Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review

A Hybrid Multi-user Cloud Access Control based Block Chain Framework for Privacy Preserving Distributed Databases

Most of the traditional medical applications are insecure and difficult to compute the data integrity with variable hash size. Traditional medical data security systems are insecure and it depend on static parameters for data security. Also, distributed based cloud storage systems are independent of integrity computational and data security due to unstructured data and computational memory. As the size of the data and its dimensions are increasing in the public and private cloud servers, it is difficult to provide the machine learning based privacy preserving in cloud computing environment. Block-chain technology plays a vital role for large cloud databases. Most of the conventional block-chain frameworks are based on the existing integrity and confidentiality models. Also, these models are based on the data size and file format. In this model, a novel integrity verification and encryption framework is designed and implemented in cloud environment.  In order to overcome these problems in the cloud computing environment, a hybrid integrity and security-based block-chain framework is designed and implemented on the large distributed databases. In this framework,a novel decision tree classifier is used along with non-linear mathematical hash algorithm and advanced attribute-based encryption models are used to improve the privacy of multiple users on the large cloud datasets. Experimental results proved that the proposed advanced privacy preserving based block-chain technology has better efficiency than the traditional block-chain based privacy preserving systems on large distributed databases

Data security in cloud storage services

Cloud Computing is considered to be the next-generation architecture for ICT where it moves the application software and databases to the centralized large data centers. It aims to offer elastic IT services where clients can benefit from significant cost savings of the pay-per-use model and can easily scale up or down, and do not have to make large investments in new hardware. However, the management of the data and services in this cloud model is under the control of the provider. Consequently, the cloud clients have less control over their outsourced data and they have to trust cloud service provider to protect their data and infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. This is especially true with cloud storage services. Nowadays, users rely on cloud storage as it offers cheap and unlimited data storage that is available for use by multiple devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, notebooks, etc.). Besides famous cloud storage providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, more and more third-party cloud storage service providers are emerging. These services are dedicated to offering more accessible and user friendly storage services to cloud customers. Examples of these services include Dropbox, Box.net, Sparkleshare, UbuntuOne or JungleDisk. These cloud storage services deliver a very simple interface on top of the cloud storage provided by storage service providers. File and folder synchronization between different machines, sharing files and folders with other users, file versioning as well as automated backups are the key functionalities of these emerging cloud storage services. Cloud storage services have changed the way users manage and interact with data outsourced to public providers. With these services, multiple subscribers can collaboratively work and share data without concerns about their data consistency, availability and reliability. Although these cloud storage services offer attractive features, many customers have not adopted these services. Since data stored in these services is under the control of service providers resulting in confidentiality and security concerns and risks. Therefore, using cloud storage services for storing valuable data depends mainly on whether the service provider can offer sufficient security and assurance to meet client requirements. From the way most cloud storage services are constructed, we can notice that these storage services do not provide users with sufficient levels of security leading to an inherent risk on users\u27 data from external and internal attacks. These attacks take the form of: data exposure (lack of data confidentiality); data tampering (lack of data integrity); and denial of data (lack of data availability) by third parties on the cloud or by the cloud provider himself. Therefore, the cloud storage services should ensure the data confidentiality in the following state: data in motion (while transmitting over networks), data at rest (when stored at provider\u27s disks). To address the above concerns, confidentiality and access controllability of outsourced data with strong cryptographic guarantee should be maintained. To ensure data confidentiality in public cloud storage services, data should be encrypted data before it is outsourced to these services. Although, users can rely on client side cloud storage services or software encryption tools for encrypting user\u27s data; however, many of these services fail to achieve data confidentiality. Box, for example, does not encrypt user files via SSL and within Box servers. Client side cloud storage services can intentionally/unintentionally disclose user decryption keys to its provider. In addition, some cloud storage services support convergent encryption for encrypting users\u27 data exposing it to “confirmation of a file attack. On the other hand, software encryption tools use full-disk encryption (FDE) which is not feasible for cloud-based file sharing services, because it encrypts the data as virtual hard disks. Although encryption can ensure data confidentiality; however, it fails to achieve fine-grained access control over outsourced data. Since, public cloud storage services are managed by un-trusted cloud service provider, secure and efficient fine-grained access control cannot be realized through these services as these policies are managed by storage services that have full control over the sharing process. Therefore, there is not any guarantee that they will provide good means for efficient and secure sharing and they can also deduce confidential information about the outsourced data and users\u27 personal information. In this work, we would like to improve the currently employed security measures for securing data in cloud store services. To achieve better data confidentiality for data stored in the cloud without relying on cloud service providers (CSPs) or putting any burden on users, in this thesis, we designed a secure cloud storage system framework that simultaneously achieves data confidentiality, fine-grained access control on encrypted data and scalable user revocation. This framework is built on a third part trusted (TTP) service that can be employed either locally on users\u27 machine or premises, or remotely on top of cloud storage services. This service shall encrypts users data before uploading it to the cloud and decrypts it after downloading from the cloud; therefore, it remove the burden of storing, managing and maintaining encryption/decryption keys from data owner\u27s. In addition, this service only retains user\u27s secret key(s) not data. Moreover, to ensure high security for these keys, it stores them on hardware device. Furthermore, this service combines multi-authority ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and attribute-based Signature (ABS) for achieving many-read-many-write fine-grained data access control on storage services. Moreover, it efficiently revokes users\u27 privileges without relying on the data owner for re-encrypting massive amounts of data and re-distributing the new keys to the authorized users. It removes the heavy computation of re-encryption from users and delegates this task to the cloud service provider (CSP) proxy servers. These proxy servers achieve flexible and efficient re-encryption without revealing underlying data to the cloud. In our designed architecture, we addressed the problem of ensuring data confidentiality against cloud and against accesses beyond authorized rights. To resolve these issues, we designed a trusted third party (TTP) service that is in charge of storing data in an encrypted format in the cloud. To improve the efficiency of the designed architecture, the service allows the users to choose the level of severity of the data and according to this level different encryption algorithms are employed. To achieve many-read-many-write fine grained access control, we merge two algorithms (multi-authority ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (MA- CP-ABE) and attribute-based Signature (ABS)). Moreover, we support two levels of revocation: user and attribute revocation so that we can comply with the collaborative environment. Last but not least, we validate the effectiveness of our design by carrying out a detailed security analysis. This analysis shall prove the correctness of our design in terms of data confidentiality each stage of user interaction with the cloud

