Dynamic Security Risk Evaluation via Hybrid Bayesian Risk Graph in Cyber-Physical Social Systems

© 2014 IEEE. Cyber-physical social system (CPSS) plays an important role in both the modern lifestyle and business models, which significantly changes the way we interact with the physical world. The increasing influence of cyber systems and social networks is also a high risk for security threats. The objective of this paper is to investigate associated risks in CPSS, and a hybrid Bayesian risk graph (HBRG) model is proposed to analyze the temporal attack activity patterns in dynamic cyber-physical social networks. In the proposed approach, a hidden Markov model is introduced to model the dynamic influence of activities, which then be mapped into a Bayesian risks graph (BRG) model that can evaluate the risk propagation in a layered risk architecture. Our numerical studies demonstrate that the framework can model and evaluate risks of user activity patterns that expose to CPSSs

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Strategic Learning for Active, Adaptive, and Autonomous Cyber Defense

The increasing instances of advanced attacks call for a new defense paradigm that is active, autonomous, and adaptive, named as the \texttt{`3A'} defense paradigm. This chapter introduces three defense schemes that actively interact with attackers to increase the attack cost and gather threat information, i.e., defensive deception for detection and counter-deception, feedback-driven Moving Target Defense (MTD), and adaptive honeypot engagement. Due to the cyber deception, external noise, and the absent knowledge of the other players' behaviors and goals, these schemes possess three progressive levels of information restrictions, i.e., from the parameter uncertainty, the payoff uncertainty, to the environmental uncertainty. To estimate the unknown and reduce uncertainty, we adopt three different strategic learning schemes that fit the associated information restrictions. All three learning schemes share the same feedback structure of sensation, estimation, and actions so that the most rewarding policies get reinforced and converge to the optimal ones in autonomous and adaptive fashions. This work aims to shed lights on proactive defense strategies, lay a solid foundation for strategic learning under incomplete information, and quantify the tradeoff between the security and costs.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.1218

Advanced Topics in Systems Safety and Security

This book presents valuable research results in the challenging field of systems (cyber)security. It is a reprint of the Information (MDPI, Basel) - Special Issue (SI) on Advanced Topics in Systems Safety and Security. The competitive review process of MDPI journals guarantees the quality of the presented concepts and results. The SI comprises high-quality papers focused on cutting-edge research topics in cybersecurity of computer networks and industrial control systems. The contributions presented in this book are mainly the extended versions of selected papers presented at the 7th and the 8th editions of the International Workshop on Systems Safety and Security—IWSSS. These two editions took place in Romania in 2019 and respectively in 2020. In addition to the selected papers from IWSSS, the special issue includes other valuable and relevant contributions. The papers included in this reprint discuss various subjects ranging from cyberattack or criminal activities detection, evaluation of the attacker skills, modeling of the cyber-attacks, and mobile application security evaluation. Given this diversity of topics and the scientific level of papers, we consider this book a valuable reference for researchers in the security and safety of systems