Cyberspace Research Articles

Categorizing Cyber Activity Through an Information-psychological and Information-technological Perspective, Case Ukraine.

Russian approach to warfighting includes an informational facet. Western hemisphere usually treats cyber activity as a tool similar to traditional warfighting tools such as rifles, artillery and tanks, whereas the Russian approach has an informational and narrative stance to the whole conflict. Placing information in the focus, switches the cyber activity to serve either an informational-psychological or an informational-technical approach. Examining the activity from this non-conventional trait and correlating it to other activities during the execution, the study highlights the coordination of kinetic and non-kinetic actions in an altered manner. In this article I am examining cyber activity through the terms of information-psychological and information-technological approach to form an understanding of Russian or Russian supported activities in cyber space before and during the Ukraine crisis. This will recognize types of cyber activity connected to actions in the physical environment. Actions identified are categorized and placed in a matrix created on psychological and/or technical clout. From this matrix groups of activities are scrutinized in correlation to other activities to expose possible narratives or underlying themes. The study relies on a variant of Grounded theory and is selected to elude from examine technical methods and actions. The observed timeframe is for the first study from 2021, well before the current hot phase, until summer 2022. This article is the first part of a two-stage study, where the first part examines cyber activity through the terms of information-psychological and information-technological approach. The second study places the previous findings in correlation to actions, reactions and mitigation activities to find out how defensive measures were relevant or if the outcome were result of something else than deliberate defensive (cyber-)activities. Throughout the larger study, the underlying hypothesis is that there is a larger coordination of cyber activities than acknowledged related to the ongoing crisis.

Visual Object Detection and Tracking for Internet of Things Devices Based on Spatial Attention Powered Multidomain Network

Internet of Things (IoT) has brought changes in many fields by joining physical space with the cyber space. The IoT devices are becoming increasingly complex. With the rapid deployment of cameras, tasks in IoT like visual information are more important, but IoT devices have limited computing resources, including power, computing ability, storage, etc. Some tasks that might be perfectly normal to perform on a computer would be rather challenging on an IoT device. Therefore, how to maintain acceptable performance while minimizing resources is becoming a more consequential part in IoT. In this article, we aim to solve the problem of object detection and tracking in IoT while minimizing resources. The traditional algorithms need to use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify different objects in each frame, and then determine the tracking target from identified objects, which typically requires a lot of computing resources. By incorporating spatial attention, and multidomain network, we proposed a novel algorithm named as spatial attention powered multidomain network (SA-MDNet). By adding the spatial attention mechanism to the original MDNet model, and using multiclass cross-entropy loss, we are able to distinguish the background and the target in different video sequences effectively and efficiently. This novel algorithm achieves similar performance on the OTB 50/100/2013 data sets compared to several state-of-art models, while uses only a fraction of the memory compared to MDNet.

Radical rest and recreation and their spatial permutations

Radical rest and recreation and their spatial permutations

Composite Finite-Time Resilient Control for Cyber-Physical Systems Subject to Actuator Attacks.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) seamlessly integrate communication, computing, and control, thus exhibiting tight coupling of their cyber space with the physical world and human intervention. Forming the basis of future smart services, they play an important role in the era of Industry 4.0. However, CPSs also suffer from increasing cyber attacks due to their connections to the Internet. This article investigates resilient control for a class of CPSs subject to actuator attacks, which intentionally manipulate control commands from controllers to actuators. In our study, the supertwisting sliding-mode algorithm is adopted to construct a finite-time converging extended state observer (ESO) for estimating the state and uncertainty of the system in the presence of actuator attacks. Then, for the attacked system, a finite-time converging resilient controller is designed based on the proposed ESO. It integrates global fast terminal sliding-mode and prescribed performance control. Finally, an industrial CPS, permanent magnet synchronous motor control system, is investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the composite resilient control strategy presented in this article.

Mutual Clustered Redundancy and Composite Learning for Intrusion Detection Systems

In the area of cyber space security, intrusion detection is a challenging task which aims at the provision of security from various malicious attacks. Hence, this paper proposes a two-stage hybrid intrusion detection system (IDS) mechanism to identify between normal and attack activities. The proposed mechanism is an integrated form of two simple and effective machine learning algorithms; they are support vector machine (SVM) and composite extreme learning machine (CELM). The first stage aims to distinguish the normal activities from abnormal activities and employed SVM. Next, the second stage employs CELM for the detection of different types of attacks . Further, aiming over training data, a clustering followed by duplicate connections removal and duplicate features removal is accomplished through fuzzy C-means clustering, correlation, and mutual information respectively. The proposed method applied eventually on the standard benchmark dataset NSL-KDD and the real modern UNSW-NB15 dataset. The performance analysis validates through accuracy, false alarm rate and computational time.

