Complex networked systems are an integral part of today's support infrastructures. Due to their importance, these systems become more and more the target for cyber-attacks, suffering a notable number of security incidents. Also, they are subject to regulation by national and international legislation. An operator of such an infrastructure or system is responsible for ensuring its security and correct functioning in order to satisfy customers. In addition, the entire process of risk and quality control needs to be efficient and manageable. This short paper introduces the Compliance, Risk Assessment and Security Testing Improvement Profiling (CRSTIP) scheme. CRSTIP is an evaluation scheme that enables assessing the maturity of security assessment processes, taking into consideration systematic use of formalisms, integration and tool-support in the areas of compliance assessment, security risk assessment and security testing. The paper describes the elements of the scheme and their application to one of the case studies of the RASEN research project.
An approach to the development of security test procedures for information security controls is presented. The recommendations for optimizing the test procedure are obtained
Over the last years, we have seen several security incidents that compromised system safety, of which some caused physical harm to people. Meanwhile, various risk assessment methods have been developed that integrate safety and security, and these could help to address the corresponding threats by implementing suitable risk treatment plans. However, an overarching overview of these methods, systematizing the characteristics of such methods, is missing. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review, and identify 7 integrated safety and security risk assessment methods. We analyze the…
Technical security is only part of E-Commerce security operations; human usability and security perception play major and sometimes dominating factors. For instance, slick websites with impressive security icons but no real technical security are often perceived by users to be trustworthy (and thus more profitable) than plain vanilla websites that use powerful encryption for transmission and server protection. We study one important type of E-Commerce transaction website, E-Tax Filing, that is exposed to large populations. We assess a large number of international (5), Federal (USA), and state…
Cloud computing has been adopted widely, providing on-demand computing resources to improve perfornance and reduce the operational costs. However, these new functionalities also bring new ways to exploit the cloud computing environment. To assess the security of the cloud, graphical security models can be used, such as Attack Graphs and Attack Trees. However, existing models do not consider all types of threats, and also automating the security assessment functions are difficult. In this paper, we propose a new security assessment tool for the cloud named CloudSafe, an automated security asses…
Threats targeting cyberspace are becoming more prominent and intelligent day by day. This inherently leads to a dire demand for continuous security validation and testing. Using this paper, we aim to provide a holistic and precise security analysis rating framework for organizations that increases the overall coherency of the outcomes of such testing. This scorecard is based on the security assessment performed following the globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques called the MITRE ATTACK matrix. The scorecard for an evaluation is generated by ingesting the securi…
Recently, a novel approach towards semi-quantitative IT security risk assessment has been proposed in the draft IEC 62443-3-2. This approach is analyzed from several different angles, e.g. embedding into the overall standard series, semantic and methodological aspects. As a result, several systematic flaws in the approach are exposed. As a way forward, an alternative approach is proposed which blends together semi-quantitative risk assessment as well as threat and risk analysis.
Some recent incidents have shown that possibly the vulnerability of IT systems in railway automation has been underestimated. Fortunately, so far, almost only denial-of-service attacks were successful, but due to several trends, such as the use of commercial IT and communication systems or privatization, the threat potential could increase in the near future. However, up to now, no harmonized IT security risk assessment framework for railway automation exists. This paper defines an IT security risk assessment framework which aims to separate IT security and safety requirements as well as certi…
For years, attack graphs have been an important tool for security assessment of enterprise networks, but IoT devices, a new player in the IT world, might threat the reliability of this tool. In this paper, we review the challenges that must be addressed when using attack graphs to model and analyze enterprise networks that include IoT devices. In addition, we propose novel ideas and countermeasures aimed at addressing these challenges.
In this paper, we present the Cloud Property Graph (CloudPG), which bridges the gap between static code analysis and runtime security assessment of cloud services. The CloudPG is able to resolve data flows between cloud applications deployed on different resources, and contextualizes the graph with runtime information, such as encryption settings. To provide a vendor- and technology-independent representation of a cloud service's security posture, the graph is based on an ontology of cloud resources, their functionalities and security features. We show, using an example, that our CloudPG frame…
The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and comm…
The paper at hand presents the design of a survey aiming at the cyber-security culture assessment of critical infrastructures during the COVID-19 crisis, when living reality was heavily disturbed and working conditions fundamentally affected. The survey is rooted in a security culture framework layered into two levels, organizational and individual, further analyzed into 10 different security dimensions consisted of 52 domains. An in-depth questionnaire building analysis is presented focusing on the aims, goals, and expected results. It concludes with the survey implementation approach while u…
Characterizing attacker behavior with respect to Cyber-Physical Systems is important to assuring the security posture and resilience of these systems. Classical cyber vulnerability assessment approaches rely on the knowledge and experience of cyber-security experts to conduct security analyses and can be inconsistent where the experts' knowledge and experience are lacking. This paper proposes a flexible attacker modeling framework that aids in the security analysis process by simulating a diverse set of attacker behaviors to predict attack progression and provide consistent system vulnerabilit…
This paper presents one suggestion that comprises the authors' experience in development and implementation of systems for information security in the Automated Information Systems of the Bulgarian Armed Forces. The architecture of risk analysis and assessment system for the communication and information system's information security (CIS IS) has been presented. E-net model of "Defining" Subsystem as a tool that allows to examine the subsystems is proposed as well. Such approach can be applied successfully for communication and information systems in the business field.
