Digital signature schemes (DSS) are ubiquitously used for public authentication in the infrastructure of the internet, in addition to their use as a cryptographic tool to construct even more sophisticated schemes such as those that are identity-based. The security of DSS is analyzed through the existential unforgeability under chosen message attack (EUF-CMA) experiment which promises unforgeability of signatures on new messages even when the attacker has access to an arbitrary set of messages and their corresponding signatures. However, the EUF-CMA model does not account for attacks such as an attacker forging a different signature on an existing message, even though the attack could be devastating in the real world and constitutes a severe breach of the security system. Nonetheless, most of the DSS are not analyzed in this security model, which possibly makes them vulnerable to such an attack. In contrast, a better security notion known as strong EUF-CMA (sEUF-CMA) is designed to be resistant to such attacks. This review aims to identify DSS in the literature that are secure in the sEUF-CMA model. In addition, the article discusses the challenges and future directions of DSS. In our review, we consider the security of existing DSS that fit our criterion in the sEUF-CMA model; our criterion is simple as we only require the DSS to be at least secure against the minimum of existential forgery. Our findings are categorized into two classes: the direct and indirect classes of sEUF-CMA. The former is inherently sEUF-CMA without any modification while the latter requires some transformation. Our comprehensive review contributes to the security and cryptographic research community by discussing the efficiency and security of DSS that are sEUF-CMA, which aids in selecting robust DSS in future design considerations.
In this paper, we presented a new key exchange method based on decomposition problem for elliptic curve cryptography. We showed that our key exchange method was not only an alternative method for designing keys in cryptography, but it also has improved security condition from the previous key exchange based on decomposition problem over noncommutative groups. We proposed elliptic an curve cryptography to be the new platform for our key exchange protocol and showed how it was implemented. The security of our protocol was based on discrete logarithm problem, which was not infeasible and strictly difficult to retrieve in elliptic curve cryptography without any prior knowledge.
The main obstacles in mass adoption of cloud computing for database operations in healthcare organization are the data security and privacy issues. In this paper, it is shown that IT services particularly in hardware performance evaluation in virtual machine can be accomplished effectively without IT personnel gaining access to actual data for diagnostic and remediation purposes. The proposed mechanisms utilized the hypothetical data from TPC-H benchmark, to achieve 2 objectives. First, the underlying hardware performance and consistency is monitored via a control system, which is constructed using TPC-H queries. Second, the mechanism to construct stress-testing scenario is envisaged in the host, using a single or combination of TPC-H queries, so that the resource threshold point can be verified, if the virtual machine is still capable of serving critical transactions at this constraining juncture. This threshold point uses server run queue size as input parameter, and it serves 2 purposes: It provides the boundary threshold to the control system, so that periodic learning of the synthetic data sets for performance evaluation does not reach the host's constraint level. Secondly, when the host undergoes hardware change, stress-testing scenarios are simulated in the host by loading up to this resource threshold level, for subsequent response time verification from real and critical transactions.
Data compression and encryption are key components of commonly deployed platforms such as Hadoop. Numerous data compression and encryption tools are presently available on such platforms and the tools are characteristically applied in sequence, i.e., compression followed by encryption or encryption followed by compression. This paper focuses on the open-source Hadoop framework and proposes a data storage method that efficiently couples data compression with encryption. A simultaneous compression and encryption scheme is introduced that addresses an important implementation issue of source coding based on Tent Map and Piece-wise Linear Chaotic Map (PWLM), which is the infinite precision of real numbers that result from their long products. The approach proposed here solves the implementation issue by removing fractional components that are generated by the long products of real numbers. Moreover, it incorporates a stealth key that performs a cyclic shift in PWLM without compromising compression capabilities. In addition, the proposed approach implements a masking pseudorandom keystream that enhances encryption quality. The proposed algorithm demonstrated a congruent fit within the Hadoop framework, providing robust encryption security and compression.
