Biblio

User engagement is recognized as an important component of the user experience, but relatively little is known about the effect of engagement on the learning outcomes of such interactions. This experimental user study examines the relationship between user engagement (UE) and comprehension in varied academic reading environments. Forty-one university students interacted with one of two sets of texts presented in 4 conditions in the context of preparing for a class assignment. Employing the User Engagement Scale (UES), we found evidence of a relationship between students' comprehension of the texts and their degree of engagement with them. However, this association was confined to one of the UES subscales and was not consistent across levels of engagement. An examination of additional variables found little evidence that system and content characteristics influenced engagement; however, we noted that all students' reported increased knowledge, but topical interest for non-engaged students declined. Results contribute to existing literature by adding further evidence that the relationship between engagement and comprehension is complex and mediated.

It is generally difficult for a relying party to obtain trustworthy evidence about the characteristics of the remote systems with which they interact, and such systems as exist today tend to be proprietary and/or expensive to deploy. Large-scale IoT deployments will require mechanisms enabling the state of system components to be reliably determined to enable management systems to efficiently identify certain classes of overall system vulnerability. Such attestation mechanisms will need to support heterogeneous systems comprising equipment from many vendors, often with differing cost and security profiles. The Entity Attestation Token (EAT) [1] is an extensible and crypto-agile container for transporting claims about a device state in a verifiable manner. In its simplest form, the Entity Attestation Token can be implemented at very low cost in pure hardware, but it can scale to meet the requirements of complex systems. The Entity Attestation Token is built on the IETF COSE (CBOR Object Signing and Encryption) standard. COSE provides a lightweight, flexible and crypto-agile container for a collection of standardized claims definitions — these are being defined in number of bodies including the IETF and GlobalPlatform. Of particular practical note is the strong support for Entity Attestation Token from a number of very significant vendors in the semiconductor industry. This paper outlines the technical foundations of the Entity Attestation Token as a mechanism for reliably transporting claims within an attestation framework, discusses some of the interoperability challenges and considers areas where further work may be required.

Funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, SAFEcrypto will provide a new generation of practical, robust and physically secure post-quantum cryptographic solutions that ensure long-term security for future ICT systems, services and applications. The project will focus on the remarkably versatile field of Lattice-based cryptography as the source of computational hardness, and will deliver optimised public key security primitives for digital signatures and authentication, as well identity based encryption (IBE) and attribute based encryption (ABE). This will involve algorithmic and design optimisations, and implementations of lattice-based cryptographic schemes addressing cost, energy consumption, performance and physical robustness. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) prepares for the transition to a post-quantum cryptographic suite B, urging organisations that build systems and infrastructures that require long-term security to consider this transition in architectural designs; the SAFEcrypto project will provide Proof-of-concept demonstrators of schemes for three practical real-world case studies with long-term security requirements, in the application areas of satellite communications, network security and cloud. The goal is to affirm Lattice-based cryptography as an effective replacement for traditional number-theoretic public-key cryptography, by demonstrating that it can address the needs of resource-constrained embedded applications, such as mobile and battery-operated devices, and of real-time high performance applications for cloud and network management infrastructures.

We measure the prevalence and uses of TLS proxies using a Flash tool deployed with a Google AdWords campaign. We generate 2.9 million certificate tests and find that 1 in 250 TLS connections are TLS-proxied. The majority of these proxies appear to be benevolent, however we identify over 1,000 cases where three malware products are using this technology nefariously. We also find numerous instances of negligent, duplicitous, and suspicious behavior, some of which degrade security for users without their knowledge. Distinguishing these types of practices is challenging in practice, indicating a need for transparency and user awareness.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a term applied to the industrial application of M2M devices. The security of IIoT devices is a difficult problem and where the automation of critical infrastructure is intended, risks may be unacceptable. Remote attacks are a significant threat and solutions are sought which are secure by default. The problem space may be analyzed using threat modelling methods. Software Defined Networks (SDN) provide mitigation for remote attacks which exploit local area networks. Similar concepts applied to the WAN may improve availability and performance and provide granular data on link characteristics. Schemes such as the Software Defined Perimeter allow IIoT devices to communicate on the Internet, mitigating avenues of remote attack. Finally, separation of duties at the IIoT device may prevent attacks on the integrity of the device or the confidentiality and integrity of its communications. Work remains to be done on the mitigation of DDoS.

