On-board multispectral classification study. Volume 2: Supplementary tasks

The operational tasks of the onboard multispectral classification study were defined. These tasks include: sensing characteristics for future space applications; information adaptive systems architectural approaches; data set selection criteria; and onboard functional requirements for interfacing with global positioning satellites

Security and Trust in Safety Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures such as road vehicles and railways are undergoing a major change, which increases the dependency of their operation and control on Information Technology (IT) and makes them more vulnerable to malicious intent. New complex communication infrastructures emerge using the increased connectivity of these safety-critical systems to enable efficient management of operational processes, service provisioning, and information exchange for various (third-party) actors. Railway Command and Control Systems (CCSs) turn with the introduction of digital interlocking into an “Internet of Railway Things”, where safety-critical railway signaling components are deployed on common-purpose platforms and connected via standard IP-based networks. Similarly, the mass adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the need to supply their batteries with energy for charging has given rise to a Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) infrastructure, which connects vehicles to power grids and multiple service providers to coordinate charging and discharging processes and maintain grid stability under varying power demands. The Plug-and-Charge feature brought in by the V2G communication standard ISO 15118 allows an EV to access charging and value-added services, negotiate charging schedules, and support the grid as a distributed energy resource in a largely automated way, by leveraging identity credentials installed in the vehicle for authentication and payment. The fast deployment of this advanced functionality is driven by economical and political decisions including the EU Green Deal for climate neutrality. Due to the complex requirements and long standardization and development cycles, the standards and regulations, which play the key role in operating and protecting critical infrastructures, are under pressure to enable the timely and cost-effective adoption. In this thesis, we investigate security and safety of future V2G and railway command and control systems with respect to secure communication, platform assurance as well as safety and security co-engineering. One of the major goals in this context is the continuous collaboration and establishment of the proposed security solutions in upcoming domain-specific standards, thus ensuring their practical applicability and prompt implementation in real-world products. We first analyze the security of V2G communication protocols and requirements for secure service provisioning via charging connections. We propose a new Plug-and-Patch protocol that enables secure update of EVs as a value-added service integrated into the V2G charging loop. Since EVs can also participate in energy trading by storing and feeding previously stored energy to grid, home, or other vehicles, we then investigate fraud detection methods that can be employed to identify manipulations and misbehaving users. In order to provide a strong security foundation for V2G communications, we propose and analyze three security architectures employing a hardware trust anchor to enable trust establishment in V2G communications. We integrate these architectures into standard V2G protocols for load management, e-mobility services and value-added services in the V2G infrastructure, and evaluate the associated performance and security trade-offs. The final aspect of this work is safety and security co-engineering, i.e., integration of safety and security processes vital for the adequate protection of connected safety-critical systems. We consider two application scenarios, Electric Vehicle Charging System (EVCS) and Object Controller (OC) in railway CCS, and investigate how security methods like trusted computing can be applied to provide both required safety and security properties. In the case of EVCS, we bind the trust boundary for safety functionality (certified configuration) to the trust boundary in the security domain and design a new security architecture that enforces safety properties via security assertions. For the railway use case, we focus on ensuring non-interference (separation) between these two domains and develop a security architecture that allows secure co-existence of applications with different criticality on the same hardware platform. The proposed solutions have been presented to the committee ISO/TC 22/SC 31/JWG 1 that develops the ISO 15118 standard series and to the DKE working group “Informationssicherheit für Elektromobilität” responsible for the respective application guidelines. Our security extension has been integrated in the newest edition ISO 15118-20 released in April 2022. Several manufacturers have already started concept validation for their future products using our results. In this way, the presented analyses and techniques are fundamental contributions in improving the state of security for e-mobility and railway applications, and the overall resilience of safety-critical infrastructures to malicious attacks

Comparative Analysis of Leakage Tools on Scalable Case Studies

International audienceQuantitative security techniques have been proven effective to measure the security of systems against various types of attackers. However, such techniques are often tested against small-scale academic examples. In this paper we use analyze two scalable, real life privacy case studies: the privacy of the energy consumption data of the users of a smart grid network and the secrecy of the voters' voting preferences with different types of voting protocols. We analyze both case studies with three state-of-the-art information leakage computation tools: LeakWatch, Moped-QLeak, and our tool QUAIL equipped with a new trace analysis algorithm. We highlight the relative advantages and drawbacks of the tools and compare their usability and effectiveness in analyzing the case studies

Improving shared access to Cloud of Things resources.

