Biblio

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the biggest revelations of the last decade. These cyber-physical systems seamlessly integrate and improve the activities in our daily lives. Hence, creating a wide application for it in several domains, such as smart buildings and cities. However, the integration of IoT also comes with privacy challenges. The privacy challenges result from the ability of these devices to pervasively collect personal data about individuals through sensors in ways that could be unknown to them. A number of research efforts have evaluated privacy policy awareness and enforcement as key components for addressing these privacy challenges. This paper provides a framework for understanding contextualized privacy policy within the IoT domain. This will enable IoT privacy researchers to better understand IoT privacy policies and their modeling.

Power systems automation and communication standards are crucial for the transition of the conventional power system towards a smart grid. The IEC 61850 standard is widely used for substation automation and protection. It enables real-time communication and data exchange between critical substation automation devices. IEC 61850 serves as the foundation for open communication and data exchange for digital substations of the smart grid. However, IEC 61850 has cyber security vulnerabilities that can be exploited with a man-in-the-middle attack. Such coordinated cyber attacks against the protection system in digital substations can disconnect generation and transmission lines, causing cascading failures. In this paper, we demonstrate a cyber attack involving the Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol of IEC 61850. This is achieved by exploiting the cyber security vulnerabilities in the protocol and injecting spoofed GOOSE data frames into the substation communication network at the bay level. The cyber attack leads to tripping of multiple protective relays in the power grid, eventually resulting in a blackout. The attack model and impact on system dynamics are verified experimentally through hardware-in-the-loop simulations using commercial relays and Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS).

Inter-substation Generic Object Oriented Substation Events (GOOSE) communications that are used for critical protection functions have several cyber-security vulnerabilities. GOOSE messages are directly mapped to the Layer 2 Ethernet without network and transport layer headers that provide data encapsulation. The high-status-number attack is a malicious attack on GOOSE messages that allows hackers to completely take over intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) subscribing to GOOSE communications. The status-number parameter of GOOSE messages, stNum is tampered with in these attacks. Given the strict delivery time requirement of 3 ms for GOOSE messaging, it is infeasible to encrypt the GOOSE payload. This work proposes to secure the sensitive stNum parameter of the GOOSE payload using systematically encoded polynomial codes. Exploiting linear codes allows for the security features to be encoded in linear time, in contrast to complex hashing algorithms. At the subscribing IED, the security feature is used to verify that the stNum parameter has not been tampered with during transmission in the insecure medium. The decoding and verification using syndrome computation at the subscriber IED is also accomplished in linear time.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as intelligent connected vehicles, smart farming and smart logistics are constantly generating tons of data and requiring real-time data processing capabilities. Therefore, Edge Computing which provisions computing resources close to the End Devices from the network edge is becoming the ideal platform for CPS. However, it also brings many issues and one of the most prominent challenges is how to ensure the development of trustworthy smart services given the dynamic and distributed nature of Edge Computing. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a novel Federated Learning based Edge Computing platform for CPS, named “FengHuoLun”. Specifically, based on FengHuoLun, we can: 1) implement smart services where machine learning models are trained in a trusted Federated Learning framework; 2) assure the trustworthiness of smart services where CPS behaviours are tested and monitored using the Federated Learning framework. As a work in progress, we have presented an overview of the FengHuoLun platform and also some preliminary studies on its key components, and finally discussed some important future research directions.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has arisen as an emerging trend in the industrial sector. Millions of sensors present in IIoT networks generate a massive amount of data that can open the doors for several cyber-attacks. An intrusion detection system (IDS) monitors real-time internet traffic and identify the behavior and type of network attacks. In this paper, we presented a deep random neural (DRaNN) based scheme for intrusion detection in IIoT. The proposed scheme is evaluated by using a new generation IIoT security dataset UNSW-NB15. Experimental results prove that the proposed model successfully classified nine different types of attacks with a low false-positive rate and great accuracy of 99.54%. To validate the feasibility of the proposed scheme, experimental results are also compared with state-of-the-art deep learning-based intrusion detection schemes. The proposed model achieved a higher attack detection rate of 99.41%.

