Biblio

Satisfying the growing demand for electricity is a huge challenge for electricity providers without a robust and good infrastructure. For effective electricity management, the infrastructure has to be strengthened from the generation stage to the transmission and distribution stages. In the current electrical infrastructure, the evolution of smart grids provides a significant solution to the problems that exist in the conventional system. Enhanced management visibility and better monitoring and control are achieved by the integration of wireless sensor network technology in communication systems. However, to implement these solutions in the existing grids, the infrastructural constraints impose a major challenge. Along with the choice of technology, it is also crucial to avoid exorbitant implementation costs. This paper presents a self-stabilizing hierarchical algorithm for the existing electrical network. Neighborhood Area Networks (NAN) and Home Area Networks (HAN) layers are used in the proposed architecture. The Home Node (HN), Simple Node (SN) and Cluster Head (CH) are the three types of nodes used in the model. Fraudulent users in the system are identified efficiently using the proposed model based on the observations made through simulation on OMNeT++ simulator.

Anomalous behaviour in subsystems of complex machines often affect overall performance even without failures. We devise unsupervised methods to detect times with degraded performance, and localize correlated signals, evaluated on a system with over 4000 monitored signals. From incidents comprising both downtimes and degraded performance, our approach localizes relevant signals within 1.2% of the parameter space.

Internet of Things (IoT) networks consist of small devices that use a wireless communication to monitor and possibly control the physical world. A common threat to such networks are jamming attacks, a particular type of denial of service attack. Current research highlights the need for the design of more effective and efficient anti-jamming techniques that can handle different types of attacks in IoT networks. In this paper, we propose DeMiJA, short for Detection and Mitigation of Jamming Attacks in IoT, a novel approach to deal with different jamming attacks in IoT networks. DeMiJA leverages architecture-based adaptation and the MAPE-K reference model (Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute that share Knowledge). We present the general architecture of DeMiJA and instantiate the architecture to deal with jamming attacks in the DeltaIoT exemplar. The evaluation shows that DeMiJA can handle different types of jamming attacks effectively and efficiently, with neglectable overhead.

With the recent rise of HTTPS adoption on the Web, attackers have begun "HTTPSifying" phishing websites. HTTPSifying a phishing website has the advantage of making the website appear legitimate and evading conventional detection methods that leverage URLs or web contents in the network. Further, adopting HTTPS could also contribute to generating intrinsic footprints and provide defenders with a great opportunity to monitor and detect websites, including phishing sites, as they would need to obtain a public-key certificate issued for the preparation of the websites. The potential benefits of certificate-based detection include: (1) the comprehensive monitoring of all HTTPSified websites by using certificates immediately after their issuance, even if the attacker utilizes dynamic DNS (DDNS) or hosting services; this could be overlooked with the conventional domain-registration-based approaches; and (2) to detect phishing websites before they are published on the Internet. Accordingly, we address the following research question: How can we make use of the footprints of TLS certificates to defend against phishing attacks? For this, we collected a large set of TLS certificates corresponding to phishing websites from Certificate Transparency (CT) logs and extensively analyzed these TLS certificates. We demonstrated that a template of common names, which are equivalent to the fully qualified domain names, obtained through the clustering analysis of the certificates can be used for the following promising applications: (1) The discovery of previously unknown phishing websites with low false positives and (2) understanding the infrastructure used to generate the phishing websites. We use our findings on the abuse of free certificate authorities (CAs) for operating HTTPSified phishing websites to discuss possible solutions against such abuse and provide a recommendation to the CAs.

