Information security in Process-aware Information System (PAIS) relies on many factors, including security of business process and the underlying system and technologies. Moreover, humans can be the weakest link that creates pathway to vulnerabilities, or the worst enemy that compromises a well-defended system. Since a system is as secure as its weakest link, information security can only be achieved in PAIS if all factors are secure. In this paper, we address two research questions: how to conduct a cross-layer security analysis that couple security concerns at business process layer as well as at the technical layer; and how to include human factor into the security analysis for the identification of human-oriented vulnerabilities and threats. We propose a methodology that supports the tracking of security interdependencies between functional, technical, and human aspects which contribute to establish a holistic approach to information security in PAIS. We demonstrate the applicability with a scenario from the payment card industry.
While the security literature predominantly focuses on the core network, the enhancement of the security of the beyond fifth generation (B5G) access network becomes of critical importance. Despite the strengthening of 5G security protocols with respect to LTE, there are still open issues that have not yet been fully addressed. In parallel as we move gradually away from the standard client-server networking paradigm and enter a new era of truly E2E quality of service (QoS), service level agreements (SLAs) in the near future will be expected to include guarantees about the quality of security (Q…
Smart city is one of the most known Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The smart city services improve user's daily lives. However, security and privacy issues are slowing down their adoption. In addition, the characteristics of IoT devices, applications and users make security implementation of the considered applications a challenging task. To address these issues, we present, in this paper, a new context-aware security and privacy architecture for the IoT. Thanks to the "as a service" approach, this new architecture will be user-centric. It will also support known context-aware security…
The gap between the knowledge and the practices regarding the computer and Internet use are the major factors which influence security of Information. A survey was performed on the education institutions in Oman to investigate the level of information security awareness among various entities. The survey focused on the following factors of IT Security: Demographics, Internet usage, Awareness about organizations network Security threats experience, Awareness on Password management, Email security awareness and Knowledge on security practices. The survey attracted 173 respondents: the level of i…
Imagine interconnected objects with embedded artificial intelligence (AI), empowered to sense the environment, see it, hear it, touch it, interact with it, and move. As future networks of intelligent objects come to life, tremendous new challenges arise for security, but also new opportunities, allowing to address current, as well as future, pressing needs. In this paper we put forward a roadmap towards the realization of a new security paradigm that we articulate as intelligent context-aware security. The premise of this roadmap is that sensing and advanced AI will enable context awareness, w…
Sixth generation systems are expected to face new security challenges, while opening up new frontiers towards context awareness in the wireless edge. The workhorse behind this projected technological leap will be a whole new set of sensing capabilities predicted for 6G devices, in addition to the ability to achieve high precision localization. The combination of these enhanced traits can give rise to a new breed of context-aware security protocols, following the quality of security (QoSec) paradigm. In this framework, physical layer security solutions emerge as competitive candidates for low c…
TUBITAK National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE) Department of Information Systems Security makes social engineering attacks to Turkish public agencies within the frame of "Information Security Tests" [19]. This paper will make an analysis of the social engineering tests that have been carried out in several Turkish public agencies. The tests include phone calling to sample employees by the social engineer and trying to seize employees' sensitive information by exploiting their good faith. The aim of this research is to figure that the employees in Turkish public agenc…
The revolution of internet technology and its usage have led a significant increase in the number of online transactions and electronic data transfer, parallely increased the number of cybercrime incidents around the world. Steady economic growth in the Sultanate of Oman accelerated the volume of online utilization for e-commerce, banking, communication, education and so forth. Normally attackers target the users who ignore security practices due to the lack of information security awareness. Unawareness of information security practices, user negligence, lack of awareness programs and trainin…
The growing popularity of digital systems have paved the way for digital locker that ensures security and safety of the digital documents in store. While facilitating this system to user and availing its services offered by service provider, non-repudiation of service offered and service consumed is an important security requirement in the digital locker system. In this paper, we present a digital locker system that addresses the aspect of confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation along with other security properties. The proposed protocol ensures the confirmed participation of the user …
The various types of communication technologies and mobility features in Internet of Things (IoT) on the one hand enable fruitful and attractive applications, but on the other hand facilitates malware propagation, thereby raising new challenges on handling IoT-empowered malware for cyber security. Comparing with the malware propagation control scheme in traditional wireless networks where nodes can be directly repaired and secured, in IoT, compromised end devices are difficult to be patched. Alternatively, blocking malware via patching intermediate nodes turns out to be a more feasible and pra…
