Biblio

The growing number of attacks against cyber-physical systems in recent years elevates the concern for cybersecurity of industrial control systems (ICSs). The current efforts of ICS cybersecurity are mainly based on firewalls, data diodes, and other methods of intrusion prevention, which may not be sufficient for growing cyber threats from motivated attackers. To enhance the cybersecurity of ICS, a cyber-attack detection system built on the concept of defense-in-depth is developed utilizing network traffic data, host system data, and measured process parameters. This attack detection system provides multiple-layer defense in order to gain the defenders precious time before unrecoverable consequences occur in the physical system. The data used for demonstrating the proposed detection system are from a real-time ICS testbed. Five attacks, including man in the middle (MITM), denial of service (DoS), data exfiltration, data tampering, and false data injection, are carried out to simulate the consequences of cyber attack and generate data for building data-driven detection models. Four classical classification models based on network data and host system data are studied, including k-nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree, bootstrap aggregating (bagging), and random forest (RF), to provide a secondary line of defense of cyber-attack detection in the event that the intrusion prevention layer fails. Intrusion detection results suggest that KNN, bagging, and RF have low missed alarm and false alarm rates for MITM and DoS attacks, providing accurate and reliable detection of these cyber attacks. Cyber attacks that may not be detectable by monitoring network and host system data, such as command tampering and false data injection attacks by an insider, are monitored for by traditional process monitoring protocols. In the proposed detection system, an auto-associative kernel regression model is studied to strengthen early attack detection. The result shows that this approach detects physically impactful cyber attacks before significant consequences occur. The proposed multiple-layer data-driven cyber-attack detection system utilizing network, system, and process data is a promising solution for safeguarding an ICS.

Detection of network attacks is the first step to network security. Many different methods for attack detection were proposed in the past. However, descriptions of these methods are often not complete and it is difficult to verify that the actual implementation matches the description. In this demo paper, we propose to use Complex Event Processing (CEP) for developing detection methods based on network flows. By writing the detection methods in an Event Processing Language (EPL), we can address the above-mentioned problems. The SQL-like syntax of most EPLs is easily readable so the detection method is self-documented. Moreover, it is directly executable in the CEP system, which eliminates inconsistencies between documentation and implementation. The demo will show a running example of a multi-stage HTTP brute force attack detection using Esper and its EPL.

Nowadays, computers are used everywhere to carry out daily routine tasks. The input devices i.e. keyboard or mouse are used to feed input to computers. The surveillance of input devices is much important as monitoring the users logging activity. A keylogger also referred as a keystroke logger, is a software or hardware device which monitors every keystroke typed by a user. Keylogger runs in the background that user cannot identify its presence. It can be used as monitoring software for parents to keep an eye on children activity on computers and for the owner to monitor their employees. A keylogger (which can be either spyware or software) is a kind of surveillance software that has the ability to store every keystroke in a log file. It is very dangerous for those systems which use their system for daily transaction purpose i.e. Online Banking Systems. A keylogger is a tool, made to save all the keystroke generated through the machine which sanctions hackers to steal sensitive information without user's intention. Privileged also relies on the access for both implementation and placement by Kernel keylogger, the entire message transmitted from the keyboard drivers, while the programmer simply relies on kernel level facilities that interrupt. This certainly needs a large power and expertise for real and error-free execution. However, it has been observed that 90% of the current keyloggers are running in userspace so they do not need any permission for execution. Our aim is focused on detecting userspace keylogger. Our intention is to forbid userspace keylogger from stealing confidential data and information. For this purpose, we use a strategy which is clearly based on detection manner techniques for userspace keyloggers, an essential category of malware packages. We intend to achieve this goal by matching I/O of all processes with some simulated activity of the user, and we assert detection in case the two are highly correlated. The rationale behind this is that the more powerful stream of keystrokes, the more I/O operations are required by the keylogger to log the keystrokes into the file.

