Description:
Due to the mission-critical nature of energy management, smart power grids are prime targets for cyber-attacks. A key security objective in the smart grid is to protect the integrity of synchronized real-time measurements taken by phasor measurement units (PMUs). The current communication protocol in substation automation allows the transmission of PMU data in absence of integrity protection for applications that strictly require low communication latency. This leaves the PMU data vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, a lightweight and secure integrity protection algorithm has been proposed to maintain the integrity of PMU data, which fills the missing integrity protection in the IEC 61850-90-5 standard, when the MAC identifier is declared 0. The rigorous security analysis proves the security of the proposed integrity protection method against ciphertext-only attacks and known/chosen plaintext attacks. A comparison with existing integrity protection methods shows that our method is much faster, and is also the only integrity protection scheme that meets the strict timing requirement. Not only the proposed method can be used in power protection applications, but it also can be used in emerging anomaly detection scenarios, where a fast integrity check coupled with low latency communications is used for multiple rounds of message exchanges.
Description:
Due to the widespread application of augmented and virtual environments, the research into 3D content protection is fundamentally important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D content, including the 3D objects and texture images, is essential. In this paper, a novel texture encryption scheme is proposed which complements the existing 3D object encryption methods. The proposed method encrypts texture images by bit masking and a permutation procedure using the Salsa20/12 stream cipher. The method is lightweight and satisfies the security requirement. It also prevents the partial disclosure of the encrypted 3D surface geometry by protecting the texture patterns from being partially leaked. The scheme has a better speed-security profile than the full encryption and the selective (4most significant bit-plane) encryption by 128-bit AES. The encryption schemes are implemented and tested with 500 sample texture images. The experimental results show that the scheme has a better encryption performance compared to the full/selective encryption by 128-bit AES.
Description:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Description:
Due to the widespread application of augmented and virtual environments, the research into 3D content protection is fundamentally important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D content, including the 3D objects and texture images, is essential. In this paper, a novel texture encryption scheme is proposed which complements the existing 3D object encryption methods. The proposed method encrypts texture images by bit masking and a permutation procedure using the Salsa20/12 stream cipher. The method is lightweight and satisfies the security requirement. It also prevents the partial disclosure of the encrypted 3D surface geometry by protecting the texture patterns from being partially leaked. The scheme has a better speed-security profile than the full encryption and the selective (4most significant bit-plane) encryption by 128-bit AES. The encryption schemes are implemented and tested with 500 sample texture images. The experimental results show that the scheme has a better encryption performance compared to the full/selective encryption by 128-bit AES.
Description:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Description:
Despite the benefits of the passive keyless entry and start (PKES) system in improving the locking and starting capabilities, it is vulnerable to relay attacks even though the communication is protected using strong cryptographic techniques. In this paper, we propose a data-intensive solution based on machine learning to mitigate relay attacks on PKES Systems. The main contribution of the paper, beyond the novelty of the solution in using machine learning, is in (1) the use of a set of security features that accurately profiles the PKES system, (2) identifying abnormalities in PKES regular behavior, and (3) proposing a countermeasure that guarantees a desired probability of detection with a fixed false alarm rate by trading off the training time and accuracy. We evaluated our method using the last three months log of a PKES system using the Decision Tree, SVM, KNN and ANN and provide the comparative analysis of the relay attack detection results. Our proposed framework leverages the accuracy of supervised learning on known classes with the adaptability of k-fold cross-validation technique for identifying malicious and suspicious activities. Our test results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solution in distinguishing relayed messages from legitimate transactions.
Description:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Description:
This study aimed to explore the cybersecurity landscape to identify cybersecurity indexes that may be relevant to the health industry. While the healthcare sector poses security concerns regarding patients' records, cybersecurity in the healthcare sector has not been given much consideration. Cybersecurity indexes are a survey that measures security preparedness and capabilities of a country or organisation. An index is made up of a series of questions, often broken into categories. These categories target areas such as law, technical responses, organisational threats, capacity building and social context. Some indexes provide ranking capabilities against other countries, while others directly evaluate what it means to be cyber-ready. In this paper, cybersecurity indexes were reviewed regarding the level of assessment (country level/organisation level), and their consideration of the wider community, the health sector, and their appearance in academic literature. Results from this study found that there was no consistency between the indexes investigated, with each index having a diverse number of categories and indicators. Some indexes resulted in a score; others did not rank their results in league tables. Evidence to calculate the level of adherence was often obtained from secondary sources, with four of the country indexes using both primary and secondary sources. Eight (out of fourteen) indexes measured wider community indicators and only one index specifically measured eHealth services. Findings from the initial systematic review suggest that hardly any peer-reviewed journal articles exist on the topic of cybersecurity indexes. The paper concludes that most of the indexes studied are broad and do not consider the eHealth sector specifically. Each index relies on a different process to gauge cybersecurity, with little to no academic rigour. It is expected that this research will contribute to the current (limited) literature addressing cybersecurity indexes.
