Biblio

In recent years, technology use has assumed an important role in the support of human activities. Intellectual work has become the main preferred human activity, while structured activities are going to become ever more automatized for increasing their efficiency. For this reason, we assist to the diffusion of ever more innovative devices able to face new emergent problems. These devices can interact with the environment and each other autonomously, taking decisions even without human control. This is the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon, favored by low cost, high mobility, high interaction and low power devices. This spread of devices has become uncontrolled, but security in this context continues to increase slowly. The purpose of this work is to model and evaluate a new IoT security system. The context is based on a generic IoT system in the presence of lightweight actuator and sensor nodes exchanging messages through Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. This work aims to increase the security of this protocol at application level, particularly mitigating Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The system is based on the use of a host Intrusion Detection System (IDS) which applies a threshold based packet discarding policy to the different topics defined through MQTT.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an advanced automation technology and analytics systems which connected physical objects that have access through the Internet and have their unique flexibility and an ability to be suitable for any environment. There are some critical applications like smart health care system, in which the data collection, sharing and routing through IoT has to be handled in sensitive way. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for LL(Low-power and Lossy) networks (RPL) is the routing protocols to ensure reliable data transfer in 6LOWPAN networks. However, RPL is vulnerable to number of security attacks which creates a major impact on energy consumption and memory requirements which is not suitable for energy constraint networks like IoT. This requires secured RPL protocol to be used for critical data transfer. This paper introduces a novel approach of combining a lightweight LBS (Location Based Service) authentication and Attribute Based Trust Evaluation (ABTE). The algorithm has been implemented for smart health care system and analyzed how its perform in the RPL protocol for IoT constrained environments.

Devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) are usually battery-powered and have limited resources. Hence, energy-efficient and lightweight protocols were designed for IoT devices, such as the popular Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Yet, CoAP itself does not include any defenses against denial-of-sleep attacks, which are attacks that aim at depriving victim devices of entering low-power sleep modes. For example, a denial-of-sleep attack against an IoT device that runs a CoAP server is to send plenty of CoAP messages to it, thereby forcing the IoT device to expend energy for receiving and processing these CoAP messages. All current security solutions for CoAP, namely Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), IPsec, and OSCORE, fail to prevent such attacks. To fill this gap, Seitz et al. proposed a method for filtering out inauthentic and replayed CoAP messages "en-route" on 6LoWPAN border routers. In this paper, we expand on Seitz et al.'s proposal in two ways. First, we revise Seitz et al.'s software architecture so that 6LoWPAN border routers can not only check the authenticity and freshness of CoAP messages, but can also perform a wide range of further checks. Second, we propose a couple of such further checks, which, as compared to Seitz et al.'s original checks, more reliably protect IoT devices that run CoAP servers from remote denial-of-sleep attacks, as well as from remote exploits. We prototyped our solution and successfully tested its compatibility with Contiki-NG's CoAP implementation.

In recent years, IPv6 will gradually replace IPv4 with IPv4 address exhaustion and the rapid development of the Low-Power Wide-Area network (LPWAN) wireless communication technology. This paper proposes a data acquisition and application system based on 6LoWPAN and IPv6 transition technology. The system uses 6LoWPAN and 6to4 tunnel to realize integration of the internal sensor network and Internet to improve the adaptability of the gateway and reduce the average forwarding delay and packet loss rate of small data packet. Moreover, we design and implement the functions of device access management, multiservice data storage and affair data service by combining the C/S architecture with the actual uploaded river quality data. The system has the advantages of flexible networking, low power consumption, rich IPv6 address, high communication security, and strong reusability.

The intense incursion of the Internet of Things (IoT) into all areas of modern life has led to a need for a more detailed study of these technologies and their mechanisms of work. It is necessary to study mechanisms in order to improve QoS, security, identifying shortest routes, mobility, etc. This paper proposes an enhanced simulation framework that implements an improved mechanism for prioritising traffic on 6LoWPAN networks and the realisation of micro-mobility.

