Industrial control protocols in the Internet core: Dismantling operational practices

Industrial control systems (ICS) are managed remotely with the help of dedicated protocols that were originally designed to work in walled gardens. Many of these protocols have been adapted to Internet transport and support wide-area communication. ICS now exchange insecure traffic on an inter-domain level, putting at risk not only common critical infrastructure but also the Internet ecosystem (e.g., by DRDoS attacks). In this paper, we measure and analyze inter-domain ICS traffic at two central Internet vantage points, an IXP and an ISP. These traffic observations are correlated with data from honeypots and Internet-wide scans to separate industrial from non-industrial ICS traffic. We uncover mainly unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic and provide an in-depth view on Internet-wide ICS communication. Our results can be used (i) to create precise filters for potentially harmful non-industrial ICS traffic and (ii) to detect ICS sending unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic, being vulnerable to eavesdropping and traffic manipulation attacks. Additionally, we survey recent security extensions of ICS protocols, of which we find very little deployment. We estimate an upper bound of the deployment status for ICS security protocols in the Internet core

Testing and verification of neural-network-based safety-critical control software: A systematic literature review

Context: Neural Network (NN) algorithms have been successfully adopted in a number of Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems (SCCPSs). Testing and Verification (T&V) of NN-based control software in safety-critical domains are gaining interest and attention from both software engineering and safety engineering researchers and practitioners. Objective: With the increase in studies on the T&V of NN-based control software in safety-critical domains, it is important to systematically review the state-of-the-art T&V methodologies, to classify approaches and tools that are invented, and to identify challenges and gaps for future studies. Method: We retrieved 950 papers on the T&V of NN-based Safety-Critical Control Software (SCCS). To reach our result, we filtered 83 primary papers published between 2001 and 2018, applied the thematic analysis approach for analyzing the data extracted from the selected papers, presented the classification of approaches, and identified challenges. Conclusion: The approaches were categorized into five high-order themes: assuring robustness of NNs, assuring safety properties of NN-based control software, improving the failure resilience of NNs, measuring and ensuring test completeness, and improving the interpretability of NNs. From the industry perspective, improving the interpretability of NNs is a crucial need in safety-critical applications. We also investigated nine safety integrity properties within four major safety lifecycle phases to investigate the achievement level of T&V goals in IEC 61508-3. Results show that correctness, completeness, freedom from intrinsic faults, and fault tolerance have drawn most attention from the research community. However, little effort has been invested in achieving repeatability; no reviewed study focused on precisely defined testing configuration or on defense against common cause failure.Comment: This paper had been submitted to Journal of Information and Software Technology on April 20, 2019,Revised 5 December 2019, Accepted 6 March 2020, Available online 7 March 202

Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future

The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses, organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security, the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics. We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.Comment: Author's copy of the book published under ISBN: 978-620-4-74421-