62,445 research outputs found
CyPhERS: A cyber-physical event reasoning system providing real-time situational awareness for attack and fault response
Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) constitute the backbone of critical infrastructures such as power grids or water distribution networks. Operating failures in these systems can cause serious risks for society. To avoid or minimize downtime, operators require real-time awareness about critical incidents. However, online event identification in CPSs is challenged by the complex interdependency of numerous physical and digital components, requiring to take cyber attacks and physical failures equally into account. The online event identification problem is further complicated through the lack of historical observations of critical but rare events, and the continuous evolution of cyber attack strategies. This work introduces and demonstrates CyPhERS, a Cyber-Physical Event Reasoning System. CyPhERS provides real-time information pertaining the occurrence, location, physical impact, and root cause of potentially critical events in CPSs, without the need for historical event observations. Key novelty of CyPhERS is the capability to generate informative and interpretable event signatures of known and unknown types of both cyber attacks and physical failures. The concept is evaluated and benchmarked on a demonstration case that comprises a multitude of attack and fault events targeting various components of a CPS. The results demonstrate that the event signatures provide relevant and inferable information on both known and unknown event types
CyPhERS: A cyber-physical event reasoning system providing real-time situational awareness for attack and fault response
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) constitute the backbone of critical infrastructures such as power grids or water distribution networks. Operating failures in these systems can cause serious risks for society. To avoid or minimize downtime, operators require real-time awareness about critical incidents. However, online event identification in CPSs is challenged by the complex interdependency of numerous physical and digital components, requiring to take cyber attacks and physical failures equally into account. The online event identification problem is further complicated through the lack of historical observations of critical but rare events, and the continuous evolution of cyber attack strategies. This work introduces and demonstrates CyPhERS, a Cyber-Physical Event Reasoning System. CyPhERS provides real-time information pertaining the occurrence, location, physical impact, and root cause of potentially critical events in CPSs, without the need for historical event observations. Key novelty of CyPhERS is the capability to generate informative and interpretable event signatures of known and unknown types of both cyber attacks and physical failures. The concept is evaluated and benchmarked on a demonstration case that comprises a multitude of attack and fault events targeting various components of a CPS. The results demonstrate that the event signatures provide relevant and inferable information on both known and unknown event types
Hardware accelerated authentication system for dynamic time-critical networks
The secure and efficient operation of time-critical networks, such as vehicular networks, smart-grid and other smart-infrastructures, is of primary importance in today’s society. It is crucial to minimize the impact of security mechanisms over such networks so that the safe and reliable operations of time-critical systems are not being interfered.
Even though there are several security mechanisms, their application to smart-infrastructure and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments may not meet the ubiquitous and time-sensitive needs of these systems. That is, existing security mechanisms either introduce a significant computation and communication overhead, or they are not scalable for a large number of IoT components. In particular, as a primary authentication mechanism, existing digital signatures cannot meet the real-time processing requirements of time-critical networks, and also do not fully benefit from advancements in the underlying hardware/software of IoTs.
As a part of this thesis, we create a reliable and scalable authentication system to ensure secure and reliable operation of dynamic time-critical networks like vehicular networks through hardware acceleration. The system is implemented on System-On-Chips (SoC) leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of the embedded Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) along with the CPUs (Central Processing Units). We identify a set of cryptographic authentication mechanisms, which consist of operations that are highly parallelizable while still maintain high standards of security and are also secure against various malicious adversaries. We also focus on creating a fully functional prototype of the system which we call a “Dynamic Scheduler” which will take care of scheduling the messages for signing or verification on the basis of their priority level and the number of messages currently in the system, so as to derive maximum throughput or minimum latency from the system, whatever the requirement may be
A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications
A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE
Deep Predictive Coding Neural Network for RF Anomaly Detection in Wireless Networks
Intrusion detection has become one of the most critical tasks in a wireless
network to prevent service outages that can take long to fix. The sheer variety
of anomalous events necessitates adopting cognitive anomaly detection methods
instead of the traditional signature-based detection techniques. This paper
proposes an anomaly detection methodology for wireless systems that is based on
monitoring and analyzing radio frequency (RF) spectrum activities. Our
detection technique leverages an existing solution for the video prediction
problem, and uses it on image sequences generated from monitoring the wireless
spectrum. The deep predictive coding network is trained with images
corresponding to the normal behavior of the system, and whenever there is an
anomaly, its detection is triggered by the deviation between the actual and
predicted behavior. For our analysis, we use the images generated from the
time-frequency spectrograms and spectral correlation functions of the received
RF signal. We test our technique on a dataset which contains anomalies such as
jamming, chirping of transmitters, spectrum hijacking, and node failure, and
evaluate its performance using standard classifier metrics: detection ratio,
and false alarm rate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed
methodology effectively detects many unforeseen anomalous events in real time.
We discuss the applications, which encompass industrial IoT, autonomous vehicle
control and mission-critical communications services.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, Communications Workshop ICC'1
Modeling the Rise in Internet-based Petitions
Contemporary collective action, much of which involves social media and other
Internet-based platforms, leaves a digital imprint which may be harvested to
better understand the dynamics of mobilization. Petition signing is an example
of collective action which has gained in popularity with rising use of social
media and provides such data for the whole population of petition signatories
for a given platform. This paper tracks the growth curves of all 20,000
petitions to the UK government over 18 months, analyzing the rate of growth and
outreach mechanism. Previous research has suggested the importance of the first
day to the ultimate success of a petition, but has not examined early growth
within that day, made possible here through hourly resolution in the data. The
analysis shows that the vast majority of petitions do not achieve any measure
of success; over 99 percent fail to get the 10,000 signatures required for an
official response and only 0.1 percent attain the 100,000 required for a
parliamentary debate. We analyze the data through a multiplicative process
model framework to explain the heterogeneous growth of signatures at the
population level. We define and measure an average outreach factor for
petitions and show that it decays very fast (reducing to 0.1% after 10 hours).
After 24 hours, a petition's fate is virtually set. The findings seem to
challenge conventional analyses of collective action from economics and
political science, where the production function has been assumed to follow an
S-shaped curve.Comment: Submitted to EPJ Data Scienc
Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey
This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh
network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user
privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various
possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for
WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the
security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application
layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols,
user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation
protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the
chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms
and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible
attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with
regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed,
use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved
etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management
approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly
becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open
problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed
before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the
author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are
some text overlaps with the previous submissio
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