Information security is winding up noticeably more vital in information stockpiling and transmission. Images are generally utilised for various purposes. As a result, the protection of image from the unauthorised client is critical. Established encryption techniques are not ready to give a secure framework. To defeat this, image encryption is finished through DNA encoding which is additionally included with confused 1D and 2D logistic maps. The key communication is done through the quantum channel using the BB84 protocol. To recover the encrypted image DNA decoding is performed. Since DNA encryption is invertible, decoding can be effectively done through DNA subtraction. It decreases the complexity and furthermore gives more strength when contrasted with traditional encryption plans. The enhanced strength of the framework is measured utilising measurements like NPCR, UACI, Correlation and Entropy.

People use their personal computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones to digitally sign documents in company's websites and other online electronic applications, and one of the main cybersecurity challenges in this process is trusted digital signature. While the majority of systems use password-based authentication to secure electronic signature, some more critical systems use USB token and smart card to prevent identity theft and implement the trusted digital signing process. Even though smart card provides stronger security, any weakness in the terminal itself can compromise the security of smart card. In this paper, we investigate current smart card digital signature, and illustrate well-known basic vulnerabilities of smart card terminal with the real implementation of two possible attacks including PIN sniffing and message alteration just before signing. As we focus on second attack in this paper, we propose a novel mechanism using time-based digital signing by smart card to defend against message alteration attack. Our prototype implementation and performance analysis illustrate that our proposed mechanism is feasible and provides stronger security. Our method uses popular timestamping protocol packets and does not require any new key distribution and certificate issuance.

Traditional firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems(IDS) and network analytics tools extensively use the `flow' connection concept, consisting of five `tuples' of source and destination IP, ports and protocol type, for classification and management of network activities. By analysing flows, information can be obtained from TCP/IP fields and packet content to give an understanding of what is being transferred within a single connection. As networks have evolved to incorporate more connections and greater bandwidth, particularly from ``always on'' IoT devices and video and data streaming, so too have malicious network threats, whose communication methods have increased in sophistication. As a result, the concept of the 5 tuple flow in isolation is unable to detect such threats and malicious behaviours. This is due to factors such as the length of time and data required to understand the network traffic behaviour, which cannot be accomplished by observing a single connection. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes the use of additional, two tuple and single tuple flow types to associate multiple 5 tuple communications, with generated metadata used to profile individual connnection behaviour. This proposed approach enables advanced linking of different connections and behaviours, developing a clearer picture as to what network activities have been taking place over a prolonged period of time. To demonstrate the capability of this approach, an expert system rule set has been developed to detect the presence of a multi-peered ZeuS botnet, which communicates by making multiple connections with multiple hosts, thus undetectable to standard IDS systems observing 5 tuple flow types in isolation. Finally, as the solution is rule based, this implementation operates in realtime and does not require post-processing and analytics of other research solutions. This paper aims to demonstrate possible applications for next generation firewalls and methods to acquire additional information from network traffic.

In Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE), two parties need to communicate to each other by sharing their secret key (cipher text) over an unsecure communication channel. An adversary or cryptanalyst can easily get their secret keys but cannot get the information (plaintext). Brute force is one the common tools used to obtain the secret key, but when the key is too large (etc. 1024 bits and 2048 bits) this tool is no longer suitable. Thus timing attacks have become more attractive in the new cryptographic era where networked embedded systems security present several vulnerabilities such as lower processing power and high deployment scale. Experiments on timing attacks are useful in helping cryptographers make security schemes more resistant. In this work, we timed the computations of the Discrete Log Hard Problem of the Diffie Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) protocol implemented on an embedded system network and analyzed the timing patterns of 1024-bit and 2048-bit keys that was obtained during the attacks. We have chosen to implement the protocol on the Raspberry-pi board over U-BOOT Bare Metal and we used the GMP bignum library to compute numbers greater than 64 bits on the embedded system.

