Increased dependence on networked, software based control has escalated the vulnerabilities of Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs). Detection and monitoring components developed leveraging dynamical systems theory are often employed as lightweight security measures for protecting such safety critical CPSs against false data injection attacks. However, existing approaches do not correlate attack scenarios with parameters of detection systems. In the present work, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based framework which adaptively sets the parameters of such detectors based on experience learned from attack scenarios, maximizing detection rate and minimizing false alarms in the process while attempting performance preserving control actions.
In a connected transportation system, adaptive traffic signal controllers (ATSC) utilize real-time vehicle trajectory data received from vehicles through wireless connectivity (i.e., connected vehicles) to regulate green time. However, this wirelessly connected ATSC increases cyber-attack surfaces and increases their vulnerability to various cyber-attack modes, which can be leveraged to induce significant congestion in a roadway network. An attacker may receive financial benefits to create such a congestion for a specific roadway. One such mode is a 'sybil' attack in which an attacker creates …
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Cybersecurity: From Fundamentals to Applications
Cyber-Defence Campus & Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences（网络安全校园与东瑞士应用科学大学）；Institute for Computational Engineering（计算工程研究所）；armasuisse Science and Technology（armasuisse科技）
Bluerydge Cybersecurity and Technology（布鲁里奇网络安全与技术公司）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）；The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Secure robotics is a multi-disciplinary endeavour for improving the cybersecurity posture of robotic and embodied Artificial Intelligence systems. The article surveys emerging concepts and ideas encapsulating the notion of secure robotics and identifies five Secure Robotics Cybersecurity Control Implementation Layers as a crucial starting point for consideration by practitioners. It also recognises the need for further studies on the relationship between Human-robot trust and the implementation of established and novel cybersecurity controls.
This paper surveys the latest on Smart Grid security. It focuses on the deep understanding of the risk in terms of threats, vulnerabilities and consequences that arise from cyber-attacks.
In recent years, researchers have proposed \emph{cyber-insurance} as a suitable risk-management technique for enhancing security in Internet-like distributed systems. However, amongst other factors, information asymmetry between the insurer and the insured, and the inter-dependent and correlated nature of cyber risks have contributed in a big way to the failure of cyber-insurance markets. Security experts have argued in favor of operating system (OS) platform switching (ex., from Windows to Unix-based OSs) or secure OS adoption as being one of the techniques that can potentially mitigate the p…
Cyber physical systems (CPS) are mission critical systems engineered by combination of cyber and physical systems respectively. These systems are tightly coupled, resource constrained systems and have dynamic real time applications. Due to the limitation of resources, and in order to improve the efficiency of the CPS systems, they are combined with cloud computing architecture, and are called as Cyber Physical Cloud Computing Systems (CPCCS). These CPCCS have critical care applications where security of the systems is a major concern. Therefore, we propose a Secure Service provisioning archite…
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University（伊玛目阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·本·费萨尔大学）；North Orissa University（北奥里萨大学）
Smart city improved the quality of life for the citizens by implementing information communication technology (ICT) such as the internet of things (IoT). Nevertheless, the smart city is a critical environment that needs to secure it is network and data from intrusions and attacks. This work proposes a hybrid deep learning (DL) model for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) to improve threats classification performance based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and quasi-recurrent neural network (QRNN). We use QRNN to provide a real-time threat classification model. The evaluation results of the pr…
Safety risk assessment is an essential process to ensure a dependable Cyber-Physical System (CPS) design. Traditional risk assessment considers only physical failures. For modern CPS, failures caused by cyber attacks are on the rise. The focus of latest research effort is on safety-security lifecycle integration and the expansion of modeling formalisms for risk assessment to incorporate security failures. The interaction between safety and security lifecycles and its impact on the overall system design, as well as the reliability loss resulting from ignoring security failures are some of the o…
Innovations in Cardless Artificial Intelligence Banking: A Comprehensive Framework for Cyber Secure and Fraud Mitigation using Machine Learning Algorithms
Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being widely adopted in critical infrastructures, such as smart grids, nuclear plants, water systems, transportation systems, manufacturing and healthcare services, among others. However, the increasing prevalence of cyberattacks targeting them raises a growing security concern in the domain. In particular, memory-safety attacks, that exploit memory-safety vulnerabilities, constitute a major attack vector against real-time control devices in CPS. Traditional IT countermeasures against such attacks have limitations when applied to the CPS context: they typically…
