Quantitative Security Evaluation Research Articles

Study on Entropy Weighting Method of Quantitative Evaluation of Energy Security: The Case of Latin America

Study on Entropy Weighting Method of Quantitative Evaluation of Energy Security: The Case of Latin America

Fallen Sanctuary: A Higher-Order and Leakage-Resilient Rekeying Scheme

This paper presents a provably secure, higher-order, and leakage-resilient (LR) rekeying scheme named LR Rekeying with Random oracle Repetition (LR4), along with a quantitative security evaluation methodology. Many existing LR primitives are based on a concept of leveled implementation, which still essentially require a leak-free sanctuary (i.e., differential power analysis (DPA)-resistant component(s)) for some parts. In addition, although several LR pseudorandom functions (PRFs) based on only bounded DPA-resistant components have been developed, their validity and effectiveness for rekeying usage still need to be determined. In contrast, LR4 is formally proven under a leakage model that captures the practical goal of side-channel attack (SCA) protection (e.g., masking with a practical order) and assumes no unbounded DPA-resistant sanctuary. This proof suggests that LR4 resists exponential invocations (up to the birthday bound of key size) without using any unbounded leak-free component, which is the first of its kind. Moreover, we present a quantitative SCA success rate evaluation methodology for LR4 that combines the bounded leakage models for LR cryptography and a state-of-the-art information-theoretical SCA evaluation method. We validate its soundness and effectiveness as a DPA countermeasure through a numerical evaluation; that is, the number of secure calls of a symmetric primitive increases exponentially by increasing a security parameter under practical conditions.

A quantitative security evaluation and analysis model for web applications based on OWASP application security verification standard

In today's digital world, web applications are popular tools used by businesses. As more and more applications are deployed on the web, they are seen as increasingly attractive targets by malicious actors eager to exploit any security gaps present. Organizations are always at risk for potential vulnerabilities in their web-based software systems, which can lead to data loss, service interruption, and lack of trust. Therefore, organizations need to have an effective and efficient method for assessing and analyzing the security of acquired web-based software to ensure adequate confidence in its use. Quantitative security evaluation employs mathematical and computational techniques to express the security level that a system reaches. This research focuses on improving the quantitative analysis of web application security evaluation. We strive to unite the Open Web Application Security Project's (OWASP) Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) into a structural and analyzable model, which aims to efficiently evaluate web application security levels while providing meaningful insights into their strengths and weaknesses.

Quantitative Evaluation of Android Application Privacy Security Based on Privacy Policy and Behaviour

The emerging landscape of Android applications in mobile phones encompasses industries involving millions and billions of app developers to improve usability and comfort for smartphone users. Popular apps are categorized into social media, entertainment, games, news, lifestyle, health and fitness. In this vein, privacy security is categorized into two major sections: distribution and development of particularities and running software on the user's mobile. According to European Union, the major issues of legal and regulations arising from the requirement from the GDPR, the Personal information protection law of China and other related regulations combined with the behaviour and privacy policy of application. In this article, Privacy security was quantitatively analyzed through data collection and analysis of scores by comparing the comprehensive use of ML, NLP and other technologies. E-privacy was regulated in the environment of mobile applications. The features were analyzed in privacy and data protection. The scope of this study is to evaluate the privacy security of the application in Android devices based on the privacy policy and behaviour.

Quantitative Security Evaluation of Intrusion Tolerant Systems With Markovian Arrivals

Intrusion tolerance is an ability to keep the correct service by masking the intrusion based on fault-tolerant techniques. With the rapid development of virtualization, the virtual machine (VM)-based intrusion tolerance scheme has been developed according to the concept of state machine replication with Byzantine fault tolerant technique. In this article, we present the quantitative security evaluation of the VM-based intrusion tolerant system with the time to security failure. We assume that the arrival stream follows a Markovian arrival process (MAP), which is one of the most general stochastic processes, and analytically derive the Laplace-Stieltjes transform of time to security failure based on the analysis of the MAP/G/1/∞ queue.

Quantitative evaluation of security of nuclear energy supply: United States as a case study

Nuclear energy utilization became an emerging issue in the global energy security agenda after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Thus, it is crucial to develop a multifaceted measure to assess the performance of security of nuclear energy supply and to aid policy decisions relevant to nuclear energy utilization. For this purpose, quantitative evaluation method for security of nuclear energy supply has been investigated. Indicators which are associated with security of nuclear energy supply are identified by taking the nuclear-specific characteristics including 3S (safeguard, safety and security) and public opinion into account. The methodology for quantitative analysis of security of nuclear energy supply is developed based on the dedicated six indicators by employing the different weighting and aggregation approaches. Finally, composite indices for security of nuclear energy supply are assessed in United States as a case study during the period between 2000 and 2012. It was found that the nuclear energy supply security in U.S. has improved during this target period, and the specific externality which potentially affects nuclear energy supply security could be identified using the proposed method.