In the recent past, Internet of Things (IoT) plays a significant role in different applications such as health care, industrial sector, defense and research etc.… It provides effective framework in maintaining the security, privacy and reliability of the information in internet environment. Among various applications as mentioned health care place a major role, because security, privacy and reliability of the medical information is maintained in an effective way. Even though, IoT provides the effective protocols for maintaining the information, several intermediate attacks and intruders trying to access the health information which in turn reduce the privacy, security and reliability of the entire health care system in internet environment. As a result and to solve the issues, in this research Learning based Deep-Q-Networks has been introduced for reducing the malware attacks while managing the health information. This method examines the medical information in different layers according to the Q-learning concept which helps to minimize the intermediate attacks with less complexity. The efficiency of the system has been evaluated with the help of experimental results and discussions.
OpenFlow makes a network highly flexible and fast-evolving by separating control and data planes. The control plane thus becomes responsive to changes in topology and load balancing requirements. OpenFlow also offers a new approach to handle security threats accurately and responsively. Therefore, it is used as an innovative firewall that acts as a first-hop security to protect networks against malicious users. However, the firewall provided by OpenFlow suffers from Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) fragmentation, which can be used to bypass the OpenFlow firewall. The OpenFlow firewall cannot identify the message payload unless the switch implements IPv6 fragment reassembly. This study tests the IPv6 fragmented packets that can evade the OpenFlow firewall, and proposes a new mechanism to guard against attacks carried out by malicious users to exploit IPv6 fragmentation loophole in OpenFlow networks. The proposed mechanism is evaluated in a simulated environment by using six scenarios, and results exhibit that the proposed mechanism effectively fixes the loophole and successfully prevents the abuse of IPv6 fragmentation in OpenFlow networks.
One of the most dangerous kinds of attacks affecting computers is a distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack. The main goal of this attack is to bring the targeted machine down and make their services unavailable to legal users. This can be accomplished mainly by directing many machines to send a very large number of packets toward the specified machine to consume its resources and stop it from working. We implemented a method using Java based on entropy and sequential probabilities ratio test (ESPRT) methods to identify malicious flows and their switch interfaces that aid them in passing through. Entropy (E) is the first technique, and the sequential probabilities ratio test (SPRT) is the second technique. The entropy method alone compares its results with a certain threshold in order to make a decision. The accuracy and F-scores for entropy results thus changed when the threshold values changed. Using both entropy and SPRT removed the uncertainty associated with the entropy threshold. The false positive rate was also reduced when combining both techniques. Entropy-based detection methods divide incoming traffic into groups of traffic that have the same size. The size of these groups is determined by a parameter called window size. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 1998, DARPA2000, and Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC-DDoS2019) databases were used to evaluate the implementation of this method. The metric of a confusion matrix was used to compare the ESPRT results with the results of other methods. The accuracy and f-scores for the DARPA 1998 dataset were 0.995 and 0.997, respectively, for the ESPRT method when the window size was set at 50 and 75 packets. The detection rate of ESPRT for the same dataset was 0.995 when the window size was set to 10 packets. The average accuracy for the DARPA 2000 dataset for ESPRT was 0.905, and the detection rate was 0.929. Finally, ESPRT was scalable to a multiple domain topology application.
Smart home technologies have attracted more users in recent years due to significant advancements in their underlying enabler components, such as sensors, actuators, and processors, which are spreading in various domains and have become more affordable. However, these IoT-based solutions are prone to data leakage; this privacy issue has motivated researchers to seek a secure solution to overcome this challenge. In this regard, wireless signal eavesdropping is one of the most severe threats that enables attackers to obtain residents' sensitive information. Even if the system encrypts all communications, some cyber attacks can still steal information by interpreting the contextual data related to the transmitted signals. For example, a "fingerprint and timing-based snooping (FATS)" attack is a side-channel attack (SCA) developed to infer in-home activities passively from a remote location near the targeted house. An SCA is a sort of cyber attack that extracts valuable information from smart systems without accessing the content of data packets. This paper reviews the SCAs associated with cyber-physical systems, focusing on the proposed solutions to protect the privacy of smart homes against FATS attacks in detail. Moreover, this work clarifies shortcomings and future opportunities by analyzing the existing gaps in the reviewed methods.