Cloud of Things (CoT) is an emerging paradigm that integrates Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) to support a wide range of real-world applications. Resource allocation plays a vital role in CoT, especially when allocating IoT physical resources to Cloud-based applications to ensure seamless application execution. Due to the heterogeneity and the constrained capacities of IoT resources, resource allocation is a challenge. This complexity leads to missing/limiting shared access to the IoT physical resources and consequently lessen the reusability of the resources across multiple applications. This issue results in, 1) replicating IoT deployments making them expensive and not feasible for many prospective users, 2) existing IoT infrastructures are over-provisioned to meet the unpredictable application requirements in which resources may be significantly underutilised, and 3) the adoption of CoT is slowed. Improving shared access to CoT resources can provide efficient resource allocation, improve resource utilisation and likely to reduce the cost of IoT deployments. Existing solutions include small-scale, hardware and platform-dependent mechanisms to enable or improve shared access to IoT resources. The research presented in this thesis considers trading CoT resources in a marketplace as an approach to improve shared access to CoT resources. It proposes a solution to Cot resource allocation that re-imagines CoT resources as commodities that can be provided and consumed by the marketplace participants. The novel contributions of the research presented in this thesis are summarised as follows: 1) a model to describe and quantify the value of CoT resources, 2) a resource sharing and allocation strategy called Exclusive Shared Access (ESA) to CoT resources, 3) a QoS-aware optimisation model for trading CoT resources as a single and multipleobjective optimisation problem, and 4) a marketplace architecture and experimental evaluation to verify its performance and scalability

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Efficiency and Automation in Threat Analysis of Software Systems

Context: Security is a growing concern in many organizations. Industries developing software systems plan for security early-on to minimize expensive code refactorings after deployment. In the design phase, teams of experts routinely analyze the system architecture and design to find potential security threats and flaws. After the system is implemented, the source code is often inspected to determine its compliance with the intended functionalities. Objective: The goal of this thesis is to improve on the performance of security design analysis techniques (in the design and implementation phases) and support practitioners with automation and tool support.Method: We conducted empirical studies for building an in-depth understanding of existing threat analysis techniques (Systematic Literature Review, controlled experiments). We also conducted empirical case studies with industrial participants to validate our attempt at improving the performance of one technique. Further, we validated our proposal for automating the inspection of security design flaws by organizing workshops with participants (under controlled conditions) and subsequent performance analysis. Finally, we relied on a series of experimental evaluations for assessing the quality of the proposed approach for automating security compliance checks. Findings: We found that the eSTRIDE approach can help focus the analysis and produce twice as many high-priority threats in the same time frame. We also found that reasoning about security in an automated fashion requires extending the existing notations with more precise security information. In a formal setting, minimal model extensions for doing so include security contracts for system nodes handling sensitive information. The formally-based analysis can to some extent provide completeness guarantees. For a graph-based detection of flaws, minimal required model extensions include data types and security solutions. In such a setting, the automated analysis can help in reducing the number of overlooked security flaws. Finally, we suggested to define a correspondence mapping between the design model elements and implemented constructs. We found that such a mapping is a key enabler for automatically checking the security compliance of the implemented system with the intended design. The key for achieving this is two-fold. First, a heuristics-based search is paramount to limit the manual effort that is required to define the mapping. Second, it is important to analyze implemented data flows and compare them to the data flows stipulated by the design