Due to the critical importance of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to the operations of cities and countries, research into the security of critical infrastructure has become increasingly relevant and necessary. As a component of both the research and application sides of smart city development, accurate and precise modeling, simulation, and verification are key parts of a robust design and development tools that provide critical assistance in the prevention, detection, and recovery from abnormal behavior in the sensors, controllers, and actuators which make up a modern ICS system. However, while these tools have potential, there is currently a need for helper-tools to assist with their setup and configuration, if they are to be utilized widely. Existing state-of-the-art tools are often technically complex and difficult to customize for any given IoT/ICS processes. This is a serious barrier to entry for most technicians, engineers, researchers, and smart city planners, while slowing down the critical aspects of safety and security verification. To remedy this issue, we take a case study of existing simulation toolkits within the field of water management and expand on existing tools and algorithms with simplistic automated retrieval functionality using a much more in-depth and usable customization interface to accelerate simulation scenario design and implementation, allowing for customization of the cyber-physical network infrastructure and cyber attack scenarios. We additionally provide a novel in-tool-assessment of network’s resilience according to graph theory path diversity. Further, we lay out a roadmap for future development and application of the proposed tool, including expansions on resiliency and potential vulnerability model checking, and discuss applications of our work to other fields relevant to the design and operation of smart cities.

SSL certificates are a core component of the public key infrastructure that underpins encrypted communication in the Internet. In this paper, we report the results of a longitudinal study of the characteristics of SSL certificate chains presented to clients during secure web (HTTPS) connection setup. Our data set consists of 23B SSL certificate chains collected from a global panel consisting of over 2M residential client machines over a period of 6 months. The data informing our analyses provide perspective on the entire chain of trust, including root certificates, across a wide distribution of client machines. We identify over 35M unique certificate chains with diverse relationships at all levels of the PKI hierarchy. We report on the characteristics of valid certificates, which make up 99.7% of the total corpus. We also examine invalid certificate chains, finding that 93% of them contain an untrusted root certificate and we find they have shorter average chain length than their valid counterparts. Finally, we examine two unintended but prevalent behaviors in our data: the deprecation of root certificates and secure traffic interception. Our results support aspects of prior, scan-based studies on certificate characteristics but contradict other findings, highlighting the importance of the residential client-side perspective.

Self-organising networks, such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), are growing more and more in importance each day. However, due to their nature and constraints MANETs are vulnerable to a wide array of attacks, such as black hole attacks. Furthermore, there are numerous routing protocols in use in MANETs, and what works for one might not for another. In this paper, we present a review of previous surveys of black hole attack solutions, followed by a collation of recently published papers categorised by original routing protocol and evaluated on a set of common metrics. Finally, we suggest areas for further research.

Browser extensions have by and large become a normal and accepted omnipresent feature within modern browsers. However, since their inception, browser extensions have remained under scrutiny for opening vulnerabilities for users. While a large amount of effort has been dedicated to patching such issues as they arise, including the implementation of extension sandboxes and explicit permissions, issues remain within the browser extension ecosystem through user-scripts. User-scripts, or micro-script extensions hosted by a top-level extension, are largely unregulated but inherit the permissions of the top-level application manager, which popularly includes extensions such as Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, or xStyle. While most user-scripts are docile and serve a specific beneficial functionality, due to their inherently open nature and the unregulated ecosystem, they are easy for malicious parties to exploit. Common attacks through this method involve hijacking of DOM elements to execute malicious javascript and/or XSS attacks, although other more advanced attacks can be deployed as well. User-scripts have not received much attention, and this vulnerability has persisted despite attempts to make browser extensions more secure. This ongoing vulnerability remains an unknown threat to many users who employ user-scripts, and circumvents security mechanisms otherwise put in place by browsers. This paper discusses this extension derivative vulnerability as it pertains to current browser security paradigms.

Current paradigms for client-server authentication often rely on username/password schemes. Studies show such schemes are increasingly vulnerable to heuristic and brute-force attacks. This is either due to poor practices by users such as insecure weak passwords, or insecure systems by server operators. A recurring problem in any system which retains information is insecure management policies for sensitive information, such as logins and passwords, by both hosts and users. Increased processing power on the horizon also threatens the security of many popular hashing algorithms. Furthermore, increasing reliance on applications that exchange sensitive information has resulted in increased urgency. This is demonstrated by a large number of mobile applications being deemed insecure by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) standards. This paper proposes a secure alternative technique of authentication that retains the current ecosystem, while minimizes attack vectors without inflating responsibilities on users or server operators. Our proposed authentication scheme uses layered encryption techniques alongside a two-part verification process. In addition, it provides dynamic protection for preventing against common cyber-attacks such as replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Results show that our proposed authentication mechanism outperform other schemes in terms of deployability and resilience to cyber-attacks, without inflating transaction's speed.

In today’s world, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks have many critical tasks, including managing infrastructure such as power, water, and sewage systems, and controlling automated manufacturing and transportation systems. Securing these systems is crucial. Here we describe a project to design security into an example system using formal specifications. Our example system is a component in a cybersecurity testbed at the University of Cincinnati, which was described in previous work. We also show how a design flaw can be discovered and corrected early in the system development process.