Cyber-Physical-Social Awareness Platform for Comprehensive Situation Awareness.

Cyber-physical-social computing system integrates the interactions between cyber, physical, and social spaces by fusing information from these spaces. The result of this fusion can be used to drive many applications in areas such as intelligent transportation, smart cities, and healthcare. Situation Awareness was initially used in military services to provide knowledge of what is happening in a combat zone but has been used in many other areas such as disaster mitigation. Various applications have been developed to provide situation awareness using either IoT sensors or social media information spaces and, more recently, using both IoT sensors and social media information spaces. The information from these spaces is heterogeneous and, at their intersection, is sparse. In this paper, we propose a highly scalable, novel Cyber-physical-social Awareness (CPSA) platform that provides situation awareness by using and intersecting information from both IoT sensors and social media. By combining and fusing information from both social media and IoT sensors, the CPSA platform provides more comprehensive and accurate situation awareness than any other existing solutions that rely only on data from social media and IoT sensors. The CPSA platform achieves that by semantically describing and integrating the information extracted from sensors and social media spaces and intersects this information for enriching situation awareness. The CPSA platform uses user-provided situation models to refine and intersect cyber, physical, and social information. The CPSA platform analyses social media and IoT data using pretrained machine learning models deployed in the cloud, and provides coordination between information sources and fault tolerance. The paper describes the implementation and evaluation of the CPSA platform. The evaluation of the CPSA platform is measured in terms of capabilities such as the ability to semantically describe and integrate heterogenous information, fault tolerance, and time constraints such as processing time and throughput when performing real-world experiments. The evaluation shows that the CPSA platform can reliably process and intersect with large volumes of IoT sensor and social media data to provide enhanced situation awareness.

The concept of modern political confrontation in cyber space

Abstract The purpose of the study is to determine the main forms of behavior of the participants of the political process in the information space of Ukraine and progressive informative countries of the world in order to achieve political goals and decisions that have a constructive or destructive function in the political system, considering social, cultural, legal, and ideological factors that affect interaction of participants during the confrontation of political processes in cyberspace. The subject of the study is the concept of modern political confrontation in cyberspace. Through the lens of a combination of international and national approaches to the development of effective ways of improvement for the further segmental possibility of use in the field of cybersecurity and cyber protection, the theoretical and practical underpinnings of political conflict in Ukraine were established. The protection of an individual’s and a citizen’s rights and freedoms was used in an approach that calls for the implementation of political conflict within the context of political interaction. The correlation of global cybersecurity in the context of the dichotomy “democratic political regime—non-democratic political regime” is revealed. It is proposed to borrow the experience of individual states regarding coordination of the increase of scientific potential and human resources in the field of the IT industry in order to achieve the highest level in the protection of the state’s critical infrastructure; improvement of the political system organization in the direction of the formation of an institutional subsystem at the modern informational level.

Cybersecurity for MSMEs in India: “Analysis of Cyber-Attacks and Implementation of Suitable Security Framework”

Micro, small, and medium-sized businesses (MSME) are currently the main targets of cyberattacks in India, yet the fact is that their environment frequently overlooks the prevention of cybercrime. We attempted to introduce a somewhat more robust, self reliant, and efficient cybersecurity solution that can enable higher oppportunity to each individual enterprise's evolving needs and can also quickly adjust with the constantly changing threat environment over the cyber space. Cybersecurity is an environment that is highly demanding and challenging due to the various data transmission layers and the supported IoT devices. The various technologies and tools that can be used to build a cyber security framework specifically for MSMEs are reviewed in this article.

Technology facilitated sexual violence and abuse: exploring the what, who, where, why, when, and how of the 21st century interpersonal crime

ABSTRACT In recent years, a new type of interpersonal crime has emerged where victimization happens through the use of technology and/or cyber space. The legal, law enforcement, as well as social scientific research fields have yet to fully grasp the scope of this modern crime type. In this paper, we review what is currently known on the issue with 5 Ws and 1 H approach, in terms of their current understanding, prevalence, victimization patterns, motivations, and relationship between violence in the cyberspace and offline. We end with a proposal for future directions and argue that a useful framework for researching this type of crime may be the interpersonal model first developed within the investigative psychology field for the classification and profiling of sexually violent offenses.