Today's network is distributed and heterogeneous in nature and has numerous applications which affect day to day life, such as e-Banking, e-Booking of tickets, on line shopping etc. Hence the security of the network is crucial. Threats in the network can be due to intrusions. Such threats can be observed and handled using Intrusion Detection System. The security can be achieved using intrusion detection system, which observes the data traffic and identifies it as an intrusion or not. The objective of this paper is to design a model using game theoretic approach for intrusion detection. Game model is designed by defining players, strategies and utility functions to identify the Probe attacks. This model is tested with NSLKDD data set. The model is the Probe attacks are identified by dominated strategies elimination method. Experimental results shows that game model identifies the attacks with good detection rate.

Denial-of-Service attack (DoS attack) is an attack on network in which an attacker tries to disrupt the availability of network resources by overwhelming the target network with attack packets. In DoS attack it is typically done using a single source, and in a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS attack), like the name suggests, multiple sources are used to flood the incoming traffic of victim. Typically, such attacks use vulnerabilities of Domain Name System (DNS) protocol and IP spoofing to disrupt the normal functioning of service provider or Internet user. The attacks involving DNS, or attacks exploiting vulnerabilities of DNS are known as DNS based DDOS attacks. Many of the proposed DNS based DDoS solutions try to prevent/mitigate such attacks using some intelligent non-``network layer'' (typically application layer) protocols. Utilizing the flexibility and programmability aspects of Software Defined Networks (SDN), via this proposed doctoral research it is intended to make underlying network intelligent enough so as to prevent DNS based DDoS attacks.

The convergence of access networks in the fifth-generation (5G) evolution promises multi-tier networking infrastructures for the successes of various applications realizing the Internet-of-Everything era. However, in this context, the support of a massive number of connected devices also opens great opportunities for attackers to exploit these devices in illegal actions against their victims, especially within the distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attacks. Nowadays, DDoS prevention still remains an open issue in term of performance improvement although there is a significant number of existing solutions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the advances of multi-access edge computing (MAEC), which is considered as one of the most important emerging technologies in 5G networks, in order to provide an effective DDoS prevention solution (referred to be MAEC-X). The proposed MAEC-X architecture and mechanism are developed as well as proved its effectiveness against DDoS attacks through intensive security analysis.

The emergence of Software Defined Network (SDN) and its promises in networking technology has gotten every stakeholder excited. However, it is believed that every technological development comes with its own challenges of which the most prominent in this case is security. This paper presents a real time detection of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the SDN and a control method based on the sFlow mitigation technology. sFlow analyses samples of packets collected from the network traffic and generates handling rules to be sent to the controller in case of an attack detection. The implementation was done by emulating the network in Mininet which runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) and it was shown that the proposed method effectively detects and mitigates DDoS attacks.

We present Ouroboros Crypsinous, the first formally analyzed privacy-preserving proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. To model its security we give a thorough treatment of private ledgers in the (G)UC setting that might be of independent interest. To prove our protocol secure against adaptive attacks, we introduce a new coin evolution technique relying on SNARKs and key-private forward secure encryption. The latter primitive-and the associated construction-can be of independent interest. We stress that existing approaches to private blockchain, such as the proof-of-work-based Zerocash are analyzed only against static corruptions.

The Internet of things (IoT) has experienced rapid development these years, while its security and privacy remains a major challenge. One of the main security goals for the IoT is to build secure and authenticated channels between IoT nodes. A common way widely used to achieve this goal is using authenticated key exchange protocol. However, with the increasing progress of quantum computation, most authenticated key exchange protocols nowadays are threatened by the rise of quantum computers. In this study, we address this problem by using ring-SIS based KEM and hash function to construct an authenticated key exchange scheme so that we base the scheme on lattice based hard problems believed to be secure even with quantum attacks. We also prove the security of universal composability of our scheme. The scheme hence can keep security while runs in complicated environment.

