Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS

The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory

X-Vine: Secure and Pseudonymous Routing Using Social Networks

Distributed hash tables suffer from several security and privacy vulnerabilities, including the problem of Sybil attacks. Existing social network-based solutions to mitigate the Sybil attacks in DHT routing have a high state requirement and do not provide an adequate level of privacy. For instance, such techniques require a user to reveal their social network contacts. We design X-Vine, a protection mechanism for distributed hash tables that operates entirely by communicating over social network links. As with traditional peer-to-peer systems, X-Vine provides robustness, scalability, and a platform for innovation. The use of social network links for communication helps protect participant privacy and adds a new dimension of trust absent from previous designs. X-Vine is resilient to denial of service via Sybil attacks, and in fact is the first Sybil defense that requires only a logarithmic amount of state per node, making it suitable for large-scale and dynamic settings. X-Vine also helps protect the privacy of users social network contacts and keeps their IP addresses hidden from those outside of their social circle, providing a basis for pseudonymous communication. We first evaluate our design with analysis and simulations, using several real world large-scale social networking topologies. We show that the constraints of X-Vine allow the insertion of only a logarithmic number of Sybil identities per attack edge; we show this mitigates the impact of malicious attacks while not affecting the performance of honest nodes. Moreover, our algorithms are efficient, maintain low stretch, and avoid hot spots in the network. We validate our design with a PlanetLab implementation and a Facebook plugin.Comment: 15 page

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Reliable Bidirectional Data Transfer Approach for the Internet of Secured Medical Things Using ZigBee Wireless Network

[EN] Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) performs robust services for real-time applications in monitoring communication systems and generating meaningful information. The ZigBee devices offer low latency and manageable costs for wireless communication and support the process of physical data collection. Some biosensing systems comprise IoT-based ZigBee devices to monitor patient healthcare attributes and alert healthcare professionals for needed action. However, most of them still face unstable and frequent data interruption issues due to transmission service intrusions. Moreover, the medical data is publicly available using cloud services, and communicated through the smart devices to specialists for evaluation and disease diagnosis. Therefore, the applicable security analysis is another key factor for any medical system. This work proposed an approach for reliable network supervision with the internet of secured medical things using ZigBee networks for a smart healthcare system (RNM-SC). It aims to improve data systems with manageable congestion through load-balanced devices. Moreover, it also increases security performance in the presence of anomalies and offers data routing using the bidirectional heuristics technique. In addition, it deals with more realistic algorithm to associate only authorized devices and avoid the chances of compromising data. In the end, the communication between cloud and network applications is also protected from hostile actions, and only certified end-users can access the data. The proposed approach was tested and analyzed in Network Simulator (NS-3), and, compared to existing solutions, demonstrated significant and reliable performance improvements in terms of network throughput by 12%, energy consumption by 17%, packet drop ratio by 37%, end-to-end delay by 18%, routing complexity by 37%, and tampered packets by 37%.This research is supported by Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics Lab (AIDA) CCIS Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Authors are thankful for the support.Rehman, A.; Haseeb, K.; Fati, SM.; Lloret, J.; Peñalver Herrero, ML. (2021). Reliable Bidirectional Data Transfer Approach for the Internet of Secured Medical Things Using ZigBee Wireless Network. Applied Sciences. 11(21):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219947S116112