of the operating parameters of the end system devices. Using an experimental model of water treatment, a comparison was made of the forecasting results for the parameters characterizing the operation of the entire model, and for the parameters characterizing the flow of individual subprocesses implemented by the model. For forecasting, GRU-neural network training was performed.

We present a unified communication architecture for security requirements in the industrial internet of things. Formulating security requirements in the language of OPC UA provides a unified method to communicate and compare security requirements within a heavily heterogeneous landscape of machines in the field. Our machine-readable data model provides a fully automatable approach for security requirement communication within the rapidly evolving fourth industrial revolution, which is characterized by high-grade interconnection of industrial infrastructures and self-configuring production systems. Capturing security requirements in an OPC UA compliant and unified data model for industrial control systems enables strong use cases within modern production plants and future supply chains. We implement our data model as well as an OPC UA server that operates on this model to show the feasibility of our approach. Further, we deploy and evaluate our framework within a reference project realized by 14 industrial partners and 7 research facilities within Germany.

Flow-based network attack detection technology is able to identify many threats in network traffic. Existing techniques have several drawbacks: i) rule-based approaches are vulnerable because it needs all the signatures defined for the possible attacks, ii) anomaly-based approaches are not efficient because it is easy to find ways to launch attacks that bypass detection, and iii) both rule-based and anomaly-based approaches heavily rely on domain knowledge of networked system and cyber security. The major challenge to existing methods is to understand novel attack scenarios and design a model to detect novel and more serious attacks. In this paper, we investigate network attacks and unveil the key activities and the relationships between these activities. For that reason, we propose methods to understand the network security practices using theoretic concepts such as graph kernels. In addition, we integrate graph kernels over deep learning architecture to exploit the relationship expressiveness among network flows and combine ability of deep neural networks (DNNs) with deep architectures to learn hidden representations, based on the communication representation graph of each network flow in a specific time interval, then the flow-based network attack detection can be done effectively by measuring the similarity between the graphs to two flows. The proposed study provides the effectiveness to obtain insights about network attacks and detect network attacks. Using two real-world datasets which contain several new types of network attacks, we achieve significant improvements in accuracies over existing network attack detection tasks.

Security vulnerabilities are among the most critical software defects in existence. When identified, programmers aim to produce patches that prevent the vulnerability as quickly as possible, motivating the need for automatic program repair (APR) methods to generate patches automatically. Unfortunately, most current APR methods fall short because they approximate the properties necessary to prevent the vulnerability using examples. Approximations result in patches that either do not fix the vulnerability comprehensively, or may even introduce new bugs. Instead, we propose property-based APR, which uses human-specified, program-independent and vulnerability-specific safety properties to derive source code patches for security vulnerabilities. Unlike properties that are approximated by observing the execution of test cases, such safety properties are precise and complete. The primary challenge lies in mapping such safety properties into source code patches that can be instantiated into an existing program. To address these challenges, we propose Senx, which, given a set of safety properties and a single input that triggers the vulnerability, detects the safety property violated by the vulnerability input and generates a corresponding patch that enforces the safety property and thus, removes the vulnerability. Senx solves several challenges with property-based APR: it identifies the program expressions and variables that must be evaluated to check safety properties and identifies the program scopes where they can be evaluated, it generates new code to selectively compute the values it needs if calling existing program code would cause unwanted side effects, and it uses a novel access range analysis technique to avoid placing patches inside loops where it could incur performance overhead. Our evaluation shows that the patches generated by Senx successfully fix 32 of 42 real-world vulnerabilities from 11 applications including various tools or libraries for manipulating graphics/media files, a programming language interpreter, a relational database engine, a collection of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, and a collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation tools.

Inference of unknown opinions with uncertain, adversarial (e.g., incorrect or conflicting) evidence in large datasets is not a trivial task. Without proper handling, it can easily mislead decision making in data mining tasks. In this work, we propose a highly scalable opinion inference probabilistic model, namely Adversarial Collective Opinion Inference (Adv-COI), which provides a solution to infer unknown opinions with high scalability and robustness under the presence of uncertain, adversarial evidence by enhancing Collective Subjective Logic (CSL) which is developed by combining SL and Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL). The key idea behind the Adv-COI is to learn a model of robust ways against uncertain, adversarial evidence which is formulated as a min-max problem. We validate the out-performance of the Adv-COI compared to baseline models and its competitive counterparts under possible adversarial attacks on the logic-rule based structured data and white and black box adversarial attacks under both clean and perturbed semi-synthetic and real-world datasets in three real world applications. The results show that the Adv-COI generates the lowest mean absolute error in the expected truth probability while producing the lowest running time among all.