In this paper we propose a responsive autonomic and data-driven adaptive virtual networking framework (RAvN) that integrates the adaptive reconfigurable features of a popular SDN platform called open networking operating system (ONOS), the network performance statistics provided by traffic monitoring tools such as T-shark or sflow-RT and analytics and decision making skills provided from new and current machine learning techniques to detect and mitigate anomalous behavior. For this paper we focus on the development of novel detection schemes using a developed Centroid-based clustering technique and the Intragroup variance of data features within network traffic (C. Intra), with a multivariate gaussian distribution model fitted to the constant changes in the IP addresses of the network to accurately assist in the detection of low rate and high rate denial of service (DoS) attacks. We briefly discuss our ideas on the development of the decision-making and execution component using the concept of generating adaptive policy updates (i.e. anomalous mitigation solutions) on-the-fly to the ONOS SDN controller for updating network configurations and flows. In addition we provide the analysis on anomaly detection schemes used for detecting low rate and high rate DoS attacks versus a commonly used unsupervised machine learning technique Kmeans. The proposed schemes outperformed Kmeans significantly. The multivariate clustering method and the intragroup variance recorded 80.54% and 96.13% accuracy respectively while Kmeans recorded 72.38% accuracy.

High performance computing is widely used for large-scale simulations, designs and analysis of critical problems especially through the use of cloud computing systems nowadays because cloud computing provides ubiquitous, on-demand computing capabilities with large variety of hardware configurations including GPUs and FPGAs that are highly used for high performance computing. However, it is well known that inefficient management of such systems results in excessive power consumption affecting the budget, cooling challenges, as well as reducing reliability due to the overheating and hotspots. Furthermore, considering the latest trends in the attack scenarios and crypto-currency based intrusions, security has become a major problem for high performance computing. Therefore, to address both challenges, in this paper we present an autonomic management methodology for both security and power/performance. Our proposed approach first builds knowledge of the environment in terms of power consumption and the security tools' deployment. Next, it provisions virtual resources so that the power consumption can be reduced while maintaining the required performance and deploy the security tools based on the system behavior. Using this approach, we can utilize a wide range of secure resources efficiently in HPC system, cloud computing systems, servers, embedded systems, etc.

Every day, university networks are bombarded with attempts to steal the sensitive data of the various disparate domains and organizations they serve. For this reason, universities form teams of information security specialists called a Security Operations Center (SOC) to manage the complex operations involved in monitoring and mitigating such attacks. When a suspicious event is identified, members of the SOC are tasked to understand the nature of the event in order to respond to any damage the attack might have caused. This process is defined by administrative policies which are often very high-level and rarely systematically defined. This impedes the implementation of generalized and automated event response solutions, leading to specific ad hoc solutions based primarily on human intuition and experience as well as immediate administrative priorities. These solutions are often fragile, highly specific, and more difficult to reuse in other scenarios.

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trust-worthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an inter-operable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trust-worthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.

Social networks are highly preferred to express opinions, share information, and communicate with others on arbitrary topics. However, the downside is that many cybercriminals are leveraging social networks for cyber-crime. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the important social networks which can grant the anonymity to users by allowing them to connect channels without sign-up process. Therefore, IRC has been the playground of hackers and anonymous users for various operations such as hacking, cracking, and carding. Hence, it is urgent to study effective methods which can identify the authors behind the IRC messages. In this paper, we design an autonomic IRC monitoring system, performing recursive deep learning for classifying threat levels of messages and develop a novel author verification approach with one-class classification with deep autoencoder neural networks. The experimental results show that our approach can successfully perform effective author verification for IRC users.

By studying the problems of network information security in power system, this paper proposes a self-defense research and solution for power information network based on artificial intelligence. At the same time, it proposes active defense new technologies such as vulnerability scanning, baseline scanning, network security attack and defense drills in power information network security, aiming at improving the security level of network information and ensuring the security of the information network in the power system.

Insecure data storage may open a door to malicious malware to steal users' and system sensitive information. These problems may due to developer negligence or lack of security knowledge. Android developers use various storage methods to store data. However, Attackers have attacked these vulnerable data storage. Although the developers have modified the apps after knowing the vulnerability, the user's personal information has been leaked and caused serious consequences. As a result, instead of patching and fixing the vulnerability, we should conduct proactive control for secure Android data storage. In this paper, we analyzed Android external storage vulnerability and discussed the prevention solutions to prevent sensitive information in external storage from disclosure.

