Defensive Measures Research Articles

Soft Security Strategies to Enhance Nepal’s National Security

Due to the existing geo-location, geo-political advancement, and geo-strategic cum geo-political interests of powerful nations, the national security milieu of Nepal is constantly under a ‘state of flux’. The changing dynamics of the regional politics have also induced specific geo-political challenges to Nepal’s national security. Nepal has adopted an essence of “Amity with all and enmity with none” on its foreign policy, which is based on the spirit of its long standing ‘Non-Aligned Foreign Policy’. Since Nepal does not acquire any substantial intelligence, counter intelligence or strategic intelligence mechanisms, and has not been fortified with any defense technology yet; Nepal must foster ‘Soft Security Strategies’ that not only enhances its national security, but also help promote its national power capability. Based on various literature reviews, it suggest that the idea of reckoning the impact of soft security approach is an indicative defensive measure of addressing the contemporary security issues in national security. Nevertheless, the main objectives of this research article are to identify the emerging security threat, and assess the ‘Soft Security Strategies’ to enhance Nepal’s national security. This article discourses the geo-strategic prospects in conceiving national security, and explores the potential instruments of Nepal’s national power. The first part deals with apparent challenges to Nepal’s national security, and the second part deals with whether the existing ‘National Security Policy’ is aligned with its corresponding ‘National Security Strategy’. Finally, this paper aims to identify how the small power like Nepal can strengthen the instruments of national power and enhance national security.

Can Technology Solve the Principal-Agent Problem? Evidence from China’s War on Air Pollution

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at the local level, a central feature of China’s “war on pollution.” Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based on city-level variation in the day that monitoring was automated, we find an immediate and lasting increase of 35 percent in reported PM10 concentrations post-automation. Moreover, automation’s introduction increased online searches for face masks and air filters, which are strong predictors of purchases. Overall, our findings suggest that the biased and imperfect information prior to automation led to suboptimal investments in defensive measures, plausibly imposing meaningful welfare costs. (JEL D82, O13, P28, Q53, Q55, Q58)

Legal Regulation ensuring Security in the Regions of the Russian Federation bordering Ukraine

The subject of the study is the legal norms regulating the basics of protection of the population and territories from emergency situations, including in conditions of armed conflict. The object of the study is the social relations developing in the field of provision of public security in the border territories of the Russian Federation. The relevance of the research topic is due to the combination of legal and practical circumstances. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as issues of internal and external security, fire safety and protection of the population and territories from man-made emergencies, civil defense measures and actions to counter terrorism in the regions bordering Ukraine since the beginning of a special military operation on February 24, 2022. The novelty of the research lies in a comprehensive analysis of legal and organizational problems in the event of new threats with the use of weapons in the Russian border regions with the proposed differentiation of individual processes for the protection of the population, which is necessary to build a high-quality and understandable system for ensuring public security on the territory of the Russian Federation. The mechanism of the established interrelations in the system of ensuring defense and security in armed conflicts outside the territory of the Russian Federation to ensure the state of protection of the individual, society and the state in the border regions of Russia is substantiated. It is proposed to comprehend the legal regime through which, in reality, the ordering of both the public security system itself should be achieved in conditions of regular manifestations of hostile military actions, and the components of this system for military security, civil defense, protection of the population and territories from natural and man-made emergencies, fire safety.

Major Problems Confronting the Covid-19 Pandemic

Beginning from December 2019, the present COVID-19 has ravaged the world for almost two years. While it appears to have peaked in many countries, it is still not under control in other areas. Worse still, new mutations of the virus continue to drive new waves of infection which manage to break through natural and human measures of defence.

BEFP: An Extension Recognition System Based on Behavioral and Environmental Fingerprinting

Browser extensions are third-party applications that can customize the browsing experience. Previous studies have shown that browser extension fingerprinting can be used to track users and reveal users’ privacy information by obtaining the browser extension list. However, the proposal of various defense measures weakens the effectiveness of the existing extension fingerprinting technologies. In this paper, we first propose two extension fingerprinting technologies: JavaScript-based environmental fingerprinting and DOM-based behavioral fingerprinting. They, respectively, capture the operation behaviors of extensions on JavaScript properties and webpage’s DOM. Second, we design BEFP, an extension recognition system which comprehensively utilizes the above two technologies to improve the uniqueness of the extension fingerprint. Finally, we collect the latest data set and carry out experiments on the actual scenario where users install multiple extensions. The results show that the true positive rate of extension recognition is as high as 96.3%. And the extension’s detectable rate of BEFP is superior to the existing technologies. Moreover, it is proved that the JavaScript-based environmental fingerprinting can complement the DOM-based fingerprinting to distinguish the extensions with the same DOM modification.

