Biblio

Databases are at the heart of modern applications and any threats to them can seriously endanger the safety and functionality of applications relying on the services offered by a DBMS. It is therefore pertinent to identify key risks to the secure operation of a database system. This paper identifies the key risks, namely, SQL injection, weak audit trails, access management issues and issues with encryption. A malicious actor can get help from any of these issues. It can compromise integrity, availability and confidentiality of the data present in database systems. The paper also identifies various means and ways to defend against these issues and remedy them. This paper then proceeds to identify from the literature, the potential solutions to these ameliorate the threat from these vulnerabilities. It proposes the usage of encryption to protect the data from being breached and leveraging encrypted databases such as CryptoDB. Better access control norms are suggested to prevent unauthorized access, modification and deletion of the data. The paper also recommends ways to prevent SQL injection attacks through techniques such as prepared statements.

Malicious attacks, malware, and ransomware families pose critical security issues to cybersecurity, and it may cause catastrophic damages to computer systems, data centers, web, and mobile applications across various industries and businesses. Traditional anti-ransomware systems struggle to fight against newly created sophisticated attacks. Therefore, state-of-the-art techniques like traditional and neural network-based architectures can be immensely utilized in the development of innovative ransomware solutions. In this paper, we present a feature selection-based framework with adopting different machine learning algorithms including neural network-based architectures to classify the security level for ransomware detection and prevention. We applied multiple machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers on a selected number of features for ransomware classification. We performed all the experiments on one ransomware dataset to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrate that RF classifiers outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, F -beta, and precision scores.

The latest generation of IoT systems incorporate machine learning (ML) technologies on edge devices. This introduces new engineering challenges to bring ML onto resource-constrained hardware, and complications for ensuring system security and privacy. Existing research prescribes iterative processes for machine learning enabled IoT products to ease development and increase product success. However, these processes mostly focus on existing practices used in other generic software development areas and are not specialized for the purpose of machine learning or IoT devices. This research seeks to characterize engineering processes and security practices for ML-enabled IoT systems through the lens of the engineering lifecycle. We collected data from practitioners through a survey (N=25) and interviews (N=4). We found that security processes and engineering methods vary by company. Respondents emphasized the engineering cost of security analysis and threat modeling, and trade-offs with business needs. Engineers reduce their security investment if it is not an explicit requirement. The threats of IP theft and reverse engineering were a consistent concern among practitioners when deploying ML for IoT devices. Based on our findings, we recommend further research into understanding engineering cost, compliance, and security trade-offs.

The increase of autonomy in autonomous surface vehicles development brings along modified and new risks and potential hazards, this in turn, introduces the need for processes and methods for ensuring that systems are acceptable for their intended use with respect to dependability and safety concerns. One approach for evaluating software requirements for claims of safety is to employ an assurance case. Much like a legal case, the assurance case lays out an argument and supporting evidence to provide assurance on the software requirements. This paper analyses safety and security requirements relating to autonomous vessels, and regulations in the automotive industry and the marine industry before proposing a generic cybersecurity and safety assurance case that takes a general graphical approach of Goal Structuring Notation (GSN).

Middlebox is primarily used in Software-Defined Network (SDN) to enhance operational performance, policy compliance, and security operations. Therefore, security of the middlebox itself is essential because incorrect use of the middlebox can cause severe cybersecurity problems for SDN. Existing attacks against middleboxes in SDN (for instance, middleboxbypass attack) use methods such as cloned tags from the previous packets to justify that the middlebox has processed the injected packet. Flowcloak as the latest solution to defeat such an attack creates a defence using a tag by computing the hash of certain parts of the packet header. However, the security mechanisms proposed to mitigate these attacks are compromise-able since all parts of the packet header can be imitated, leaving the middleboxes insecure. To demonstrate our claim, we introduce a novel attack against SDN middleboxes by hijacking TCP/IP headers. The attack uses crafted TCP/IP headers to receive the tags and signatures and successfully bypasses the middleboxes.

SDN represents a significant advance for the telecom world, since the decoupling of the control and data planes offers numerous advantages in terms of management dynamism and programmability, mainly due to its software-based centralized control. Unfortunately, these features can be exploited by malicious entities, who take advantage of the centralized control to extend the scope and consequences of their attacks. When this happens, both the legal and network technical fields are concerned with gathering information that will lead them to the root cause of the problem. Although forensics and incident response processes share their interest in the event information, both operate in isolation due to the conceptual and pragmatic challenges of integrating them into SDN environments, which impacts on the resources and time required for information analysis. Given these limitations, the current work focuses on proposing a framework for SDNs that combines the above approaches to optimize the resources to deliver evidence, incorporate incident response activation mechanisms, and generate assumptions about the possible origin of the security problem.

Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target attacker to a source one-i.e., syntax-directed back-translation-or show that the interaction traces of the target attacker can also be emitted by source attackers—i.e., trace-directed back-translation. Syntax-directed back-translation is not suitable when the target attacker may use unstructured control flow that the source language cannot directly represent. Trace-directed back-translation works with such syntactic dissimilarity because only the external interactions of the target attacker have to be mimicked in the source, not its internal control flow. Revealing only external interactions is, however, inconvenient when sharing memory via unforgeable pointers, since information about shared pointers stashed in private memory is not present on the trace. This made prior proofs unnecessarily complex, since the generated attacker had to instead stash all reachable pointers. In this work, we introduce more informative data-flow traces, combining the best of syntax- and trace-directed back-translation in a simpler technique that handles both syntactic dissimilarity and memory sharing well, and that is proved correct in Coq. Additionally, we develop a novel turn-taking simulation relation and use it to prove a recomposition lemma, which is key to reusing compiler correctness in such secure compilation proofs. We are the first to mechanize such a recomposition lemma in the presence of memory sharing. We use these two innovations in a secure compilation proof for a code generation compiler pass between a source language with structured control flow and a target language with unstructured control flow, both with safe pointers and components.

The distributed energy resources (DERs) have significantly stimulated the development of decentralized energy system and changed the way how the energy system works. In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading has drawn attention as a promising alternative for prosumers to engage with the energy market more actively, particular by using the emerging blockchain technology. Blockchain can securely hold critical information and store data in blocks linking with chain, providing a desired platform for the P2P energy trading. This paper provides a detailed description of blockchain-enabled P2P energy trading, its essential components, and how it can be implemented within the local energy market An analysis of potential threats during blockchain-enabled P2P energy trading is also performed, which subsequently results in a list of operation and privacy requirements suggested to be implemented in the local energy market.

Cybersecurity attacks, which have many business impacts, continuously become more intelligent and complex. These attacks take the form of a combination of various attack elements. APT attacks reflect this characteristic well. To defend against APT attacks, organizations should sufficiently understand these attacks based on the attack elements and their relations and actively defend against these attacks in multiple dimensions. Most organizations perform risk management to manage their information security. Generally, they use the information system risk assessment (ISRA). However, the method has difficulties supporting sufficiently analyzing security risks and actively responding to these attacks due to the limitations of asset-driven qualitative evaluation activities. In this paper, we propose a threat-driven risk assessment method. This method can evaluate how dangerous APT attacks are for an organization, analyze security risks from multiple perspectives, and support establishing an adaptive security strategy.

Consumer IoT devices may suffer malware attacks, and be recruited into botnets or worse. There is evidence that generic advice to device owners to address IoT malware can be successful, but this does not account for emerging forms of persistent IoT malware. Less is known about persistent malware, which resides on persistent storage, requiring targeted manual effort to remove it. This paper presents a field study on the removal of persistent IoT malware by consumers. We partnered with an ISP to contrast remediation times of 760 customers across three malware categories: Windows malware, non-persistent IoT malware, and persistent IoT malware. We also contacted ISP customers identified as having persistent IoT malware on their network-attached storage devices, specifically QSnatch. We found that persistent IoT malware exhibits a mean infection duration many times higher than Windows or Mirai malware; QSnatch has a survival probability of 30% after 180 days, whereby most if not all other observed malware types have been removed. For interviewed device users, QSnatch infections lasted longer, so are apparently more difficult to get rid of, yet participants did not report experiencing difficulty in following notification instructions. We see two factors driving this paradoxical finding: First, most users reported having high technical competency. Also, we found evidence of planning behavior for these tasks and the need for multiple notifications. Our findings demonstrate the critical nature of interventions from outside for persistent malware, since automatic scan of an AV tool or a power cycle, like we are used to for Windows malware and Mirai infections, will not solve persistent IoT malware infections.