It is standard practice that the secret key derived from an execution of a Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol is used to authenticate and encrypt some data payload using a Symmetric Key Protocol (SKP). Unfortunately, most PAKEs of practical interest are studied using so-called game-based models, which – unlike simulation models – do not guarantee secure composition per se. However, Brzuska et al. (CCS 2011) have shown that a middle ground is possible in the case of authenticated key exchange that relies on Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI): the game-based models do provide secure composition guarantees when the class of higher-level applications is restricted to SKPs. The question that we pose in this paper is whether or not a similar result can be exhibited for PAKE. Our work answers this question positively. More specifically, we show that PAKE protocols secure according to the game-based Real-or-Random (RoR) definition with the weak forward secrecy of Abdalla et al. (S&P 2015) allow for safe composition with arbitrary, higher-level SKPs. Since there is evidence that most PAKEs secure in the Find-then-Guess (FtG) model are in fact secure according to RoR definition, we can conclude that nearly all provably secure PAKEs enjoy a certain degree of composition, one that at least covers the case of implementing secure channels.

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), secondary users (SUs) are vulnerable to malicious attacks because an SU node's opportunistic access cannot be protected from adversaries. How to design a channel hopping scheme to protect SU nodes from jamming attacks is thus an important issue in CRNs. Existing anti-jamming channel hopping schemes have some limitations: Some require SU nodes to exchange secrets in advance; some require an SU node to be either a receiver or a sender, and some are not flexible enough. Another issue for existing anti-jamming channel hopping schemes is that they do not consider different nodes may have different traffic loads. In this paper, we propose an anti-jamming channel hopping protocol, Load Awareness Anti-jamming channel hopping (LAA) scheme. Nodes running LAA are able to change their channel hopping sequences based on their sending and receiving traffic. Simulation results verify that LAA outperforms existing anti-jamming schemes.

The number of sensors and embedded devices in an urban area can be on the order of thousands. New low-power wide area (LPWA) wireless network technologies have been proposed to support this large number of asynchronous, low-bandwidth devices. Among them, the Cooperative UltraNarrowband (C-UNB) is a clean-slate cellular network technology to connect these devices to a remote site or data collection server. C-UNB employs small bandwidth channels, and a lightweight random access protocol. In this paper, a new application is investigated - the use of C-UNB wireless networks to support the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), in order to facilitate the communication between smart meters and utilities. To this end, we adapted a mathematical model for C-UNB, and implemented a network simulation module in NS-3 to represent C-UNB's physical and medium access control layer. For the application layer, we implemented the DLMS-COSEM protocol, or Device Language Message Specification - Companion Specification for Energy Metering. Details of the simulation module are presented and we conclude that it supports the results of the mathematical model.

Mobile military networks are uniquely challenging to build and maintain, because of their wireless nature and the unfriendliness of the environment, resulting in unreliable and capacity limited performance. Currently, most tactical networks implement TCP/IP, which was designed for fairly stable, infrastructure-based environments, and requires sophisticated and often application-specific extensions to address the challenges of the communication scenario. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a clean slate networking approach that does not depend on stable connections to retrieve information and naturally provides support for node mobility and delay/disruption tolerant communications - as a result it is particularly interesting for tactical applications. However, despite ICN seems to offer some structural benefits for tactical environments over TCP/IP, a number of challenges including naming, security, performance tuning, etc., still need to be addressed for practical adoption. This document, prepared within NATO IST-161 RTG, evaluates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption.

After suffering decades of high-profile attacks, the need for formal verification of security-critical software has never been clearer. Verification-oriented programming languages like F* are now being used to build high-assurance cryptographic libraries and implementations of standard protocols like TLS. In this paper, we seek to apply these verification techniques to modern Web applications, like WhatsApp, that embed sophisticated custom cryptographic components. The problem is that these components are often implemented in JavaScript, a language that is both hostile to cryptographic code and hard to reason about. So we instead target WebAssembly, a new instruction set that is supported by all major JavaScript runtimes. We present a new toolchain that compiles Low*, a low-level subset of the F* programming language, into WebAssembly. Unlike other WebAssembly compilers like Emscripten, our compilation pipeline is focused on compactness and auditability: we formalize the full translation rules in the paper and implement it in a few thousand lines of OCaml. Using this toolchain, we present two case studies. First, we build WHACL*, a WebAssembly version of the existing, verified HACL* cryptographic library. Then, we present LibSignal*, a brand new, verified implementation of the Signal protocol in WebAssembly, that can be readily used by messaging applications like WhatsApp, Skype, and Signal.