The paper proposes a method for solving problems of classifying multi-step attacks on wireless sensor networks in the conditions of uncertainty (incompleteness and inconsistency) of the observed signs of attacks. The method aims to eliminate the uncertainty of classification of attacks on networks of this class one the base of the use of neural network approaches to the processing of incomplete and contradictory knowledge on possible attack characteristics. It allows increasing objectivity (accuracy and reliability) of information security monitoring in modern software and hardware systems and Internet of Things networks that actively exploit advantages of wireless sensor networks.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a task that aims to assess students' mastery level of knowledge and predict their performance over questions, which has attracted widespread attention over the years. Recently, an increasing number of researches have applied deep learning techniques to knowledge tracing and have made a huge success over traditional Bayesian Knowledge Tracing methods. Most existing deep learning-based methods utilized either Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, it is worth noticing that these two sorts of models are complementary in modeling abilities. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel knowledge tracing model by taking advantage of both two models via combining them into a single integrated model, named Convolutional Recurrent Knowledge Tracing (CRKT). Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in multiple KT datasets.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, mobile Internet and the Internet of Things, the current network environment continues to become more complicated. Due to the increasing variety and severity of cybersecurity threats, traditional means of network security protection have ushered in a huge challenge. The network security posture prediction can effectively predict the network development trend in the future time based on the collected network history data, so this paper proposes an algorithm based on simulated annealing-particle swarm algorithm to optimize improved Elman neural network parameters to achieve posture prediction for network security. Taking advantage of the characteristic that the value of network security posture has periodicity, a simulated annealing algorithm is introduced along with an improved particle swarm algorithm to solve the problem that neural network training is prone to fall into a local optimal solution and achieve accurate prediction of the network security posture. Comparison of the proposed scheme with existing prediction methods validates that the scheme has a good posture prediction accuracy.

Internet of Things (IoT) development and the addition of billions of computationally limited devices prohibit the use of classical security measures such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). In this paper, we study the influence of the implementation of different feed-forward type of Neural Networks (NNs) on the detection Rate of the Negative Selection Neural Network (NSNN) algorithm. Feed-forward and cascade forward NN structures with different number of neurons and different number of hidden layers are tested. For training and testing the NSNN algorithm the labeled KDD NSL dataset is applied. The detection rates provided by the algorithm with several NN structures to determine the optimal solution are calculated and compared. The results show how these different feed-forward based NN architectures impact the performance of the NSNN algorithm.

Low accuracy and slow speed of predictions for cyber security situational awareness. This paper proposes a network security situational awareness model based on accelerated accurate k-means radial basis function (RBF) neural network, the model uses the ball k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the input samples, to get the nodes of the hidden layer of the RBF neural network, speeding up the selection of the initial center point of the RBF neural network, and optimize the parameters of the RBF neural network structure. Finally, use the training data set to train the neural network, using the test data set to test the accuracy of this neural network structure, the results show that this method has a greater improvement in training speed and accuracy than other neural networks.

One of the most significant systems in computer network security assurance is the assessment of computer network security. With the goal of finding an effective method for performing the process of security evaluation in a computer network, this paper uses a deep neural network to be responsible for the task of security evaluating. The DNN will be built with python on Spyder IDE, it will be trained and tested by 17 network security indicators then the output that we get represents one of the security levels that have been already defined. The maj or purpose is to enhance the ability to determine the security level of a computer network accurately based on its selected security indicators. The method that we intend to use in this paper in order to evaluate network security is simple, reduces the human factors interferences, and can obtain the correct results of the evaluation rapidly. We will analyze the results to decide if this method will enhance the process of evaluating the security of the network in terms of accuracy.

