A Survey of Security in UAVs and FANETs: Issues, Threats, Analysis of Attacks, and Solutions

Thanks to the rapidly developing technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are able to complete a number of tasks in cooperation with each other without need for human intervention. In recent years, UAVs, which are widely utilized in military missions, have begun to be deployed in civilian applications and mostly for commercial purposes. With their growing numbers and range of applications, UAVs are becoming more and more popular; on the other hand, they are also the target of various threats which can exploit various vulnerabilities of UAV systems in order to cause destructive effects. It is therefore critical that security is ensured for UAVs and the networks that provide communication between UAVs. In this survey, we aimed to present a comprehensive detailed approach to security by classifying possible attacks against UAVs and flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). We classified the security threats into four major categories that make up the basic structure of UAVs; hardware attacks, software attacks, sensor attacks, and communication attacks. In addition, countermeasures against these attacks are presented in separate groups as prevention and detection. In particular, we focus on the security of FANETs, which face significant security challenges due to their characteristics and are also vulnerable to insider attacks. Therefore, this survey presents a review of the security fundamentals for FANETs, and also four different routing attacks against FANETs are simulated with realistic parameters and then analyzed. Finally, limitations and open issues are also discussed to direct future wor

Have you been a victim of COVID-19-related cyber incidents? Survey, taxonomy, and mitigation strategies

Cybercriminals are constantly on the lookout for new attack vectors, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. For example, social distancing measures have resulted in travel bans, lockdowns, and stay-at-home orders, consequently increasing the reliance on information and communications technologies, such as Zoom. Cybercriminals have also attempted to exploit the pandemic to facilitate a broad range of malicious activities, such as attempting to take over videoconferencing platforms used in online meetings/educational activities, information theft, and other fraudulent activities. This study briefly reviews some of the malicious cyber activities associated with COVID-19 and the potential mitigation solutions. We also propose an attack taxonomy, which (optimistically) will help guide future risk management and mitigation responses. © 2013 IEEE

HIDROID: prototyping a behavioral host-based intrusion detection and prevention system for android

Previous research efforts on developing an Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) for Android mobile devices rely mostly on centralized data collection and processing on a cloud server. However, this trend is characterized by two major limitations. First, it requires a continuous connection between monitored devices and the server, which might be infeasible, due to mobile network's outage or partial coverage. Second, it increases the risk of sensitive information leakage and the violation of user's privacy. To help alleviate these problems, in this paper, we develop a novel Host-based IDPS for Android (HIDROID), which runs completely on a mobile device, with a minimal computation burden. It collects data in run-time, by periodically sampling features reflecting the utilization of scarce resources on a mobile device (e.g. CPU, memory, battery, bandwidth, etc.). The detection engine exploits statistical and machine learning algorithms to build a data-driven model for the benign behavior. Any observation failing to match this model triggers an alert, and the preventive agent takes proper countermeasure(s) to minimize the risk. HIDROID requires no malicious data for training or tuning, which makes it handy for day-to-day usage. Experimental test results, on a real-life device, show that HIDROID is well able to learn and discriminate normal from malicious behavior, with very promising accuracy of up to 0.9, while maintaining false positive rate by 0.03

Determining Resilience Gains from Anomaly Detection for Event Integrity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Measurements collected in a wireless sensor network (WSN) can be maliciously compromised through several attacks, but anomaly detection algorithms may provide resilience by detecting inconsistencies in the data. Anomaly detection can identify severe threats to WSN applications, provided that there is a sufficient amount of genuine information. This article presents a novel method to calculate an assurance measure for the network by estimating the maximum number of malicious measurements that can be tolerated. In previous work, the resilience of anomaly detection to malicious measurements has been tested only against arbitrary attacks, which are not necessarily sophisticated. The novel method presented here is based on an optimization algorithm, which maximizes the attack’s chance of staying undetected while causing damage to the application, thus seeking the worst-case scenario for the anomaly detection algorithm. The algorithm is tested on a wildfire monitoring WSN to estimate the benefits of anomaly detection on the system’s resilience. The algorithm also returns the measurements that the attacker needs to synthesize, which are studied to highlight the weak spots of anomaly detection. Finally, this article presents a novel methodology that takes in input the degree of resilience required and automatically designs the deployment that satisfies such a requirement