A Survey on Security of Digital Microfluidic Biochips: Technology, Attack, and Defense

As an emerging lab-on-a-chip technology platform, digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) have been widely used for executing various laboratory procedures in biochemistry and biomedicine such as gene sequencing and near-patient diagnosis, with the advantages of low reagent consumption, high precision, and miniaturization and integration. With the ongoing rapid deployment of DMFBs, however, these devices are now facing serious and complicated security challenges that not only damage their functional integrity but also affect their system reliability. In this article, we present a systematic review of DMFB security, focusing on both the state-of-the-art attack and defense techniques. First, the overall security situation, the working principle, and the corresponding fabrication technology of DMFBs are introduced. Afterwards, existing attack approaches are divided into several categories and discussed in detail, including denial of service, intellectual property piracy, bioassay tampering, layout modification, actuation sequence tampering, concentration altering, parameter modification, reading forgery, and information leakage. To prevent biochips from being damaged by these attack behaviors, a number of defense measures have been proposed in recent years. Accordingly, we further classify these techniques into three categories according to their respective defense purposes, including confidentiality protection, integrity protection, and availability protection. These measures, to varying degrees, can provide effective protection for DMFBs. Finally, key trends and directions for future research that are related to the security of DMFBs are discussed from several aspects, e.g., manufacturing materials, biochip structure, and usage environment, thus providing new ideas for future biochip protection.

Preventive portfolio against data-selling ransomware—A game theory of encryption and deception

Ransomware has risen to be among the top cyber threats in recent years. There is an alarming trend of ransomware stealing data in addition to locking files. Compared to traditional ransomware, this new data-selling ransomware can be more harmful to the victims facing the data leakage threat. Traditional wisdom of defensive measures such as data backup is less effective in preventing the attacker from making money by selling data. We propose two preventive measures designed to defend against the data-selling ransomware, i.e., preventive data encryption and preventive data deception. Users may form a preventive portfolio made up of the two preventive measures. We contribute a novel game theoretical model of the data-selling ransomware to study the equilibrium strategies of the attacker and victims. The equilibrium solution of the portfolio and tradeoff analysis of both data encryption and deception are particularly useful for the users to optimize their system to defend against ransomware attacks. Simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the preventive portfolio, which maximizes user utility while significantly reducing the profit of the attacker.

A glutamatergic basal forebrain to midbrain circuit mediates wakefulness and defensive behavior

Defensive behavior, a group of responses that evolved due to threatening stimuli, is crucial for animal survival in the natural environment. For defensive measures to be timely and successful, a high arousal state and immediate sleep-to-wakefulness transition are required. Recently, the glutamatergic basal forebrain (BF) has been implicated in sleep-wake regulation; however, the associated physiological functions and underlying neural circuits remain unknown. Here, using in vivo fiber photometry, we found that BF glutamatergic neuron is activated by various threatening stimuli, including predator odor, looming threat, sound, and tail suspension. Optogenetic activation of BF glutamatergic neurons induced a series of context-dependent defensive behaviors in mice, including escape, fleeing, avoidance, and hiding. Similar to the effects of activated BF glutamatergic cell body, photoactivation of BF glutamatergic terminals in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) strongly drove defensive behaviors in mice. Using synchronous electroencephalogram (EEG)/electromyogram (EMG) recording, we showed that photoactivation of the glutamatergic BF-VTA pathway produced an immediate transition from sleep to wakefulness and significantly increased wakefulness. Collectively, our results clearly demonstrated that the glutamatergic BF is a key neural substrate involved in wakefulness and defensive behaviors, and encodes these behaviors through glutamatergic BF-VTA pathway. Overexcitation of the glutamatergic BF-VTA pathway may be implicated in clinical psychiatric diseases characterized by exaggerated defensive responses, such as autism spectrum disorders.

