A Practical Approach to Protect IoT Devices against Attacks and Compile Security Incident Datasets

open access articleThe Internet of Things (IoT) introduced the opportunity of remotely manipulating home appliances (such as heating systems, ovens, blinds, etc.) using computers and mobile devices. This idea fascinated people and originated a boom of IoT devices together with an increasing demand that was difficult to support. Many manufacturers quickly created hundreds of devices implementing functionalities but neglected some critical issues pertaining to device security. This oversight gave rise to the current situation where thousands of devices remain unpatched having many security issues that manufacturers cannot address after the devices have been produced and deployed. This article presents our novel research protecting IOT devices using Berkeley Packet Filters (BPFs) and evaluates our findings with the aid of our Filter.tlk tool, which is able to facilitate the development of BPF expressions that can be executed by GNU/Linux systems with a low impact on network packet throughput

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user

Infrastructure as a service: exploring network access control challenges

Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a great model for outsourcing IT infrastructure. It is built to offer fascinating features to support business development, such as elasticity, multi-tenancy, configurability and dynamicity. However, IaaS faces security challenges on account of its flexible nature. For this article, we studied the IaaS characteristics and investigated their related security challenges. We then elaborated these security challenges by exploring the security threats on live virtual machine migration as it is one of the main IaaS operations. We found that proper access control techniques and models are a critical element in enhancing IaaS and mitigating the identified security threats. Therefore, we investigated and contrasted the implemented and the proposed firewall architectures in IaaS as a firewall is a basic security appliance that enforces access control. We also explored and contrasted the proposed access control models in the IaaS. It was found that the traditional firewalls and access control models were not sufficient for IaaS. Therefore, there is a need to develop a proper access control model and enforcement techniques to mitigate IaaS security threats. Based on the security research trend and the results obtained in this articles exploration, we endorse an IaaS access control system built on a computational intelligent approach

Interoperating Context Discovery Mechanisms

Context-Aware applications adapt their behaviour to the current situation of the user. This information, for instance user location and user availability, is called context information. Context is delivered by distributed context sources that need to be discovered before they can be used to retrieve context. Currently, multiple context discovery mechanisms exist, exhibiting heterogeneous capabilities (e.g. communication mechanisms, and data formats), which can be available to context-aware applications at arbitrary moments during the ap-plication’s lifespan. In this paper, we discuss a middleware mechanism that en-ables a (mobile) context-aware application to interoperate transparently with different context discovery mechanisms available at run-time. The goal of the proposed mechanism is to hide the heterogeneity and availability of context discovery mechanisms for context-aware applications, thereby facilitating their development

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Cyber-security of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

This master's thesis reports on security of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in the department of industrial engineering at UiT campus Narvik. The CPS targets connecting distinctive robots in the laboratory in the department of industrial engineering. The ultimate objective of the department is to propose such a system for the industry. The thesis focuses on the network architecture of the CPS and the availability principle of security. This report states three research questions that are aimed to be answered. The questions are: what a secure CPS architecture for the purpose of the existing system is, how far the current state of system is from the defined secure architecture, and how to reach the proposed architecture. Among the three question, the first questions has absorbed the most attention of this project. The reason is that a secure and robust architecture would provide a touchstone that makes answering the second and third questions easier. In order to answer the questions, Cisco SAFE for IoT threat defense for manufacturing approach is chosen. The architectural approach of Cisco SAFE for IoT, with similarities to the Cisco SAFE for secure campus networks, provides a secure network architecture based on business flows/use cases and defining related security capabilities. This approach supplies examples of scenarios, business flows, and security capabilities that encouraged selecting it. It should be noted that Cisco suggests its proprietary technologies for security capabilities. According to the need of the project owners and the fact that allocating funds are not favorable for them, all the suggested security capabilities are intended to be open-source, replacing the costly Cisco-proprietary suggestions. Utilizing the approach and the computer networking fundamentals resulted in the proposed secure network architecture. The proposed architecture is used as a touchstone to evaluate the existing state of the CPS in the department of industrial engineering. Following that, the required security measures are presented to approach the system to the proposed architecture. Attempting to apply the method of Cisco SAFE, the identities using the system and their specific activities are presented as the business flow. Based on the defined business flow, the required security capabilities are selected. Finally, utilizing the provided examples of Cisco SAFE documentations, a complete network architecture is generated. The architecture consists of five zones that include the main components, security capabilities, and networking devices (such as switches and access points). Investigating the current state of the CPS and evaluating it by the proposed architecture and the computer networking fundamentals, helped identifying six important shortcomings. Developing on the noted shortcomings, and identification of open-source alternatives for the Cisco-proprietary technologies, nine security measures are proposed. The goal is to perform all the security measures. Thus, the implementations and solutions for each security measure is noted at the end of the presented results. The security measures that require purchasing a device were not considered in this project. The reasons for this decision are the time-consuming process of selecting an option among different alternatives, and the prior need for grasping the features of the network with the proposed security capabilities; features such as amount and type of traffic inside the network, and possible incidents detected using an Intrusion Detection Prevention System. The attempts to construct a secure cyber-physical system is an everlasting procedure. New threats, best practices, guidelines, and standards are introduced on a daily basis. Moreover, business needs could vary from time to time. Therefore, the selected security life-cycle is required and encouraged to be used in order to supply a robust lasting cyber-physical system