With technology at our fingertips waiting to be exploited, the past decade saw the revolutionizing Human Computer Interactions. The ease with which a user could interact was the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of a sales team. Human Computer Interactions have many underlying parameters like Data Visualization and Presentation as some to deal with. With the race, on for better and faster presentations, evolved many frameworks to be widely used by all software developers. As the need grew for user friendly applications, more and more software professionals were lured into the front-end sophistication domain. Application frameworks have evolved to such an extent that with just a few clicks and feeding values as per requirements we are able to produce a commercially usable application in a few minutes. These frameworks generate quantum lines of codes in minutes which leaves a contrail of bugs to be discovered in the future. We have also succumbed to the benchmarking in Software Quality Metrics and have made ourselves comfortable with buggy software's to be rectified in future. The exponential evolution in the cyber domain has also attracted attackers equally. Average human awareness and knowledge has also improved in the cyber domain due to the prolonged exposure to technology for over three decades. As the attack sophistication grows and zero day attacks become more popular than ever, the suffering end users only receive remedial measures in spite of the latest Antivirus, Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems installed. We designed a software to display the complete services and applications running in users Operating System in the easiest perceivable manner aided by Computer Graphics and Data Visualization techniques. We further designed a study by empowering the fence sitter users with tools to actively participate in protecting themselves from threats. The designed threats had impressions from the complete threat canvas in some form or other restricted to systems functioning. Network threats and any sort of packet transfer to and from the system in form of threat was kept out of the scope of this experiment. We discovered that end users had a good idea of their working environment which can be used exponentially enhances machine learning for zero day threats and segment the unmarked the vast threat landscape faster for a more reliable output.

The past decade has shown us the power of cyber space and we getting dependent on the same. The exponential evolution in the domain has attracted attackers and defenders of technology equally. This inevitable domain has led to the increase in average human awareness and knowledge too. As we see the attack sophistication grow the protectors have always been a step ahead mitigating the attacks. A study of the various Threat Detection, Protection and Mitigation Systems revealed to us a common similarity wherein users have been totally ignored or the systems rely heavily on the user inputs for its correct functioning. Compiling the above we designed a study wherein user inputs were taken in addition to independent Detection and Prevention systems to identify and mitigate the risks. This approach led us to a conclusion that involvement of users exponentially enhances machine learning and segments the data sets faster for a more reliable output.

The risk of detecting incidents in the field of computer technology in Maritime transport is considered. The structure of the computer incident investigation system and its functions are given. The system of conducting investigations of computer incidents on sea transport is considered. A possible algorithm for investigating the incident using the tools of forensic science and an algorithm for transmitting the received data for further processing are presented.

In order to ensure the security of information assets and standardize the risk assessment and inspection workflow of information assets. This paper has designed and developed a risk assessment system for information and communication equipment with simple operation, offline assessment, and diversified external interfaces. The process of risk assessment can be realized, which effectively improves the efficiency of risk assessment.

The growth in the use of virtualization in the last ten years has contributed to the improvement of this technology. The practice of implementing and managing this type of isolated environment raises doubts about the security of such systems. Considering the host's proximity to a container, approaches that use anomaly detection systems attempt to monitor and detect unexpected behavior. Our work aims to use system calls to identify threats within a container environment, using machine learning based strategies to distinguish between expected and unexpected behaviors (possible threats).

To ensure comprehensive information protection, it is necessary to use various means of information protection, distributed by levels and segments of the information system. This creates a contradiction, which consists in the presence of many different means of information protection and the inability to ensure their joint coordinated application in ensuring the protection of information due to the lack of an automated control system. One of the tasks that contribute to the solution of this problem is the task of generating a feasible organizational structure and the structure of such an automated control system, the results of which would provide these options and choose the one that is optimal under given initial parameters and limitations. The problem is solved by reducing the General task with particular splitting the original graph of the automated cyber defense control system into subgraphs. As a result, the organizational composition and the automated cyber defense management system structures will provide a set of acceptable variants, on the basis of which the optimal choice is made under the given initial parameters and restrictions. As a result, admissible variants for the formation technique of organizational structure and structure by the automated control system of cyber defense is received.

The growing use of digital media has been accompanied by an increase of the risks associated with the use of information systems, notably cybersecurity risks. In turn, the increasing use of information systems has an impact on users' media and information literacy. This research aims to address the relationship between media and information literacy, and the adoption of risky cybersecurity behaviours. This approach will be carried out through the definition of a conceptual framework supported by a literature review, and a quantitative research of the relationships mentioned earlier considering a sample composed by students of a Higher Education Institution.