Email based Uniform Resource Locator (URL) distribution is one of the popular ways for starting phishing attacks. Conventional anti-phishing solutions rely on security facilities and investigate all incoming emails. This makes the security facilities get overloaded and cause consequences of upgrades or new deployments even with no better options. This paper presents a novel detour strategy for the traffic of visiting potential phishing URLs based on dynamic Domain Name System (DNS) Response Policy Zone (RPZ) in order to mitigate the overloads on security facilities. In the strategy, the URLs included in the incoming emails will be extracted and the corresponding Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) will be registered in the RPZ of the local DNS cache server with mapping the IP address of a special Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) proxy. The contribution of the approach is to avoid heavy investigations on all incoming emails and mitigate the overloads on security facilities by directing the traffic to phishing URLs to the special HTTP proxy connected with a set of security facilities conducting various inspections. The evaluation results on the prototype system showed that the URL extraction and FQDN registration were finished before the emails had been delivered and accesses to the URLs were successfully directed to the special HTTP proxy. The results of overhead measurements also confirmed that the proposed strategy only affected the internal email server with 11% of performance decrease on the prototype system.

It is important to ensure source location privacy (SLP) protection in safety-critical monitoring applications. Also, to achieve effective long-term monitoring, it is essential to design SLP protocols with high energy efficiency and energy balancing. Therefore, this study proposes a new phantom with angle (PwA) protocol. The PwA protocol employs dynamic routing paths which are designed to achieve SLP protection with energy efficiency and energy balancing. Analysis results reveal that the PwA protocol exhibits superior performance features to outperform existing protocols by achieving high levels of SLP protection for time petime periods. The results confirm that the PwA protocol is practical in long-term monitoring systems.riods. The results confirm that the PwA protocol is practical in long-term monitoring systems.

Industrial Control System (ICS) transmits control and monitoring data between devices in an industrial environment that includes smart grids, water and gas distribution, or traffic control. Unlike traditional internet communication, ICS traffic is stable, periodical, and with regular communication patterns that can be described using statistical modeling. By observing selected features of ICS transmission, e.g., packet direction and inter-arrival times, we can create a statistical profile of the communication based on distribution of features learned from the normal ICS traffic. This paper demonstrates that using statistical modeling, we can detect various anomalies caused by irregular transmissions, device or link failures, and also cyber attacks like packet injection, scanning, or denial of service (DoS). The paper shows how a statistical model is automatically created from a training dataset. We present two types of statistical profiles: the master-oriented profile for one-to-many communication and the peer-to-peer profile that describes traffic between two ICS devices. The proposed approach is fast and easy to implement as a part of an intrusion detection system (IDS) or an anomaly detection (AD) module. The proof-of-concept is demonstrated on two industrial protocols: IEC 60870-5-104 (aka IEC 104) and IEC 61850 (Goose).

Cloud computing is a modern type of service that provides each consumer with a large-scale computing tool. Different cyber-attacks can potentially target cloud computing systems, as most cloud computing systems offer services to so many people who are not known to be trustworthy. Therefore, to protect that Virtual Machine from threats, a cloud computing system must incorporate some security monitoring framework. There is a tradeoff between the security level of the security system and the performance of the system in this scenario. If a strong security is required then a stronger security service using more rules or patterns should be incorporated and then in proportion to the strength of security, it needs much more computing resources. So the amount of resources allocated to customers is decreasing so this research work will introduce a new way of security system in cloud environments to the VM in this research. The main point of Fog computing is to part of the cloud server's work in the ongoing study tells the step-by-step cloud server to change gigantic information measurement because the endeavor apps are relocated to the cloud to keep the framework cost. So the cloud server is devouring and changing huge measures of information step by step so it is rented to keep up the problem and additionally get terrible reactions in a horrible device environment. Cloud computing and Fog computing approaches were combined in this paper to review data movement and safe information about MDHC.

Trust along digitalized supply chains is challenged by the aspect that monitoring equipment may not be trustworthy or unreliable as respective measurements originate from potentially untrusted parties. To allow for dynamic relationships along supply chains, we propose a blockchain-backed supply chain monitoring architecture relying on trusted hardware. Our design provides a notion of secure end-to-end sensing of interactions even when originating from untrusted surroundings. Due to attested checkpointing, we can identify misinformation early on and reliably pinpoint the origin. A blockchain enables long-term verifiability for all (now trustworthy) IoT data within our system even if issues are detected only after the fact. Our feasibility study and cost analysis further show that our design is indeed deployable in and applicable to today’s supply chain settings.

