10 research outputs found

    Advances in Information Security and Privacy

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    With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

    Security for Decentralised Service Location - Exemplified with Real-Time Communication Session Establishment

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    Decentralised Service Location, i.e. finding an application communication endpoint based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), is a fairly new concept. The precise security implications of this approach have not been studied in detail. More importantly, a detailed analysis regarding the applicability of existing security solutions to this concept has not been conducted. In many cases existing client-server approaches to security may not be feasible. In addition, to understand the necessity for such an analysis, it is key to acknowledge that Decentralised Service Location has some unique security requirements compared to other P2P applications such as filesharing or live streaming. This thesis concerns the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. The goals of our work are on the one hand to precisely understand the security requirements and research challenges for Decentralised Service Location, and on the other hand to develop and evaluate corresponding security mechanisms. The thesis is organised as follows. First, fundamentals are explained and the scope of the thesis is defined. Decentralised Service Location is defined and P2PSIP is explained technically as a prototypical example. Then, a security analysis for P2PSIP is presented. Based on this security analysis, security requirements for Decentralised Service Location and the corresponding research challenges -- i.e. security concerns not suitably mitigated by existing solutions -- are derived. Second, several decentralised solutions are presented and evaluated to tackle the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. We present decentralised algorithms to enable availability of the DHTs lookup service in the presence of adversary nodes. These algorithms are evaluated via simulation and compared to analytical bounds. Further, a cryptographic approach based on self-certifying identities is illustrated and discussed. This approach enables decentralised integrity protection of location-bindings. Finally, a decentralised approach to assess unknown identities is introduced. The approach is based on a Web-of-Trust model. It is evaluated via prototypical implementation. Finally, the thesis closes with a summary of the main contributions and a discussion of open issues

    Achieving network resiliency using sound theoretical and practical methods

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    Computer networks have revolutionized the life of every citizen in our modern intercon- nected society. The impact of networked systems spans every aspect of our lives, from financial transactions to healthcare and critical services, making these systems an attractive target for malicious entities that aim to make financial or political profit. Specifically, the past decade has witnessed an astounding increase in the number and complexity of sophisti- cated and targeted attacks, known as advanced persistent threats (APT). Those attacks led to a paradigm shift in the security and reliability communities’ perspective on system design; researchers and government agencies accepted the inevitability of incidents and malicious attacks, and marshaled their efforts into the design of resilient systems. Rather than focusing solely on preventing failures and attacks, resilient systems are able to maintain an acceptable level of operation in the presence of such incidents, and then recover gracefully into normal operation. Alongside prevention, resilient system design focuses on incident detection as well as timely response. Unfortunately, the resiliency efforts of research and industry experts have been hindered by an apparent schism between theory and practice, which allows attackers to maintain the upper hand advantage. This lack of compatibility between the theory and practice of system design is attributed to the following challenges. First, theoreticians often make impractical and unjustifiable assumptions that allow for mathematical tractability while sacrificing accuracy. Second, the security and reliability communities often lack clear definitions of success criteria when comparing different system models and designs. Third, system designers often make implicit or unstated assumptions to favor practicality and ease of design. Finally, resilient systems are tested in private and isolated environments where validation and reproducibility of the results are not publicly accessible. In this thesis, we set about showing that the proper synergy between theoretical anal- ysis and practical design can enhance the resiliency of networked systems. We illustrate the benefits of this synergy by presenting resiliency approaches that target the inter- and intra-networking levels. At the inter-networking level, we present CPuzzle as a means to protect the transport control protocol (TCP) connection establishment channel from state- exhaustion distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). CPuzzle leverages client puzzles to limit the rate at which misbehaving users can establish TCP connections. We modeled the problem of determining the puzzle difficulty as a Stackleberg game and solve for the equilibrium strategy that balances the users’ utilizes against CPuzzle’s resilience capabilities. Furthermore, to handle volumetric DDoS attacks, we extend CPuzzle and implement Midgard, a cooperative approach that involves end-users in the process of tolerating and neutralizing DDoS attacks. Midgard is a middlebox that resides at the edge of an Internet service provider’s network and uses client puzzles at the IP level to allocate bandwidth to its users. At the intra-networking level, we present sShield, a game-theoretic network response engine that manipulates a network’s connectivity in response to an attacker who is moving laterally to compromise a high-value asset. To implement such decision making algorithms, we leverage the recent advances in software-defined networking (SDN) to collect logs and security alerts about the network and implement response actions. However, the programma- bility offered by SDN comes with an increased chance for design-time bugs that can have drastic consequences on the reliability and security of a networked system. We therefore introduce BiFrost, an open-source tool that aims to verify safety and security proper- ties about data-plane programs. BiFrost translates data-plane programs into functionally equivalent sequential circuits, and then uses well-established hardware reduction, abstrac- tion, and verification techniques to establish correctness proofs about data-plane programs. By focusing on those four key efforts, CPuzzle, Midgard, sShield, and BiFrost, we believe that this work illustrates the benefits that the synergy between theory and practice can bring into the world of resilient system design. This thesis is an attempt to pave the way for further cooperation and coordination between theoreticians and practitioners, in the hope of designing resilient networked systems

    Cyberspace, Blockchain, Governance:How Technology Implies Normative Power and Regulation

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    Technologies and their inherent design choices create normative structures that affect governance. This chapter aims to illustrate how blockchain technology in particular introduces new norms into a legal framework. We first analyze the different forms of governance by distinguishing between old and new governance. With a view to code that functions as legal norms, Blockchain technology is particularly suited to create governance structures and mechanisms. However, one needs to be aware of the norms that are implicitly introduced into the legal system by a specific blockchain technology. We look at the blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This blockchain introduces a decentralized, transparent, cryptographically locked and thus immutable shared ledger. In summary, these design choices have normative powers over the user and over user interaction. If this is indeed the case, then regulators have to actively assess newly introduced digital ledger technology and other technologies for their effect on the normative and legal system.</p

    Enabling the Development and Implementation of Digital Twins : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality

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    Welcome to the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR 2020). This year we are meeting on-line due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. The overarching theme for CONVR2020 is "Enabling the development and implementation of Digital Twins". CONVR is one of the world-leading conferences in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality and building information modelling. Each year, more than 100 participants from all around the globe meet to discuss and exchange the latest developments and applications of virtual technologies in the architectural, engineering, construction and operation industry (AECO). The conference is also known for having a unique blend of participants from both academia and industry. This year, with all the difficulties of replicating a real face to face meetings, we are carefully planning the conference to ensure that all participants have a perfect experience. We have a group of leading keynote speakers from industry and academia who are covering up to date hot topics and are enthusiastic and keen to share their knowledge with you. CONVR participants are very loyal to the conference and have attended most of the editions over the last eighteen editions. This year we are welcoming numerous first timers and we aim to help them make the most of the conference by introducing them to other participants

    Applied Metaheuristic Computing

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    For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

    Applied Methuerstic computing

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    For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC
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