Biblio

With the development of social networks, traditional covert communication requires more consideration of lossy processes of Social Network Platforms (SNPs), which is called robust steganography. Since JPEG compression is a universal processing of SNPs, a method using repeated JPEG compression to fit transport channel matching is recently proposed and shows strong compression-resist performance. However, the repeated JPEG compression will inevitably introduce other artifacts into the stego image. Using only traditional steganalysis methods does not work well towards such robust steganography under low payload. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method to detect the mentioned steganography by chasing both steganographic perturbations as well as continuous compression artifacts. We introduce compression-forensic features as a complement to steganalysis features, and then use the ensemble classifier for detection. Experiments demonstrate that this method owns a similar and better performance with respect to both traditional and neural-network-based steganalysis.

Steganography is the technique of hiding a confidential message in an ordinary message where the extraction of embedded information is done at its destination. Among the different carrier files formats; digital images are the most popular. This paper presents a Wavelet-based method for hiding secret information in digital images where skin areas are identified and used as a region of interest. The work presented here is an extension of a method published earlier by the authors that utilized a rule-based approach to detect skin regions. The proposed method, proposed embedding the secret data into the integer Wavelet coefficients of the approximation sub-band of the cover image. When compared to the original technique, experimental results showed a lower error percentage between skin maps detected before the embedding and during the extraction processes. This eventually increased the similarity between the original and the retrieved secret image.

Minimizing embedding impact model of steganography has good performance for steganalysis detection. By using effective distortion cost function and coding method, steganography under this model becomes the mainstream embedding framework recently. In this paper, to improve the anti-detection performance, a new steganography optimization model by constructing a reference cover is proposed. First, a reference cover is construed by performing a filtering operation on the cover image. Then, by minimizing the residual between the reference cover and the original cover, the optimization function is formulated considering the effect of different modification directions. With correcting the distortion cost of +1 and \_1 modification operations, the stego image obtained by the proposed method is more consistent with the natural image. Finally, by applying the proposed framework to the cost function of the well-known HILL embedding, experimental results show that the anti-detection performance of the proposed method is better than the traditional method.

While cloud-based deep learning benefits for high-accuracy inference, it leads to potential privacy risks when exposing sensitive data to untrusted servers. In this paper, we work on exploring the feasibility of steganography in preserving inference privacy. Specifically, we devise GHOST and GHOST+, two private inference solutions employing steganography to make sensitive images invisible in the inference phase. Motivated by the fact that deep neural networks (DNNs) are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks, our main idea is turning this vulnerability into the weapon for data privacy, enabling the DNN to misclassify a stego image into the class of the sensitive image hidden in it. The main difference is that GHOST retrains the DNN into a poisoned network to learn the hidden features of sensitive images, but GHOST+ leverages a generative adversarial network (GAN) to produce adversarial perturbations without altering the DNN. For enhanced privacy and a better computation-communication trade-off, both solutions adopt the edge-cloud collaborative framework. Compared with the previous solutions, this is the first work that successfully integrates steganography and the nature of DNNs to achieve private inference while ensuring high accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that steganography has excellent ability in accuracy-aware privacy protection of deep learning.

In our time the rapid growth of internet and digital communications has been required to be protected from illegal users. It is important to secure the information transmitted between the sender and receiver over the communication channels such as the internet, since it is a public environment. Cryptography and Steganography are the most popular techniques used for sending data in secrete way. In this paper, we are proposing a new algorithm that combines both cryptography and steganography in order to increase the level of data security against attackers. In cryptography, we are using affine hill cipher method; while in steganography we are using Hybrid edge detection with LSB to hide the message. Our paper shows how we can use image edges to hide text message. Grayscale images are used for our experiments and a comparison is developed based on using different edge detection operators such as (canny-LoG ) and (Canny-Sobel). Their performance is measured using PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise ratio), MSE (Mean Squared Error) and EC (Embedding Capacity). The results indicate that, using hybrid edge detection (canny- LoG) with LSB for hiding data could provide high embedding capacity than using hybrid edge detection (canny- Sobel) with LSB. We could prove that hiding in the image edge area could preserve the imperceptibility of the Stego-image. This paper has also proved that the secrete message was extracted successfully without any distortion.