A Review on Cloud Data Security Challenges and existing Countermeasures in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing (CC) is among the most rapidly evolving computer technologies. That is the required accessibility of network assets, mainly information storage with processing authority without the requirement for particular and direct user administration. CC is a collection of public and private data centers that provide a single platform for clients throughout the Internet. The growing volume of personal and sensitive information acquired through supervisory authorities demands the usage of the cloud not just for information storage and for data processing at cloud assets. Nevertheless, due to safety issues raised by recent data leaks, it is recommended that unprotected sensitive data not be sent to public clouds. This document provides a detailed appraisal of the research regarding data protection and privacy problems, data encrypting, and data obfuscation, including remedies for cloud data storage. The most up-to-date technologies and approaches for cloud data security are examined. This research also examines several current strategies for addressing cloud security concerns. The performance of each approach is then compared based on its characteristics, benefits, and shortcomings. Finally, go at a few active cloud storage data security study fields

A Framework for Securing Health Information Using Blockchain in Cloud Hosted Cyber Physical Systems

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have undergone numerous technical improvements in recent years, including the incorporation of mobile devices with the cloud computing technologies to facilitate medical data exchanges between patients and the healthcare professionals. This cutting-edge architecture enables cyber physical systems housed in the cloud to provide healthcare services with minimal operational costs, high flexibility, security, and EHR accessibility. If patient health information is stored in the hospital database, there will always be a risk of intrusion, i.e., unauthorized file access and information modification by attackers. To address this concern, we propose a decentralized EHR system based on Blockchain technology. To facilitate secure EHR exchange across various patients and medical providers, we develop a reliable access control method based on smart contracts. We incorporate Cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum, in the suggested system to protect sensitive health information from potential attackers. In our suggested approach, both physicians and patients are required to be authenticated. Patients can register, and a block with a unique hash value will be generated. Once the patient discusses the disease with the physician, the physician can check the patient's condition and offer drugs. For experimental findings, we employ the public Block chain Ganache and solidity remix-based smart contracts to protect privacy. Ethers are used as the crypto currencies

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Whitewash: Outsourcing Garbled Circuit Generation for Mobile Devices

Research areas: Information Security and Cryptography, Secure Multiparty Computation, Mobile SecurityGarbled circuits offer a powerful primitive for computation on a user’s personal data while keeping that data private. Despite recent improvements, constructing and evaluating circuits of any useful size remains expensive on the limited hardware resources of a smartphone, the primary computational device available to most users around the world. In this work, we develop a new technique for securely outsourcing the generation of garbled circuits to a Cloud provider. By outsourcing the circuit generation, we are able to eliminate the most costly operations from the mobile device, including oblivious transfers. After proving the security of our techniques in the malicious model, we experimentally demonstrate that our new protocol, built on this role reversal, decreases execution time by 98% and reduces network costs by as much as 63% compared to previous outsourcing protocols. In so doing, we demonstrate that the use of garbled circuits on mobile devices can be made nearly as practical as it is becoming for server-class machines