Information security of logistics services. Information security of logistics services is understood as a complex activity aimed at using information and means of its processing in order to increase the level of protection and normal functioning of the object's information environment. At the same time the main recommendations for ensuring information security of logistics processes include: logistics support of processes for ensuring the security of information flows of the enterprise; assessment of the quality and reliability of elements, reliability and efficiency of obtaining information about the state of logistics processes. However, it is possible to assess the level of information security within the organization's controlled part of the supply chain through levels and indicators. In this case, there are four levels and elements of information security of supply chains.

Recently, the informatics infrastructure of INRiM Time and Frequency Laboratory has been completely renewed with particular attention to network security and software architecture aspects, with the aims to improve the reliability, robustness and automation of the overall set-up. This upgraded infrastructure has allowed, since January 2020, a fully automated generation and monitoring of the Italian time scale UTC(IT), based on dedicated software developed in-house [1]. We focus in this work on the network and software aspects of our set-up, which enable a robust and reliable automatic time scale generation with continuous monitoring and minimal human intervention.

Information flow type systems enforce the security property of noninterference by detecting unauthorized data flows at compile-time. However, they require precise type annotations, making them difficult to use in practice as much of the legacy infrastructure is written in untyped or dynamically-typed languages. Gradual typing seamlessly integrates static and dynamic typing, providing the best of both approaches, and has been applied to information flow control, where information flow monitors are derived from gradual security types. Prior work on gradual information flow typing uncovered tensions between noninterference and the dynamic gradual guarantee- the property that less precise security type annotations in a program should not cause more runtime errors.This paper re-examines the connection between gradual information flow types and information flow monitors to identify the root cause of the tension between the gradual guarantees and noninterference. We develop runtime semantics for a simple imperative language with gradual information flow types that provides both noninterference and gradual guarantees. We leverage a proof technique developed for FlowML and reduce noninterference proofs to preservation proofs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been proposed in the last few years with the goal of addressing technical problems in fields such as home and industrial automation, smart lighting systems and traffic monitoring. However, due to the very nature of the IoT devices (generally low-powered and often lacking strong security functionalities), typical deployments pose a great risk in terms of security and privacy. In this respect, the utilization of both a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) can serve as a countermeasure against typical attacks. Furthermore, these functional blocks can serve as safe key storage services and provide a robust secure boot implementation and a firmware update mechanism, thus ensuring run-time authentication and integrity. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation allows to determine the degree of attainment of precise security properties in a product. The main objective of this work is to identify, propose and compose bricks of protection profile (PP), as defined by Common Criteria, that are applicable to secure IoT architectures. Moreover, it aims at giving some guiding rules and facilitate future certifications of components and/or their composition. Finally, it also provides a structure for a future methodology of assessment for IoT devices.

Authentication, forms an important step in any security system to allow access to resources that are to be restricted. In this paper, we propose a novel artificial intelligence-assisted risk-based two-factor authentication method. We begin with the details of existing systems in use and then compare the two systems viz: Two Factor Authentication (2FA), Risk-Based Two Factor Authentication (RB-2FA) with each other followed by our proposed AIA-RB-2FA method. The proposed method starts by recording the user features every time the user logs in and learns from the user behavior. Once sufficient data is recorded which could train the AI model, the system starts monitoring each login attempt and predicts whether the user is the owner of the account they are trying to access. If they are not, then we fallback to 2FA.

Preventing the cyberattacks has been a concern for any organization. In this research, the authors propose a novel method to detect cyberattacks by monitoring and analyzing the network traffic. It was observed that the various log files that are created in the server does not contain all the relevant traces to detect a cyberattack. Hence, the HTTP traffic to the web server was analyzed to detect any potential cyberattacks. To validate the research, a web server was simulated using the Opensource Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) and the cyberattacks were simulated as per the OWASP standards. A python program was scripted that captured the network traffic to the DVWA server. This traffic was analyzed in real-time by reading the various HTTP parameters viz., URLs, Get / Post methods and the dependencies. The results were found to be encouraging as all the simulated attacks in real-time could be successfully detected. This work can be used as a template by various organizations to prevent any insider threat by monitoring the internal HTTP traffic.