In this work, we synthesize collaboration protocols for human-unmanned aerial vehicle (H-UAV) command and control systems, where the human operator aids in securing the UAV by intermittently performing geolocation tasks to confirm its reported location. We first present a stochastic game-based model for the system that accounts for both the operator and an adversary capable of launching stealthy false-data injection attacks, causing the UAV to deviate from its path. We also describe a synthesis challenge due to the UAV's hidden-information constraint. Next, we perform human experiments using a developed RESCHU-SA testbed to recognize the geolocation strategies that operators adopt. Furthermore, we deploy machine learning techniques on the collected experimental data to predict the correctness of a geolocation task at a given location based on its geographical features. By representing the model as a delayed-action game and formalizing the system objectives, we utilize off-the-shelf model checkers to synthesize protocols for the human-UAV coalition that satisfy these objectives. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the H-UAV protocol synthesis through a case study where the protocols are experimentally analyzed and further evaluated by human operators.

IEC61850 and IEC62351 combined provide a set of security promises for the communications channels that are used to run a substation automation system (SAS), that use IEC61850 based technologies. However, one area that is largely untouched by these security promises is the generic object oriented substation events (GOOSE) messaging service. GOOSE is designed to multicast commands and data across a substation within hard real time quality of service (QoS) requirements. This means that GOOSE is unable to implement the required security technologies as the added latency to any message would violate the QoS.

Supervisory control and data acquisition system is an important part of the country's critical infrastructure, but its inherent network characteristics are vulnerable to attack by intruders. The vulnerability of supervisory control and data acquisition system was analyzed, combining common attacks such as information scanning, response injection, command injection and denial of service in industrial control systems, and proposed an intrusion detection model based on graphical features. The time series of message transmission were visualized, extracting the vertex coordinates and various graphic area features to constitute a new data set, and obtained classification model of intrusion detection through training. An intrusion detection experiment environment was built using tools such as MATLAB and power protocol testers. IEC 60870-5-104 protocol which is widely used in power systems had been taken as an example. The results of tests have good effectiveness.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a trend of the smart industry. By collecting field data from sensors, the industry can make decisions dynamically in time for better performance. In most cases, IIoT is built on private networks and cannot be reached from the Internet. Currently, data transmission in most of IIoT network protocols is in plaintext without encryption protection. Once an attacker breaks into the field, the attacker can intercept data and injects malicious commands to field agents. In this paper, we propose a compound approach for defending command injection attacks in IIOT. First, we leverage the power of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to detect the injection attack. When the injection attack event is detected, the system owner is alarmed that someone tries to pretend a controller or a field agent to deceive the other entity. Second, we develop a lightweight authentication scheme to ensure the identity of the command sender. Command receiver can verify commands first before processing commands.

In this paper, we propose a frozen bit selection scheme for polar coding scheme combined with physical layer security that enhances the security of two legitimate users on a wiretap channel. By flipping certain frozen bits, the bit-error rate (BER) of an eavesdropper is maximized while the BER of the legitimate receiver is unaffected. An ARQ protocol is proposed that only feeds back a small proportion of the frozen bits to the transmitter, which increases the secrecy rate. The scheme is evaluated on a wiretap channel affected by impulsive noise and we consider cases where the eavesdropper's channel is actually more impulsive than the main channel. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme ensures the eavesdropper's BER is high even when only one frozen bit is flipped and this is achieved even when their channel is more impulsive than the main channel.