Cyber Security of Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures are vital assets for public safety, economic welfare, and the national security of countries. The vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures have increased with the widespread use of information technologies. As Critical National Infrastructures are becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, their protection becomes a significant issue for organizations as well as nations. The risks to continued operations, from failing to upgrade aging infrastructure or not meeting mandated regulatory regimes, are considered highly significant, given the demonstrable impact of such circumstances. Due to the rapid increase of sophisticated cyber threats targeting critical infrastructures with significant destructive effects, the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures has become an agenda item for academics, practitioners, and policy makers. A holistic view which covers technical, policy, human, and behavioural aspects is essential to handle cyber security of critical infrastructures effectively. Moreover, the ability to attribute crimes to criminals is a vital element of avoiding impunity in cyberspace. In this book, both research and practical aspects of cyber security considerations in critical infrastructures are presented. Aligned with the interdisciplinary nature of cyber security, authors from academia, government, and industry have contributed 13 chapters. The issues that are discussed and analysed include cybersecurity training, maturity assessment frameworks, malware analysis techniques, ransomware attacks, security solutions for industrial control systems, and privacy preservation methods

Test and measurement environments for VANETs and MANETs

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaA crescente necessidade por parte dos utilizadores em obterem acesso à Internet “em qualquer lugar e qualquer momento” tem incentivado investiga ção e desenvolvimento de abordagens capazes de resolver esta questão. Um dos maiores obstáculos em fornecer uma solução de acesso ubíquo à Internet tem sido a gestão de mobilidade. Nesta Tese de Mestrado ir-se-á implementar uma das soluções correntemente em desenvolvimento, integrando-a num ambiente MANET. A plataforma resultante pode ser posteriormente avaliada e até retiradas medidas de desempenho, podendo-se ainda tirar conclusões importantes sobre como um ambiente MANET se comporta numa plataforma de mobilidade global e acesso ubíquo. Na àrea de Sistemas de Transporte Inteligentes, tópicos como eficiência de tráfego e segurança dos utilizadores têm-se mostrado muito populares e deram in´ıcio a pesquisa extensiva em Redes Veículares Ad-Hoc (VANETs). Métodos tradicionais para investigação e desenvolvimento como testes com protótipos ou simulação computacional têm sido largamente usados. No entanto, os testes com protótipos são usualmente muito caros e a simulação computacional tem falta de precisão em ambientes sem fios. Esta Tese de Mestrado tem também por objectivo construir uma solução híbrida que combine os métodos de emulação e simulação. A solução proposta será implementada num testbed para VANETs. O testbed resultante irá permitir que multiplas instâncias de programas de routing reais possam ser executadas sobre um ambiente simulado computacionalmente. Assim poderão ser também retiradas elacções sobre o seu desempenho em características como o consumo de recursos e escalabilidade. ABSTRACT: The growing need from users to have internet access “whenever and wherever” has driven research to devise several approaches to cope with this issue. One of the greatest challenges in providing ubiquitous internet access has been the management of mobility. In this Master Thesis a solution currently under development, will be implemented integrating a MANET environment. The resulting testbed can later be evaluated and it’s performance measured, drawing important conclusions about how a MANET environment behaves in a global mobility and ubiquitous access framework. In the area of Intelligent Transportation System traffic efficiency and safety for users have become very popular topics and have triggered extensive research in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). Traditional methods for reaserch and development like field testing and simulation have been used. But field testing is usually very expensive expensive and simulation lacks accuracy in wireless environments. This Master Thesis also aims to provide a hybrid solution that combines the simulation and emulation methods. The proposed solution is implemented in a testbed for VANETs. The resulting testbed would allow multiple real routing instances to run simultaneously on a simulated environment. And to provide performance measures such as resource consumption and scalability

Performance evaluation of robust header compression protocol for low data rate networks

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) have limited capacity due to properties of the physical medium for tactical operations. Several traffic types are typical for tactical applications, i.e. transmit frequent short IP packets (e.g., VoIP and friendly force tracking message). The RTP, TCP/UDP and IP headers comprise a significant overhead for these traffic types. Therefore, robust header compression (ROHC) protocol can useful to save the bandwidth for such applications. This thesis work is divided into two tasks. First one is the technological background of the robust header compression (ROHC) protocol. Furthermore, a brief introduction and comparison of the related research work which has been performed for header compression in MANETs. Second task is a real-life testbed scenario where a hybrid wired channel is emulated with loss or delay which is caused by an imperfect wireless channel for a single hop case. Traffic source (compressor node) and bridge node emulation approaches are proposed for channel emulation. Additionally, Netem (network emulator) is used as emulation tool for these approaches. ROHC protocol performance is evaluated over bridge node emulation testbed scenario. Vyatta Linux routers are already integrated with ROHC library and perform the compression and de-compression functions respectively. The performance of the ROHC protocol is assessed in terms of robustness against transmission errors. Finally, we concluded that robust header compression (ROHC) protocol is robust up to 40% channel loss for independent packet loss pattern. On the other hand, burst/consecutive packet pattern interrupts the ROHC operation when channel loss is equal to or more than 20%. Additionally, it is observed that ROHC protocol fails to de-compress the header at de-compressor end when consecutive packet loss duration is equal to or more than 30 seconds. Consequently, ROHC is very robust therefore it can useful for MANETS header compression where the delay ranges from milliseconds to seconds. Furthermore, it is also effective for satellite communication which has longer channel delay and RTT

SNAP : A Software-Defined & Named-Data Oriented Publish-Subscribe Framework for Emerging Wireless Application Systems