Description:
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Description:
Confidentiality of digital images is an important requirement for many multimedia applications and services. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of digital images is essential. Digital images are usually very large and encrypting such bulky data induces many performance overheads, which can be too expensive for real-time applications in resource constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a chaotic image encryption scheme which satisfies the need for both light-weightedness and security. To justify the security and efficiency, the new cipher was evaluated using a series of statistical tests. These tests included a visual testing and a histogram analysis, a randomness analysis, a correlation analysis, an entropy analysis and an image encryption quality analysis. Based on all analyses and experimental results, it is concluded that the proposed scheme is effective, efficient and trustworthy and therefore can be adopted for image encryption.
Description:
Confidentiality of digital images is an important requirement for many multimedia applications and services. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of digital images is essential. Digital images are usually very large and encrypting such bulky data induces many performance overheads, which can be too expensive for real-time applications in resource constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a chaotic image encryption scheme which satisfies the need for both light-weightedness and security. To justify the security and efficiency, the new cipher was evaluated using a series of statistical tests. These tests included a visual testing and a histogram analysis, a randomness analysis, a correlation analysis, an entropy analysis and an image encryption quality analysis. Based on all analyses and experimental results, it is concluded that the proposed scheme is effective, efficient and trustworthy and therefore can be adopted for image encryption.
Description:
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are playing important roles in the critical infrastructure now. A prominent family of CPSs are networked control systems in which the control and feedback signals are carried over computer networks like the Internet. Communication over insecure networks make system vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this article, we design an intrusion detection and compensation framework based on system/plant identification to fight covert attacks. We collect error statistics of the output estimation during the learning phase of system operation and after that, monitor the system behavior to see if it significantly deviates from the expected outputs. A compensating controller is further designed to intervene and replace the classic controller once the attack is detected. The proposed model is tested on a DC motor as the plant and is put against a deception signal amplification attack over the forward link. Simulation results show that the detection algorithm well detects the intrusion and the compensator is also successful in alleviating the attack effects.
Description:
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are playing important roles in the critical infrastructure now. A prominent family of CPSs are networked control systems in which the control and feedback signals are carried over computer networks like the Internet. Communication over insecure networks make system vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this article, we design an intrusion detection and compensation framework based on system/plant identification to fight covert attacks. We collect error statistics of the output estimation during the learning phase of system operation and after that, monitor the system behavior to see if it significantly deviates from the expected outputs. A compensating controller is further designed to intervene and replace the classic controller once the attack is detected. The proposed model is tested on a DC motor as the plant and is put against a deception signal amplification attack over the forward link. Simulation results show that the detection algorithm well detects the intrusion and the compensator is also successful in alleviating the attack effects.
Description:
Data transmission in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is a challenging problem due to the lack of continuous network connectivity and nondeterministic mobility of the nodes. Epidemic routing and spray-and-wait methods are two popular mechanisms that are proposed for DTNs. In order to reduce the transmission delay in DTNs, some previous works combine intra-flow network coding with the routing protocols. In this paper, we propose two routing mechanisms using systematic joint inter- and intra-flow network coding for the purpose of data exchange between the nodes. We discuss the reasons why inter-flow network coding helps to reduce the delivery delay of the packets, and we also analyze the delays related with only using intra-flow coding, and joint inter- and intra-flow coding methods. We empirically show the benefit of joint coding over just intra-flow coding. Based on our simulation, joint coding can reduce the delay up to 40%, compared to only intra-flow coding.