Research on ACPS Architecture of Precision Prataculture: A Case of Water Precision Regulation for Alfalfa

Highlights A precision regulation architecture of prataculture based on agriculture cyber-physical system (PRACPS) was proposed. The PRACPS-ALFA model was designed and implemented through the actual physical environment and Ptolemy tool. The PRACPS-ALFA has good applicability in the Ningxia irrigation area of the Yellow River. The architecture can achieve precise water regulation of forage under a complex physical environment. Abstract. Because the architecture of prataculture precision irrigation cannot dynamically track forage growth and change in future physical environments, a precision regulation architecture of prataculture based on an agriculture cyber-physical system (PRACPS) is proposed. We use the most widely planted alfalfa as an example and design an alfalfa application architecture based on the PRACPS (PRACPS-ALFA). An alfalfa growth model based on water factor was built into the PRACPS-ALFA. We discuss the construction methods of the physical space, the cyber space, and the cyber-physical interaction interfaces. The PRACPS-ALFA is designed and implemented through the actual physical environment and the Ptolemy tool. Four evaluation indices are designed to evaluate the applicability and accuracy of the architecture. Finally, through field experiments in the Ningxia irrigation area of the Yellow River, the model is validated and analyzed by the simulated and observed values of each evaluation indicator. The results show that the PRACPS-ALFA has good applicability in the Ningxia irrigation area of the Yellow River and can achieve precise water regulation of forage in a complex physical environment. Keywords: ACPS, Alfalfa, Applicability, Prataculture, Precision regulation, Ptolemy.

ЦИФРОВІ ДОКАЗИ У КРИМІНАЛЬНОМУ ПРОЦЕСІ: ВИДОВА ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА

The given article studies the development of the system of procedural evidence types with the aim to distinguish the criteria for its typological classification, as well as to define its place in the system of criminal procedural evidence, taking into account a specific artificial intangible nature of digital evidence data. The author of the article states that the development of information society supposes a new model of social relations, communication and respectively new approaches to solving important issues, including those within the criminal proceedings field. Information technologies are evolving very fast so are the methods of use of digital technical means with malicious purposes, which results in a steady increase of crimes committed in cyber space. But, the question of digital data use as the evidence is still poorly studied and not regulated enough in criminal and procedural legislation of Ukraine. In particular, the place of digital evidence in the system of procedural evidence sources has not been defined yet. The author of the article analyses the status of scientific research related to the classification of procedural evidence types, its evolution, and raises the question of establishing a separate type of criminal procedural evidence for digital information which has a probative value. The analysis of criminal and procedural legislation and evaluable scientific resources shows, that the existing concept of classification requires improvement bearing in mind a specific nature of digital evidence. There also have been defined the criteria for dividing procedural evidence into certain types with further grounding the necessity to classify digital evidence as a separate type due to its specific nature. It has been substantiated that it is inaccurate to refer digital evidence to both physical evidence and documents in criminal procedure. The article convincingly proves that digital data in the form of files and machine media is a separate type of evidence, and, correspondently, it is advisable to amend p.2 of Article 84 of CPC of Ukraine.

A review on security analysis of cyber physical systems using Machine learning

The concept of Cyber Physical System (CPS) is widely used in different industries across the globe. In fact, it is the holistic approach towards dealing with cyber space and physical environments that do have inter-dependencies. In the existing systems, there was a separate approach for security of the two worlds (cyber and physical). However, it does not provide necessary security when security is employed independently. The research in this paper identifies the need for integrated security for CPS. Besides it throws light into different security challenges associated with CPS and the countermeasures that existed based on machine learning and deep learning techniques that come under Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science. From the review of literature, it is understood that data science perspective is suitable for protecting CPS with required adaptive strategy. This paper provides several useful insights related to security analysis of CPS using machine learning. It paves way for further investigation and realize a comprehensive security framework to protect CPS from internal and external cyber-attacks.