A Hybrid Model of Hesitant Fuzzy Decision-Making Analysis for Estimating Usable-Security of Software

The main idea for practicing research towards security is to maintain usability of the software as well. This can be achieved by making less complex and high secure software. Though considerable efforts have been made in this context by the developers and security experts, the standard of usable-security is not the same as it should be. Therefore, it is important to research more on the most conversant mechanisms for assessing and increasing the usable-security of software. The quantitative evaluation of usability and security is an important part in increasing the level of secure software. This paper, in particular, is intended to estimate the usable-security of software and achieve the objective of developing software with optimum security while retaining its usability. The decision-makers often find it difficult to integrate security and usability. Hence this paper approaches the integration of usability and security with its contributing attributes. Also, in this league, the present research study suggests a novel technique which is the hybrid of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Hesitant Fuzzy (HF) sets, and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to significantly assess the usability along with security. To test the usefulness of the proposed approach hybrid HF-AHP-TOPSIS technique, the researchers applied it onto software developed for Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in India. Furthermore, the procedural sensitivity was also achieved by using the various versions of the method. The findings of the usability along with security assessment insist that this inventive hybrid procedure would be the most conversant mechanism for determining the usable-security of software. Further these findings will be helpful in managing security without affecting the usability for end user.

Beyond 2014

Attack trees are a well established and commonly used framework for security modeling. They provide a readable and structured representation of possible attacks against a system to protect. Their hierarchical structure reveals common features of the attacks and enables quantitative evaluation of security, thus highlighting the most severe vulnerabilities to focus on while implementing countermeasures. Since in real-life studies attack trees have a large number of nodes, their manual creation is a tedious and error-prone process, and their analysis is a computationally challenging task. During the last half decade, the attack tree community witnessed a growing interest in employing formal methods to deal with the aforementioned difficulties. We survey recent advances in graphical security modeling with focus on the application of formal methods to the interpretation, (semi-)automated creation, and quantitative analysis of attack trees and their extensions. We provide a unified description of existing frameworks, compare their features, and outline interesting open questions.

Reactive side-channel countermeasures: Applicability and quantitative security evaluation

The security of cryptographic implementations running on embedded systems is threatened by side-channel attacks. Such attacks retrieve a secret key from a computing device observing the information leaking on unintended channels such as the energy consumed during a computation. The vast majority of the countermeasures proposed against such attacks aims at preventing the attacker from exploiting fruitfully the information leaking on the side-channel either altering it or hiding it within a higher noise envelope. Whilst all these countermeasures provide a quantitative security margin against an attacker, they do not provide an indication of having been successfully overcome, thus forsaking the possibility of taking a reactive action upon an eventual security breach. In an effort to propose a reactive countermeasure, we describe our proposal suggesting the introduction of redundant computations employing fixed fake keys (a.k.a. chaffs) to pollute the leaked information with plausible albeit deceitful one. We provide an in depth analysis of the proposed approach, highlighting the constraints to its effective applicability, and the boundary conditions which allow its employment for the securization of a system. We detail the attacker model considered, and the reactive security margin provided by the proposed scheme, highlighting the extent of the realizability of a reactive countermeasure, given the nature of the side-channel information. To provide experimental backing to our analysis, effectiveness and efficiency results on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher implementation as well as lightweight block ciphers implementations running on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor are shown.

A Stochastic Game Model for Evaluating the Impacts of Security Attacks Against Cyber-Physical Systems

A quantitative security evaluation in the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which operate under intentional disturbances, is an important open problem. In this paper, we propose a stochastic game model for quantifying the security of CPS. The proposed model divides the security modeling process of these systems into two phases: (1) intrusion process modeling and (2) disruption process modeling. In each phase, the game theory paradigm predicts the behaviors of the attackers and the system. By viewing the security states of the system as the elements of a stochastic game, Nash equilibriums and best-response strategies for the players are computed. After parameterization, the proposed model is analytically solved to compute some quantitative security measures of CPS. Furthermore, the impact of some attack factors and defensive countermeasures on the system availability and mean time-to-shutdown is investigated. Finally, the proposed model is applied to a boiling water power plant as an illustrative example.