Due to recent advancements and appealing applications, the purchase rate of smart devices is increasing at a higher rate. Parallely, the security related threats and attacks are also increasing at a greater ratio on these devices. As a result, a considerable number of attacks have been noted in the recent past. To resist these attacks, many password-based authentication schemes are proposed. However, most of these schemes are not screen size independent; whereas, smart devices come in different sizes. Specifically, they are not suitable for miniature smart devices due to the small screen size and/or lack of full sized keyboards. In this paper, we propose a new screen size independent password-based authentication scheme, which also offers an affordable defense against shoulder surfing, brute force, and smudge attacks. In the proposed scheme, the Press Touch (PT)-a.k.a., Force Touch in Apple's MacBook, Apple Watch, ZTE's Axon 7 phone; 3D Touch in iPhone 6 and 7; and so on-is transformed into a new type of code, named Press Touch Code (PTC). We design and implement three variants of it, namely mono-PTC, multi-PTC, and multi-PTC with Grid, on the Android Operating System. An in-lab experiment and a comprehensive survey have been conducted on 105 participants to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
The Internet of vehicles (IoVs) is an innovative paradigm which ensures a safe journey by communicating with other vehicles. It involves a basic safety message (BSM) that contains sensitive information in a plain text that can be subverted by an adversary. To reduce such attacks, a pool of pseudonyms is allotted which are changed regularly in different zones or contexts. In base schemes, the BSM is sent to neighbors just by considering their speed. However, this parameter is not enough because network topology is very dynamic and vehicles can change their route at any time. This problem increases pseudonym consumption which ultimately increases communication overhead, increases traceability and has high BSM loss. This paper presents an efficient pseudonym consumption protocol (EPCP) which considers the vehicles in the same direction, and similar estimated location. The BSM is shared only to these relevant vehicles. The performance of the purposed scheme in contrast to base schemes is validated via extensive simulations. The results prove that the proposed EPCP technique outperformed compared to its counterparts in terms of pseudonym consumption, BSM loss rate and achieved traceability.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine or non-face-to-face medicine has increased significantly. In practice, various types of medical images are essential to achieve effective telemedicine. Medical image encryption algorithms play an irreplaceable role in the fast and secure transmission and storage of these medical images. However, most of the existing medical image encryption algorithms are full encryption algorithms, which are inefficient and time-consuming, so they are not suitable for emergency medical scenarios. To improve the efficiency of encryption, a small number of works have focused on partial or selective encryption algorithms for medical images, in which different levels of encryption strategies were adopted for different information content regions of medical images. However, these encryption algorithms have inadequate security more or less. In this paper, based on the Logistic map, we designed an improved variable dimension map. Then, an encryption algorithm for medical images was proposed based on it. This algorithm has two modes: (1) full encryption mode and (2) semi-full encryption mode, which can better adapt to different medical scenarios, respectively. In full encryption mode, all pixels of medical images are encrypted by using the confusion-diffusion structure. In semi-full encryption mode, the region of interest of medical images is extracted. The confusion was first adopted to encrypt the region of interest, and then, the diffusion was adopted to encrypt the entire image. In addition, no matter which encryption mode is used, the algorithm provides the function of medical image integrity verification. The proposed algorithm was simulated and analyzed to evaluate its effectiveness. The results show that in semi-full encryption mode, the algorithm has good security performance and lower time consumption; while in full encryption mode, the algorithm has better security performance and is acceptable in time.
Fifth-generation (5G)-enabled vehicular fog computing technologies have always been at the forefront of innovation because they support smart transport like the sharing of traffic data and cooperative processing in the urban fabric. Nevertheless, the most important factors limiting progress are concerns over message protection and safety. To cope with these challenges, several scholars have proposed certificateless authentication schemes with pseudonyms and traceability. These schemes avoid complicated management of certificate and escrow of key in the public key infrastructure-based approaches in the identity-based approaches, respectively. Nevertheless, problems such as high communication costs, security holes, and computational complexity still exist. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient certificateless authentication called the ECA-VFog scheme for fog computing with 5G-assisted vehicular systems. The proposed ECA-VFog scheme applied efficient operations based on elliptic curve cryptography that is supported by a fog server through a 5G-base station. This work conducts a safety analysis of the security designs to analysis the viability and value of the proposed ECA-VFog scheme. In the performance ovulation section, the computation costs for signing and verification process are 2.3539 ms and 1.5752 ms, respectively. While, the communication costs and energy consumption overhead of the ECA-VFog are 124 bytes and 25.610432 mJ, respectively. Moreover, comparing the ECA-VFog scheme to other existing schemes, the performance estimation reveals that it is more cost-effective with regard to computation cost, communication cost, and energy consumption.