Characterizing the effects of 2-phenylethylamine and coyote urine on unconditioned and conditioned defensive behaviors in adolescent male and female Long-Evans hooded rats

Predator odors provide critical information to prey species allowing them to gage potential threat via the detection of semiochemicals called kairomones. Recent reports indicate that the commercially available predator odor coyote urine (CU), and to a lesser extent 2-phenylethylamine (PEA), induce innate defensive behaviors in adult rats and mice. The aim of the present study was to see if the defense-inducing effects of CU and PEA would extend to adolescents. Specifically, we evaluated the ability of CU and PEA to induce unconditioned and conditioned defensive behavior in predator-odor naïve adolescent male and female Long-Evans hooded rats. An additional group of males were exposed to the non-predatory aversive odor formalin to control for potential general aversive properties of the odorants. The data revealed that in males, both CU and PEA, but not formalin induced measures of risk assessment, whereas CU and formalin produced avoidance of the odor source. In partial contrast, both CU and PEA produced avoidance of the odor source and increased measures of risk assessment in females. Surprisingly males failed to show any measures of defense during the cue+context conditioning test trial. In contrast, in females both odorants produced marginal effects during re-exposure to the conditioning context, with CU inducing conditioned avoidance and PEA inducing conditioned risk assessment. We conclude that commercially available CU and PEA elicit a moderate defensive profile compared to previous reports examining cat fur/skin odor in male and female adolescent rats. Future research needs to examine additional concentrations of the odorants to determine if a more robust unconditioned defensive profile (e.g., freezing) can be induced by these predator odors, and whether the defensive profile responds to standard anxiolytic drugs.

A novel approach for DDoS attacks detection in COVID-19 scenario for small entrepreneurs

The current COVID-19 issue has altered the way of doing business. Now that most customers prefer to do business online, many companies are shifting their business models, which attracts cyber attackers to launch several kinds of cyberattacks against commercial companies simultaneously. The most common and lethal DDoS attack disables the victim’s online resources. While large businesses can afford defensive measures against DDoS assaults, the situation is different for new entrepreneurs. Their lack of security resources restricts their ability to ward off DDoS attacks. Here, we aim to highlight the problems that prospective entrepreneurs should be aware of before joining the business, followed by a filtering mechanism that efficiently identifies DDoS assaults in the COVID-19 scenario, which is the subject of our research. The suggested approach employs statistical and machine learning techniques to discriminate between DDoS attack data and regular communication. Our suggested framework is cost-effective and identifies DDoS attack traffic with a 92.8% accuracy rate.

Cost–benefit analysis of coastal flood defence measures in the North Adriatic Sea

Abstract. The combined effect of global sea level rise and land subsidence phenomena poses a major threat to coastal settlements. Coastal flooding events are expected to grow in frequency and magnitude, increasing the potential economic losses and costs of adaptation. In Italy, a large share of the population and economic activities are located along the low-lying coastal plain of the North Adriatic coast, one of the most sensitive areas to relative sea level changes. Over the last half a century, this stretch of coast has experienced a significant rise in relative sea level, the main component of which was land subsidence; in the forthcoming decades, climate-induced sea level rise is expected to become the first driver of coastal inundation hazard. We propose an assessment of flood hazard and risk linked with extreme sea level scenarios, under both historical conditions and sea level rise projections in 2050 and 2100. We run a hydrodynamic inundation model on two pilot sites located along the North Adriatic coast of Emilia-Romagna: Rimini and Cesenatico. Here, we compare alternative extreme sea level scenarios accounting for the effect of planned and hypothetical seaside renovation projects against the historical baseline. We apply a flood damage model to estimate the potential economic damage linked to flood scenarios, and we calculate the change in expected annual damage according to changes in the relative sea level. Finally, damage reduction benefits are evaluated by means of cost–benefit analysis. Results suggest an overall profitability of the investigated projects over time, with increasing benefits due to increased probability of intense flooding in the near future.

Implications of bleaching on cnidarian venom ecology.

