Lightweight Overhead Research Articles

CarePlus: A general framework for hardware performance counter based malware detection under system resource competition

Hardware performance counter (HPC) has been used for malware detection because of its lightweight overhead. Unfortunately, such detection models including their software implementation and hardware implementation suffer from performance decline in environments where resource competition among programs exists in the operating system. In this paper, we propose a framework called CarePlus, which enables two kinds of implementations of hardware performance counter-based malware detection (HMD) resilient to resource competition. The core idea is to detect malware by using invariants extracted from HPC-level behaviors in resource competition environments. To achieve this, a benchmark-based resource pressure generator is designed to generate controlled resource competition environments for observing typical HPC-level behavior of a program. Then, a behavior representation network is trained to map HPC-level behaviors in any competition environment into low-dimensional representations, which allows software-implemented HMD models built on them to detect malware regardless of resource competition. Finally, an adapter is introduced to project behavior representation in the competition environment into data that conforms to the training distribution of the hardware-implemented HMD model. Using three datasets collected in different application systems (e.g., server or desktop) with different resource competition types or levels, the experimental results show that compared with existing detection models, CarePlus is helpful to improve the performance of software-implemented HMD classifier and hardware-implemented HMD classifier in the competition environment. We also prove that the classifier using CarePlus is insensitive to different application systems. Finally, we demonstrate the computational overhead.

NetSpirit: A Smart Collaborative Learning Framework for DDoS Attack Detection

Facing one of the most common threats to Internet security, the existing traffic-driven distributed denial of service (DDoS) defense schemes mainly focus on establishing more accurate detection models that highly require labeled untrusted traffic flows in the attacked network. Unfortunately, they usually ignore the communication overhead when collecting data through inherently distributed networks, which also introduces nontrivial privacy leakage. In this article, we propose a collaborative learning framework called NetSpirit to achieve effective detection of DDoS attacks. Leveraging parameter interactions instead of traffic data between network elements, its detection model can be efficiently trained and synchronized, with lightweight overhead and packet privacy protection. Meanwhile, semi-su-pervised machine learning is employed to learn from unlabeled data, and model pruning is used to further reduce the traffic transmission cost. NetSpir-it can be implemented by several major machine learning frameworks. In this article, we choose to implement the NetSpirit prototype using MindSpore in our simulated environment and use public data-sets to evaluate its effects. The experimental results demonstrate that NetSpirit can reduce by 28.28 percent the average transmission amount compared to traditional collaborative learning and achieve a detection accuracy of 63.80 percent, with a top-3 accuracy of 87.57 percent and a top-5 accuracy of 90.34 percent for the 13-classification problem of DDoS attacks using only 50 percent labeled data. Moreover, by adjusting the hyperparameters, it can make a good trade-off between computing time and transmission amount. We hope the intra- and inter-domain collaboration in NetSpirit can act as a fundamental primitive to build the intelligence layer of a trustworthy network architecture.

Integrity Authentication for SQL Query Evaluation on Outsourced Databases: A Survey

Spurred by the development of cloud computing, there has been considerable recent interest in the Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) paradigm. Users lacking in expertise or computational resources can outsource their data and database management needs to a third-party service provider. Outsourcing, however, raises an important issue of result integrity: how can the client verify with lightweight overhead that the query results returned by the service provider are correct (i.e., the same as the results of query execution locally)? This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the progress on the current approaches for result integrity of SQL query evaluation in the DaaS model. The survey also includes some potential future research directions for result integrity verification of the outsourced computations.

A High-Performance and Secure TRNG Based on Chaotic Cellular Automata Topology

As an important hardware security primitive, the true random number generator (TRNG) has been widely utilized in many critical applications. The performance and security of TRNGs are always dominant features that determine the usability of a TRNG scheme. In this article, we propose a novel TRNG design method based on a self-timed ring structure. Different from most existing self-timed circuit-based TRNGs that use ring oscillators, the basic circuit component of the proposed TRNG is a digital realization of a chaotic cellular automata topology. We utilize three different methods to validate the proposed TRNG method, including HSpice simulation, FPGA prototype, and ASIC test chips. As the proposed TRNG structure is pure digital, thus it is synthesizable with standard all-digital components. The test chips of the proposed TRNG structure are fabricated with 40 nm TSMC technology node, with a hardware footprint equals to 75 NAND gates and a die area of 270 μm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . With a PCIe setup connecting the testchip and computer, the TRNGs achieves high throughput as 1600 Mb/s. The FPGA implementation is built on a Virtex6 family FPGA from Xilinx, which also achieves lightweight overhead: 53 look-up-table (LUT) and 22 D Flip-flops (DFF). The collected random numbers from FPGA implementations and ASIC testchips are comprehensively tested with three test suites, including NIST SP800-22, NIST SP800-90B, and AIS-31 with a high pass-rate. Further, the security of the TRNG testchips and FPGA implementations are validated by applying three different attacks, including frequency injection attacks, power attacks, and thermal attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TRNG structure is immune to these attacks with trivial entropy loss.

Throughput oriented lightweight near-optimal rendezvous algorithm for cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, secondary users have to dynamically search and access spectrum unused by primary users. Due to this dynamic spectrum access nature, the rendezvous between secondary users is a great challenge for cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we propose a Throughput oriEnted lightweight Near-Optimal Rendezvous (TENOR) algorithm that does not need a common control channel. TENOR has very lightweight overhead and accomplishes near-optimal performance with regard to both throughput and rendezvous time. With TENOR, secondary users are grouped into node pairs that are spread onto different channels in a decentralized manner. The co-channel interference is minimized and the throughput is near optimal. We develop a mathematical model to analyze the performance of TENOR. Both analytical and simulation results indicate that TENOR achieves near-optimal throughput and rendezvous time, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art rendezvous algorithms in the literature.