Actually Information security becomes a very important part for the organization's intangible assets, so level of confidence and stakeholder trusted are performance indicator as successes organization. Since information security has a very important role in supporting the activities of the organization, we need a standard or benchmark which regulates governance over information security. The main objective of this paper is to implement a novel practical approach framework to the development of information security management system (ISMS) assessment and monitoring software, called by I-SolFram…
Attacks on software systems occur world-wide on a daily basis targeting individuals, corporations, and governments alike. The systems that facilitate maritime shipping are at risk of serious disruptions, and these disruptions can stem from vulnerabilities in the software and processes used in these systems. These vulnerabilities leave such systems open to cyber-attack. Assessments of the security of maritime shipping systems have focused on identifying risks but have not taken the critical (and expensive) next step of actually identifying vulnerabilities present in these systems. While such ri…
These days, cyber-criminals target humans rather than machines since they try to accomplish their malicious intentions by exploiting the weaknesses of end users. Thus, human vulnerabilities pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of computer systems and data. The human tendency to trust and help others, as well as personal, social, and cultural characteristics, are indicative of the level of susceptibility that one may exhibit towards certain attack types and deception strategies. This work aims to investigate the factors that affect human susceptibility by studying the existing li…
The demand for quick and reliable DevOps operations pushed distributors of repository platforms to implement workflows. Workflows allow automating code management operations directly on the repository hosting the software. However, this feature also introduces security issues that directly affect the repository, its content, and all the software supply chains in which the hosted code is involved in. Hence, an attack exploiting vulnerable workflows can affect disruptively large software ecosystems. To empirically assess the importance of this problem, in this paper, we focus on the de-facto mai…
Local Area Networks(LAN) at present become an important instrument for organizing of process and information communication in an organization. They provides important purposes such as association of large amount of data, hardware and software resources and expanding of optimum communications. Becase these network do work with valuable information, the problem of security providing is an important issue in organization. So, the stablishment of an information security management system(ISMS) in organization is significant. In this paper, we introduce ISMS and its implementation in LAN scop. The …
Advanced persistent threats pose a significant challenge for blue teams as they apply various attacks over prolonged periods, impeding event correlation and their detection. In this work, we leverage various diverse attack scenarios to assess the efficacy of EDRs and other endpoint security solutions against detecting and preventing APTs. Our results indicate that there is still a lot of room for improvement as state of the art endpoint security systems fail to prevent and log the bulk of the attacks that are reported in this work. Additionally, we discuss methods to tamper with the telemetry …
We present a way to combine security and safety assessments using Bowtie Diagrams. Bowties model both the causes leading up to a central failure event and consequences which arise from that event, as well as barriers which impede events. Bowties have previously been used separately for security and safety assessments, but we suggest that a unified treatment in a single model can elegantly capture safety-security interdependencies of several kinds. We showcase our approach with the example of the October 2021 Facebook DNS shutdown, examining the chains of events and the interplay between the se…
Alias Robotics S.L.（Alias Robotics 有限公司）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Robots have gained relevance in society, increasingly performing critical tasks. Nonetheless, robot security is being underestimated. Robotics security is a complex landscape, which often requires a cross-disciplinar perspective to which classical security lags behind. To address this issue, we present the Robot Security Framework (RSF), a methodology to perform systematic security assessments in robots. We propose, adapt and develop specific terminology and provide guidelines to enable a holistic security assessment following four main layers (Physical, Network, Firmware and Application). We …
Users of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are often unaware of their security risks and cannot sufficiently factor security considerations into their device selection. This puts networks, infrastructure and users at risk. We developed and evaluated SAFER, an IoT device risk assessment framework designed to improve users' ability to assess the security of connected devices. We deployed SAFER in a large multinational organization that permits use of private devices. To evaluate the framework, we conducted a mixed-method study with 20 employees. Our findings suggest that SAFER increases users' aw…
Information security and privacy in the healthcare sector is an issue of growing importance. The adoption of digital patient records, increased regulation, provider consolidation and the increasing need for information exchange between patients, providers and payers, all point towards the need for better information security. We critically survey the literature on information security and privacy in healthcare, published in information systems journals as well as many other related disciplines including health informatics, public health, law, medicine, and the trade press and industry reports
Our goal is to enable holistic hardware security evaluation from the microarchitectural point of view. To achieve this, we propose a framework that categorizes threat models based on the microarchitectural components being targeted, and provides a generic security metric that can be used to assess the vulnerability of components, as well as the system as a whole.