In the present innovation, for the trading of information, the internet is the most well-known and significant medium. With the progression of the web and data innovation, computerized media has become perhaps the most famous and notable data transfer tools. This advanced information incorporates text, pictures, sound, video etc moved over the public organization. The majority of these advanced media appear as pictures and are a significant part in different applications, for example, chat, talk, news, website, web-based business, email, and digital books. The content is still facing various challenges in which including the issues of protection of copyright, modification, authentication. Cryptography, steganography, embedding techniques is widely used to secure the digital data. In this present the hybrid model of LSB steganography and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptography techniques to enhanced the security of the digital image and text that is undeniably challenging to break by the unapproved person. The security level of the secret information is estimated in the term of MSE and PSNR for better hiding required the low MSE and high PSNR values.

Data or information are being transferred at an enormous pace and hence protecting and securing this transmission of data are very important and have been very challenging. Cryptography and Steganography are the most broadly used techniques for safeguarding data by encryption of data and hiding the existence of data. A multi-layered secure transmission can be achieved by combining Cryptography with Steganography and by adding message authentication ensuring the confidentiality of the message. Different approach towards Steganography implementation is proposed using rotations and flips to prevent detection of encoded messages. Compression of multimedia files is set up for increasing the speed of encoding and consuming less storage space. The HMAC (Hash-based Authentication Code) algorithm is chosen for message authentication and integrity. The performance of the proposed Steganography methods is concluded using Histogram comparative analysis. Simulations have been performed to back the reliability of the proposed method.

Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.

Ethical bias in machine learning models has become a matter of concern in the software engineering community. Most of the prior software engineering works concentrated on finding ethical bias in models rather than fixing it. After finding bias, the next step is mitigation. Prior researchers mainly tried to use supervised approaches to achieve fairness. However, in the real world, getting data with trustworthy ground truth is challenging and also ground truth can contain human bias. Semi-supervised learning is a technique where, incrementally, labeled data is used to generate pseudo-labels for the rest of data (and then all that data is used for model training). In this work, we apply four popular semi-supervised techniques as pseudo-labelers to create fair classification models. Our framework, Fair-SSL, takes a very small amount (10%) of labeled data as input and generates pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. We then synthetically generate new data points to balance the training data based on class and protected attribute as proposed by Chakraborty et al. in FSE 2021. Finally, classification model is trained on the balanced pseudo-labeled data and validated on test data. After experimenting on ten datasets and three learners, we find that Fair-SSL achieves similar performance as three state-of-the-art bias mitigation algorithms. That said, the clear advantage of Fair-SSL is that it requires only 10% of the labeled training data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SE work where semi-supervised techniques are used to fight against ethical bias in SE ML models. To facilitate open science and replication, all our source code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/joymallyac/FairSSL. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning. ACM Reference Format: Joymallya Chakraborty, Suvodeep Majumder, and Huy Tu. 2022. Fair-SSL: Building fair ML Software with less data. In International Workshop on Equitable Data and Technology (FairWare ‘22), May 9, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3524491.3527305

The Activity and Event Network (AEN) graph is a new framework that allows modeling and detecting intrusions by capturing ongoing security-relevant activity and events occurring at a given organization using a large time-varying graph model. The graph is generated by processing various network security logs, such as network packets, system logs, and intrusion detection alerts. In this paper, we show how known attack methods can be captured generically using attack fingerprints based on the AEN graph. The fingerprints are constructed by identifying attack idiosyncrasies under the form of subgraphs that represent indicators of compromise (IOes), and then encoded using Property Graph Query Language (PGQL) queries. Among the many attack types, three main categories are implemented as a proof of concept in this paper: scanning, denial of service (DoS), and authentication breaches; each category contains its common variations. The experimental evaluation of the fingerprints was carried using a combination of intrusion detection datasets and yielded very encouraging results.