Gestion de la sécurité des réseaux à l'aide d'un service innovant de Cloud Based Firewall

Cloud computing has evolved over the last decade from a simple storage service for more complex services, offering the software as a service (SaaS) platforms as a service (PaaS) and most recently the security as a service (SECaaS). In our work, we started with the simple idea to use the resources offered by the Cloud with a low financial cost to propose new architectures of security service. The security of virtual environments is a major issue for the deployment of the use of the Cloud. Unfortunately, these environments are composed of a set of already existing technologies used in a new way, many security solutions are only traditional reconditioned solutions to solve the Cloud and virtual networks security issues. The work done in this thesis is a response to the resource limitations of physical security devices such as firewalls and propose new security architectures consist of management of network security in the cloud-based services following Security as a Service model and propose novel architectures for managing these services. We took the initiative to propose a completely Cloud-Based architecture. The latter allows a cloud provider to provide firewalling service to its customers. It asks them to subscribe to the offer by guaranteeing treatment (analysis) with a capacity of bandwidth traffic with functional filtering rules and other proposed by the subscriber. The results demonstrated the ability of our architecture to manage and cope with network DDoS attacks and to increase analytical capacity by distributing traffic over multiple virtualLe Cloud Computing a évolué au cours de la dernière décennie, passant d’un simple service de stockage à des services plus complexes, en proposant le software comme service (SaaS), les plateformes comme service(PaaS) et très récemment la sécurité comme service (SECaaS).Dans notre travail, nous sommes partis de l'idée simple d'utiliser les ressources offertes par le Cloud avec un faible coût financier pour proposer des nouvelles architectures de service de sécurité.La sécurité des environnements virtuels est un sujet majeur pour le déploiement de l’usage du Cloud. Malheureusement, comme ces environnements sont composés d’un ensemble de technologies déjà existantes, utilisées d'une manière nouvelle, de nombreuses solutions sécuritaires ne sont que des solutions traditionnelles reconditionnées à la problématique Cloud et réseaux virtuels.Le travail effectué dans le cadre de cette thèse vient répondre à la limitation de ressources des équipements physiques de sécurité comme les Firewalls et a pour objectif de proposer de nouveaux services de sécurité composés d’architectures de gestion de la sécurité des réseaux dans le Cloud basé sur le modèle Security as a Service, ainsi que des architectures de management de ces services.Nous avons pris l’initiative de proposer une architecture totalement Cloud-Based. Cette dernière, permet à un Cloud provider de proposer un service de Firewalling à ses clients. Celui-ci leur demande de s’abonner à l’offre en leur garantissant le traitement (analyse) d’une capacité de bande-passante de trafic avec des règles de filtrages fonctionnelles et d’autres proposées par l’abonné.Les résultats obtenus ont démontré les aptitudes de nos architectures à gérer et à faire face à des attaques réseaux de type DDoS et à augmenter la capacité d’analyse en distribuant le trafic sur plusieurs pare-feu virtuels

A Novel Hybrid Security Framework (HSF) with Vshield Based Firewall to Secure Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology that provides an enormous amount of computing resources which includes networks, servers and storages which are accessed through the internet. In addition it allows useful provisioning of the resources based on the user’s demands. A crucial aspect of cloud computing infrastructure is to provide secure and reliable services.  The main challenge lies in the security issues is to reduce the impact of third party attacks in the cloud computing environment. Hence a novel Hybrid Security Framework(HSF) based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) Methodology with Vshield Firewall is proposed for securing the cloud environment.  The RL method is used for deep packet inspection and VShiled based firewall is established to deny the attacks which are malicious when authenticating the signature of incoming packets. The bipartite pattern matching approach is integrated with the RL method to verify the signatures for obtaining the decisions quickly.  The simulation results shows that the hybrid security framework is effective when compared with the existing methods by considering response time, resource utilization and denial of malicious attacks.  This indicates that our proposed framework achieves not only better security but also attains better efficiency in cloud computing environment