The inherent complexities of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architecture make its security and privacy issues becoming critically challenging. Numerous surveys have been published to review IoT security issues and challenges. The studies gave a general overview of IIoT security threats or a detailed analysis that explicitly focuses on specific technologies. However, recent studies fail to analyze the gap between security requirements of these technologies and their deployed countermeasure in the industry recently. Whether recent industry countermeasure is still adequate to address the security challenges of IIoT environment are questionable. This article presents a comprehensive survey of IIoT security and provides insight into today's industry countermeasure, current research proposals and ongoing challenges. We classify IIoT technologies into the four-layer security architecture, examine the deployed countermeasure based on CIA+ security requirements, report the deficiencies of today's countermeasure, and highlight the remaining open issues and challenges. As no single solution can fix the entire IIoT ecosystem, IIoT security architecture with a higher abstraction level using the bottom-up approach is needed. Moving towards a data-centric approach that assures data protection whenever and wherever it goes could potentially solve the challenges of industry deployment.
Sharing individual patient data (IPD) is a simple concept but complex to achieve due to data privacy and data security concerns, underdeveloped guidelines, and legal barriers. Sharing IPD is additionally difficult in big data-driven collaborations such as Bigdata@Heart in the Innovative Medicines Initiative, due to competing interests between diverse consortium members. One project within BigData@Heart, case study 1, needed to pool data from seven heterogeneous data sets: five randomized controlled trials from three different industry partners, and two disease registries. Sharing IPD was not considered feasible due to legal requirements and the sensitive medical nature of these data. In addition, harmonizing the data sets for a federated data analysis was difficult due to capacity constraints and the heterogeneity of the data sets. An alternative option was to share summary statistics through contingency tables. Here it is demonstrated that this method along with anonymization methods to ensure patient anonymity had minimal loss of information. Although sharing IPD should continue to be encouraged and strived for, our approach achieved a good balance between data transparency while protecting patient privacy. It also allowed a successful collaboration between industry and academia.
Grouping and clustering alerts for intrusion detection based on the similarity of features is referred to as structurally base alert correlation and can discover a list of attack steps. Previous researchers selected different features and data sources manually based on their knowledge and experience, which lead to the less accurate identification of attack steps and inconsistent performance of clustering accuracy. Furthermore, the existing alert correlation systems deal with a huge amount of data that contains null values, incomplete information, and irrelevant features causing the analysis of the alerts to be tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, this paper focuses on selecting accurate and significant features of alerts that are appropriate to represent the attack steps, thus, enhancing the structural-based alert correlation model. A two-tier feature selection method is proposed to obtain the significant features. The first tier aims at ranking the subset of features based on high information gain entropy in decreasing order. The second tier extends additional features with a better discriminative ability than the initially ranked features. Performance analysis results show the significance of the selected features in terms of the clustering accuracy using 2000 DARPA intrusion detection scenario-specific dataset.
Cyberattacks have changed dramatically and have become highly advanced. This latest phenomenon has a massive negative impact on organizations, such as financial losses and shutting-down of operations. Therefore, developing and implementing the Cyber Security Operations Centre (SOC) is imperative and timely. Based on previous research, there are no international guidelines and standards used by organizations that can contribute to the successful implementation and development of SOC. In this regard, this study focuses on highlighting the significant factors that will impact and contribute to the success of SOC. Simultaneously, it will further design a model for the successful development and implementation of SOC for the organization. The study was conducted quantitatively and involved 63 respondents from 25 ministries and agencies in Malaysia. The results of this study will enable the retrieval of ten success factors for SOC, and it specifically focuses on humans, processes, and technology. The descriptive analysis shows that the top management support factor is the most influential factor in the success of the development and implementation of SOC. The study also contributes to the empirical finding that technology and process factors are more significant in the success of SOCs. Based on the regression test, the technology factor has major impact on determining the success of SOC, followed by the process and human factors. Relevant organizations or agencies can use the proposed model to develop and implement SOCs, formulate policies and guidelines, strengthen human models, and enhance cyber security.