This paper studies the current status and future directions of RTOS (Real-Time Operating Systems) for time-sensitive CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems). GPOS (General Purpose Operating Systems) existed before RTOS but did not meet performance requirements for time sensitive CPS. Many GPOS have put forward adaptations to meet the requirements of real-time performance, and this paper compares RTOS and GPOS and shows their pros and cons for CPS applications. Furthermore, comparisons among select RTOS such as VxWorks, RTLinux, and FreeRTOS have been conducted in terms of scheduling, kernel, and priority inversion. Various tools for WCET (Worst-Case Execution Time) estimation are discussed. This paper also presents a CPS use case of RTOS, i.e. JetOS for avionics, and future advancements in RTOS such as multi-core RTOS, new RTOS architecture and RTOS security for CPS.

Recently, some innovations have been applied to the linear permanent magnet generator (LPMG). They are including the introduction of high-remanence rare-earth magnets and the use of different magnet configurations. However, these actions also affect the flow and distribution of the magnetic flux. Under the load condition, the load current will also generate reverse flux. The flux resultant then affects the coil parameters; the significant one is the coil inductance. Since it is influential to the output voltage and output power profiles, the impact study of the permanent magnet settings under load condition is essential. Hence this paper presents the inductance profile study of the LMPG with different magnet configurations. After presenting the initial designs, several magnet settings including the material and configuration were varied. Finite element magnetic simulation and analytical calculations were then performed to obtain the inductance profile of the LPMG. The results show that the inductance value varies with change in load current and magnet position. The different magnet materials (SmCo 30 and N35) do not significantly affect the inductance. Meanwhile, different magnet configuration (radial, axial, halbach) results in different inductance trends.

This paper reports electroplated CoPt permanent magnets samples yielding thicknesses up to 100 μm, deposition rates up to 35 μm/h, coercivities up to 1000 kA/m (1.25 T), remanences up to 0.8 T, and energy products up to 77 kJ/m3. The impact of electroplating bath temperature and glycine additives are systematically studied. Compared to prior work, these microfabricated magnets not only exhibit up to 10X increase in thickness without sacrificing magnetic performance, but also improve the areal magnetic energy density by 2X. Using a thick removeable SU-8 mold, these high-performing thick-film magnets are intended for magnetic microactuators, magnetic field sensors, energy conversion devices, and more.

Nanosize multiferroic La-doped YFeO3 powders are harvested via a low-temperature solid-state reaction method. X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman spectra analysis reveal that with La addition, YFeO3 powders are successfully fabricated at a lower temperature with the size below 60 nm, and a refined structure is obtained. Magnetic hysteresis loop illustrates ferromagnetic behavior of YFeO3 nano particles can be enhanced with La addition. The maximum and remnant magnetization of the powders are about 4.03 and 1.22 emu/g, respectively. It is shown that the optical band gap is around 2.25 eV, proving that La doped YFeO3 nano particles can strongly absorb visible light. Both magnetic and optical properties are greatly enhanced with La addition, proving its potential application in magnetic and optical field.

The papers in this special section focus on network science for high confidence cyber-physical systems (CPS) Here CPS refers to the engineered systems that can seamlessly integrate the physical world with the cyber world via advanced computation and communication capabilities. To enable high-confidence CPS for achieving better benefits as well as supporting emerging applications, network science-based theories and methodologies are needed to cope with the ever-growing complexity of smart CPS, to predict the system behaviors, and to model the deep inter-dependencies among CPS and the natural world. The major objective of this special section is to exploit various network science techniques such as modeling, analysis, mining, visualization, and optimization to advance the science of supporting high-confidence CPS for greater assurances of security, safety, scalability, efficiency, and reliability. These papers bring a timely and important research topic. The challenges and opportunities of applying network science approaches to high-confidence CPS are profound and far-reaching.