Description:
2018 IEEE 37th International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, IPCCC 2018
Description:
Data transmission in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is a challenging problem due to the lack of continuous network connectivity and nondeterministic mobility of the nodes. Epidemic routing and spray-and-wait methods are two popular mechanisms that are proposed for DTNs. In order to reduce the transmission delay in DTNs, some previous works combine intra-flow network coding with the routing protocols. In this paper, we propose two routing mechanisms using systematic joint inter- and intra-flow network coding for the purpose of data exchange between the nodes. We discuss the reasons why inter-flow network coding helps to reduce the delivery delay of the packets, and we also analyze the delays related with only using intra-flow coding, and joint inter- and intra-flow coding methods. We empirically show the benefit of joint coding over just intra-flow coding. Based on our simulation, joint coding can reduce the delay up to 40%, compared to only intra-flow coding.
Description:
2018 IEEE 37th International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, IPCCC 2018
Description:
Permutation is a commonly used primitive in multimedia (image/video) encryption schemes, and many permutation-only algorithms have been proposed in recent years for the protection of multimedia data. In permutation-only image ciphers, the entries of the image matrix are scrambled using a permutation mapping matrix which is built by a pseudo-random number generator. The literature on the cryptanalysis of image ciphers indicates that the permutation-only image ciphers are insecure against ciphertext-only attacks and/or known/chosenplaintext attacks. However, the previous studies have not been able to ensure the correct retrieval of the complete plaintext elements. In this paper, we revisited the previous works on cryptanalysis of permutation-only image encryption schemes and made the cryptanalysis work on chosen-plaintext attacks complete and more efficient. We proved that in all permutationonly image ciphers, regardless of the cipher structure, the correct permutation mapping is recovered completely by a chosenplaintext attack. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, this paper gives a chosen-plaintext attack that completely determines the correct plaintext elements using a deterministic method. When the plain-images are of size M × N and with L different color intensities, the number n of required chosen plain-images to break the permutation-only image encryption algorithm is n = logL(MN). The complexity of the proposed attack is O (n · M N) which indicates its feasibility in a polynomial amount of computation time. To validate the performance of the proposed chosen-plaintext attack, numerous experiments were performed on two recently proposed permutation-only image/video ciphers. Both theoretical and experimental results showed that the proposed attack outperforms the state-of-theart cryptanalytic methods.
Description:
Permutation is a commonly used primitive in multimedia (image/video) encryption schemes, and many permutation-only algorithms have been proposed in recent years for the protection of multimedia data. In permutation-only image ciphers, the entries of the image matrix are scrambled using a permutation mapping matrix which is built by a pseudo-random number generator. The literature on the cryptanalysis of image ciphers indicates that the permutation-only image ciphers are insecure against ciphertext-only attacks and/or known/chosenplaintext attacks. However, the previous studies have not been able to ensure the correct retrieval of the complete plaintext elements. In this paper, we revisited the previous works on cryptanalysis of permutation-only image encryption schemes and made the cryptanalysis work on chosen-plaintext attacks complete and more efficient. We proved that in all permutationonly image ciphers, regardless of the cipher structure, the correct permutation mapping is recovered completely by a chosenplaintext attack. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, this paper gives a chosen-plaintext attack that completely determines the correct plaintext elements using a deterministic method. When the plain-images are of size M × N and with L different color intensities, the number n of required chosen plain-images to break the permutation-only image encryption algorithm is n = logL(MN). The complexity of the proposed attack is O (n · M N) which indicates its feasibility in a polynomial amount of computation time. To validate the performance of the proposed chosen-plaintext attack, numerous experiments were performed on two recently proposed permutation-only image/video ciphers. Both theoretical and experimental results showed that the proposed attack outperforms the state-of-theart cryptanalytic methods.