The advancements in technology can be seen in recent years, and people have been adopting the emerging technologies. Though people rely upon these advancements, many loopholes can be seen if you take a particular field, and attackers are thirsty to steal personal data. There has been an increasing number of cyber threats and breaches happening worldwide, primarily for fun or for ransoms. Web servers and sites of the users are being compromised, and they are unaware of the vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities include OWASP's top vulnerabilities like SQL injection, Cross-site scripting, and so on. To overcome the vulnerabilities and protect the site from getting down, the proposed work includes the implementation of a Web Application Firewall focused on the Application layer of the OSI Model; the product protects the target web applications from the Common OWASP security vulnerabilities. The Application starts analyzing the incoming and outgoing requests generated from the traffic through the pre-built Application Programming Interface. It compares the request and parameter with the algorithm, which has a set of pre-built regex patterns. The outcome of the product is to detect and reject general OWASP security vulnerabilities, helping to secure the user's business and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data, respectively.

To restrict unauthorized access to the data of the website. Most of the web-based systems nowadays require users to verify themselves before accessing the website is authentic information. In terms of security, it is very important to take different security measures for the protection of the authentic data of the website. However, most of the authentication systems which are used on the web today have several security flaws. This document is based on the security of the previous schemes. Compared to the previous approaches, this “spoofed proof stateless session model” method offers superior security assurance in a scenario in which an attacker has unauthorized access to the data of the website. The various protocol models are being developed and implemented on the web to analyze the performance. The aim was to secure the authentic database backups of the website and prevent them from SQL injection attacks by using the read-only properties for the database. This limits potential harm and provides users with reasonable security safeguards when an attacker has an unauthorized read-only access to the website's authentic database. This scheme provides robustness to the disclosure of authentic databases. Proven experimental results show the overheads due to the modified authentication method and the insecure model.

For a long time, SQL injection has been considered one of the most serious security threats. NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular as big data and cloud computing technologies progress. NoSQL injection attacks are designed to take advantage of applications that employ NoSQL databases. NoSQL injections can be particularly harmful because they allow unrestricted code execution. In this paper we use supervised learning and natural language processing to construct a model to detect NoSQL injections. Our model is designed to work with MongoDB, CouchDB, CassandraDB, and Couchbase queries. Our model has achieved an F1 score of 0.95 as established by 10-fold cross validation.

The increasing use of Information Technology applications in the distributed environment is increasing security exploits. Information about vulnerabilities is also available on the open web in an unstructured format that developers can take advantage of to fix vulnerabilities in their IT applications. SQL injection (SQLi) attacks are frequently launched with the objective of exfiltration of data typically through targeting the back-end server organisations to compromise their customer databases. There have been a number of high profile attacks against large enterprises in recent years. With the ever-increasing growth of online trading, it is possible to see how SQLi attacks can continue to be one of the leading routes for cyber-attacks in the future, as indicated by findings reported in OWASP. Various machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been applied to detect and prevent these attacks. However, such preventive attempts have not limited the incidence of cyber-attacks and the resulting compromised database as reported by (CVE) repository. In this paper, the potential of using data mining approaches is pursued in order to enhance the efficacy of SQL injection safeguarding measures by reducing the false-positive rates in SQLi detection. The proposed approach uses CountVectorizer to extract features and then apply various supervised machine-learning models to automate the classification of SQLi. The model that returns the highest accuracy has been chosen among available models. Also a new model has been created PALOSDM (Performance analysis and Iterative optimisation of the SQLI Detection Model) for reducing false-positive rate and false-negative rate. The detection rate accuracy has also been improved significantly from a baseline of 94% up to 99%.

