Empirical analysis of certificate revocation lists

NS

Vulnerability-Based Impact Criticality Estimation for Industrial Control Systems

Cyber threats directly affect the critical reliability and availability of modern Industry Control Systems (ICS) in respects of operations and processes. Where there are a variety of vulnerabilities and cyber threats, it is necessary to effectively evaluate cyber security risks, and control uncertainties of cyber environments, and quantitative evaluation can be helpful. To effectively and timely control the spread and impact produced by attacks on ICS networks, a probabilistic Multi-Attribute Vulnerability Criticality Analysis (MAVCA) model for impact estimation and prioritised remediation is presented. This offer a new approach for combining three major attributes: vulnerability severities influenced by environmental factors, the attack probabilities relative to the vulnerabilities, and functional dependencies attributed to vulnerability host components. A miniature ICS testbed evaluation illustrates the usability of the model for determining the weakest link and setting security priority in the ICS. This work can help create speedy and proactive security response. The metrics derived in this work can serve as sub-metrics inputs to a larger quantitative security metrics taxonomy; and can be integrated into the security risk assessment scheme of a larger distributed system

A Leakage-Abuse Attack Against Multi-User Searchable Encryption

Searchable Encryption (SE) allows a user to upload data to the cloud and to search it in a remote fashion while preserving the privacy of both the data and the queries. Recent research results describe attacks on SE schemes using the access pattern, denoting the ids of documents matching search queries, which most SE schemes reveal during query processing. However SE schemes usually leak more than just the access pattern, and this extra leakage can lead to attacks (much) more harmful than the ones using basic access pattern leakage only. We remark that in the special case of Multi-User Searchable Encryption (MUSE), where many users upload and search data in a cloud-based infrastructure, a large number of existing solutions have a common leakage in addition to the well-studied access pattern leakage. We show that this seemingly small extra leakage allows a very simple yet powerful attack, and that the privacy degree of the affected schemes have been overestimated. We also show that this new vulnerability affects existing software. Finally we formalize the newly identified leakage profile and show how it relates to previously defined ones

Partially-Observable Security Games for Automating Attack-Defense Analysis

Network systems often contain vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in a network for various reasons, such as the lack of a patch or knowledge to fix them. With the presence of such residual vulnerabilities, the network administrator should properly react to the malicious activities or proactively prevent them, by applying suitable countermeasures that minimize the likelihood of an attack by the attacker. In this paper, we propose a stochastic game-theoretic approach for analyzing network security and synthesizing defense strategies to protect a network. To support analysis under partial observation, where some of the attacker's activities are unobservable or undetectable by the defender, we construct a one-sided partially observable security game and transform it into a perfect game for further analysis. We prove that this transformation is sound for a sub-class of security games and a subset of properties specified in the logic rPATL. We implement a prototype that fully automates our approach, and evaluate it by conducting experiments on a real-life network

Secure and Scalable Multi-User Searchable Encryption

By allowing a large number of users to behave as readers or writers, Multi-User Searchable Encryption (MUSE) raises new security and performance challenges beyond the typical requirements of Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE). In this paper we identify two core mandatory requirements of MUSE protocols being privacy in face of users colluding with the CSP and low complexity for the users, pointing that no existing MUSE protocol satisfies these two requirements at the same time. We then come up with the first MUSE protocol that satisfies both of them. The design of the protocol also includes new constructions for a secure variant of Bloom Filters (BFs) and multi-query Oblivious Transfer (OT)

Improving cyber security in industrial control system environment.

Integrating industrial control system (ICS) with information technology (IT) and internet technologies has made industrial control system environments (ICSEs) more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Increased connectivity has brought about increased security threats, vulnerabilities, and risks in both technology and people (human) constituents of the ICSE. Regardless of existing security solutions which are chiefly tailored towards technical dimensions, cyber-attacks on ICSEs continue to increase with a proportionate level of consequences and impacts. These consequences include system failures or breakdowns, likewise affecting the operations of dependent systems. Impacts often include; marring physical safety, triggering loss of lives, causing huge economic damages, and thwarting the vital missions of productions and businesses. This thesis addresses uncharted solution paths to the above challenges by investigating both technical and human-factor security evaluations to improve cyber security in the ICSE. An ICS testbed, scenario-based, and expert opinion approaches are used to demonstrate and validate cyber-attack feasibility scenarios. To improve security of ICSs, the research provides: (i) an adaptive operational security metrics generation (OSMG) framework for generating suitable security metrics for security evaluations in ICSEs, and a list of good security metrics methodology characteristics (scope-definitive, objective-oriented, reliable, simple, adaptable, and repeatable), (ii) a technical multi-attribute vulnerability (and impact) assessment (MAVCA) methodology that considers and combines dynamic metrics (temporal and environmental) attributes of vulnerabilities with the functional dependency relationship attributes of the vulnerability host components, to achieve a better representation of exploitation impacts on ICSE networks, (iii) a quantitative human-factor security (capability and vulnerability) evaluation model based on human-agent security knowledge and skills, used to identify the most vulnerable human elements, identify the least security aspects of the general workforce, and prioritise security enhancement efforts, and (iv) security risk reduction through critical impact point assessment (S2R-CIPA) process model that demonstrates the combination of technical and human-factor security evaluations to mitigate risks and achieve ICSE-wide security enhancements. The approaches or models of cyber-attack feasibility testing, adaptive security metrication, multi-attribute impact analysis, and workforce security capability evaluations can support security auditors, analysts, managers, and system owners of ICSs to create security strategies and improve cyber incidence response, and thus effectively reduce security risk.PhD in Manufacturin

