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The THREAT-ARREST Cyber-Security Training Platform
Cyber security is always a main concern for critical infrastructures and nation-wide safety and sustainability. Thus, advanced cyber ranges and security training is becoming imperative for the involved organizations. This paper presets a cyber security training platform, called THREAT-ARREST. The various platform modules can analyze an organizationās system, identify the most critical threats, and tailor a training program to its personnel needs. Then, different training programmes are created based on the trainee types (i.e. administrator, simple operator, etc.), providing several teaching procedures and accomplishing diverse learning goals. One of the main novelties of THREAT-ARREST is the modelling of these programmes along with the runtime monitoring, management, and evaluation operations. The platform is generic. Nevertheless, its applicability in a smart energy case study is detailed
Refining the PoinTER āhuman firewallā pentesting framework
PurposePenetration tests have become a valuable tool in the cyber security defence strategy, in terms of detecting vulnerabilities. Although penetration testing has traditionally focused on technical aspects, the field has started to realise the importance of the human in the organisation, and the need to ensure that humans are resistant to cyber-attacks. To achieve this, some organisations āpentestā their employees, testing their resilience and ability to detect and repel human-targeted attacks. In a previous paper we reported on PoinTER (Prepare TEst Remediate), a human pentesting framework, tailored to the needs of SMEs. In this paper, we propose improvements to refine our framework. The improvements are based on a derived set of ethical principles that have been subjected to ethical scrutiny.MethodologyWe conducted a systematic literature review of academic research, a review of actual hacker techniques, industry recommendations and official body advice related to social engineering techniques. To meet our requirements to have an ethical human pentesting framework, we compiled a list of ethical principles from the research literature which we used to filter out techniques deemed unethical.FindingsDrawing on social engineering techniques from academic research, reported by the hacker community, industry recommendations and official body advice and subjecting each technique to ethical inspection, using a comprehensive list of ethical principles, we propose the refined GDPR compliant and privacy respecting PoinTER Framework. The list of ethical principles, we suggest, could also inform ethical technical pentests.OriginalityPrevious work has considered penetration testing humans, but few have produced a comprehensive framework such as PoinTER. PoinTER has been rigorously derived from multiple sources and ethically scrutinised through inspection, using a comprehensive list of ethical principles derived from the research literature
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
CEPS Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Technology, Governance and Policy Challenges Task Force Evaluation of the HLEG Trustworthy AI Assessment List (Pilot Version). CEPS Task Force Report 22 January 2020
The Centre for European Policy Studies launched a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
Cybersecurity in September 2019. The goal of this Task Force is to bring attention to the market,
technical, ethical and governance challenges posed by the intersection of AI and cybersecurity,
focusing both on AI for cybersecurity but also cybersecurity for AI. The Task Force is multi-stakeholder
by design and composed of academics, industry players from various sectors, policymakers and civil
society.
The Task Force is currently discussing issues such as the state and evolution of the application of AI
in cybersecurity and cybersecurity for AI; the debate on the role that AI could play in the dynamics
between cyber attackers and defenders; the increasing need for sharing information on threats and
how to deal with the vulnerabilities of AI-enabled systems; options for policy experimentation; and
possible EU policy measures to ease the adoption of AI in cybersecurity in Europe.
As part of such activities, this report aims at assessing the High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on AI Ethics
Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, presented on April 8, 2019. In particular, this report analyses and
makes suggestions on the Trustworthy AI Assessment List (Pilot version), a non-exhaustive list aimed
at helping the public and the private sector in operationalising Trustworthy AI. The list is composed
of 131 items that are supposed to guide AI designers and developers throughout the process of
design, development, and deployment of AI, although not intended as guidance to ensure
compliance with the applicable laws. The list is in its piloting phase and is currently undergoing a
revision that will be finalised in early 2020.
This report would like to contribute to this revision by addressing in particular the interplay between
AI and cybersecurity. This evaluation has been made according to specific criteria: whether and how
the items of the Assessment List refer to existing legislation (e.g. GDPR, EU Charter of Fundamental
Rights); whether they refer to moral principles (but not laws); whether they consider that AI attacks
are fundamentally different from traditional cyberattacks; whether they are compatible with
different risk levels; whether they are flexible enough in terms of clear/easy measurement,
implementation by AI developers and SMEs; and overall, whether they are likely to create obstacles
for the industry.
The HLEG is a diverse group, with more than 50 members representing different stakeholders, such
as think tanks, academia, EU Agencies, civil society, and industry, who were given the difficult task of
producing a simple checklist for a complex issue. The public engagement exercise looks successful
overall in that more than 450 stakeholders have signed in and are contributing to the process.
The next sections of this report present the items listed by the HLEG followed by the analysis and
suggestions raised by the Task Force (see list of the members of the Task Force in Annex 1)
Reinforcement learning for efficient network penetration testing
Penetration testing (also known as pentesting or PT) is a common practice for actively assessing the defenses of a computer network by planning and executing all possible attacks to discover and exploit existing vulnerabilities. Current penetration testing methods are increasingly becoming non-standard, composite and resource-consuming despite the use of evolving tools. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an AI-based pentesting system which makes use of machine learning techniques, namely reinforcement learning (RL) to learn and reproduce average and complex pentesting activities. The proposed system is named Intelligent Automated Penetration Testing System (IAPTS) consisting of a module that integrates with industrial PT frameworks to enable them to capture information, learn from experience, and reproduce tests in future similar testing cases. IAPTS aims to save human resources while producing much-enhanced results in terms of time consumption, reliability and frequency of testing. IAPTS takes the approach of modeling PT environments and tasks as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) problem which is solved by POMDP-solver. Although the scope of this paper is limited to network infrastructures PT planning and not the entire practice, the obtained results support the hypothesis that RL can enhance PT beyond the capabilities of any human PT expert in terms of time consumed, covered attacking vectors, accuracy and reliability of the outputs. In addition, this work tackles the complex problem of expertise capturing and re-use by allowing the IAPTS learning module to store and re-use PT policies in the same way that a human PT expert would learn but in a more efficient way
Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview
The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity networkāthe smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio
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