The prevalence of Cloud Computing has appealed many users to put their business into low-cost and flexible cloud servers instead of bare-metal machines. Most virtual machines in the cloud run commodity operating system(e.g., linux), and the complexity of such operating systems makes them more bug-prone and easier to be compromised. To mitigate the security threats, previous works attempt to mediate and filter system calls, transform all unpopular paths into popular paths, or implement a nested kernel along with the untrusted outter kernel to enforce certain security policies. However, such solutions only enforce read-only protection or assume that popular paths in the kernel to contain almost no bug, which is not always the case in the real world. To overcome their shortcomings and combine their advantages as much as possible, we propose a hardware-assisted isolation mechanism that isolates untrusted part of the kernel. To achieve isolation, we prepare multiple restricted Extended Page Table (EPT) during boot time, each of which has certain critical data unmapped from it so that the code executing in the isolated environment could not access sensitive data. We leverage the VMFUNC instruction already available in recent Intel processors to directly switch to another pre-defined EPT inside guest virtual machine without trapping into the underlying hypervisor, which is faster than the traditional trap-and-emulate procedure. The semantic gap is minimized and real-time check is achieved by allowing EPT violations to be converted to Virtualization Exception (VE), which could be handled inside guest kernel in non-root mode. Our preliminary evaluation shows that with hardware virtualization feature, we are able to run the untrusted code in an isolated environment with negligible overhead.

As trust becomes increasingly important in the software domain. Due to its complex composite concept, people face great challenges, especially in today's dynamic and constantly changing internet technology. In addition, measuring the software trustworthiness correctly and effectively plays a significant role in gaining users trust in choosing different software. In the context of security, trust is previously measured based on the vulnerability time occurrence to predict the total number of vulnerabilities or their future occurrence time. In this study, we proposed a new unified index called "loss speed index" that integrates the most important variables of software security such as vulnerability occurrence time, number and severity loss, which are used to evaluate the overall software trust measurement. Based on this new definition, a new model called software trustworthy security growth model (STSGM) has been proposed. This paper also aims at filling the gap by addressing the severity of vulnerabilities and proposed a vulnerability severity prediction model, the results are further evaluated by STSGM to estimate the future loss speed index. Our work has several features such as: (1) It is used to predict the vulnerability severity/type in future, (2) Unlike traditional evaluation methods like expert scoring, our model uses historical data to predict the future loss speed of software, (3) The loss metric value is used to evaluate the risk associated with different software, which has a direct impact on software trustworthiness. Experiments performed on real software vulnerability datasets and its results are analyzed to check the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed model.

Increasingly modern data science platforms today have non-intrusive and extensible provenance ingestion mechanisms to collect rich provenance and context information, handle modifications to the same file using distinguishable versions, and use graph data models (e.g., property graphs) and query languages (e.g., Cypher) to represent and manipulate the stored provenance/context information. Due to the schema-later nature of the metadata, multiple versions of the same files, and unfamiliar artifacts introduced by team members, the resulting "provenance graphs" are quite verbose and evolving; further, it is very difficult for the users to compose queries and utilize this valuable information just using standard graph query model. In this paper, we propose two high-level graph query operators to address the verboseness and evolving nature of such provenance graphs. First, we introduce a graph segmentation operator, which queries the retrospective provenance between a set of source vertices and a set of destination vertices via flexible boundary criteria to help users get insight about the derivation relationships among those vertices. We show the semantics of such a query in terms of a context-free grammar, and develop efficient algorithms that run orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art. Second, we propose a graph summarization operator that combines similar segments together to query prospective provenance of the underlying project. The operator allows tuning the summary by ignoring vertex details and characterizing local structures, and ensures the provenance meaning using path constraints. We show the optimal summary problem is PSPACE-complete and develop effective approximation algorithms. We implement the operators on top of Neo4j, evaluate our query techniques extensively, and show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things, intelligent manufacturing has gradually entered the application stage, which urgently needs to solve the problem of information transmission security. In order to realize data security with transmission encryption, the UHF RFID tag based on domestic cryptographic algorithm SM7 is proposed. By writing the anti-counterfeiting authentication identification code when the tag leaves the factory, verifying the identification code when the tag is issued, and using the authentication code of the tag to participate in the sectoral key dispersion, the purpose of data security protection is achieved. Through this scheme, the security of tag information and transmission is guaranteed, and a new idea is provided for the follow-up large-scale extension of intelligent manufacturing.