Trustworthy and secure operation of the cyber-power system calls for resilience against malicious and accidental failures. The objective of a resilient system is to withstand and recover operation of the system to supply critical loads despite multiple contingencies in the system. To take timely actions, we need to continuously measure the cyberphysical security of the system. We propose a cyber-physical security assessment metric (CP-SAM) based on quantitative factors affecting resiliency and utilizing concepts from graph theoretic analysis, probabilistic model of availability, attack graph metrics, and vulnerabilities across different layers of the microgrid system. These factors are integrated into a single metric using a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, Choquet Integral to compute CP-SAM. The developed metric will be valuable for i) monitoring the microgrid resiliency considering a holistic cyber-physical model; and ii) enable better decision-making to select best possible mitigation strategies towards resilient microgrid system. Developed CP-SAM can be extended for active distribution system and has been validated in a real-world power-grid test-bed to monitor the microgrid resiliency.

Cloud architecture has become a valuable solution for different applications, such as big data analytics, due to its high degree of availability, scalability and strategic value. However, there still remain challenges in managing cloud architecture, in areas such as cloud security. In this paper, we exploit software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain technologies to secure cloud management platforms from a networking perspective. We develop a blockchain-powered SDN-enabled networking infrastructure in which the integration between blockchain-based security and autonomy management layer and multi-controller SDN networking layer is defined to enhance the integrity of the control and management messages. Furthermore, our proposed networking infrastructure also enables the autonomous bandwidth provisioning to enhance the availability of cloud architecture. In the simulation section, we evaluate the performance of our proposed blockchain-powered SDN-enabled networking infrastructure by considering different scenarios.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus system works inside connected cars as a central system for communication between electronic control units (ECUs). Despite its central importance, the CAN does not support an authentication mechanism, i.e., CAN messages are broadcast without basic security features. As a result, it is easy for attackers to launch attacks at the CAN bus network system. Attackers can compromise the CAN bus system in several ways: denial of service, fuzzing, spoofing, etc. It is imperative to devise methodologies to protect modern cars against the aforementioned attacks. In this paper, we propose a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect and mitigate the CAN bus network attacks. We first inject attacks at the CAN bus system in a car that we have at our disposal to generate the attack dataset, which we use to test and train our model. Our results demonstrate that our classifier is efficient in detecting the CAN attacks. We achieved a detection accuracy of 99.9949%.

The recent advancement in the automotive sector has led to a technological explosion. As a result, the modern car provides a wide range of features supported by state of the art hardware and software. Unfortunately, while this is the case of most major components, in the same vehicle we find dozens of sensors and sub-systems built over legacy hardware and software with limited computational capabilities. This paper presents LOKI, a lightweight cryptographic key distribution scheme applicable in the case of the classical invehicle communication systems. The LOKI protocol stands out compared to already proposed protocols in the literature due to its ability to use only a single broadcast message to initiate the generation of a new cryptographic key across a group of nodes. It's lightweight key derivation algorithm takes advantage of a reverse hash chain traversal algorithm to generate fresh session keys. Experimental results consisting of a laboratory-scale system based on Vector Informatik's CANoe simulation environment demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology and its seamless impact manifested on the network.

The automotive Controller Area Network (CAN) allows Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to communicate with each other and control various vehicular functions such as engine and braking control. Consequently CAN and ECUs are high priority targets for hackers. As CAN implementation details are held as proprietary information by vehicle manufacturers, it can be challenging to decode and correlate CAN messages to specific vehicle operations. To understand the precise meanings of CAN messages, reverse engineering techniques that are time-consuming, manually intensive, and require a physical vehicle are typically used. This work aims to address the process of reverse engineering CAN messages for their functionality by creating a machine learning classifier that analyzes messages and determines their relationship to other messages and vehicular functions. Our work examines CAN traffic of different vehicles and standards to show that it can be applied to a wide arrangement of vehicles. The results show that the function of CAN messages can be determined without the need to manually reverse engineer a physical vehicle.