An Effective Instructional Design to Enhance Learning Outcomes of Information Security Course in Online Mode

The course on Information Security deals with the processes and tools for protecting sensitive digital data from disruption, modification and destruction in cyber space. This course is offered as a programme core during the third year of study in the undergraduate curriculum of various engineering programmes such as Computer Science and Engineering and Information Technology. The demand for graduating engineers with the technical skills to detect, respond to, and prevent cyberattacks is at an all-time high. Having understood the potential job market for Cyber Security Professionals, the syllabus of the Information Security course at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai has been carefully designed in collaboration with industrial experts. The course also provides the necessary foundation for certification exams like Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and for pursuing a master’s degree with specialization in Information Security. Because of pandemic, the course has to be delivered in online mode with no compromise in quality. A wide variety of simulation tools, programming assignments, active and collaborative learning techniques, Problem based Learning have been included in the instructional design to create an effective online learning environment. Exclusive rubrics were created for assessing teamwork, ethics and communication. The paper presents a detailed impact analysis of the customized instructional design in improving the attainment of learning outcomes, student engagement and satisfaction. The experimental study has been carried out in a student group of 138 members from the undergraduate programme on Information Technology at our institute in the academic year 2020-21. Adoption of multiple teaching learning strategies has shown significant improvement in the performance of learners in continuous assessment tests and terminal examinations. The satisfaction index of the learners analysed from course end surveys and informal feedback and is found to be significantly high. Keywords— Active Learning; Collaborative Learning; Information Security; Higher Order Thinking Skills; Learning Outcome Attainment; Student Engagemen

Tensor-Empowered Federated Learning for Cyber-Physical-Social Computing and Communication Systems

The deep fusion of human-centered Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSSs) has attracted widespread attention worldwide and big data as the blood of CPSSs could lay a solid data cornerstone for providing more proactive and accurate wisdom services. However, due to concerns about data privacy and security, traditional data centralized learning paradigm is no longer suitable. Federated Learning (FL) as an emerging distributed privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm would have great research significance and application values. Although few survey papers on FL already exist in the literature, the survey about FL from the perspective of human-centered CPSSs and tensor theory is lacking. Toward this end, we first introduce the CPSSs and deeply analyze the correlations among humans, cyber space, physical space and social space, as well as the opportunities brought by it. Afterwards, we present an overview of FL and then review extensive researches on FL in terms of resources management, communication, security and privacy protection, which provides a shortcut for readers to quickly understand and learn FL. Furthermore, the theory about tensor representation, operation and decomposition for handling massive, multi-source heterogeneous big data and corresponding applications are described. By leveraging the advantages of tensor in unified modeling, dimensionality reduction, and feature extraction, a framework and three tensor-empowered solutions are provided to solve these challenges about heterogeneous resource management, communication overhead together with security and privacy. Finally, some future research directions are listed for looking forward to inspiring more readers to devote themselves to researching tensor-empowered FL for human-centered CPSSs in the future.

A Graph Theory Based Self-Learning Honeypot to Detect Persistent Threats

Attacks on the cyber space is getting exponential in recent times. Illegal penetrations and breaches are real threats to the individuals and organizations. Conventional security systems are good enough to detect the known threats but when it comes to Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) they fails. These APTs are targeted, more sophisticated and very persistent and incorporates lot of evasive techniques to bypass the existing defenses. Hence, there is a need for an effective defense system that can achieve a complete reliance of security. To address the above-mentioned issues, this paper proposes a novel honeypot system that tracks the anonymous behavior of the APT threats. The key idea of honeypot leverages the concepts of graph theory to detect such targeted attacks. The proposed honeypot is self-realizing, strategic assisted which withholds the APTs actionable techniques and observes the behavior for analysis and modelling. The proposed graph theory based self learning honeypot using the results γ(C(n,1)),γc (C(n,1)), γsc (C(n,1)) outperforms traditional techniques by detecting APTs behavioral with detection rate of 96%.

StohMCharts: A Modeling Framework for Quantitative Performance Evaluation of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

Cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) have recently gained attention from researchers due to their combination of cyber, physical, and social spaces. Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) extension profile that supports the specification, design, and verification of Real-Time Embedded Systems (RTES). While MARTE Statecharts can assist in describing CPS, it does not model the uncertainty within a CPSS environment. To enhance the accuracy of CPSS analysis, we propose the stohMCharts (stochastic hybrid MARTE statecharts) modelling framework as an extension of MARTE statecharts for modelling and analyzing stochastic hybrid systems. stohMCharts can model CPSS in a unified manner. Additionally, based on the mapping rules and algorithms, we have developed a tool to convert models built in stohMChart language into Networks Stochastic Hybrid Automata (NSHA) which can be verified by statistical model checker UPPAAL-SMC. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the framework by applying it to one autonomous driving scenarios.