Cybersecurity is paramount for all public and private sectors for protecting their information systems, data, and digital assets from cyber-attacks; thus, relying on technology-based protections alone will not achieve this goal. This work examines the role of human factors in cybersecurity by looking at the top-tier conference on Human Factors in Cybersecurity over the past 6 years. A total of 24 articles were selected for the final analysis. Findings show that most of the authors used a quantitative method, where survey was the most used tool for collecting the data, and less attention has been paid to the theoretical research. Besides, three types of users were identified: university-level users, organizational-level users, and unspecified users. Culture is another less investigated aspect, and the samples were biased towards the western community. Moreover, 17 human factors are identified; human awareness, privacy perception, trust perception, behavior, and capability are the top five among them. Also, new insights and recommendations are presented.

Over the years, human errors have been identified as one of the most critical factors impacting cybersecurity in an organization that has had a substantial impact. The research uses recent articles published on human resources and information cybersecurity. This research focuses on the vulnerabilities and the best solution to mitigate these threats based on literature review methodology. The study also focuses on identifying the human attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and how that would impact the organization's financial impact. With the help of the Two-factor Taxonomy of the security behavior model developed in past research, the research aims to identify the best practices and compare the best practices with that of the attitude-behavior found and matched to the model. Finally, the study would compare the difference between best practices and the current practices from the model. This would help provide the organization with specific recommendations that would help change their attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and ensure the organization is not fearful of the cyber threat of human error threat.

The need for cyber defense research is growing as more cyber-attacks are directed at critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks. Traditionally, the focus has been on hardening system defenses. However, other techniques are being explored including cyber and psychological deception which aim to negatively impact the cognitive and emotional state of cyber attackers directly through the manipulation of network characteristics. In this study, we present a preliminary analysis of survey data collected following a controlled experiment in which over 130 professional red teamers participated in a network penetration task that included cyber deception and psychological deception manipulations [7]. Thematic and inductive analysis of previously un-analyzed open-ended survey responses revealed factors associated with affective states. These preliminary results are a first step in our analysis efforts and show that there are potentially several distinct dimensions of cyber-behavior that induce negative affective states in cyber attackers, which may serve as potential avenues for supplementing traditional cyber defense strategies.

Most of the existing calculation method of expert evaluation ability directly call data onto calculation, which leads to the risk of privacy leakage of expert review information and affects the peer review environment. With regard to this problem, a privacy protection method of experts' evaluation ability calculation of peer review is proposed. Privacy protection and data usability are adjusted according to privacy preferences. Using Gauss distribution and combining with the distributive law of real evaluation data, the virtual projects are generated, and the project data are anonymized according to the virtual projects. Laplace distribution is used to add noise to the evaluation sub score for perturbation, and the evaluation data are obfuscation according to the perturbation sub score. Based on the protected project data and evaluation data, the expert evaluation ability is calculated, and the review privacy is protected. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively balance the privacy protection and the accuracy of the calculation results.

This article discusses the problem of information security management in computer systems and describes the process of developing an algorithm that allows to determine measures to protect personal data. The organizational and technical measures formulated by the FSTEC are used as measures.

In Cloud Computing, a wide range of virtual platforms are integrated and offer users a flexible pay-as-you-need service. Compared to conventional computing systems, the provision of an acceptable degree of resilience to cloud services is a daunting challenge due to the complexities of the cloud environment and the need for efficient technology that could sustain cloud advantages over other technologies. For a cloud guest resilience service solution, we provide architectural design, installation specifics, and performance outcomes throughout this article. Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) enables execution statistical test of the virtual machine states to be monitored and avoids to reach faulty states.

In this extended abstract, we outline an approach for security certification of products or services for modern commercial systems that are characterized by agile development, the integration of development and operations, and high dynamics of system features and structures. The proposed scheme rather evaluates the processes applied in development and operations than investigates into the validity of the product properties itself. We argue that the resulting claims are still suitable to increase the confidence in the security of products and services resulting from such processes.

Electromagnetic emissions associated with the transmission of automotive controller area network (CAN) messages within a passenger car have been analysed and used to reconstruct the original CAN messages. Concurrent monitoring of the CAN traffic via a wired connection to the vehicle OBD-II port was used to validate the effectiveness of the reconstruction process. These results confirm the feasibility of reconstructing in-vehicle network data for forensic purposes, without the need for wired access, at distances of up to 1 m from the vehicle by using magnetic field measurements, and up to 3 m using electric field measurements. This capability has applications in the identification and resolution of EMI issues in vehicle data network, as well as possible implications for automotive cybersecurity.