Description:
Contemporary healthcare has witnessed a wide deployment of Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs), which have the capability to be controlled remotely, making them equally accessible from both home and hospitals. The therapeutic benefits of ICDs seem to outweigh potential security concerns, yet overlooking the presence of malicious attacks cannot be justified. This study investigates the scenario where an adversary falsifies a controller command and sends instructions to issue high electric shocks in succession. We propose a novel security hardening mechanism to protect data communications between ICD and controller from malicious data manipulations. Our proposed method verifies the correctness of an external command with respect to the history of heart rhythms. The proposed method is evaluated using real data. Multi-aspect analyses show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Description:
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology
Description:
Contemporary healthcare has witnessed a wide deployment of Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs), which have the capability to be controlled remotely, making them equally accessible from both home and hospitals. The therapeutic benefits of ICDs seem to outweigh potential security concerns, yet overlooking the presence of malicious attacks cannot be justified. This study investigates the scenario where an adversary falsifies a controller command and sends instructions to issue high electric shocks in succession. We propose a novel security hardening mechanism to protect data communications between ICD and controller from malicious data manipulations. Our proposed method verifies the correctness of an external command with respect to the history of heart rhythms. The proposed method is evaluated using real data. Multi-aspect analyses show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Description:
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology
Description:
Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) is an industry standard that can assess the vulnerability of nodes in traditional computer systems. The metrics computed by CVSS would determine critical nodes and attack paths. However, traditional IT security models would not fit IoT embedded networks due to distinct nature and unique characteristics of IoT systems. This paper analyses the application of CVSS for IoT embedded systems and proposes an improved vulnerability scoring system based on CVSS v3 framework. The proposed framework, named CVSSIoT, is applied to a realistic IT supply chain system and the results are compared with the actual vulnerabilities from the national vulnerability database. The comparison result validates the proposed model. CVSSIoT is not only effective, simple and capable of vulnerability evaluation for traditional IT system, but also exploits unique characteristics of IoT devices.
Description:
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology
Description:
Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) is an industry standard that can assess the vulnerability of nodes in traditional computer systems. The metrics computed by CVSS would determine critical nodes and attack paths. However, traditional IT security models would not fit IoT embedded networks due to distinct nature and unique characteristics of IoT systems. This paper analyses the application of CVSS for IoT embedded systems and proposes an improved vulnerability scoring system based on CVSS v3 framework. The proposed framework, named CVSSIoT, is applied to a realistic IT supply chain system and the results are compared with the actual vulnerabilities from the national vulnerability database. The comparison result validates the proposed model. CVSSIoT is not only effective, simple and capable of vulnerability evaluation for traditional IT system, but also exploits unique characteristics of IoT devices.
Description:
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology
Description:
Due to widespread applications of 3D vision technology, the research into 3D object protection is primarily important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D objects is essential. However, the requirements and limitations imposed by 3D objects indicate the impropriety of conventional cryptosystems for 3D object encryption. This suggests the necessity of designing new ciphers. In addition, the study of prior works indicates that the majority of problems encountered with encrypting 3D objects are about point cloud protection, dimensional and spatial stability, and robustness against surface reconstruction attacks. To address these problems, this paper proposes a 3D object encryption scheme, based on a series of random permutations and rotations, which deform the geometry of the point cloud. Since the inverse of a permutation and a rotation matrix is its transpose, the decryption implementation is very efficient. Our statistical analyses show that within the cipher point cloud, points are randomly distributed. Furthermore, the proposed cipher leaks no information regarding the geometric structure of the plain point cloud, and is also highly sensitive to the changes of the plaintext and secret key. The theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the security, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed cipher against surface reconstruction attacks.
Description:
Due to widespread applications of 3D vision technology, the research into 3D object protection is primarily important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D objects is essential. However, the requirements and limitations imposed by 3D objects indicate the impropriety of conventional cryptosystems for 3D object encryption. This suggests the necessity of designing new ciphers. In addition, the study of prior works indicates that the majority of problems encountered with encrypting 3D objects are about point cloud protection, dimensional and spatial stability, and robustness against surface reconstruction attacks. To address these problems, this paper proposes a 3D object encryption scheme, based on a series of random permutations and rotations, which deform the geometry of the point cloud. Since the inverse of a permutation and a rotation matrix is its transpose, the decryption implementation is very efficient. Our statistical analyses show that within the cipher point cloud, points are randomly distributed. Furthermore, the proposed cipher leaks no information regarding the geometric structure of the plain point cloud, and is also highly sensitive to the changes of the plaintext and secret key. The theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the security, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed cipher against surface reconstruction attacks.
