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

Duo: Software Defined Intrusion Tolerant System Using Dual Cluster

An intrusion tolerant system (ITS) is a network security system that is composed of redundant virtual servers that are online only in a short time window, called exposure time. The servers are periodically recovered to their clean state, and any infected servers are refreshed again, so attackers have insufficient time to succeed in breaking into the servers. However, there is a conflicting interest in determining exposure time, short for security and long for performance. In other words, the short exposure time can increase security but requires more servers to run in order to process requests in a timely manner. In this paper, we propose Duo, an ITS incorporated in SDN, which can reduce exposure time without consuming computing resources. In Duo, there are two types of servers: some servers with long exposure time (White server) and others with short exposure time (Gray server). Then, Duo classifies traffic into benign and suspicious with the help of SDN/NFV technology that also allows dynamically forwarding the classified traffic to White and Gray servers, respectively, based on the classification result. By reducing exposure time of a set of servers, Duo can decrease exposure time on average. We have implemented the prototype of Duo and evaluated its performance in a realistic environment

Nature-inspired survivability: Prey-inspired survivability countermeasures for cloud computing security challenges

As cloud computing environments become complex, adversaries have become highly sophisticated and unpredictable. Moreover, they can easily increase attack power and persist longer before detection. Uncertain malicious actions, latent risks, Unobserved or Unobservable risks (UUURs) characterise this new threat domain. This thesis proposes prey-inspired survivability to address unpredictable security challenges borne out of UUURs. While survivability is a well-addressed phenomenon in non-extinct prey animals, applying prey survivability to cloud computing directly is challenging due to contradicting end goals. How to manage evolving survivability goals and requirements under contradicting environmental conditions adds to the challenges. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a holistic taxonomy which integrate multiple and disparate perspectives of cloud security challenges. In addition, it proposes the TRIZ (Teorija Rezbenija Izobretatelskib Zadach) to derive prey-inspired solutions through resolving contradiction. First, it develops a 3-step process to facilitate interdomain transfer of concepts from nature to cloud. Moreover, TRIZ’s generic approach suggests specific solutions for cloud computing survivability. Then, the thesis presents the conceptual prey-inspired cloud computing survivability framework (Pi-CCSF), built upon TRIZ derived solutions. The framework run-time is pushed to the user-space to support evolving survivability design goals. Furthermore, a target-based decision-making technique (TBDM) is proposed to manage survivability decisions. To evaluate the prey-inspired survivability concept, Pi-CCSF simulator is developed and implemented. Evaluation results shows that escalating survivability actions improve the vitality of vulnerable and compromised virtual machines (VMs) by 5% and dramatically improve their overall survivability. Hypothesis testing conclusively supports the hypothesis that the escalation mechanisms can be applied to enhance the survivability of cloud computing systems. Numeric analysis of TBDM shows that by considering survivability preferences and attitudes (these directly impacts survivability actions), the TBDM method brings unpredictable survivability information closer to decision processes. This enables efficient execution of variable escalating survivability actions, which enables the Pi-CCSF’s decision system (DS) to focus upon decisions that achieve survivability outcomes under unpredictability imposed by UUUR

General Terms

In this paper, we describe the prevention-focused and adaptive middleware mechanisms implemented as part of the Advanced Adaptive Applications (A3) Environment that we are developing as a near-application and application-focused cyber-defense technology under the DARPA Clean-slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) program

CloudIDS: Cloud Intrusion Detection Model Inspired by Dendritic Cell Mechanism

Cloud Computing Security is a new era of computer technology and opens a new research area and creates a lot of opportunity of exploration. One of the new implementation in Cloud is Intrusion Detection System (IDS).There are problems with existing IDS approach in Cloud environment. Implementing traditional IDS need a lot of self-maintenance and did not scale with the customer security requirements. In addition, maintenance of traditional IDS in Cloud Computing system requires expertise and consumes more time where not each Cloud user has. A decentralized traditional IDS approach where being deployed in current Cloud Computing infrastructure will make the IDS management become complicated. Each user's IDS will not be the same in term of type and configurations and each user may have outdated signatures. Inter VM's communication also become a big concern when we implementing Cloud Computing system where communication between Clouds are not monitored and controlled by the traditional IDS. A specific IDS model for Cloud computing is required to solve these problems. In this paper, we develop a prototype of Cloud IDS inspired by Dendritic Cell mechanism. Experiment result proved that Cloud IDS was able to detect any attempt to attack the Cloud environment. The experiments show that the Cloud IDS model based on Dendritic Cell algorithm able to identify and detect novel threat that targeting Cloud environment

How Practical Are Intrusion-Tolerant Distributed Systems?

Building secure, inviolable systems using traditional mechanisms is becoming increasingly an unattainable goal. The recognition of this fact has fostered the interest in alternative approaches to security such as intrusion tolerance, which applies fault tolerance concepts and techniques to security problems. Albeit this area is quite promising, intrusion-tolerant distributed systems typically rely on the assumption that the system components fail or are compromised independently. This is a strong assumption that has been repeatedly questioned. In this paper we discuss how this assumption can be implemented in practice using diversity of system components. We present a taxonomy of axes of diversity and discuss how they provide failure independence. Furthermore, we provide a practical example of an intrusion-tolerant system built using diversity

Resource Allocation in Networking and Computing Systems: A Security and Dependability Perspective

In recent years, there has been a trend to integrate networking and computing systems, whose management is getting increasingly complex. Resource allocation is one of the crucial aspects of managing such systems and is affected by this increased complexity. Resource allocation strategies aim to effectively maximize performance, system utilization, and profit by considering virtualization technologies, heterogeneous resources, context awareness, and other features. In such complex scenario, security and dependability are vital concerns that need to be considered in future computing and networking systems in order to provide the future advanced services, such as mission-critical applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing literature that considers security and dependability for resource allocation in computing and networking systems. The current research works are categorized by considering the allocated type of resources for different technologies, scenarios, issues, attributes, and solutions. The paper presents the research works on resource allocation that includes security and dependability, both singularly and jointly. The future research directions on resource allocation are also discussed. The paper shows how there are only a few works that, even singularly, consider security and dependability in resource allocation in the future computing and networking systems and highlights the importance of jointly considering security and dependability and the need for intelligent, adaptive and robust solutions. This paper aims to help the researchers effectively consider security and dependability in future networking and computing systems.publishedVersio