The evolution of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) has given rise to an emergent class of CPSs defined by ad-hoc wireless connectivity, mobility, and resource constraints in computation, memory, communications, and battery power. These systems are expected to fulfill essential roles in critical infrastructure sectors. Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) and a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV swarm) are examples of such systems. The significant utility of these systems, coupled with their economic viability, is a crucial indicator of their anticipated growth in the future. Typically, the tasks assigned to these systems have strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and require sensing, perception, and analysis of a substantial amount of data. To fulfill these QoS requirements, the system requires network connectivity, data dissemination, and data analysis methods that can operate well within a system\u27s limitations. Traditional Internet protocols and methods for network connectivity and data dissemination are typically designed for well-engineering cyber systems and do not comprehensively support this new breed of emerging systems. The imminent growth of these CPSs presents an opportunity to develop broadly applicable methods that can meet the stated system requirements for a diverse range of systems and integrate these systems with the Internet. These methods could potentially be standardized to achieve interoperability among various systems of the future. This work presents a solution that can fulfill the communication and data dissemination requirements of a broad class of emergent CPSs. The two main contributions of this work are the Application System (APPSYS) system abstraction, and a complementary communications framework called the Software-Defined NAmed-data enabled Publish-Subscribe (SNAP) communication framework. An APPSYS is a new breed of Internet application representing the mobile and resource-constrained CPSs supporting data-intensive and QoS-sensitive safety-critical tasks, referred to as the APPSYS\u27s mission. The functioning of the APPSYS is closely aligned with the needs of the mission. The standard APPSYS architecture is distributed and partitions the system into multiple clusters where each cluster is a hierarchical sub-network. The SNAP communication framework within the APPSYS utilized principles of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) through the publish-subscribe communication paradigm. It further extends the role of brokers within the publish-subscribe paradigm to create a distributed software-defined control plane. The SNAP framework leverages the APPSYS design characteristics to provide flexible and robust communication and dynamic and distributed control-plane decision-making that successfully allows the APPSYS to meet the communication requirements of data-oriented and QoS-sensitive missions. In this work, we present the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of an APPSYS through an exemplar UAV swarm APPSYS. We evaluate the benefits offered by the APPSYS design and the SNAP communication framework in meeting the dynamically changed requirements of a data-intensive and QoS-sensitive Coordinated Search and Tracking (CSAT) mission operating in a UAV swarm APPSYS on the battlefield. Results from the performance evaluation demonstrate that the UAV swarm APPSYS successfully monitors and mitigates network impairment impacting a mission\u27s QoS to support the mission\u27s QoS requirements

Swarming Reconnaissance Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in a Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Current military affairs indicate that future military warfare requires safer, more accurate, and more fault-tolerant weapons systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are one answer to this military requirement. Technology in the UAV arena is moving toward smaller and more capable systems and is becoming available at a fraction of the cost. Exploiting the advances in these miniaturized flying vehicles is the aim of this research. How are the UAVs employed for the future military? The concept of operations for a micro-UAV system is adopted from nature from the appearance of flocking birds, movement of a school of fish, and swarming bees among others. All of these natural phenomena have a common thread: a global action resulting from many small individual actions. This emergent behavior is the aggregate result of many simple interactions occurring within the flock, school, or swarm. In a similar manner, a more robust weapon system uses emergent behavior resulting in no weakest link because the system itself is made up of simple interactions by hundreds or thousands of homogeneous UAVs. The global system in this research is referred to as a swarm. Losing one or a few individual unmanned vehicles would not dramatically impact the swarms ability to complete the mission or cause harm to any human operator. Swarming reconnaissance is the emergent behavior of swarms to perform a reconnaissance operation. An in-depth look at the design of a reconnaissance swarming mission is studied. A taxonomy of passive reconnaissance applications is developed to address feasibility. Evaluation of algorithms for swarm movement, communication, sensor input/analysis, targeting, and network topology result in priorities of each model\u27s desired features. After a thorough selection process of available implementations, a subset of those models are integrated and built upon resulting in a simulation that explores the innovations of swarming UAVs

Deep Learning Based Malware Classification Using Deep Residual Network

The traditional malware detection approaches rely heavily on feature extraction procedure, in this paper we proposed a deep learning-based malware classification model by using a 18-layers deep residual network. Our model uses the raw bytecodes data of malware samples, converting the bytecodes to 3-channel RGB images and then applying the deep learning techniques to classify the malwares. Our experiment results show that the deep residual network model achieved an average accuracy of 86.54% by 5-fold cross validation. Comparing to the traditional methods for malware classification, our deep residual network model greatly simplify the malware detection and classification procedures, it achieved a very good classification accuracy as well. The dataset we used in this paper for training and testing is Malimg dataset, one of the biggest malware datasets released by vision research lab of UCSB

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2019

Old Dominion University Department of Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Engineering (MSVE) and the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) held the 13th annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization (MSV) Student Capstone Conference on April 18, 2019. The Conference featured student research and student projects that are central to MSV. Also participating in the conference were faculty members who volunteered their time to impart direct support to their students’ research, facilitated the various conference tracks, served as judges for each of the tracks, and provided overall assistance to the conference. Appreciating the purpose of the conference and working in a cohesive, collaborative effort, resulted in a successful symposium for everyone involved. These proceedings feature the works that were presented at the conference. Capstone Conference Chair: Dr. Yuzhong Shen Capstone Conference Student Chair: Daniel Pere

Wideband cyclostationary spectrum sensing and characterization for cognitive radios

Motivated by the spectrum scarcity problem, Cognitive Radios (CRs) have been proposed as a solution to opportunistically communicate over unused spectrum licensed to Primary users (PUs). In this context, the unlicensed Secondary users (SUs) sense the spectrum to detect the presence or absence of PUs, and use the unoccupied bands without causing interference to PUs. CRs are equipped with capabilities such as, learning, adaptability, and recongurability, and are spectrum aware. Spectrum awareness comes from spectrum sensing, and it can be performed using different techniques