In this paper is devoted a creation cryptographic protocol for the division of mutual authentication and session key. For secure protocols, suitable cryptographic algorithms were monitored.

Human-automation shared control is proposed to reduce the risk of driver disengagement in Level-3 autonomous vehicles. Although previous studies have approved shared control strategy is effective to keep a driver in the loop and improve the driver's performance, over- and under-trust may affect the cooperation between the driver and the automation system. This study conducted a human-in-the-loop driving simulation experiment to assess the effects of trust on driver's behavior of shared control. An expert shared control strategy with longitudinal and lateral driving assistance was proposed and implemented in the experiment platform. Based on the experiment (N=24), trust in shared control was evaluated, followed by a correlation analysis of trust and behaviors. Moderating effects of trust on the relationship between gaze focalization and minimum of time to collision were then explored. Results showed that self-reported trust in shared control could be evaluated by three subscales respectively: safety, efficiency and ease of control, which all show stronger correlations with gaze focalization than other behaviors. Besides, with more trust in ease of control, there is a gentle decrease in the human-machine conflicts of mean brake inputs. The moderating effects show trust could enhance the decrease of minimum of time to collision as eyes-off-road time increases. These results indicate over-trust in automation will lead to unsafe behaviors, particularly monitoring behavior. This study contributes to revealing the link between trust and behavior in the context of human-automation shared control. It can be applied in improving the design of shared control and reducing risky behaviors of drivers by further trust calibration.

Today's global network is filled with attackers both live and automated seeking to identify and compromise vulnerable devices, with initial scanning and attack activity occurring within minutes or even seconds of being connected to the Internet. To better understand these events, honeypots can be deployed to monitor and log activity by simulating actual Internet facing services such as SSH, Telnet, HTTP, or FTP, and malicious activity can be logged as attempts are made to compromise them. In this study six multi-service honeypots are deployed in locations around the globe to collect and catalog traffic over a period of several months between March and December, 2020. Analysis is performed on various characteristics including source and destination IP addresses and port numbers, usernames and passwords utilized, commands executed, and types of files downloaded. In addition, Cowrie log data is restructured to observe individual attacker sessions, study command sequences, and monitor tunneling activity. This data is then correlated across honeypots to compare attack and traffic patterns with the goal of learning more about the tactics being employed. By gathering data gathered from geographically separate zones over a long period of time a greater understanding can be developed regarding attacker intent and methodology, can aid in the development of effective approaches to identifying malicious behavior and attack sources, and can serve as a cyber-threat intelligence feed.

IoT honeypots that mimic the behavior of IoT devices for threat analysis are becoming increasingly important. Existing honeypot systems use devices with a specific version of firmware installed to monitor cyber attacks. However, honeypots frequently receive requests targeting devices and firmware that are different from themselves. When honeypots return an error response to such a request, the attack is terminated, and the monitoring fails.To solve this problem, we introduce FirmPot, a framework that automatically generates intelligent-interaction honeypots using firmware. This framework has a firmware emulator optimized for honeypot generation and learns the behavior of embedded applications by using machine learning. The generated honeypots continue to interact with attackers by a mechanism that returns the best from the emulated responses to the attack request instead of an error response.We experimented on embedded web applications of wireless routers based on the open-source OpenWrt. As a result, our framework generated honeypots that mimicked the embedded web applications of eight vendors and ten different CPU architectures. Furthermore, our approach to the interaction improved the session length with attackers compared to existing ones.

The application of intelligent video terminal has spread in all aspects of production and life, such as urban transportation, enterprises, hospitals, banks, and families. In recent years, intelligent video terminals, video recorders and other video monitoring system components are frequently exposed to high risks of security vulnerabilities, which is likely to threaten the privacy of users and data security. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the security research and testing of intelligent video terminals, and formulate reinforcement and protection strategies based on the evaluation results, in order to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data collected and transmitted by intelligent video terminals.

