Resilient and Trustworthy Dynamic Data-driven Application Systems (DDDAS) Services for Crisis Management Environments

Future crisis management systems needresilient and trustworthy infrastructures to quickly develop reliable applications and processes, andensure end-to-end security, trust, and privacy. Due to the multiplicity and diversity of involved actors, volumes of data, and heterogeneity of shared information;crisis management systems tend to be highly vulnerable and subjectto unforeseen incidents. As a result, the dependability of crisis management systems can be at risk. This paper presents a cloud-based resilient and trustworthy infrastructure (known as rDaaS) to quickly develop secure crisis management systems. The rDaaS integrates the Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) paradigm into a service-oriented architecture over cloud technology and provides a set of resilient DDDAS-As-A Service (rDaaS) components to build secure and trusted adaptable crisis processes. The rDaaS also ensures resilience and security by obfuscating the execution environment and applying Behavior Software Encryption and Moving Technique Defense. A simulation environment for a nuclear plant crisis management case study is illustrated to build resilient and trusted crisis response processes

CyberForce: A Federated Reinforcement Learning Framework for Malware Mitigation

Recent research has shown that the integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Moving Target Defense (MTD) can enhance cybersecurity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Nevertheless, the practicality of existing work is hindered by data privacy concerns associated with centralized data processing in RL, and the unsatisfactory time needed to learn right MTD techniques that are effective against a rising number of heterogeneous zero-day attacks. Thus, this work presents CyberForce, a framework that combines Federated and Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to collaboratively and privately learn suitable MTD techniques for mitigating zero-day attacks. CyberForce integrates device fingerprinting and anomaly detection to reward or penalize MTD mechanisms chosen by an FRL-based agent. The framework has been deployed and evaluated in a scenario consisting of ten physical devices of a real IoT platform affected by heterogeneous malware samples. A pool of experiments has demonstrated that CyberForce learns the MTD technique mitigating each attack faster than existing RL-based centralized approaches. In addition, when various devices are exposed to different attacks, CyberForce benefits from knowledge transfer, leading to enhanced performance and reduced learning time in comparison to recent works. Finally, different aggregation algorithms used during the agent learning process provide CyberForce with notable robustness to malicious attacks.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Three Decades of Deception Techniques in Active Cyber Defense -- Retrospect and Outlook

Deception techniques have been widely seen as a game changer in cyber defense. In this paper, we review representative techniques in honeypots, honeytokens, and moving target defense, spanning from the late 1980s to the year 2021. Techniques from these three domains complement with each other and may be leveraged to build a holistic deception based defense. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a work that provides a systematic retrospect of these three domains all together and investigates their integrated usage for orchestrated deceptions. Our paper aims to fill this gap. By utilizing a tailored cyber kill chain model which can reflect the current threat landscape and a four-layer deception stack, a two-dimensional taxonomy is developed, based on which the deception techniques are classified. The taxonomy literally answers which phases of a cyber attack campaign the techniques can disrupt and which layers of the deception stack they belong to. Cyber defenders may use the taxonomy as a reference to design an organized and comprehensive deception plan, or to prioritize deception efforts for a budget conscious solution. We also discuss two important points for achieving active and resilient cyber defense, namely deception in depth and deception lifecycle, where several notable proposals are illustrated. Finally, some outlooks on future research directions are presented, including dynamic integration of different deception techniques, quantified deception effects and deception operation cost, hardware-supported deception techniques, as well as techniques developed based on better understanding of the human element.Comment: 19 page

Enhancing Cyber-Resiliency of DER-based SmartGrid: A Survey

The rapid development of information and communications technology has enabled the use of digital-controlled and software-driven distributed energy resources (DERs) to improve the flexibility and efficiency of power supply, and support grid operations. However, this evolution also exposes geographically-dispersed DERs to cyber threats, including hardware and software vulnerabilities, communication issues, and personnel errors, etc. Therefore, enhancing the cyber-resiliency of DER-based smart grid - the ability to survive successful cyber intrusions - is becoming increasingly vital and has garnered significant attention from both industry and academia. In this survey, we aim to provide a systematical and comprehensive review regarding the cyber-resiliency enhancement (CRE) of DER-based smart grid. Firstly, an integrated threat modeling method is tailored for the hierarchical DER-based smart grid with special emphasis on vulnerability identification and impact analysis. Then, the defense-in-depth strategies encompassing prevention, detection, mitigation, and recovery are comprehensively surveyed, systematically classified, and rigorously compared. A CRE framework is subsequently proposed to incorporate the five key resiliency enablers. Finally, challenges and future directions are discussed in details. The overall aim of this survey is to demonstrate the development trend of CRE methods and motivate further efforts to improve the cyber-resiliency of DER-based smart grid.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid for Publication Consideratio

On the design of a moving target defense framework for the resiliency of critical services in large distributed networks

2018 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Security is a very serious concern in this era of digital world. Protecting and controlling access to secured data and services has given more emphasis to access control enforcement and management. Where, access control enforcement with strong policies ensures the data confidentiality, availability and integrity, protecting the access control service itself is equally important. When these services are hosted on a single server for a lengthy period of time, the attackers have potentially unlimited time to periodically explore and enumerate the vulnerabilities with respect to the configuration of the server and launch targeted attacks on the service. Constant proliferation of cloud usage and distributed systems over the last decade have materialized the possibilities of distributing data or hosting services over a group of servers located in different geographical locations. Existing election algorithms used to provide service continuity hosted in the distributed setup work well in a benign environment. However, these algorithms are not secure against skillful attackers who intends to manipulate or bring down the data or service. In this thesis, we design and implement the protection of critical services, such as access-control reference monitors, using the concept of moving target defense. This concept increases the level of difficulty faced by the attacker to compromise the point of service by periodically moving the critical service among a group of heterogeneous servers, thereby changing the attacker surface and increasing uncertainty and randomness in the point of service chosen. We describe an efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant leader election protocol for small networks that achieves the security and performance goals described in the problem statement. We then extend this solution to large enterprise networks by introducing random walk protocol that randomly chooses a subset of servers taking part in the election protocol

Risk and threat mitigation techniques in internet of things (IoT) environments: a survey

Security in the Internet of Things (IoT) remains a predominant area of concern. Although several other surveys have been published on this topic in recent years, the broad spectrum that this area aims to cover, the rapid developments and the variety of concerns make it impossible to cover the topic adequately. This survey updates the state of the art covered in previous surveys and focuses on defences and mitigations against threats rather than on the threats alone, an area that is less extensively covered by other surveys. This survey has collated current research considering the dynamicity of the IoT environment, a topic missed in other surveys and warrants particular attention. To consider the IoT mobility, a life-cycle approach is adopted to the study of dynamic and mobile IoT environments and means of deploying defences against malicious actors aiming to compromise an IoT network and to evolve their attack laterally within it and from it. This survey takes a more comprehensive and detailed step by analysing a broad variety of methods for accomplishing each of the mitigation steps, presenting these uniquely by introducing a “defence-in-depth” approach that could significantly slow down the progress of an attack in the dynamic IoT environment. This survey sheds a light on leveraging redundancy as an inherent nature of multi-sensor IoT applications, to improve integrity and recovery. This study highlights the challenges of each mitigation step, emphasises novel perspectives, and reconnects the discussed mitigation steps to the ground principles they seek to implement