A lack of awareness surrounding secure online behaviour can lead to end-users, and their personal details becoming vulnerable to compromise. This paper describes an ongoing research project in the field of usable security, examining the relationship between end-user-security behaviour, and the use of affective feedback to educate end-users. Part of the aforementioned research project considers the link between categorical information users reveal about themselves online, and the information users believe, or report that they have revealed online. The experimental results confirm a disparity be…
SA-DRL: Security-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ransomware Detection with Asymmetric Reward Design
School of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering, Charles Sturt University（查尔斯史都华大学计算、数学与工程学院）；AI and Cyber Futures Center, Charles Sturt University（查尔斯史都华大学人工智能与网络未来中心）
The increasing pervasiveness of internet-connected systems means that such systems will continue to be exploited for criminal purposes by cybercriminals (including malicious insiders such as employees and vendors). The importance of protecting corporate system and intellectual property, and the escalating complexities of the online environment underscore the need for ongoing information security awareness and education training and the promotion of a culture of security among employees. Two honeypots were deployed at a private university based in Singapore. Findings from the analysis of the ho…
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) system has been widely utilized at many present business areas. However, SOA system is loosely coupled with multiple services and lacks the relevant security protection mechanisms, thus it can easily be attacked by unauthorized access and information theft. The existed access control mechanism can only prevent unauthorized users from accessing the system, but they can not prevent those authorized users (insiders) from attacking the system. To address this problem, we propose a behavior-aware service access control mechanism using security policy monitoring f…
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become the new norm in enterprise networks, but BYOD security remains a top concern. Context-aware security, which enforces access control based on dynamic runtime context, holds much promise. Recent work has developed SDN solutions to collect device context for network-wide access control in a central controller. However, the central controller poses a bottleneck that can become an attack target, and processing context changes at remote software has low agility. We present a new paradigm, programmable in-network security (Poise), which is enabled by the emerge…
Attack-awareness recognizes self-awareness for security systems regarding the occurring attacks. More frequent and intense attacks on cloud and network infrastructures are pushing security systems to the limit. With the end of Moore's Law, merely scaling against these attacks is no longer economically justified. Previous works have already dealt with the adoption of Software-defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization in security systems and used both approaches to optimize performance by the intelligent placement of security functions. However, these works have not yet considered t…
Increasing communication and self-driving capabilities for road vehicles lead to threats imposed by attackers. Especially attacks leading to safety violations have to be identified to address them by appropriate measures. The impact of an attack depends on the threat exploited, potential countermeasures and the traffic situation. In order to identify such attacks and to use them for testing, we propose the systematic approach SaSeVAL for deriving attacks of autonomous vehicles. SaSeVAL is based on threats identification and safety-security analysis. The impact of automotive use cases to attack…
Tor users are vulnerable to deanonymization by an adversary that can observe some Tor relays or some parts of the network. We demonstrate that previous network-aware path-selection algorithms that propose to solve this problem are vulnerable to attacks across multiple Tor connections. We suggest that users use trust to choose the paths through Tor that are less likely to be observed, where trust is flexibly modeled as a probability distribution on the location of the user's adversaries, and we present the Trust-Aware Path Selection algorithm for Tor that helps users avoid traffic-analysis atta…
Individual and Contextual Variables of Cyber Security Behaviour -- An empirical analysis of national culture, industry, organisation, and individual variables of (in)secure human behaviour
Traffic correlation attacks to de-anonymize Tor users are possible when an adversary is in a position to observe traffic entering and exiting the Tor network. Recent work has brought attention to the threat of these attacks by network-level adversaries (e.g., Autonomous Systems). We perform a historical analysis to understand how the threat from AS-level traffic correlation attacks has evolved over the past five years. We find that despite a large number of new relays added to the Tor network, the threat has grown. This points to the importance of increasing AS-level diversity in addition to c…
The current security problems in cyberspace are characterized by strong and complex threats. Defenders face numerous problems such as lack of prior knowledge, various threats, and unknown vulnerabilities, which urgently need new fundamental theories to support. To address these issues, this article proposes a generic theoretical model for cyberspace defense and a new mimic defense framework, that is, Spatiotemporally heterogeneous, Input aware, and Dynamically updated Mimic Defense (SIDMD). We make the following contributions: (1) We first redefine vulnerabilities from the input space perspect…
Computation outsourcing is an integral part of cloud computing. It enables end-users to outsource their computational tasks to the cloud and utilize the shared cloud resources in a pay-per-use manner. However, once the tasks are outsourced, the end-users will lose control of their data, which may result in severe security issues especially when the data is sensitive. To address this problem, secure outsourcing mechanisms have been proposed to ensure security of the end-users' outsourced data. In this paper, we investigate outsourcing of general computational problems which constitute the mathe…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as the key enabling technology for smart services. Security and privacy are particularly open challenges for IoT applications due to the widespread use of commodity devices. This work introduces two hardware-based lightweight security mechanisms to ensure sensed data trustworthiness (i.e., sensed data protection and sensor node protection) and usage privacy of the sensors (i.e., privacy-aware reporting of the sensed data) for centralized and decentralized IoT applications. Physically unclonable functions (PUF) form the basis of both proposed mechanism…