Diversity-based security approaches have been studied for several decades since the 1970's. The concept of diversity-by-design emerged in the 1980's and, since then, diversity-based system design research has been explored to build more secure and dependable systems. In this work, we are particularly interested in providing an in-depth, comprehensive survey of existing diversity-based approaches, insights, and future work directions for those who want to conduct research on developing secure and dependable cyber-physical systems (CPSs) using diversity as a system design feature. To be specific…
Correct-by-construction synthesis is a cornerstone of the confluence of formal methods and control theory towards designing safety-critical systems. Instead of following the time-tested, albeit laborious (re)design-verify-validate loop, correct-by-construction methodology advocates the use of continual refinements of formal requirements -- connected by chains of formal proofs -- to build a system that assures the correctness by design. A remarkable progress has been made in scaling the scope of applicability of correct-by-construction synthesis -- with a focus on cyber-physical systems that ti…
COVID-19 has caused widespread damage across many areas of life and has made humans more dependent on the internet and technology making us realize the importance of secure remote working environments. While social separation is encouraged during moments of lockdown, online infrastructure has become the central focus for communication, commerce, working, and learning, creating a new challenge and trend for companies to adopt new methods and operating models. The cases of cyber-attacks increased, and fraudsters and cybercriminals took use of this to intensify their illegal activities by taking …
Individual and Contextual Variables of Cyber Security Behaviour -- An empirical analysis of national culture, industry, organisation, and individual variables of (in)secure human behaviour
Most of the smart applications, such as smart energy metering devices, demand strong privacy preservation to strengthen data privacy. However, it is difficult to protect the privacy of the smart device data, especially on the client side. It is mainly because payment for billing is computed by the server deployed at the client's side, and it is highly challenging to prevent the leakage of client's information to unauthorised users. Various researchers have discussed this problem and have proposed different privacy preservation techniques. Conventional techniques suffer from the problem of high…
Teleoperated robots are playing an increasingly important role in military actions and medical services. In the future, remotely operated surgical robots will likely be used in more scenarios such as battlefields and emergency response. But rapidly growing applications of teleoperated surgery raise the question; what if the computer systems for these robots are attacked, taken over and even turned into weapons? Our work seeks to answer this question by systematically analyzing possible cyber security attacks against Raven II, an advanced teleoperated robotic surgery system. We identify a slew …
Blockchain transactions are signed by private keys. Secure key storage and tamper-proof computers are essential requirements for deploying a trusted infrastructure. In this paper, we identify some threats against blockchain wallets and propose a set of physical and logical countermeasures to thwart them. We present the crypto terminal device, operating with a removable secure element, built on open software and hardware architectures, capable of detecting a cloned device or corrupted software. These technologies are based on tamper-resistant computing (javacard), smart card anti-cloning, smart…
The cloud model allows many enterprises able to outsource computing resources at an affordable price without having to commit the expense upfront. Although the cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, there are still many security concerns due to inherently complex model the cloud providers operate on (e.g.,multi-tenancy). In addition, the enterprises whose services have migrated into the cloud have a preference for their own cybersecurity situation awareness capability on top of the security mechanisms provided by the cloud providers. In this way, the enterprises can mon…
Paper ballot voting with its fully-reviewable paper-trail is usually considered as more secure than their e-voting counterparts, given the large number of recent incidents. In this work, we explore the security of paper voting and show that paper voting, as it is implemented today, is surprisingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In particular, the aggregation methods of preliminary voting results of various countries rely on insecure communication channels like telephone, fax or non-secure e-mail. Furthermore, regulations typically do not mandate the use of secure channels for the transmission of…
The 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense was held as part of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This workshop was organized to share research that explores unique applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as foundational capabilities for the pursuit of adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats. Building on recent advances in…
This paper sets the context for the urgency for cyber autonomy, and the current gaps of the cyber security industry. A novel framework proposing four phases of maturity for full cyber autonomy will be discussed. The paper also reviews new and emerging cyber security automation techniques and tools, and discusses their impact on society, the perceived cyber security skills gap/shortage and national security. We will also be discussing the delicate balance between national security, human rights and ethics, and the potential demise of the manual penetration testing industry in the face of automa…