Security is undoubtedly the most serious problem for Web applications, and SQL injection (SQLi) attacks are one of the most damaging. The detection of SQL blind injection vulnerability is very important, but unfortunately, it is not fast enough. This is because time-based SQL blind injection lacks web page feedback, so the delay function can only be set artificially to judge whether the injection is successful by observing the response time of the page. However, brute force cracking and binary search methods used in injection require more web requests, resulting in a long time to obtain database information in SQL blind injection. In this paper, a gated recurrent neural network-based SQL blind injection technology is proposed to generate the predictive characters in SQL blind injection. By using the neural language model based on deep learning and character sequence prediction, the method proposed in this paper can learn the regularity of common database information, so that it can predict the next possible character according to the currently obtained database information, and sort it according to probability. In this paper, the training model is evaluated, and experiments are carried out on the shooting range to compare the method used in this paper with sqlmap (the most advanced sqli test automation tool at present). The experimental results show that the method used in this paper is more effective and significant than sqlmap in time-based SQL blind injection. It can obtain the database information of the target site through fewer requests, and run faster.

Injection attack is one of the best 10 security dangers declared by OWASP. SQL infusion is one of the main types of attack. In light of their assorted and quick nature, SQL injection can detrimentally affect the line, prompting broken and public data on the site. Therefore, this article presents a profound woodland-based technique for recognizing complex SQL attacks. Research shows that the methodology we use resolves the issue of expanding and debasing the first condition of the woodland. We are currently presenting the AdaBoost profound timberland-based calculation, which utilizes a blunder level to refresh the heaviness of everything in the classification. At the end of the day, various loads are given during the studio as per the effect of the outcomes on various things. Our model can change the size of the tree quickly and take care of numerous issues to stay away from issues. The aftereffects of the review show that the proposed technique performs better compared to the old machine preparing strategy and progressed preparing technique.

Due to the simplicity of implementation and high threat level, SQL injection attacks are one of the oldest, most prevalent, and most destructive types of security attacks on Web-based information systems. With the continuous development and maturity of artificial intelligence technology, it has been a general trend to use AI technology to detect SQL injection. The selection of the sample set is the deciding factor of whether AI algorithms can achieve good results, but dataset with tagged specific category labels are difficult to obtain. This paper focuses on data augmentation to learn similar feature representations from the original data to improve the accuracy of classification models. In this paper, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks combined with genetic algorithms are applied to the field of Web vulnerability attacks, aiming to solve the problem of insufficient number of SQL injection samples. This method is also expected to be applied to sample generation for other types of vulnerability attacks.

Cyberattacks are one of the most pressing issues of our time. The impact of cyberthreats can damage various sectors such as business, health care, and governments, so one of the best solutions to deal with these cyberattacks and reduce cybersecurity threats is using Deep Learning. In this paper, we have created an in-depth study model to detect SQL Injection Attacks and Cross-Site Script attacks. We focused on XSS on the Stored-XSS attack type because SQL and Stored-XSS have similar site management methods. The advantage of combining deep learning with cybersecurity in our system is to detect and prevent short-term attacks without human interaction, so our system can reduce and prevent web attacks. This post-training model achieved a more accurate result more than 99% after maintaining the learning level, and 99% of our test data is determined by this model if this input is normal or dangerous.

SQL Injection has been around as a harmful and prolific threat on web applications for more than 20 years, yet it still poses a huge threat to the World Wide Web. Rapidly evolving web technology has not eradicated this threat; In 2017 51 % of web application attacks are SQL injection attacks. Most conventional practices to prevent SQL injection attacks revolves around secure web and database programming and administration techniques. Despite developer ignorance, a large number of online applications remain susceptible to SQL injection attacks. There is a need for a more effective method to detect and prevent SQL Injection attacks. In this research, we offer a unique machine learning-based strategy for identifying potential SQL injection attack (SQL injection attack) threats. Application of the proposed method in a Security Information and Event Management(SIEM) system will be discussed. SIEM can aggregate and normalize event information from multiple sources, and detect malicious events from analysis of these information. The result of this work shows that a machine learning based SQL injection attack detector which uses SIEM approach possess high accuracy in detecting malicious SQL queries.