Idiosyncratic Risk, Aggregate Risk, and the Welfare Effects of Social Security

We ask whether a pay-as-you-go financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic productivity and aggregate business cycle risk. We show analytically that the whole welfare benefit from joint insurance against both risks is greater than the sum of benefits from insurance against the isolated risk components. One reason is the convexity of the welfare gain in total risk. The other reason is a direct risk interaction which amplifies the utility losses from consumption risk. We proceed with a quantitative evaluation of social security's welfare effects. We find that introducing an unconditional minimum pension leads to substantial welfare gains in expectation, even net of the welfare losses from crowding out. About 60% of the welfare gains would be missing when simply summing up the isolated benefits.

Quantitative Indicators of Social Sustainability and Determination of Their Interdependencies. Example Analysis for a Wastewater Treatment Plant

Social impact as growing concern is becoming an important aspect of the design and operation of wastewater treatment processes. A need has arisen for the development of quantitative indicators of social sustainability. Design and operation of wastewater treatment processes additionally require simple and effective methods to represent and understand the interconnections between the indicators of social sustainability. This paper presents an approach for the development of quantitative social sustainability indicators, and introduces a novel method for defining and visualizing indicator interdependence. It outlines equations for quantitative evaluation of health, safety and security, and comfort. Weighting method of the bipartite network of the relations between the indicators and stakeholders enables clear visualization of the interdependencies of the indicators and facilitates simplification of the set of social sustainability criteria. It creates a basis for reduction of amount of data needed for performing the analysis and reducing the social sustainability assessment’s costs.

Automatic Contract Insertion with CCBot

Memory corruption errors in C/C++ programs remain the most common source of security vulnerabilities in today's systems. Control-flow hijacking attacks exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to divert program execution away from the intended control flow. Researchers have spent more than a decade studying and refining defenses based on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), and this technique is now integrated into several production compilers. However, so far no study has systematically compared the various proposed CFI mechanisms, nor is there any protocol on how to compare such mechanisms. We compare a broad range of CFI mechanisms using a unified nomenclature based on (i) a qualitative discussion of the conceptual security guarantees, (ii) a quantitative security evaluation, and (iii) an empirical evaluation of their performance in the same test environment. For each mechanism, we evaluate (i) protected types of control-flow transfers, (ii) the precision of the protection for forward and backward edges. For open-source compiler-based implementations, we additionally evaluate (iii) the generated equivalence classes and target sets, and (iv) the runtime performance.

Control-Flow Integrity

Memory corruption errors in C/C++ programs remain the most common source of security vulnerabilities in today’s systems. Control-flow hijacking attacks exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to divert program execution away from the intended control flow. Researchers have spent more than a decade studying and refining defenses based on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI); this technique is now integrated into several production compilers. However, so far, no study has systematically compared the various proposed CFI mechanisms nor is there any protocol on how to compare such mechanisms. We compare a broad range of CFI mechanisms using a unified nomenclature based on (i) a qualitative discussion of the conceptual security guarantees, (ii) a quantitative security evaluation, and (iii) an empirical evaluation of their performance in the same test environment. For each mechanism, we evaluate (i) protected types of control-flow transfers and (ii) precision of the protection for forward and backward edges. For open-source, compiler-based implementations, we also evaluate (iii) generated equivalence classes and target sets and (iv) runtime performance.

SecIVo: a quantitative security evaluation framework for internet voting schemes

Voting over the Internet is subject to a number of security requirements. Each voting scheme has its own bespoke set of assumptions to ensure these security requirements. The criticality of these assumptions depends on the election setting (e.g., how trustworthy the voting servers or the voting devices are). The consequence of this is that the security of different Internet voting schemes cannot easily be compared. We have addressed this shortcoming by developing SecIVo, a quantitative security evaluation framework for Internet voting schemes. On the basis of uniform adversarial capabilities, the framework provides two specification languages, namely qualitative security models and election settings. Upon system analysis, system analysts feed the framework with qualitative security models composed of adversarial capabilities. On the other side, election officials specify their election setting in terms of—among others—expected adversarial capabilities. The framework evaluates the qualitative security models within the given election setting and returns satisfaction degrees for a set of security requirements. We apply SecIVo to quantitatively evaluate Helios and Remotegrity within three election settings. It turns out that there is no scheme which outperforms the other scheme in all settings. Consequently, selecting the most appropriate scheme from a security perspective depends on the environment into which the scheme is to be embedded.