Aspects of using ground and above-ground transport for urban passenger transportation

Abstract A need for having high-speed and cost-effective transportation systems in large cities is substantiated. A potential dramatic decrease in power consumed by public and private transport means in large cities is outlined due to reducing the number of transport means per citizen. It is established that the risk of fatal outcome is much higher for road accidents involving automobiles than for road accidents involving alternative types of transport. Above-ground transport means allowing increasing passenger transportation safety and significantly reducing power consumption are listed as a group of innovative transport technologies. Cable and light-weight overhead road or string types of above-ground transport are distinguished as the most promising. A comparative analysis of transportation systems, most popular in large cities, is given comprising the subway, monorail, high-speed tram, tram, trolleybus, bus, cable car, and string transport, using three technical and economic parameters: costs for the construction of one km of a transportation system line, average speed of transport means and specific reduced power consumption. Specifics in applying light-weight overhead road transport (also referred to as string transport) are outlined. Currently, this type of transport is at the design stage, i.e. it is not as developed as other types of transport featuring greater or lesser implementation degree. According to development engineers, string transport rails will have a bunch of stressed steel wires or carbon fibers in the cross-section. In order to implement the principle of gravity energy recovery, claimed by developers of string transport, anchor supports-stations in string transportation systems should be located at a significant height, thus, increasing construction costs. Average speeds for string transport modules are established based on the gravity energy recovery principle. Graphic images are plotted for transportation system indicators. Potential advantages and disadvantages of cable and string transport are examined. A conclusion is made that, under modern conditions, limited construction of cable and light-weight overhead transportation lines to supplement and duplicate the existing roads in large cities is expedient.

Lightweight Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Scheme for V2G Connections

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) connection allows a two-way electricity transmission between electric vehicles (EVs) and the power grid for achieving many known benefits. However, V2G connections suffer from certain security threats, such as to the EV's privacy and in authenticating the EV to the grid. In this paper, we propose a lightweight secure and privacy-preserving V2G connection scheme in which the power grid assures the confidentiality and integrity of exchanged information during (dis)charging electricity sessions and overcomes the EVs' authentication problem. The proposed scheme guarantees the financial profits of the grid and prevents EVs from acting maliciously. Meanwhile, EVs preserve their private information by generating their own pseudonym identities. In addition, the scheme maintains accountability for the electricity exchange trade. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides these security requirements by lightweight overhead, as it diminishes the number of exchanged messages during (dis)charging sessions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the total communication and computation load for V2G connection, particularly for EVs.

Lightweight Communication Overhead Authentication Scheme Using Smart Card

&lt;p&gt;Authentication takes its place to grant authorized user a remote access to certain online resources. As well, prevent unauthorized user from accessing that resources. Unforyunatly most of authentication schemes consider only security factors without taking in consideration the communication resources required. Recently, Li et. al. proposed an enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme. We analyzed their scheme and we pointed out that, their scheme required high communication overhead. Furthermore, their scheme suffer from forgery, user impersonation and server impersonation attacks. Through this paper to address aforesaid weaknesses, we propose a Lightweight communication overhead authentication scheme using smart card. The security and performance analysis shows that, our proposed scheme is lightweight communication and computation cost as well secure and can withstand wide spectrum of malicious attacks, like forgery, insider, replay and stolen smart card attack. Besides, our scheme encompasses desired security attributes. Therefore, it is suitable for practical use compared to other related scheme. &lt;/p&gt;

Reliable and energy aware query-driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks become very attractive in the research community, due to their applications in diverse fields such as military tracking, civilian applications and medical research, and more generally in systems of systems. Routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks due to the use of computationally and resource limited sensor nodes. Any routing protocol designed for use in wireless sensor networks should be energy efficient and should increase the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose an efficient and highly reliable query-driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. Our protocol provides the best theoretical energy aware routes to reach any node in the network and routes the request and reply packets with a lightweight overhead. We perform an overall evaluation of our protocol through simulations with comparison to other routing protocols. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our protocol in terms of energy consumption, load balancing of routes, and network lifetime.

Defence against packet injection in ad hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks have very limited network resources and are thus susceptible to attacks that focus on resource exhaustion, such as the injection of junk packets. These attacks cause serious denial-of-service via wireless channel contention and network congestion. Although ad hoc network security has been extensively studied, most previous work focuses on secure routing, but cannot prevent attackers from injecting a large number of junk data packets into a route that has been established. We propose an on-demand hop-by-hop source authentication protocol, namely Source Authentication Forwarding (SAF), to defend against this type of packet injection attacks. The protocol can either immediately filter out injected junk packets with very high probability or expose the true identity of an injector. Unlike other forwarding defences, this protocol is designed to fit in the unreliable environment of ad hoc networks and incurs lightweight overhead in communication and computation.

Development of aluminum alloy overhead line structure

In electrification work of railways, steel truss structure, having fabricated steel masts or concrete poles, is generally used for supporting overhead line. The structure shall need bearing capacity of soil amounting 10-20t/m2 in order to support its weight and moment. However, in the electrificationwork of JNR Tohoku Line, it was found that the ground is as weak as 1t/m2 in bearing capacity at Mutsuichikawa Station. In order to solve the problem mentioned above, the authors developed a light weight overhead line structure of 15m in span, constructed with shapes and plates of 6061-T6 aluminum alloy. The design and test results of the structure are reported in this paper.The developed light weight portal structure is as light as 40% in weight as compared with that of the ordinary structures of the same class. As the results of tests at the actual spot, it was found to be durable to support the loads, which are to be expected by overhead line structure. The structure can endure uneven settlement of struts up to 312mm induced by the weak ground. However, its recovery after the settlement will easily be adjusted owing to its light weight.