As the Internet becomes an important part of the infrastructure our society depends on, it is crucial to construct networks that are able to work even when part of the network is compromised. This paper presents the first practical intrusion-tolerant network service, targeting high-value applications such as monitoring and control of global clouds and management of critical infrastructure for the power grid. We use an overlay approach to leverage the existing IP infrastructure while providing the required resiliency and timeliness. Our solution overcomes malicious attacks and compromises in both the underlying network infrastructure and in the overlay itself. We deploy and evaluate the intrusion-tolerant overlay implementation on a global cloud spanning East Asia, North America, and Europe, and make it publicly available.

Establishing trust relationships between network participants by having them prove their operating system's integrity via a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides interesting approaches for securing local networks at a higher level. In the introduced approach on OSI layer 2, attacks carried out by already authenticated and participating nodes (insider threats) can be detected and prevented. Forbidden activities and manipulations in hard- and software, such as executing unknown binaries, loading additional kernel modules or even inserting unauthorized USB devices, are detected and result in an autonomous reaction of each network participant. The provided trust establishment and authentication protocol operates independently from upper protocol layers and is optimized for resource constrained machines. Well known concepts of backbone architectures can maintain the chain of trust between different kinds of network types. Each endpoint, forwarding and processing unit monitors the internal network independently and reports misbehaviours autonomously to a central instance in or outside of the trusted network.

In the area of the Internet of Things, cloud-based camera surveillance systems are ubiquitously available for industrial and private environments. However, the sensitive nature of the surveillance use case imposes high requirements on privacy/confidentiality, authenticity, and availability of such systems. In this work, we investigate how currently available mass-market camera systems comply with these requirements. Considering two attacker models, we test the cameras for weaknesses and analyze for their implications. We reverse-engineered the security implementation and discovered several vulnerabilities in every tested system. These weaknesses impair the users' privacy and, as a consequence, may also damage the camera system manufacturer's reputation. We demonstrate how an attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to blackmail users and companies by denial-of-service attacks, injecting forged video streams, and by eavesdropping private video data - even without physical access to the device. Our analysis shows that current systems lack in practice the necessary care when implementing security for IoT devices.

To ensure reliable and predictable service in the electrical grid it is important to gauge the level of trust present within critical components and substations. Although trust throughout a smart grid is temporal and dynamically varies according to measured states, it is possible to accurately formulate communications and service level strategies based on such trust measurements. Utilizing an effective set of machine learning and statistical methods, it is shown that establishment of trust levels between substations using behavioral pattern analysis is possible. It is also shown that the establishment of such trust can facilitate simple secure communications routing between substations.

In recent years the use of security gateways (SG) located within the electrical grid distribution network has become pervasive. SGs in substations and renewable distributed energy resource aggregators (DERAs) protect power distribution control devices from cyber and cyber-physical attacks. When encrypted communications within a DER network is used, TCP/IP packet inspection is restricted to packet header behavioral analysis which in most cases only allows the SG to perform anomaly detection of blocks of time-series data (event windows). Packet header anomaly detection calculates the probability of the presence of a threat within an event window, but fails in such cases where the unreadable encrypted payload contains the attack content. The SG system log (syslog) is a time-series record of behavioral patterns of network users and processes accessing and transferring data through the SG network interfaces. Threatening behavioral pattern in the syslog are measurable using both anomaly detection and graph theory. In this paper it will be shown that it is possible to efficiently detect the presence of and classify a potential threat within an SG syslog using light-weight anomaly detection and graph theory.

Static code analysis is a convenient technique to support the development of software. Without prior test setup, information about a later runtime behavior can be inferred and errors in the code can be found before using a regular compiler. Solutions to apply static code analysis to PLC software following the IEC 61131-3 already exist, but using these separate tools usually creates a gap in the development process. In this paper we introduce an architecture to use static analysis directly in a development environment and give instant feedback to the developer while he is still editing the PLC software.

Science gateways bring out the possibility of reproducible science as they are integrated into reusable techniques, data and workflow management systems, security mechanisms, and high performance computing (HPC). We introduce BioinfoPortal, a science gateway that integrates a suite of different bioinformatics applications using HPC and data management resources provided by the Brazilian National HPC System (SINAPAD). BioinfoPortal follows the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and the web server is freely available for academic use. The goal of this paper is to describe the science gateway and its usage, addressing challenges of designing a multiuser computational platform for parallel/distributed executions of large-scale bioinformatics applications using the Brazilian HPC resources. We also present a study of performance and scalability of some bioinformatics applications executed in the HPC environments and perform machine learning analyses for predicting features for the HPC allocation/usage that could better perform the bioinformatics applications via BioinfoPortal.