Recently, damage caused by ransomware has been increasing in PC and Android environments. There are many studies into real-time ransomware detection because the most important time to prevent encryption is before ransomware is able to execute its malicious process. Traditional analyses determine an application is ransomware or not by static/dynamic methods. Those analyses can serve as components of a method to detect ransomware in real time. However, problems can occur such as the inability to detect new/variant/unknown ransomware. These types require signed patches from a trusted party that can only be created after attacks occur. In a previous study into realtime new/variant/unknown ransomware detection in a PC environment, important files are monitored and only programs that have been previously analyzed and evaluated as nonmalicious are allowed. As such, programs that have not been analyzed are restricted from accessing important files. In an Android environment, this method can be applied using Android applications to prevent emerging threats and verify consistency with user intent. Thus, this paper proposes a method of detecting new/variant/unknown ransomware in real time in an Android environment.

With the ever-increasing number of smart home devices, the issues related to these environments are also growing. With an ever-growing attack surface, there is no standard way to protect homes and their inhabitants from new threats. The inhabitants are rarely aware of the increased security threats that they are exposed to and how to manage them. To tackle this problem, we propose a solution based on segmented architectures similar to the ones used in industrial systems. In this approach, the smart home is segmented into various levels, which can broadly be categorised into an inner level and external level. The external level is protected by a firewall that checks the communication from/to the Internet to/from the external devices. The internal level is protected by an additional firewall that filters the information and the communications between the external and the internal devices. This segmentation guarantees a trusted environment among the entities of the internal network. In this paper, we propose an adaptive trust model that checks the behaviour of the entities and in case the entities violate trust rules they can be put in quarantine or banned from the network.

Mobile Ad-hoc network is decentralized and composed of various individual devices for communicating with each other. Its distributed nature and infrastructure deficiency are the way for various attacks in the network. On implementing Intrusion detection systems (IDS) in ad-hoc node securities were enhanced by means of auditing and monitoring process. This system is composed with clustering protocols which are highly effective in finding the intrusions with minimal computation cost on power and overhead. The existing protocols were linked with the routes, which are not prominent in detecting intrusions. The poor route structure and route renewal affect the cluster hardly. By which the cluster are unstable and results in maximization processing along with network traffics. Generally, the ad hoc networks are structured with battery and rely on power limitation. It needs an active monitoring node for detecting and responding quickly against the intrusions. It can be attained only if the clusters are strong with extensive sustaining capability. Whenever the cluster changes the routes also change and the prominent processing of achieving intrusion detection will not be possible. This raises the need of enhanced clustering algorithm which solved these drawbacks and ensures the network securities in all manner. We proposed CBIDP (cluster based Intrusion detection planning) an effective clustering algorithm which is ahead of the existing routing protocol. It is persistently irrespective of routes which monitor the intrusion perfectly. This simplified clustering methodology achieves high detecting rates on intrusion with low processing as well as memory overhead. As it is irrespective of the routes, it also overcomes the other drawbacks like traffics, connections and node mobility on the network. The individual nodes in the network are not operative on finding the intrusion or malicious node, it can be achieved by collaborating the clustering with the system.

In this paper, we propose the first traffic monitoring and labeling system for iOS devices, named iMonitor, which not just captures mobile network traffic in .pcap files, but also provides comprehensive APP-related and user-related information of captured packets. Through further analysis, one can obtain the exact APP or device where each packet comes from. The labeled traffic can be used in many research areas for mobile security, such as privacy leakage detection and user profiling. Given the implementation methodology of NetworkExtension framework of iOS 9+, APP labels of iMonitor are reliable enough so that labeled traffic can be regarded as training data for any traffic classification methods. Evaluations on real iPhones demonstrate that iMonitor has no notable impact upon user experience even with slight packet latency. Also, the experiment result supports our motivation that mobile traffic monitoring for iOS is absolutely necessary, as traffic generated by different OSes like Android and iOS are different and unreplaceable in researches.

The security content automation includes configurations of large number of systems, installation of patches securely, verification of security-related configuration settings, compliance with security policies and regulatory requirements, and ability to respond quickly when new threats are discovered [1]. Although humans are important in information security management, humans sometimes introduce errors and inconsistencies in an organization due to manual nature of their tasks [2]. Security Content Automation Protocol was developed by the U.S. NIST to automate information security management tasks such as vulnerability and patch management, and to achieve continuous monitoring of security configurations in an organization. In this paper, SCAP is employed to develop an automated security configuration checklist for use in verifying Apple iOS device configuration against the defined security baseline to enforce policy compliance in an enterprise.