Personalized IoT adapt their behavior based on contextual information, such as user behavior and location. Unfortunately, the fact that personalized IoT adapt to user context opens a side-channel that leaks private information about the user. To that end, we start by studying the extent to which a malicious eavesdropper can monitor the actions taken by an IoT system and extract user's private information. In particular, we show two concrete instantiations (in the context of mobile phones and smart homes) of a new category of spyware which we refer to as Context-Aware Adaptation Based Spyware (SpyCon). Experimental evaluations show that the developed SpyCon can predict users' daily behavior with an accuracy of 90.3%. Being a new spyware with no known prior signature or behavior, traditional spyware detection that is based on code signature or system behavior are not adequate to detect SpyCon. We discuss possible detection and mitigation mechanisms that can hinder the effect of SpyCon.

Digital forensics investigation process begins with the acquisition, investigation until the presentation of investigation findings. Investigators are required to manage bits and pieces of digital evidence in the cloud and to correlate with evidence found in physical machines and network. The process could be made easy with a proper case management tool that is hosted in the web. The challenge of maintaining chain of custody, determining access to evidence, assignment of forensics investigator could be overcome when digital evidence is fully integrated in a single platform. Our proposed case management tool streamlines information gathering and integrates information on different platforms, shares information, tracks cases, and uploads data directly into a database. In addition, the case management tool facilitates the collaboration of investigators through sharing of forensics findings. These features allow case owner or administrator to track and monitor investigation progress in a forensically sound manner.

The reuse of libraries in software development has become prevalent for improving development efficiency and software quality. However, security vulnerabilities of reused libraries propagated through software project dependency pose a severe security threat, but they have not yet been well studied. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of project dependencies with respect to security vulnerabilities. We developed PDGraph, an innovative approach for analyzing publicly known security vulnerabilities among numerous project dependencies, which provides a new perspective for assessing security risks in the wild. As a large-scale software collection in dependency, we find 337,415 projects and 1,385,338 dependency relations. In particular, PDGraph generates a project dependency graph, where each node is a project, and each edge indicates a dependency relationship. We conducted experiments to validate the efficacy of PDGraph and characterized its features for security analysis. We revealed that 1,014 projects have publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, and more than 67,806 projects are directly dependent on them. Among these, 42,441 projects still manifest 67,581 insecure dependency relationships, indicating that they are built on vulnerable versions of reused libraries even though their vulnerabilities are publicly known. During our eight-month observation period, only 1,266 insecure edges were fixed, and corresponding vulnerable libraries were updated to secure versions. Furthermore, we uncovered four underlying dependency risks that can significantly reduce the difficulty of compromising systems. We conducted a quantitative analysis of dependency risks on the PDGraph.

The project uses 3D immersive technology to innovatively apply virtual reality technology to the monitoring field, and proposes the concept and technical route of remote 3D immersive intelligent control. A design scheme of a three-dimensional immersive remote somatosensory intelligent controller is proposed, which is applied to the remote three-dimensional immersive control of a crawler mobile robot, and the test and analysis of the principle prototype are completed.

We propose a stability monitoring approach for the mitigation of cyber threats directed at the wide area control (WAC) system used for coordinated control of Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) used for power oscillation damping (POD) of active power flow on inter-area tie lines. The approach involves monitoring the modes of the active power oscillation on an inter-area tie line using the Matrix Pencil (MP) method. We use the stability characteristics of the observed modes as a proxy for the presence of destabilizing cyber threats. We monitor the system modes to determine whether any destabilizing modes appear after the WAC system engages to control the POD. If the WAC signal exacerbates the POD performance, the FACTS falls back to POD using local measurements. The proposed approach does not require an expansive system-wide view of the network. We simulate replay, control integrity, and timing attacks for a test system and present results that demonstrate the performance of the SM approach for mitigation.