Description:
Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) is an industry standard that can assess the vulnerability of nodes in traditional computer systems. The metrics computed by CVSS would determine critical nodes and attack paths. However, traditional IT security models would not fit IoT embedded networks due to distinct nature and unique characteristics of IoT systems. This paper analyses the application of CVSS for IoT embedded systems and proposes an improved vulnerability scoring system based on CVSS v3 framework. The proposed framework, named CVSSIoT, is applied to a realistic IT supply chain system and the results are compared with the actual vulnerabilities from the national vulnerability database. The comparison result validates the proposed model. CVSSIoT is not only effective, simple and capable of vulnerability evaluation for traditional IT system, but also exploits unique characteristics of IoT devices.
Description:
Virtual reality and augmented reality are about to become explosive growth markets. Over the past decade, a substantial investment and a wide range of exciting prototypes have been made from the tech heavyweights such as Microsoft and Google. It is anticipated that the market for virtual reality and augmented reality will reach $1.06 billion by 2018 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.18% from 2013 to 2018 [1]. The growing applicability of 3D content and its potential revenue suggest the necessity for protecting such assets. The privacysensitive content in 3D environments, such as Second Life, are in risk of being recorded or monitored by malicious entities [2]. This allows manufacturing and selling real (counterfeit) objects, which is a great loss for their owner. A solution to this problem is encryption. Since the 1970s, a large number of encryption schemes have been proposed, some of which have been standardized and adopted
Description:
The paper considers data security and privacy issues in intelligent transportation systems which involve data streams coming out from individual vehicles to road side units. In this environment, there are issues in regards to the scalability of key management and computation limitations at the edge of the network. To address these issues, we suggest the formation of groups in the vehicular layer, where a group leader is assigned to communicate with group members and the road side unit. We propose a lightweight permutation mechanism for preserving the confidentiality and privacy of sensory data.
Description:
This paper considers the privacy issues in the intelligent transportation system, in which the data is largely communicated based upon vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle protocols. The sensory data communicated by the vehicles contain sensitive information, such as location and speed, which could violate the driver's privacy if they are leaked with no perturbation. Recent studies suggested mechanisms for randomizing the stream of vehicular data to ensure individuals' privacy. Although the past works on differential privacy provide a strong privacy guarantee, they are limited to applications where communication parties are trusted and/or data is limited to a few types. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a differentially private mechanism that adds noise in the user side rather than the server. Also, our mechanism is able to perturb various types of data as pointed out by the dedicated short-range communication protocols in the automotive industry. The proposed mechanism is data adaptive and scales the noise with respect to the data type and distribution. Our extensive experiments show the accuracy of our mechanism compared to the recent approaches.
Description:
The substation communication protocol used in smart grid allows the transmission of messages without integrity protection for applications that require very low communication latency. This leaves the real-time measurements taken by phasor measurement units (PMUs) vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and hence makes high voltage to medium voltage (HV/MV) substations vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In this paper, a lightweight and secure integrity protection algorithm has been proposed to maintain the integrity of PMU data, which fills the missing integrity protection in the IEC 61850-90-5 standard, when the MAC identifier is declared 0. The rigorous security analysis proves the security of the proposed integrity protection method against ciphertext-only attacks and known/chosen plaintext attacks. A comparison with existing integrity protection methods shows that our method is much faster, and is also the only integrity protection scheme that meets the strict timing requirement. Not only the proposed method can be used in power protection applications, but it also can be used in emerging anomaly detection scenarios, where a fast integrity check coupled with low latency communications is used for multiple rounds of message exchanges. This paper is an extension of work originally reported in Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (Jolfaei and Kant, 2017).
Description:
The substation communication protocol used in smart grid allows the transmission of messages without integrity protection for applications that require very low communication latency. This leaves the real-time measurements taken by phasor measurement units (PMUs) vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and hence makes high voltage to medium voltage (HV/MV) substations vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In this paper, a lightweight and secure integrity protection algorithm has been proposed to maintain the integrity of PMU data, which fills the missing integrity protection in the IEC 61850-90-5 standard, when the MAC identifier is declared 0. The rigorous security analysis proves the security of the proposed integrity protection method against ciphertext-only attacks and known/chosen plaintext attacks. A comparison with existing integrity protection methods shows that our method is much faster, and is also the only integrity protection scheme that meets the strict timing requirement. Not only the proposed method can be used in power protection applications, but it also can be used in emerging anomaly detection scenarios, where a fast integrity check coupled with low latency communications is used for multiple rounds of message exchanges. This paper is an extension of work originally reported in Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (Jolfaei and Kant, 2017).