Software vulnerabilities threaten the security of computer system, and recently more and more loopholes have been discovered and disclosed. For the detected vulnerabilities, the relevant personnel will analyze the vulnerability characteristics, and combine the vulnerability scoring system to determine their severity level, so as to determine which vulnerabilities need to be dealt with first. In recent years, some characteristic description-based methods have been used to predict the severity level of vulnerability. However, the traditional text processing methods only grasp the superficial meaning of the text and ignore the important contextual information in the text. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative method, called BERT-CNN, which combines the specific task layer of Bert with CNN to capture important contextual information in the text. First, we use Bert to process the vulnerability description and other information, including Access Gained, Attack Origin and Authentication Required, to generate the feature vectors. Then these feature vectors of vulnerabilities and their severity levels are input into a CNN network, and the parameters of the CNN are gotten. Next, the fine-tuned Bert and the trained CNN are used to predict the severity level of a vulnerability. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with 91.31% on F1-score.

The outages and power shortages are common occurrences in today's world and they have a significant economic impact. These failures can be minimized by making the power grid topologically robust. Therefore, the vulnerability assessment in power systems has become a major concern. This paper considers both pure and extended topological method to analyse the vulnerability of the power system to single line failures. The lines are ranked based on four spectral graph metrics: spectral radius, algebraic connectivity, natural connectivity, and effective graph resistance. A correlation is established between all the four metrics. The impact of load uncertainty on the component ranking has been investigated. The vulnerability assessment has been done on IEEE 9-bus system. It is observed that load variation has minor impact on the ranking.

This paper conducts simulation analysis on power transmission lines and availability of power communication link based on Latin hypercube sampling. It proposes a new method of vulnerability communication link assessment for electric cyber physical system. Wind power output, transmission line failure and communication link failure of electric cyber physical system are sampled to obtain different operating states of electric cyber physical system. The connectivity of communication links under different operating states of electric cyber physical system is calculated to judge whether the communication nodes of the links are connected with the control master station. According to the connection between the link communication node and the control master station, the switching load and switching load of the electric cyber physical system in different operating states are calculated, and the optimal switching load of the electric cyber physical system in different operating states is obtained. This method can clearly identify the vulnerable link in the electric cyber physical system, so as to monitor the vulnerable link and strengthen the link strength.

For the huge charging demands of numerous electric vehicles (EVs), coordinated charging is increasing in power grid. However, since connected with public networks, the coordinated charging control system is in a low-level cyber security and greatly vulnerable to malicious attacks. This paper investigates the malicious mode attack (MMA), which is a new cyber-attack pattern that simultaneously attacks massive EV charging piles to generate continuous sinusoidal power disturbance with the same frequency as the poorly-damped wide-area electromechanical mode. Thereby, high amplitude forced oscillations are stimulated by MMA, which seriously threats the stability of power systems and the power supply of charging stations. The potential threat of MMA is clarified by investigating the vulnerability of the IoT-based coordinated charging load control system, and an MMA process like Mirai is pointed out as an example. An MMA model is established for impact analysis. A hardware test platform is built for the verification of the MMA model. Test result verified the existence of MMA and the accuracy of the MMA model.

Aiming at the specificity and complexity of the power IoT terminal, a method of power IoT terminal firmware vulnerability detection based on memory fuzzing is proposed. Use the method of bypassing the execution to simulate and run the firmware program, dynamically monitor and control the execution of the firmware program, realize the memory fuzzing test of the firmware program, design an automatic vulnerability exploitability judgment plug-in for rules and procedures, and provide power on this basis The method and specific process of the firmware vulnerability detection of the IoT terminal. The effectiveness of the method is verified by an example.

Despite the fact that the power grid is typically regarded as a relatively stable system, outages and electricity shortages are common occurrences. Grid security is mainly dependent on accurate vulnerability assessment. The vulnerability can be assessed in terms of topology-based metrics and flow-based metrics. In this work, power flow analysis is used to calculate the metrics under single line contingency (N-1) conditions. The effect of load uncertainty on system vulnerability is checked. The IEEE 30 bus power network has been used for the case study. It has been found that the variation in load demand affects the system vulnerability.