Discrete Event Simulations

Considered by many authors as a technique for modelling stochastic, dynamic and discretely evolving systems, this technique has gained widespread acceptance among the practitioners who want to represent and improve complex systems. Since DES is a technique applied in incredibly different areas, this book reflects many different points of view about DES, thus, all authors describe how it is understood and applied within their context of work, providing an extensive understanding of what DES is. It can be said that the name of the book itself reflects the plurality that these points of view represent. The book embraces a number of topics covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas that have been categorised into five groups. As well as the previously explained variety of points of view concerning DES, there is one additional thing to remark about this book: its richness when talking about actual data or actual data based analysis. When most academic areas are lacking application cases, roughly the half part of the chapters included in this book deal with actual problems or at least are based on actual data. Thus, the editor firmly believes that this book will be interesting for both beginners and practitioners in the area of DES

Survey on IoT based Cyber Security Issues and Autonomous Solutions for Implantable Medical Devices

In today’s world the technology has got boomed up to the peak. So as a measure of this technology peak we could see that the enhancement of this has raised very large. This technology booming has also impacted health care sector. In our paper we are going to discuss much on implantable medical devices and its uses which plays a major role in patient’s life. This IMD’s are going to be the life changing aspect of each and every patient. These devices are highly controlled IoT devices (i.e.) those devices are connected through internet which will help doctors to track the details of the patients remotely. On the other hand since all these devices are connected to internet, these are easily hacked by the hackers. The factors of how those devices are much vulnerable and what are all the threats that will make these devices to malfunction and lead a problem to the patients is discussed. And also this will lead the health sector to fall in their reputation. IMD’s are of many types which are in existing in the Medical industry. But we are going to consider some IMD’s as example and we have planned to make a detailed study on the problems on those devices. All these devices are vulnerable since it is connected to internet. So our aim is to completely or partially reduce the risks on those devices via communication network. We have also showcased the possible threats and vulnerabilities chances on those devices. The main scenarios of device control issues and possible solutions have been discussed in this article

Ensuring the resilience of wireless sensor networks to malicious data injections through measurements inspection

Malicious data injections pose a severe threat to the systems based on \emph{Wireless Sensor Networks} (WSNs) since they give the attacker control over the measurements, and on the system's status and response in turn. Malicious measurements are particularly threatening when used to spoof or mask events of interest, thus eliciting or preventing desirable responses. Spoofing and masking attacks are particularly difficult to detect since they depict plausible behaviours, especially if multiple sensors have been compromised and \emph{collude} to inject a coherent set of malicious measurements. Previous work has tackled the problem through \emph{measurements inspection}, which analyses the inter-measurements correlations induced by the physical phenomena. However, these techniques consider simplistic attacks and are not robust to collusion. Moreover, they assume highly predictable patterns in the measurements distribution, which are invalidated by the unpredictability of events. We design a set of techniques that effectively \emph{detect} malicious data injections in the presence of sophisticated collusion strategies, when one or more events manifest. Moreover, we build a methodology to \emph{characterise} the likely compromised sensors. We also design \emph{diagnosis} criteria that allow us to distinguish anomalies arising from malicious interference and faults. In contrast with previous work, we test the robustness of our methodology with automated and sophisticated attacks, where the attacker aims to evade detection. We conclude that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we estimate quantitatively the WSN degree of resilience and provide a methodology to give a WSN owner an assured degree of resilience by automatically designing the WSN deployment. To deal also with the extreme scenario where the attacker has compromised most of the WSN, we propose a combination with \emph{software attestation techniques}, which are more reliable when malicious data is originated by a compromised software, but also more expensive, and achieve an excellent trade-off between cost and resilience.Open Acces

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) Security: State of the Art and Research Opportunities for Information Systems Academics

Attacks on cyber-physical systems (CPS) continue to grow in frequency. However, cybersecurity academics and practitioners have so far focused primarily on computer systems and networks rather than CPS. Given the alarming frequency with which cybercriminals attack CPS and the unique cyber-physical relationship in CPS, we propose that CPS security needs go beyond what purely computer and network security requires. Thus, we require more focused research on cybersecurity based on the cyber-physical relationship between various CPS components. In this paper, we stock of the current state of CPS security and identify research opportunities for information systems (IS) academics