Analysis and detection of security vulnerabilities in contemporary software

Contemporary application systems are implemented using an assortment of high-level programming languages, software frameworks, and third party components. While this may help to lower development time and cost, the result is a complex system of interoperating parts whose behavior is difficult to fully and properly comprehend. This difficulty of comprehension often manifests itself in the form of program coding errors that are not directly related to security requirements but can have an impact on the security of the system. The thesis of this dissertation is that many security vulnerabilities in contemporary software may be attributed to unintended behavior due to unexpected execution paths resulting from the accidental misuse of the software components. Unlike many typical programmer errors such as missed boundary checks or user input validation, these software bugs are not easy to detect and avoid. While typical secure coding best practices, such as code reviews, dynamic and static analysis, offer little protection against such vulnerabilities, we argue that runtime verification of software execution against a specified expected behavior can help to identify unexpected behavior in the software. The dissertation explores how building software systems using components may lead to the emergence of unexpected software behavior that results in security vulnerabilities. The thesis is supported by a study of the evolution of a popular software product over a period of twelve years. While anomaly detection techniques could be applied to verify software verification at runtime, there are several practical challenges in using them in large-scale contemporary software. A model of expected application execution paths and a methodology that can be used to build it during the software development cycle is proposed. The dissertation explores its effectiveness in detecting exploits on vulnerabilities enabled by software errors in a popular, enterprise software product

Upowszechnianie wyników badań naukowych w międzynarodowych bazach danych : analiza biometryczna na przykładzie nauk technicznych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem elektrotechniki

The issues of bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics and webometrics have an important place among research subject undertaken by Polish and foreign scholars. Initially, these notions were used only by researchers in the fields of library science, scientometrics and information science. However, at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, quantitative methods became a fundamental tool for evaluation of, among others, sources of academic communication, academic research, research and academic centers. One of the elements of the evaluation is a quantitative analysis of academic publications in databases with international access. It is of particular importance in the case of technical sciences. This work is an attempt at a quantitative analysis of publications by Polish authors (affiliated to Polish technical universities) and Polish journals on electrotechnics in international databases. The contents are organized into four chapters with an introduction, conclusions, bibliography, name index and a list of figures and illustrations. Chapters one and two are devoted to theoretical issues, whereas chapters three and four – to practical issues. In the first chapter, selected issues concerning quantitative methods were presented, including an analysis of literature and a discussion over terminology carried out in book publications and journals. Moreover, selected examples of research conducted with the use of quantitative methods (including rankings and scientific reports) were discussed in this chapter). In chapter two, sources of information on academic publications, their origins and development (from bibliographic bases to citation indexes) were presented. A separate subchapter was devoted to databases of academic publications created by libraries of technical universities, and to indicators in the assessment of academic publications. Chapter three deals with electrotechnics as a field of science. An analysis was conducted with regard to the place of electrotechnics in science classifications based on selected examples, and the development of the teaching of electrotechnics at university level was shown. In this chapter, early and contemporary Polish journals on electrotechnics were presented, including journals published by technical universities themselves. Chapter four contains the results of an analysis of international databases (Scopus, WoS, CC), focusing on the representation of Polish journals, including their citations, and publications of authors with affiliation to Polish technical universities. Final conclusions of research and analyses have brought an answer to questions raised with regard to the assessment of representation in international databases of publications by Polish authors affiliated to Polish technical universities (in its various aspects, e.g., a publication type, language of publication, publication dynamics taking into account years of publications, cooperation with representatives of other European and non-European countries), and of Polish journals

An Efficient Non-Interactive Multi-client Searchable Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries

Motivated by the recent searchable symmetric encryption protocol of Cash et al., we propose a new multi-client searchable encryption protocol in this work. By tactfully leveraging the RSA-function, our protocol avoids the per-query interaction between the data owner and the client, thus reducing the communication overhead significantly and eliminating the need of the data owner to provide the online services to clients at all times. Furthermore, our protocol manages to protect the query privacy of clients to some extent, meaning that our protocol hides the exact queries from the data owner. In terms of the leakage to server, it is exactly the same as Cash et al., thus achieving the same security against the adversarial server. In addition, by employing attribute-based encryption technique, our protocol also realizes the fine-grained access control on the stored data. To be compatible with our RSA-based approach, we also present a deterministic and memory-efficient `keyword to prime\u27 hash function, which may be of independent interest