Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Intrusion detection and prevention of web service attacks for software as a service:Fuzzy association rules vs fuzzy associative patterns

Cloud computing inherits all the systems, networks as well asWeb Services’ security vulnerabilities, in particular for software as a service (SaaS), where business applications or services are provided over the Cloud as Web Service (WS). Hence, WS-based applications must be protected against loss of integrity, confidentiality and availability when they are deployed over to the Cloud environment. Many existing IDP systems address only attacks mostly occurring at PaaS and IaaS. In this paper, we present our fuzzy association rule-based (FAR) and fuzzy associative pattern-based (FAP) intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) systems in defending against WS attacks at the SaaS level. Our experimental results have validated the capabilities of these two IDP systems in terms of detection of known attacks and prediction of newvariant attacks with accuracy close to 100%. For each transaction transacted over the Cloud platform, detection, prevention or prediction is carried out in less than five seconds. For load and volume testing on the SaaS where the system is under stress (at a work load of 5000 concurrent users submitting normal, suspicious and malicious transactions over a time interval of 300 seconds), the FAR IDP system provides close to 95% service availability to normal transactions. Future work involves determining more quality attributes besides service availability, such as latency, throughput and accountability for a more trustworthy SaaS

Combining Programs to Enhance Security Software

Automatic threats require automatic solutions, which become automatic threats themselves. When software grows in functionality, it grows in complexity, and in the number of bugs. To keep track of and counter all of the possible ways that a malicious party can exploit these bugs, we need security software. Such software helps human developers identify and remove bugs, or system administrators detect attempted attacks. But like any other software, and likely more so, security software itself can have blind spots or flaws. In the best case, it stops working, and becomes ineffective. In the worst case, the security software has privileged access to the system it is supposed to protect, and the attacker can hijack those privileges for its own purposes. So we will need external programs to compensate for their weaknesses. At the same time, we need to minimize the additional attack surface and development time due to creating new solutions. To address both points, this thesis will explore how to combine multiple programs to overcome a number of weaknesses in individual security software: (1) When login authentication and physical protections of a smart phone fail, fake, decoy applications detect unauthorized usage and draw the attacker away from truly sensitive applications; (2) when a fuzzer, an automatic software testing tool, requires a diverse set of initial test inputs, manipulating the tools that a human uses to generate these inputs multiplies the generated inputs; (3) when the software responsible for detecting attacks, known as an intrusion detection system, itself needs protection against attacks, a simplified state machine tracks the software's interaction with the underlying platform, without the complexity and risks of a fully functional intrusion detection system; (4) when intrusion detection systems run on multiple, independent machines, a graph-theoretic framework drives the design for how the machines cooperatively monitor each other, forcing the attacker to not only perform more work, but also do so faster. Instead of introducing new, stand-alone security software, the above solutions only require a fixed number of new tools that rely on a diverse selection of programs that already exist. Nor do any of the programs, old or new, require additional privileges that the old programs did not have before. In other words, we multiply the power of security software without multiplying their risks