Beyond the Interconnections: Split Manufacturing in RF Designs

With the globalization of the integrated circuit (IC) design flow of chip fabrication, intellectual property (IP) piracy is becoming the main security threat. While most of the protection methods are dedicated for digital circuits, we are trying to protect radio-frequency (RF) designs. For the first time, we applied the split manufacturing method in RF circuit protection. Three different implementation cases are introduced for security and design overhead tradeoffs, i.e., the removal of the top metal layer, the removal of the top two metal layers and the design obfuscation dedicated to RF circuits. We also developed a quantitative security evaluation method to measure the protection level of RF designs under split manufacturing. Finally, a simple Class AB power amplifier and a more sophisticated Class E power amplifier are used for the demonstration through which we prove that: (1) the removal of top metal layer or the top two metal layers can provide high-level protection for RF circuits with a lower request to domestic foundries; (2) the design obfuscation method provides the highest level of circuit protection, though at the cost of design overhead; and (3) split manufacturing may be more suitable for RF designs than for digital circuits, and it can effectively reduce IP piracy in untrusted off-shore foundries.

ICOPE-15-1044 Quantitative evaluation of national energy security by using multi-objective analysis

ICOPE-15-1044 Quantitative evaluation of national energy security by using multi-objective analysis

Social Security and the Interactions between Aggregate and Idiosyncratic Risk

We ask whether a pay-as-you-go-financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic productivity and aggregate business cycle risk. We show analytically that the whole welfare benefit from joint insurance against both risks is greater than the sum of benefits from insurance against the isolated risk components. One reason is the convexity of the welfare gain in total risk. The other reason is a direct risk interaction which amplifies the utility losses from consumption risk. We proceed with a quantitative evaluation of social security’s welfare effects. We find that introducing social security leads to substantial welfare gains in expectation, even net of the welfare losses from crowding out. About 60% of the welfare gains would be missing when simply summing up the isolated benefits.

Attack modelling and security evaluation based on stochastic activity networks

An appropriate model of attacker behaviour is a key requirement for quantitative security evaluation. Motivated by the fact that attacker behaviour is affected by some social factors such as monetary costs and benefits rather than merely the technical aspects of the target system, we proposed an attack modelling approach based on a hierarchical and coloured extension of stochastic activity networks HCSANs. This approach is called HCSAN-based attack modelling. By using this approach, multistage attacks can be modelled following the attack tree paradigm. Also, attacker behaviour can be modelled as a strategic decision-making process that accounts for the following factors affecting the attacker's decisions: 1 the goals of attack; 2 the cost and risk associated with available strategies; and 3 the target system's possible responses. Furthermore, we put forward an analytic solution method to measure security attributes i.e. confidentiality, integrity and availability and estimated two important quantitative security measures, which are the mean time to security failure and attack success probability. Additionally, we introduce a parametric sensitivity analysis method, which can be used to determine the sensitivity of the evaluated measures to different model parameters and optimize the model accordingly. Finally, we demonstrated how this approach can be used for survivability enhancement of the system using a well-known risk assessment process. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evaluation of the spatio-temporal pattern of urban ecological security using remote sensing and GIS

Research in urban ecology has recently focused on the field of ecological security. Ecological security should be assessed at different scales, from global (to understand some processes of global change) to regional (to understand processes in specific areas) to urban (to consider the processes of urban development). Remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GISs) are widely utilized in ecological security evaluation, with remotely sensed images applied to determine the structure and quantitative indicators of urban ecological systems and GIS to manipulate, analyse, and visualize multisource information in urban ecology. This article focuses on urban ecological security assessment based on multitemporal RS information and GIS. As a case study, the changes in spatial patterns of urban ecological security in Xuzhou City are evaluated during its transformation from a coal mining industrial city to a modern one with decreasing mining production. The popular ‘pressure–state–response’ conceptual model is used to construct an evaluation framework according to geographical properties and data availability. A hierarchical weighted model is adopted to take different factors into account and determine the state of ecological security in the study area. Using Landsat Thematic Mapper/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (TM/ETM+) images as the main RS data source, the derived parameters, such as vegetation index, urban thermal information, and landscape pattern, are integrated to depict the structure and properties of the urban ecological system. Other ancillary information, including mining pressure, water pollution pressure, population density, and ecological flexibility are collected and managed by ArcGIS. The GIS is then used to manage ecological factors derived from remotely sensed data, statistical reports, and geographical data, to evaluate and analyse urban ecological security, and to generate quantitative evaluation and spatial patterns of ecological security. The resulting maps of urban ecological security situations in 1987, 1994, 2000, 2005, and 2007 are analysed in both temporal and spatial dimensions. By analysing urban ecological security in both temporal and spatial dimensions, it is concluded that the ecological security of Xuzhou City is under increasing pressure. Influenced by the pressure of urbanization and mining industry development, the unsafe areas of Xuzhou City have greatly expanded, and with accelerating speed. Finally, suggestions for improving urban ecological security are provided.