Recent developments have made autonomous vehicles (AVs) closer to hitting our roads. However, their security is still a major concern among drivers as well as manufacturers. Although some work has been done to identify threats and possible solutions, a theoretical framework is needed to measure the security of AVs. In this paper, a simple security model based on defense graphs is proposed to quantitatively assess the likelihood of threats on components of an AV in the presence of available countermeasures. A Bayesian network (BN) analysis is then applied to obtain the associated security risk.…
Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a comprehensive empirical study on the security risks of global banking apps to provide useful insights and improve the security of banking apps. Since data-related weaknesses in banking apps are critical and may directly cause serious financial loss, this paper first revisits the state-of-the-art available tools and finds that they have limited capability in ident…
In spite of the growing importance of software security and the industry demand for more cyber security expertise in the workforce, the effect of security education and experience on the ability to assess complex software security problems has only been recently investigated. As proxy for the full range of software security skills, we considered the problem of assessing the severity of software vulnerabilities by means of a structured analysis methodology widely used in industry (i.e. the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (\CVSS) v3), and designed a study to compare how accurately individual…
The present paper shows a proposal of the characteristics Cloud Risk Assessment Models should have and presents the review of the literature considering those characteristics in order to identify current gaps. This work shows a ranking of Cloud RA models and their degree of compliance with the theoretical reference Cloud Risk Assessment model. The review of literature shows that RA approaches leveraging CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) STAR Registry that have into account organizations security requirements present higher degree of compliance, but they still lack risk economic quantification. The…
The paper examines quantitative assessment of wireless distribution system security, as well as an assessment of risks from attacks and security violations. Furthermore, it describes typical security breach and formal attack models and five methods for assessing security. The proposed normalized method for assessing the degree of security assurance operates with at least three characteristics, which allows comparatively analyze heterogeneous information systems. The improved calculating formulas have been proposed for two security assessment methods, and the elements of functional-cost analysi…
Information sharing among organizations has been gaining attention as a method for improving cybersecurity. However, the associated disclosure costs act as deterrents for firms' voluntary cooperation. In this work, we take a game-theoretic approach to understanding firms' incentives in these agreements. We propose the design of inter-temporal incentives (i.e. conditioning future cooperation on past interactions). Specifically, we show that incentives for full cooperation can be designed if firms share their private assessments of other firms' disclosure decisions through a common communication…
Virtualization technology is nowadays adopted in security-critical embedded systems to achieve higher performance and more design flexibility. However, it also comes with new security threats, where attackers leverage timing covert channels to exfiltrate sensitive information from a partition using a trojan. This paper presents a novel approach for the experimental assessment of timing covert channels in embedded hypervisors, with a case study on security assessment of a commercial hypervisor product (Wind River VxWorks MILS), in cooperation with a licensed laboratory for the Common Criteria s…
Information security risk assessment methods have served us well over the past two decades. They have provided a tool for organizations and governments to use in protecting themselves against pertinent risks. As the complexity, pervasiveness, and automation of technology systems increases and cyberspace matures, particularly with the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a strong argument that we will need new approaches to assess risk and build trust. The challenge with simply extending existing assessment methodologies to IoT systems is that we could be blind to new risks arising in such ecosys…
Web-based chatbots provide website owners with the benefits of increased sales, immediate response to their customers, and insight into customer behaviour. While Web-based chatbots are getting popular, they have not received much scrutiny from security researchers. The benefits to owners come at the cost of users' privacy and security. Vulnerabilities, such as tracking cookies and third-party domains, can be hidden in the chatbot's iFrame script. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of five Web-based chatbots among the top 1-million Alexa websites. Through our crawler tool, we identify t…
EarthOL: A Proof-of-Human-Contribution Consensus Protocol -- Addressing Fundamental Challenges in Decentralized Value Assessment with Enhanced Verification and Security Mechanisms
We introduce a model for a market based economic system of cyber-risk valuation to correct fundamental problems of incentives within the information technology and information processing industries. We assess the makeup of the current day marketplace, identify incentives, identify economic reasons for current failings, and explain how a market based risk valuation system could improve these incentives to form a secure and robust information marketplace for all consumers by providing visibility into open, consensus based risk pricing and allowing all parties to make well informed decisions.