Shape of Integrated System Interfacing between Cyber and Physical Space

爆発的に発展した情報技術を物理空間に生きる我々の暮らしの中で直接的かつ積極的に活用することで, 個人の生涯と生活ひいては社会全体の質的改善に資する高度な情報サービスの実現が期待される. このような情報空間と物理空間を積極的につなぐサービスにおいて, 両空間の境界接点には, 無数の集積回路で構成される集積システムが物理的な実態として必ず存在する. 境界をつなぐ接点たるこれら集積システムに求められるインタフェース機能と, それを実現する上での効率的な集積システムの物理的なカタチのあり方について解説し, 今後の研究開発の方向性を議論する.

P4 Medicine for Heterogeneity of Dry Eye: A Mobile Health-based Digital Cohort Study

During the 5th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan, the Japanese government proposed a novel societal concept -Society 5.0- that promoted a healthcare system characterized by its capability to provide unintrusive, predictive, longitudinal care through the integration of cyber and physical space. The role of Society 5.0 in managing our quality of vision will become more important in the modern digitalized and aging society, both of which are known risk factors for developing dry eye. Dry eye is the most common ocular surface disease encountered in Japan with symptoms including increased dryness, eye discomfort, and decreased visual acuity. Owing to its complexity, implementation of P4 (predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory) medicine in managing dry eye requires a comprehensive understanding of its pathology, as well as a strategy to visualize and stratify its risk factors. Using DryEyeRhythm®, a mobile health (mHealth) smartphone software (app), we established a route to collect holistic medical big data on dry eye, such as the subjective symptoms and lifestyle data for each individual. The studies to date aided in determining the risk factors for severe dry eye, the association between major depressive disorder and dry eye exacerbation, eye drop treatment adherence, app-based stratification algorithms based on symptomology, blink detection biosensoring as a dry eye-related digital phenotype, and effectiveness of app-based dry eye diagnosis support compared to traditional methods. These results contribute to elucidating disease pathophysiology and promoting preventive and effective measures to counteract dry eye through mHealth.

Cybercrime And Senior Citizens In India – A Comparative Study Of Legal Frameworks Within Cyberspace Globally

Cyber space regulation is that arena which is growing very rapidly, due to multidisciplinary approach in tackling innovation, technological updation, persistent cybercrimes emerging from interactions within cyberspace. This doctrinal paper is a critical study and analysis of challenges faced by stakeholders, jurisprudence of crimes committed within cyberspace, effect on vulnerable group ‘senior citizens’ as potential victims since emergence of Information Communication Technology. Aimed to study international treaties, national policies of QUAD members, statutes, community help programs, emerging new theories of cyberspace jurisprudence, adopted by netizens, challenges that are being faced by all the stakeholders to influence cyberspace, socio economic legal disabilities within a sections of society, principles or prepositions thus found, important facets of cybercrime comprehensively to contribute in the development of Cyber Security legislations and Regulatory Framework of India, for a secure safe cyberspace as severity of the issues, challenges in cyber victimization against senior’s can permeate legal gaps as previous research efforts have largely revolved around women and children, while neglecting them. Victimization in cyberspace is pushing seniors further away from use of technology confidently so as to kick off original plans for equalitarianism as envisioned in our constitution.

Survey of E-Mail Phishing Preparedness Within a Selected Group

Cyber-attacks have been in the cyber space for a long time, but in recent years they have come to the forefront. This is mainly due to organizations and individuals who are increasingly moving their activities to the online space and beginning to realize threats that can damage or misuse their data and information. One of the most common and simplest cyber-attacks is a phishing attack, which can be aimed at individuals, organization, and elements of critical infrastructure such as transportation, healthcare, energy, industry, and others. Phishing attacks have various types with various characteristics and can be sophisticated or less sophisticated. Therefore, this article discusses the definition of fundamental theoretical knowledge about phishing attacks, types of email phishing attacks, their distinctive characteristics, and a testing the preparedness of a selected group for an email phishing attack.