Bespoke Security for Resource Constrained Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are critical to many aspects of our daily lives. Autonomous cars, life saving medical devices, drones for package delivery, and robots for manufacturing are all prime examples of CPSs. The dual cyber/physical operating nature and highly integrated feedback control loops of CPSs means that they inherit security problems from traditional computing systems (e.g., software vulnerabilities, hardware side-channels) and physical systems (e.g., theft, tampering), while additionally introducing challenges of their own. The challenges to achieving security for CPSs stem not only from the interaction of the cyber and physical domains, but from the additional pressures of resource constraints imposed due to cost, limited energy budgets, and real-time nature of workloads. Due to the tight resource constraints of CPSs, there is often little headroom to devote for security. Thus, there is a need for low overhead deployable solutions to harden resource constrained CPSs. This dissertation shows that security can be effectively integrated into resource constrained cyber-physical system devices by leveraging fundamental physical properties, & tailoring and extending age-old abstractions in computing. To provide context on the state of security for CPSs, this document begins with the development of a unifying framework that can be used to identify threats and opportunities for enforcing security policies while providing a systematic survey of the field. This dissertation characterizes the properties of CPSs and typical components (e.g., sensors, actuators, computing devices) in addition to the software commonly used. We discuss available security primitives and their limitations for both hardware and software. In particular, we focus on software security threats targeting memory safety. The rest of the thesis focuses on the design and implementation of novel, deployable approaches to combat memory safety on resource constrained devices used by CPSs (e.g., 32-bit processors and microcontrollers). We first discuss how cyber-physical system properties such as inertia and feedback can be used to harden software efficiently with minimal modification to both hardware and software. We develop the framework You Only Live Once (YOLO) that proactively resets a device and restores it from a secure verified snapshot. YOLO relies on inertia, to tolerate periods of resets, and on feedback to rebuild state when recovering from a snapshot. YOLO is built upon a theoretical model that is used to determine safe operating parameters to aid a system designer in deployment. We evaluate YOLO in simulation and two real-world CPSs, an engine and drone. Second, we explore how rethinking of core computing concepts can lead to new fundamental abstractions that can efficiently hide performance overheads usually associated with hardening software against memory safety issues. To this end, we present two techniques: (i) The Phantom Address Space (PAS) is a new architectural concept that can be used to improve N-version systems by (almost) eliminating the overheads associated with handling replicated execution. Specifically, PAS can be used to provide an efficient implementation of a diversification concept known as execution path randomization aimed at thwarting code-reuse attacks. The goal of execution path randomization is to frequently switch between two distinct program variants forcing the attacker to gamble on which code to reuse. (ii) Cache Line Formats (Califorms) introduces a novel method to efficiently store memory in caches. Califorms makes the novel insight that dead spaces in program data due to its memory layout can be used to efficiently implement the concept of memory blacklisting, which prohibits a program from accessing certain memory regions based on program semantics. Califorms not onlyconsumes less memory than prior approaches, but can provide byte-granular protection while limiting the scope of its hardware changes to caches. While both PAS and Califorms were originally designed to target resource constrained devices, it's worth noting that they are widely applicable and can efficiently scale up to mobile, desktop, and server class processors. As CPSs continue to proliferate and become integrated in more critical infrastructure, security is an increasing concern. However, security will undoubtedly always play second fiddle to financial concerns that affect business bottom lines. Thus, it is important that there be easily deployable, low-overhead solutions that can scale from the most constrained of devices to more featureful systems for future migration. This dissertation is one step towards the goal of providing inexpensive mechanisms to ensure the security of cyber-physical system software

Model za praćenje usklađenosti između bezbednosnih standarda i prioritizaciju zahteva u kritičnim infrastruktirama

This thesis presents research in the field of information security. We present a model that uniformly represents the building blocks of the security requirements that are defined in various standards, security guidelines, and regulations for Critical Infrastructure. We analyze the structure of the requirements in the most commonly used standards for this purpose. We have extended the model with components to prioritize and track the implementation and compliance of similar requirements selected from different security publications. We define prioritization criteria for selecting the requirements for implementation that rely on four factors: risk assessment results, essence levels of the requirements set that is analyzed, dependency graph of the social actors involved in the implementation, and the domain affiliation of the requirement. We also define a framework with a set of activities that follow the elements of the proposed model to demonstrate its practical applicability