With the growing number of electronic features in cars and their connections to the cloud, smartphones, road-side equipment, and neighboring cars the need for effective cybersecurity is paramount. Beyond the concern of brand degradation, warranty fraud, and recalls, what keeps manufacturers up at night is the threat of malicious attacks which can affect the safety of vehicles on the road. Would any single protection technique provide the security needed over the long lifetime of a vehicle? We present a new methodology for automotive cybersecurity where the designs are made to withstand attacks in the future based on the concepts of high availability and malicious fault-tolerance through self-defending techniques. When a system has an intrusion, self-defending technologies work to contain the breach using integrity verification, self-healing, and fail-over techniques to keep the system running.

As key components of the power grid infrastructure, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are likely to be targeted by nation-state-level attackers willing to invest considerable resources to disrupt the power grid. We present Spire, the first intrusion-tolerant SCADA system that is resilient to both system-level compromises and sophisticated network-level attacks and compromises. We develop a novel architecture that distributes the SCADA system management across three or more active sites to ensure continuous availability in the presence of simultaneous intrusions and network attacks. A wide-area deployment of Spire, using two control centers and two data centers spanning 250 miles, delivered nearly 99.999% of all SCADA updates initiated over a 30-hour period within 100ms. This demonstrates that Spire can meet the latency requirements of SCADA for the power grid.

With all the exciting benefits of IoT in healthcare - from mobile applications to wearable and implantable health gadgets-it becomes prominent to ensure that patients, their medical data and the interactions to and from their medical devices are safe and secure. The security and privacy is being breached when the mobile applications are mishandled or tampered by the hackers by performing reverse engineering on the application leading to catastrophic consequences. To combat against these vulnerabilities, there is need to create an awareness of the potential risks of these devices and effective strategies are needed to be implemented to achieve a level of security defense. In this paper, the benefits of healthcare IoT system and the possible vulnerabilities that may result are presented. Also, we propose to develop solutions against these vulnerabilities by protecting mobile applications using obfuscation and return oriented programming techniques. These techniques convert an application into a form which makes difficult for an adversary to interpret or alter the code for illegitimate purpose. The mobile applications use keys to control communication with the implantable medical devices, which need to be protected as they are the critical component for securing communications. Therefore, we also propose access control schemes using white box encryption to make the keys undiscoverable to hackers.

To be able to meet demanding application performance requirements within a tight power budget, runtime power management must track hardware activity at a very fine granularity in both space and time. This gives rise to sophisticated power management algorithms, which need the underlying system to be both highly observable (to be able to sense changes in instantaneous power demand timely) and controllable (to be able to react to changes in instantaneous power demand timely). The end goal is allocating the power budget, which itself represents a very critical shared resource, in a fair way among active tasks of execution. Fundamentally, if not carefully managed, any system-wide shared resource can give rise to covert communication. Power budget does not represent an exception, particularly as systems are becoming more and more observable and controllable. In this paper, we demonstrate how power management vulnerabilities can enable covert communication over a previously unexplored, novel class of covert channels which we will refer to as POWERT channels. We also provide a comprehensive characterization of the POWERT channel capacity under various sharing and activity scenarios. Our analysis based on experiments on representative commercial systems reveal a peak channel capacity of 121.6 bits per second (bps).

Covert communications, where a transmitter Alice wishes to hide the presence of her transmitted signal from a watchful adversary Willie, has been considered extensively in recent years. Those investigations have generally considered physical-layer models, where the adversary has access to a sophisticated (often optimal) receiver to determine whether a transmission has taken place, and have addressed the question of what rate can information be communicated covertly. More recent investigations have begun to consider the change in covert rate when Willie has uncertainty about the physical layer environment. Here, we move up the protocol stack to consider the covert rate when Willie is watching the medium-access control (MAC) layer in a network employing a random access MAC such as slotted ALOHA. Based on the rate of collisions and potentially the number of users involved in those collisions, Willie attempts to determine whether unauthorized (covert) users are accessing the channel. In particular, we assume different levels of sophistication in Willie's receiver, ranging from a receiver that only can detect whether there was a collision or not, to one that can always tell exactly how many packets were on the channel in the random access system. In each case, we derive closed-form expressions for the achievable covert rates in the system. The achievable rates exhibit significantly different behavior than that observed in the study of covert systems at the physical layer.