Cnidarian bleaching research often focuses on the effects on a cnidarian's physiological health and fitness, whilst little focus has been towards the impacts of these events on their venom ecology. Given the importance of a cnidarian's venom to their survival and the increasing threat of bleaching events, it is important to understand the effects that this threat may have on this important aspect of their ecology as it may have unforeseen impacts on their ability to catch prey and defend themselves. This review aims to explore evidence that suggests that bleaching may impact on each of the key aspects of a cnidarians' venom ecology: cnidae, venom composition, and venom toxicity. Additionally, the resulting energy deficit, compensatory heterotrophic feeding, and increased defensive measures have been highlighted as possible ecological factors driving these changes. Suggestions are also made to guide the success of research in this field into the future, specifically in regards to selecting a study organism, the importance of accurate symbiont and cnidae identification, use of appropriate bleaching methods, determination of bleaching, and animal handling. Ultimately, this review highlights a significant and important gap in our knowledge into how cnidarians are, and will, continue to be impacted by bleaching stress.

A Method for Identifying Tor Users Visiting Websites Based on Frequency Domain Fingerprinting of Network Traffic

Although the anonymous communication network Tor can protect the security of users’ data and privacy during their visits to the Internet, it also facilitates illegal users to access illegal websites. Website fingerprinting attacks can identify the websites that users are visiting to discern whether they are performing illegal operations. Existing methods tend to manually extract the traffic features of users visiting websites and construct machine learning or deep learning models to classify the features. While these methods can be effective in classifying unknown website traffic, the effect of classification in the use of defensive measures or onion service scenarios is not yet ideal. This paper proposes a method to identify Tor users visiting websites based on frequency domain fingerprinting of network traffic (FDF). We extract the direction and length features of circuit sequences in access traffic and combine and transform them into the frequency domain. The classification of access traffic is accomplished by using a deep learning classification model combining CNN, FC, and Self-Attention. In this paper, the proposed FDF method is experimentally validated in common scenarios of Tor networks. The results show that FDF outperforms the existing methods for classification in different Tor scenarios. It can achieve 98.8% and 94.3% classification accuracy in undefended and WTF-PAD defense scenarios, respectively. In the onion service scenario, the accuracy is improved by 4.7% over the current state-of-the-art Tik-Tok method.

Towards Double Defense Network Security Based on Multi-Identifier Network Architecture.

Recently, more and more mobile devices have been connected to the Internet. The Internet environment is complicated, and network security incidents emerge endlessly. Traditional blocking and killing passive defense measures cannot fundamentally meet the network security requirements. Inspired by the heuristic establishment of multiple lines of defense in immunology, we designed and prototyped a Double Defense strategy with Endogenous Safety and Security (DDESS) based on multi-identifier network (MIN) architecture. DDESS adopts the idea of a zero-trust network, with identity authentication as the core for access control, which solves security problems of traditional IP networks. In addition, DDESS achieves individual static security defense through encryption and decryption, consortium blockchain, trusted computing whitelist, and remote attestation strategies. At the same time, with the dynamic collection of data traffic and access logs, as well as the understanding and prediction of the situation, DDESS can realize the situation awareness of network security and the cultivation of immune vaccines against unknown network attacks, thus achieving the active herd defense of network security.

The Study on Hardware Security and Its Defense Measures

With the globalization of the IC design supply chain and the universal interconnection of computers, the problem of hardware security has become increasingly prominent. The increasing number of hardware security attacks in recent years shows that integrated circuit hardware has become an effective entry point for launching cross-layer and long-range attacks, and it is urgent for academia and industry to propose effective solutions to hardware security problems. This paper focuses on the threat models, defense measures and metrics of hardware attacks including Hardware Trojans, Reverse Engineering and SAT attacks (using algorithms based on satisfiability checking) by literature analysis and comparative analysis. The result shows that most of the protection against Hardware Trojans should be planned at the design stage. Camouflage, logic confusion and watermarking are good ways to defend Reverse Engineering, and for SAT attacks, it is necessary to improve the existing logical encryption technology and use an anti-SAT module.

Trade Policy and Energy Decarbonization - Assessing the Impact of the Eu's Trade Defense Measures Against Chinese Solar Panels

Trade Policy and Energy Decarbonization - Assessing the Impact of the Eu's Trade Defense Measures Against Chinese Solar Panels

Budapest légiháborús tűzkeresztsége

The Hungarian capital was not hit by an air attack until September 1942. At the time of the First Vienna Award, the attack on Yugoslavia and the entry into the war against the Soviet Union, there were air raid alarms in Budapest, but no bombing took place. In August-September 1942, the Soviet strategic air force launched attacks against Berlin and the capitals of the satellite states of the Third Reich. Budapest was bombed on the night of September 4 and 9. A total of 122 machines participated in the 2 campaigns. The Soviet planes flew 1,400–1,500 km from their base to the Hungarian capital, both times in bad weather conditions, so only half of the planes reached the destination. The bombs dropped from a great height without precise targeting caused only minor material damage, the personal loss was 18 dead and 84 wounded. The first attack hit Budapest unexpectedly. Until now, the Hungarian capital lived in the deceptive illusion that nothing bad could happen to him. At the time of the second attack, the military air defence and civil air raid precaution were already better prepared. In the following weeks, additional defensive measures were taken, but no further bombing occurred until 1944.