In this paper, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus of modern vehicles has been proposed. NESLIDS is an anomaly detection algorithm based on the supervised Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture that is designed to counter three critical attack categories: Denial-of-service (DoS), fuzzy, and impersonation attacks. Our research scope included modifying DNN parameters, e.g. number of hidden layer neurons, batch size, and activation functions according to how well it maximized detection accuracy and minimized the false positive rate (FPR) for these attacks. Our methodology consisted of collecting CAN Bus data from online and in real-time, injecting attack data after data collection, preprocessing in Python, training the DNN, and testing the model with different datasets. Results show that the proposed IDS effectively detects all attack types for both types of datasets. NESLIDS outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, scalability, and low false alarm rates.

Parallel with the developing world, transportation technologies have started to expand and change significantly year by year. This change brings with it some inevitable problems. Increasing human population and growing transportation-needs result many accidents in urban and rural areas, and this recursively results extra traffic problems and fuel consumption. It is obvious that the issues brought by this spiral loop needed to be solved with the use of some new technological achievements. In this context, self-driving cars or automated vehicles concepts are seen as a good solution. However, this also brings some additional problems with it. Currently many cars are provided with some digital security systems, which are examined in two phases, internal and external. These systems are constructed in the car by using some type of embedded system (such as the Controller Area Network (CAN)) which are needed to be protected form outsider cyberattacks. These attack can be detected by several ways such as rule based system, anomaly based systems, list based systems, etc. The current literature showed that researchers focused on the use of some artificial intelligence techniques for the detection of this type of attack. In this study, an intrusion detection system based on machine learning is proposed for the CAN security, which is the in-vehicle communication structure. As a result of the study, it has been observed that the decision tree-based ensemble learning models results the best performance in the tested models. Additionally, all models have a very good accuracy levels.

The massive proliferation of state of the art interfaces into the automotive sector has triggered a revolution in terms of the technological ecosystem that is found in today's modern car. Accordingly, on the one hand, we find dozens of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) running several hundred MB of code, and more and more sophisticated dashboards with integrated wireless communications. On the other hand, in the same vehicle we find the underlying communication infrastructure struggling to keep up with the pace of these radical changes. This paper presents MixCAN (MIXed data authentication for Control Area Networks), an approach for mixing different message signatures (i.e., authentication tags) in order to reduce the overhead of Controller Area Network (CAN) communications. MixCAN leverages the attributes of Bloom Filters in order to ensure that an ECU can sign messages with different CAN identifiers (i.e., mix different message signatures), and that other ECUs can verify the signature for a subset of monitored CAN identifiers. Extensive experimental results based on Vectors Informatik's CANoe/CANalyzer simulation environment and the data set provided by Hacking and Countermeasure Research Lab (HCRL) confirm the validity and applicability of the developed approach. Subsequent experiments including a test bed consisting of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ systems equipped with CAN communication modules demonstrate the practical integration of MixCAN in real automotive systems.

The Controller Area Network (CAN), a broadcasting bus for intra-vehicle communication, does not provide any security mechanisms, although it is implemented in almost every vehicle. Attackers can exploit this issue, transmit malicious messages unnoticeably and cause severe harm. As the utilization of Message Authentication Codes (MACs) is only possible to a limited extent in resource-constrained systems, the focus is put on the development of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Due to their simple idea of operation, current developments are increasingly utilizing physical signal properties like voltages to realize these systems. Although the feasibility for CAN-based networks could be demonstrated, the least approaches consider the constrained resource-availability of vehicular hardware. To close this gap, we present Voltage-Based Lightweight Intrusion Detection (VALID), which provides physics-based intrusion detection with low resource requirements. By utilizing solely the individual voltage levels on the network during communication, the system detects unauthorized message transmissions without any sophisticated sampling approaches and feature calculations. Having performed evaluations on data from two real vehicles, we show that VALID is not only able to detect intrusions with an accuracy of 99.54 %, but additionally is capable of identifying the attack source reliably. These properties make VALID one of the most lightweight intrusion detection approaches that is ready-to-use, as it can be easily implemented on hardware already installed in vehicles and does not require any further components. Additionally, this allows existing platforms to be retrofitted and vehicular security systems to be improved and extended.