Our everyday lives are expanding fast with the introduction of new Smart Home Systems (SHSs). Today, a myriad of SHS devices and applications are widely available to users and have already started to re-define our modern lives. Smart home users utilize the apps to control and automate such devices. Users can develop their own apps or easily download and install them from vendor-specific app markets. App-based SHSs offer many tangible benefits to our lives, but also unfold diverse security risks. Several attacks have already been reported for SHSs. However, current security solutions consider s…
Secure and scalable device provisioning is a notorious challenge in Wi-Fi. WPA2/WPA3 solutions take user interaction and a strong passphrase for granted. However, the often weak passphrases are subject to guessing attacks. Notably, there has been a significant rise of cyberattacks on Wi-Fi home or small office networks during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper addresses the device provisioning problem in Wi-Fi (personal mode) and proposes ComPass protocol to supplement WPA2/WPA3. ComPass replaces the pre-installed or user-selected passphrases with automatically generated ones. For this, ComPass…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have been increasingly used in several fields to improve performance and the level of automation. In recent years, this use has exponentially increased due to the advancement of high-performance computing and the ever increasing size of data. One of such fields is that of hardware design; specifically the design of digital and analog integrated circuits~(ICs), where AI/ ML techniques have been extensively used to address ever-increasing design complexity, aggressive time-to-market, and the growing number of ubiquitous interconne…
In a world, where complexity increases on a daily basis the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) cloud model seams to take countermeasures. In comparison to other cloud models, the fast evolving FaaS increasingly abstracts the underlying infrastructure and refocuses on the application logic. This trend brings huge benefits in application and performance but comes with difficulties for benchmarking cloud applications. In this position paper, we present an initial investigation of benchmarking FaaS in close to reality production systems. Furthermore, we outline the architectural design including the nec…
Recent advancements in the field of smart machine-to-machine (M2M) communications impose the necessity to improve the service delivery by enforcing appropriate security rules. Due to the large number of connected devices, the criticality of the M2M applications, and the network stability weaknesses, we need to consider and analyse the security aspects and establish a flexible policy-aware architecture. This paper explores the relevant architectural challenges in this environment and proposes a Policy-Aware smart M2M Architecture (PAArc) based on ETSI M2M communications functional architecture.…
The present paper focuses on Cyber Security Awareness Campaigns, and aims to identify key factors regarding security which may lead them to failing to appropriately change people's behaviour. Past and current efforts to improve information-security practices and promote a sustainable society have not had the desired impact. It is important therefore to critically reflect on the challenges involved in improving information-security behaviours for citizens, consumers and employees. In particular, our work considers these challenges from a Psychology perspective, as we believe that understanding …
This study concerns the security challenges that the people face in the usage and implementation of cloud computing. Despite its growth in the past few decades, this platform has experienced different challenges. They all arise from the concern of data safety that the nature of sharing in the cloud presents. This paper looks to identify the benefits of using a cloud computing platform and the issue of information security. The paper also reviews the concept of information hiding and its relevance to the cloud. This technique has two ways about it that impact how people use cloud computing in t…
Digital healthcare systems are very popular lately, as they provide a variety of helpful means to monitor people's health state as well as to protect people against an unexpected health situation. These systems contain a huge amount of personal information in a form of electronic health records that are not allowed to be disclosed to unauthorized users. Hence, health data and information need to be protected against attacks and thefts. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed architecture for healthcare data storage and analysis. It uses a novel security model to rigorously control permi…
Microarchitectural attacks exploit the abstraction gap between the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and how instructions are actually executed by processors to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of a system. To secure systems against microarchitectural attacks, programmers need to reason about and program against these microarchitectural side-effects. However, we cannot -- and should not -- expect programmers to manually tailor programs for specific processors and their security guarantees. Instead, we could rely on compilers (and the secure compilation community), as they can play…
By leveraging the principle of software polyculture to ensure security in a network, we proposed a vulnerability-based software diversity metric to determine how a network topology can be adapted to minimize security vulnerability while maintaining maximum network connectivity. Our proposed software diversity-based adaptation (SDA) scheme estimates a node's software diversity based on the vulnerabilities of software packages installed on other nodes on attack paths reachable to the node and employs it for edge adaptations, such as removing an edge with a neighboring node that exposes high secu…