Typical techniques for tracking vital signs require body contact and most of these techniques are intrusive in nature. Body-contact methods might irritate the patient's skin and he/she might feel uncomfortable while sensors are touching his/her body. In this study, we present a new wireless (non-contact) method for monitoring human vital signs (breathing and heartbeat). We have demonstrated for the first time1 that vitals signs can be measured wirelessly through visible light signal reflected from a human subject, also referred to as visible light sensing (VLS). In this method, the breathing and heartbeat rates are measured without any body-contact device, using only a simple photodetector and a light source (e.g., LED). The light signal reflected from human subject is modulated by the physical motions during breathing and heartbeats. Signal processing tools such as filtering and Fourier transform are used to convert these small variations in the received light signal power to vitals data.We implemented the VLS-based non-contact vital signs monitoring system by using an off-the-shelf light source, a photodetector and a signal acquisition and processing unit. We observed more than 94% of accuracy as compared to a contact-based FDA (The Food and Drug Administration) approved devices. Additional evaluations are planned to assess the performance of the developed vitals monitoring system, e.g., different subjects, environments, etc. Non-contact vitals monitoring system can be used in various areas and scenarios such as medical facilities, residential homes, security and human-computer-interaction (HCI) applications.

The clear, social, and dark web have lately been identified as rich sources of valuable cyber-security information that -given the appropriate tools and methods-may be identified, crawled and subsequently leveraged to actionable cyber-threat intelligence. In this work, we focus on the information gathering task, and present a novel crawling architecture for transparently harvesting data from security websites in the clear web, security forums in the social web, and hacker forums/marketplaces in the dark web. The proposed architecture adopts a two-phase approach to data harvesting. Initially a machine learning-based crawler is used to direct the harvesting towards websites of interest, while in the second phase state-of-the-art statistical language modelling techniques are used to represent the harvested information in a latent low-dimensional feature space and rank it based on its potential relevance to the task at hand. The proposed architecture is realised using exclusively open-source tools, and a preliminary evaluation with crowdsourced results demonstrates its effectiveness.

Cyber breaches can result in disruption to business operations, reputation damage as well as directly affecting the financial stability of the targeted corporations, with potential impacts on future profits and stock values. Automatic network-stream monitoring becomes necessary for cyber situation awareness, and time-series anomaly detection plays an important role in network stream monitoring. This study surveyed recent research on time-series analysis methods in respect of parametric and non-parametric techniques, and popular machine learning platforms for data analysis on streaming data on both single server and cloud computing environments. We believe it provides a good reference for researchers in both academia and industry to select suitable (time series) data analysis techniques, and computing platforms, dependent on the data scale and real-time requirements.

With the growing scale of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), it is challenging to maintain their stability under all operating conditions. How to reduce the downtime and locate the failures becomes a core issue in system design. In this paper, we employ a hierarchical contract-based resilience framework to guarantee the stability of CPS. In this framework, we use Assume Guarantee (A-G) contracts to monitor the non-functional properties of individual components (e.g., power and latency), and hierarchically compose such contracts to deduce information about faults at the system level. The hierarchical contracts enable rapid fault detection in large-scale CPS. However, due to the vast number of components in CPS, manually designing numerous contracts and the hierarchy becomes challenging. To address this issue, we propose a technique to automatically decompose a root contract into multiple lower-level contracts depending on I/O dependencies between components. We then formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to search the optimal parameters of each lower-level contract. This enables automatic contract refinement taking into consideration the communication overhead between components. Finally, we use a case study from the manufacturing domain to experimentally demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework.

Cyber-Physical Systems are distributed, heterogeneous systems that communicate and exchange data over networks. This creates semantic dependencies between the individual components. In the event of an error, it is difficult to identify the source of an occurring error that is spread due to those underlying dependencies. Tools such as the Information Flow Monitor solve this problem, but require compliance with a protocol. Nodes that do not adhere to this protocol prevent errors from being tracked. In this paper, we present a way to bridge these black-box nodes with a dependency model and to still be able to use them in monitoring tools.