This paper proposes a novel secure live virtual machine migration framework by using a virtual trusted platform module instance to improve the integrity of the migration process from one virtual machine to another on the same platform. The proposed framework, called Kororā, is designed and developed on a public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud-computing environment and runs concurrently on the same hardware components (Input/Output, Central Processing Unit, Memory) and the same hypervisor (Xen); however, a combination of parameters needs to be evaluated before implementing Kororā. The impleme…
Autonomous vehicles are on the horizon and will be transforming transportation safety and comfort. These vehicles will be connected to various external systems and utilize advanced embedded systems to perceive their environment and make intelligent decisions. However, this increased connectivity makes these vehicles vulnerable to various cyber-attacks that can have catastrophic effects. Attacks on automotive systems are already on the rise in today's vehicles and are expected to become more commonplace in future autonomous vehicles. Thus, there is a need to strengthen cybersecurity in future a…
Blockchain-Empowered Cyber-Secure Federated Learning for Trustworthy Edge Computing
Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University (FIU)（佛罗里达国际大学奈特基金会计算与信息科学学院）；School of Computing, Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学计算学院）；Enterprise and Logistics Engineering program at FIU（佛罗里达国际大学企业与物流工程项目）
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are composed of various embedded subsystems and require specialized software, firmware, and hardware to coordinate with the rest of the system. These multiple levels of integration expose attack surfaces which can be susceptible to attack vectors that require novel architectural methods to effectively secure against. We present a multilevel hierarchical monitor architecture cybersecurity approach applied to a flight control system. However, the principles present in this paper apply to any CPS. Additionally, the real-time nature of these monitors allow for adaptabl…
As an important cyber-physical system (CPS), smart grid is highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. Amongst various types of attacks, false data injection attack (FDIA) proves to be one of the top-priority cyber-related issues and has received increasing attention in recent years. However, so far little attention has been paid to privacy preservation issues in the detection of FDIAs in smart grid. Inspired by federated learning, a FDIA detection method based on secure federated deep learning is proposed in this paper by combining Transformer, federated learning and Paillier cryptosystem. The Transf…
Recent cyber-attacks on power grids highlight the necessity to protect the critical functionalities of a control center vital for the safe operation of a grid. Even in a distributed framework one central control center acts as a coordinator in majority of the control center architectures. Such a control center can become a prime target for cyber as well as physical attacks, and, hence, a single point failure can lead to complete loss of visibility of the power grid. If the control center which runs the critical functions in a distributed computing environment can be randomly chosen between the…
The increasing instances of advanced attacks call for a new defense paradigm that is active, autonomous, and adaptive, named as the \texttt{`3A'} defense paradigm. This chapter introduces three defense schemes that actively interact with attackers to increase the attack cost and gather threat information, i.e., defensive deception for detection and counter-deception, feedback-driven Moving Target Defense (MTD), and adaptive honeypot engagement. Due to the cyber deception, external noise, and the absent knowledge of the other players' behaviors and goals, these schemes possess three progressive…
Critical Infrastructures (CIs) such as power grid, water and gas distribution are controlled by Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Sensors and actuators of a physical plant are managed by the ICS. Data and commands transmitted over the network from the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are saved and parsed within the Historian. Generally, this architecture guarantees to check for any process anomalies that may occur due to component failures and cyber attacks. The other use of this data allows activities such as forensic analysis. To secure the network is also crucial to protect the communi…
In Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), inference based on communicated data is of critical significance as it can be used to manipulate or damage the control operations by adversaries. This calls for efficient mechanisms for secure transmission of data since control systems are becoming increasingly distributed over larger geographical areas. Distortion based security, recently proposed as one candidate for secure transmissions in CPS, is not only more appropriate for these applications but also quite frugal in terms of prior requirements on shared keys. In this paper, we propose distortion-based me…
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；University of Carthage（迦太基大学）；Higher School of Communications of Tunis（突尼斯高等通信学院）
Internet-of-things (IoT) is perpetually revolutionizing our daily life and rapidly transforming physical objects into an ubiquitous connected ecosystem. Due to their massive deployment and moderate security levels, those devices face a lot of security, management, and control challenges. Their classical centralized architecture is still cloaking vulnerabilities and anomalies that can be exploited by hackers for spying, eavesdropping, and taking control of the network. In this paper, we propose to improve the IoT architecture with additional security features using Artificial Intelligence (AI) …