Using heterogeneous clouds has been considered to improve performance of big-data analytics for healthcare platforms. However, the problem of the delay when transferring big-data over the network needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare existing cloud computing environments (PaaS, IaaS) in order to implement middleware services. Understanding the differences and similarities between cloud technologies will help in the interconnection of healthcare platforms. The paper provides a general overview of the techniques and interfaces for cloud computing middleware services, and proposes a cloud architecture for healthcare. Cloud middleware enables heterogeneous devices to act as data sources and to integrate data from other healthcare platforms, but specific APIs need to be developed. Furthermore, security and management problems need to be addressed, given the heterogeneous nature of the communication and computing environment. The present paper fills a gap in the electronic healthcare register literature by providing an overview of cloud computing middleware services and standardized interfaces for the integration with medical devices.

The growing volume of data and its increasing complexity require even more efficient and faster information retrieval techniques. Approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms based on hashing were proposed to query high-dimensional datasets due to its high retrieval speed and low storage cost. Recent studies promote the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with hashing techniques to improve the search accuracy. However, there are challenges to solve in order to find a practical and efficient solution to index CNN features, such as the need for a heavy training process to achieve accurate query results and the critical dependency on data-parameters. In this work we execute exhaustive experiments in order to compare recent methods that are able to produces a better representation of the data space with a less computational cost for a better accuracy by computing the best data-parameter values for optimal sub-space projection exploring the correlations among CNN feature attributes using fractal theory. We give an overview of these different techniques and present our comparative experiments for data representation and retrieval performance.

This paper presents a new incremental parallelizable message authentication code (MAC) scheme adaptable to lightweight block ciphers for memory integrity verification. The highlight of the proposed scheme is to achieve both incremental update capability and sufficient security bound with lightweight block ciphers, which is a novel feature. We extend the conventional parallelizable MAC to realize the incremental update capability while keeping the original security bound. We prove that a comparable security bound can be obtained even if this change is incorporated. We also present a hardware architecture for the proposed MAC scheme with lightweight block ciphers and demonstrate the effectiveness through FPGA implementation. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed MAC hardware achieves 3.4 times improvement in the latency-area product for the tag update compared with the conventional MAC.

We propose an efficient and secure two-server password-only remote user authentication protocol for consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones and laptops. Our protocol works on-top of any existing trust model, like Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL). The proposed protocol is secure against dictionary and impersonation attacks.

Lo et al. (2011) proposed an efficient key assignment scheme for access control in a large leaf class hierarchy where the alternations in leaf classes are more frequent than in non-leaf classes in the hierarchy. Their scheme is based on the public-key cryptosystem and hash function where operations like modular exponentiations are very much costly compared to symmetric-key encryptions and decryptions, and hash computations. Their scheme performs better than the previously proposed schemes. However, in this paper, we show that Lo et al.’s scheme fails to preserve the forward security property where a security class can also derive the secret keys of its successor classes ’s even after deleting the security class  from the hierarchy. We aim to propose a new key management scheme for dynamic access control in a large leaf class hierarchy, which makes use of symmetric-key cryptosystem and one-way hash function. We show that our scheme requires significantly less storage and computational overheads as compared to Lo et al.’s scheme and other related schemes. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we further show that our scheme is secure against all possible attacks including the forward security. In addition, our scheme supports efficiently dynamic access control problems compared to Lo et al.’s scheme and other related schemes. Thus, higher security along with low storage and computational costs make our scheme more suitable for practical applications compared to other schemes.

The Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) proposed to replace IPV4 to solve scalability challenges and improve quality of service and security. Current implementation of IPv6 uses static value that is determined from the Media Access Control (MAC) address as the Interface Identifier (IID). This results in a deterministic IID for each user that is the same regardless of any network changes. This provides an eavesdropper with the ability to easily track the physical location of the communicating nodes using simple tools, such as ping and traceroute. Moreover, this address generation method provides a means to correlate network traffic with a specific user which can be achieved by filtering the IID and traffic analysis. These serious privacy breaches need to be addressed before widespread deployment of IPv6. In this paper we propose a privacy-enhanced method for generating IID which combines different network parameters. The proposed method generates non-deterministic IIDs that is resistance against correlation attack. We validate our approach using Wireshark, ping and traceroute tools and show that our proposed approach achieves better privacy compared to the existing IID generation methods.

Technological advances in wearable and implanted medical devices are enabling wireless body area networks to alter the current landscape of medical and healthcare applications. These systems have the potential to significantly improve real time patient monitoring, provide accurate diagnosis and deliver faster treatment. In spite of their growth, securing the sensitive medical and patient data relayed in these networks to protect patients' privacy and safety still remains an open challenge. The resource constraints of wireless medical sensors limit the adoption of traditional security measures in this domain. In this work, we propose a distributed mobile agent based intrusion detection system to secure these networks. Specifically, our autonomous mobile agents use machine learning algorithms to perform local and network level anomaly detection to detect various security attacks targeted on healthcare systems. Simulation results show that our system performs efficiently with high detection accuracy and low energy consumption.