An Efficient Approach for Uncertain Event Detection in RFID Complex Event Processing

The globalization of manufacturing has increased the risk of counterfeiting as the demand grows, the production flow increases, and the availability expands. The intensifying counterfeit issues causing a worriment to companies and putting lives at risk. Companies have ploughed a large amount of money into defensive measures, but their efforts have not slowed counterfeiters. In such complex manufacturing processes, decision-making and real-time reactions to uncertain situations throughout the production process are one way to exploit the challenges. Detecting uncertain conditions such as counterfeit and missing items in the manufacturing environment requires a specialized set of technologies to deal with a flow of continuously created data. In this paper, we propose an uncertain detection algorithm (UDA), an approach to detect uncertain events such as counterfeit and missing items in the RFID distributed system for a manufacturing environment. The proposed method is based on the hashing and thread pool technique to solve high memory consumption, long processing time and low event throughput in the current detection approaches. The experimental results show that the execution time of the proposed method is averagely reduced 22% in different tests, and our proposed method has better performance in processing time based on RFID event streams.

Strategic Analysis of Maritime Situation in Indian Ocean- Challenges and Prospects for Pakistan

Strategic maritime environment of Indian Ocean is rigorously changing in the course of last two decades. Regional focus has sharply shifted from territorial to maritime borders, largely impacting transnational ties in wake of defense and security measures. This insight covers background of strategic maritime environment of Indian Ocean along with shifting trends after the launch of China’s “Belt Road Initiative”. This discourse also covers impact of COVID crisis on maritime environment of IO and recent tactical reorientation of global powers in the region. Furthermore, Strategic analysis of maritime power of Indian Ocean is done in calibration of the narrative. USA, China, India, Australia, and Pakistan are taken under keen sight of policy analysis. Opportunities and challenges for Pakistan in lieu of this discussion is penned down categorically. Development of Maritime Security Strategy of Pakistan (MSSP) with commensurate needs is focused as a result of the deliberate policy and maritime environment study of IOR. Cogent recommendations are offered to Pakistan Navy and Government of the State to fill the lapse on way to emerging naval power of Western Indian Ocean. It is qualitative research employing descriptive chronological discussion targeting theme in the larger perspective.

Development of the national cybersecurity system of Ukraine as a necessary element of information society development

The article examines modern development problems of the national cybersecurity system of Ukraine. With the emergence of new challenges and threats in cyberspace, there is a need to find new methods and ways to combat cybercrime and cyberterrorism. The current state of the fight against cybercrime in Ukraine and the prospects for capacity building and reform of the main subjects in cybersecurity in Ukraine are outlined.
 In the course of the research general philosophical, comparative and phenomenological methods were used. The aim of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of building the national cybersecurity system of Ukraine in the context of information society development. Among cyber threats, special attention is paid to cyberattacks based on ransomware viruses.
 The need to implement the provisions of the Convention on Cybercrime, in particular in the context of the draft Second Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime to strengthen cooperation and disclosure of electronic evidence, in particular on direct cooperation with service providers (Article 6) and domain names registration services (Article 7), for the disclosure of information for the identification of suspects, accelerated forms of cooperation between the Parties for the disclosure of subscriber information and traffic data (Article 8), acceleration of cooperation and disclosure of information in emergencies (Articles 9 and 10). Attention is drawn to the unconditional fulfillment of the tasks of the new Cyber Security Strategy of Ukraine, especially those related to cyber protection of critical infrastructure. It is noted that at the legislative level it is advisable to provide for cyber defense measures in peacetime and the functions of military cyber units during hostilities, as well as the possibility of preventive cyberattacks and procedures for bringing cyber defense troops to active hostilities.
 The necessity of strengthening international cooperation and improving the current legislation in the conditions of growing number and complexity of cybercrimes is substantiated.