The evolution of malware is causing mobile devices to crash with increasing frequency. Therefore, adequate security evaluations that detect Android malware are crucial. Two techniques can be used in this regard: Static analysis, which meticulously examines the full codes of applications, and dynamic analysis, which monitors malware behaviour. While both perform security evaluations successfully, there is still room for improvement. The goal of this research is to examine the effectiveness of static analysis to detect Android malware by using permission-based features. This study proposes machine learning with different sets of classifiers was used to evaluate Android malware detection. The feature selection method in this study was applied to determine which features were most capable of distinguishing malware. A total of 5,000 Drebin malware samples and 5,000 Androzoo benign samples were utilised. The performances of the different sets of classifiers were then compared. The results indicated that with a TPR value of 91.6%, the Random Forest algorithm achieved the highest level of accuracy in malware detection.
Programmable Object Interfaces are increasingly intriguing researchers because of their broader applications, especially in the medical field. In a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), for example, patients' health can be monitored using clinical nano sensors. Exchanging such sensitive data requires a high level of security and protection against attacks. To that end, the literature is rich with security schemes that include the advanced encryption standard, secure hashing algorithm, and digital signatures that aim to secure the data exchange. However, such schemes elevate the time complexity, rendering the data transmission slower. Cognitive radio technology with a medical body area network system involves communication links between WBAN gateways, server and nano sensors, which renders the entire system vulnerable to security attacks. In this paper, a novel DNA-based encryption technique is proposed to secure medical data sharing between sensing devices and central repositories. It has less computational time throughout authentication, encryption, and decryption. Our analysis of experimental attack scenarios shows that our technique is better than its counterparts.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ubiquitous and pervasive, and therefore; highly susceptible to a number of security attacks. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is considered the most dominant and a major threat to WSNs. Moreover, the wormhole attack represents one of the potential forms of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Besides, crafting the wormhole attack is comparatively simple; though, its detection is nontrivial. On the contrary, the extant wormhole defense methods need both specialized hardware and strong assumptions to defend against static and dynamic wormhole attack. The ensuing paper introduces a novel scheme to detect wormhole attacks in a geographic routing protocol (DWGRP). The main contribution of this paper is to detect malicious nodes and select the best and the most reliable neighbors based on pairwise key pre-distribution technique and the beacon packet. Moreover, this novel technique is not subject to any specific assumption, requirement, or specialized hardware, such as a precise synchronized clock. The proposed detection method is validated by comparisons with several related techniques in the literature, such as Received Signal Strength (RSS), Authentication of Nodes Scheme (ANS), Wormhole Detection uses Hound Packet (WHOP), and Wormhole Detection with Neighborhood Information (WDI) using the NS-2 simulator. The analysis of the simulations shows promising results with low False Detection Rate (FDR) in the geographic routing protocols.
Traditionally, picture-based password systems employ password objects (pictures/icons/symbols) as input during an authentication session, thus making them vulnerable to "shoulder-surfing" attack because the visual interface by function is easily observed by others. Recent software-based approaches attempt to minimize this threat by requiring users to enter their passwords indirectly by performing certain mental tasks to derive the indirect password, thus concealing the user's actual password. However, weaknesses in the positioning of distracter and password objects introduce usability and security issues. In this paper, a new method, which conceals information about the password objects as much as possible, is proposed. Besides concealing the password objects and the number of password objects, the proposed method allows both password and distracter objects to be used as the challenge set's input. The correctly entered password appears to be random and can only be derived with the knowledge of the full set of password objects. Therefore, it would be difficult for a shoulder-surfing adversary to identify the user's actual password. Simulation results indicate that the correct input object and its location are random for each challenge set, thus preventing frequency of occurrence analysis attack. User study results show that the proposed method is able to prevent shoulder-surfing attack.