Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them.Comment: 15 page

Electrical storms: electronic information management issues and their impact on libraries

A keynote paper ranging widely over the future of the profession. It considers four key areas: the organization of knowledge; the transformation of publishing and quality assurance of information; user support; user instruction and takes the view that these areas can be developed from a base of existing skills to provide a bright future for the profession, even in the face of dynamic external threats

Empowering Collections with Swarm Behavior

Often, when modelling a system there are properties and operations that are related to a group of objects rather than to a single object. In this paper we extend Java with Swarm Behavior, a new composition operator that associates behavior with a collection of instances. The lookup resolution of swarm behavior is based on the element type of a collection and is thus orthogonal to the collection hierarchy

The Influence of a Goalkeeper as an Outfield Player on Defensive Subsystems in Futsal

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of the goalkeeper as an outfield player on defensive subsystems in the team sport of futsal. For this purpose, all sequences of play involving the goalkeeper (n = 65), and the sequences without a goalkeeper (controls) (n = 11), were selected from digital video footage of a futsal competition, and analysed using TACTO software. The defensive area, attacker-defender distance, and interception distance were used to examine players’ coordination tendencies as a team in completion of successful and unsuccessful passes and shots. Results showed that each team reduced its defensive area as well as its variability in situations where the goalkeeper acted as an outfield player. This finding implies that it was an effective defensive strategy because it led to emergence of more unsuccessful passes. It was also observed that the goalkeeper acting as an outfield player was an effective strategy for attacking in terms of increasing shots at goal

A framework for quantitative analysis of user-generated spatial data

This paper proposes a new framework for automated analysis of game-play metrics for aiding game designers in finding out the critical aspects of the game caused by factors like design modications, change in playing style, etc. The core of the algorithm measures similarity between spatial distribution of user generated in-game events and automatically ranks them in order of importance. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated on a data set collected from a modern, multiplayer First Person Shooter, together with application examples of its use. The proposed framework can be used to accompany traditional testing tools and make the game design process more efficient

MATCASC: A tool to analyse cascading line outages in power grids

Blackouts in power grids typically result from cascading failures. The key importance of the electric power grid to society encourages further research into sustaining power system reliability and developing new methods to manage the risks of cascading blackouts. Adequate software tools are required to better analyze, understand, and assess the consequences of the cascading failures. This paper presents MATCASC, an open source MATLAB based tool to analyse cascading failures in power grids. Cascading effects due to line overload outages are considered. The applicability of the MATCASC tool is demonstrated by assessing the robustness of IEEE test systems and real-world power grids with respect to cascading failures

Operational moving target defences for improved power system cyber-physical security

In this work, we examine how Moving Target Defences (MTDs) can be enhanced to circumvent intelligent false data injection (FDI) attacks against power systems. Initially, we show how, by implementing state-of-the-art topology learning techniques, we can commit full-knowledge-equivalent FDI attacks against static power systems with no prior system knowledge. We go on to explore how naive applications of topology change, as MTDs, can be countered by unsupervised learning-based FDI attacks and how MTDs can be combined with physical watermarking to enhance system resilience. A novel intelligent attack, which incorporates dimensionality reduction and density-based spatial clustering, is developed and shown to be effective in maintaining stealth in the presence of traditional MTD strategies. In resisting this new type of attack, a novel implementation of MTD is suggested. The implementation uses physical watermarking to drive detection of traditional and intelligent FDI attacks while remaining hidden to the attackers. Following this, we outline a cyber-physical authentication strategy for use against FDI attacks. An event-triggered MTD protocol is proposed at the physical layer to complement cyber-side enhancements. This protocol applies a distributed anomaly detection scheme based on Holt-Winters seasonal forecasting in combination with MTD implemented via inductance perturbation. To conclude, we developed a cyber-physical risk assessment framework for FDI attacks. Our assessment criteria combines a weighted graph model of the networks cyber vulnerabilities with a centralised residual-based assessment of the physical system with respect to MTD. This combined approach provides a cyber-physical assessment of FDI attacks which incorporates both the likelihood of intrusion and the prospect of an attacker making stealthy change once intruded.Open Acces