Reliable Security Measures Research Articles

Secure HPC: A workflow providing a secure partition on an HPC system

Driven by the progress of data and compute-intensive methods in various scientific domains, there is an increasing demand from researchers working with highly sensitive data to have access to the necessary computational resources to be able to adapt those methods in their respective fields. To satisfy the computing needs of those researchers cost-effectively, it is an open quest to integrate reliable security measures on existing High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. The fundamental problem with securely working with sensitive data is, that HPC systems are shared systems that are typically trimmed for the highest performance—not for high security. For instance, there are commonly no additional virtualization techniques employed, thus, users typically have access to the host operating system. Since new vulnerabilities are being continuously discovered, solely relying on the traditional Unix permissions is not secure enough. In this paper, we discuss Secure HPC, a workflow allowing users to transfer, store and analyze data with the highest privacy requirements. Our contributions are the design of a multi-node secure workflow with parallel I/O, a strict security model enforced by the system and network features, and lastly the demonstration of a medical use case. In our experiments, we see an advantage in the asynchronous execution of IO requests in dm_crypt, while reaching 80% of the ideal performance. When comparing eCryptFS with GoCryptFS as two representative filesystem-level encryption stacks, eCryptFS was twice as fast. In a real use case, we observed on average 97% of the native performance.

Digitisation of records to improve access at the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority

The change from paper to digital records management at the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) has been widely accepted to solve problems of poor records management systems and inefficiency throughout the organisation, but it brought with it some challenges. The purpose of the study was to assess the digitisation project to improve records access at ZERA. In a sequential explanatory design, the researchers used a simple mixed methods research approach to collect data. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews from purposively selected individuals because of their characteristics and significance in the context of what the study was investigating. The findings of the study revealed that the digitisation project at ZERA was a major success and it has improved the records management system in numerous ways, including improved access to records, fast and easy retrieval of information and timely access to records. However, the study revealed that digitisation comes with challenges such as the issue of security of records as cyber criminals always try to unlawfully access the organisation’s information. These challenges affect the organisation’s efficiency and effectiveness, slowing down processes and affecting the organisation’s service delivery. It also revealed that some members of the organisation find it difficult to adapt to digital change. Instead of embracing and using the new system, they lag behind and stick to the old ways of doing things. ZERA did not train its staff in the management of digital records, which contributed to resistance to digital change. The study recommends ZERA to budget for the appropriate infrastructure; employ more reliable security measures; train its staff in using, managing and securing digital records, and employ individuals with the required skills to manage digital records.

TD-RA policy-enforcement framework for an SDN-based IoT architecture

Internet of Things (IoT) has been suffering from increasing security threats since many years which compromise the whole network security. Automating the management of IoT devices helps in implementing security measures within communication systems. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been introduced as a new networking approach that enables this automation. Many approaches were developed to mitigate IoT attacks in SDN-based IoT networks. Some studies investigated the prevention of flooding attacks, while others tried to cover broader attack surfaces. However, their proposed methods are time consuming and resource-exhausting as they use complex algorithms. In this paper, we propose a lightweight secure Threat Detection (TD) and Rule Automation (RA) framework namely “TD-RA” to effectively detect and mitigate different cyber-security threats in an SDN-based IoT environment. The proposed solution is composed of a Binary and Multi-class Classification Modules (BCM/MCM) for IoT threat detection and a Policy-Enforcement Module (PEM) for attack mitigation. Different machine learning methods have been implemented and compared to solve the classification problems. It is shown that for binary classification, the Decision Tree method achieves the highest accuracy which is around 98.7%, while for multi-class classification, Random Forest achieves the highest accuracy which is around 91.1%. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can successfully detect abnormal traffic and prevent IoT threats through SDN with smaller network overhead and high performance. Moreover, the overall processing time of our security modules is significantly smaller than that of existing solutions by reaching a mean value of 6 ms. This paper also introduces a large-scale architecture that comprises clusters of controllers to maintain high availability of network services. Such an integrated security approach, including detection and mitigation techniques, provides IT industries with reliable security measures that can be implemented to increase SDN-based IoT system responsiveness to different IoT attacks.

A Highly Efficient ECC‐Based Authentication Protocol for RFID

The availability of safety has always been a challenge in all fields of computing and networking, and the development of reliable security measures for low operating power systems has been a continuous task for researchers. This paper focuses on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, whose market is tremendously growing due to the increasing need for efficient supply chain and healthcare management. Two protocols are proposed that offer mutual authentication, confidentiality, forward security, anonymity, unlinkability, scalability, and resistance against the most important security attacks. They differ in storage requirements at the server side. Both proposed protocols are very efficient as the number of required elliptic curve multiplications is limited to two at the tag side. Moreover, the schemes are also more effective and secure than other related work presented in literature. In addition, we show how to extend the protocols in order to provide authentication with respect to multiple readers.

An Investigation on The Intention to Adopt Mobile Banking on Security Perspective in Bangladesh

This research examines the information security of adopting mobile banking and suggests maximizing information security in mobile banking in different ways. Security issues pose a threat to mobile banking adoption and diffusion. Therefore, reliable security measures and improved trust improvement are suggested to address information security in adopting mobile banking for financial services. A questionnaire survey is conducted with users of mobile banking technology. Random sampling is adopted in the study. 650 questionnaires were sent to respondents, and 303 responses were recorded. A confirmatory factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted following correlation and multiple regression analysis to test the hypothesis of the study. The research finds that (1) perceived security and trust affect mobile banking self-efficacy and performance (SEP) of adopting mobile banking for financial services; (2) Reliable security measure and perceive trust improvement positively influence (SEP) of adopting mobile banking for financial services. This study shows the significance of user perceptions of security by inspecting the content of the security rules of mobile banking for clients’ levels. It includes the adoption of technology in financial services. Therefore, the study links the technology acceptance model (TAM) with the literature on perceived security and trust of adopting mobile banking for financial services. The research has applied to the banking industry to develop and expand its banking market by developing reliable security measures and improving the perceived trust of customers to conduct banking transactions using mobile banking technology.

Vulnerabilities of intelligent automobiles using TPEG update based on T-DMB and its countermeasures

With the advancement of communication methods of intelligent automobiles, it is delivering convenient and safe information to the drivers. However, such advancement of communication methods must also consider the security. Even the updates for navigation used for the intelligent automobiles are using the wireless update method, but the reality is that current update methods do not offer a reliable security measures. This paper aims to propose security countermeasures after creating an attack scenario in order to transmit the update information which is reliable by identifying the characteristics on the wireless update for navigation.

T-DMB 기반의 TPEG 업데이트 취약점을 이용한 공격 기법

The development of communication method for a variety of intelligent automobiles are delivering comfortable and safe information. However the development of such communication method must also think about security. Even the update of navigation to be used for intelligent automobiles uses the wireless updating methods but the updating methods currently being used has no reliable security measures. The navigation communications used in the intelligent automobiles are being provided with TTI(Traffic and Travel Information) service using a variety of methods by the countries. In the case of Korea, most are based on T-DMB using the TPEG method for transmitting the information. By identifying the characteristics on the navigation wireless update, a security solution is proposed for delivering the reliable update information after creating the attack scenario.

Maximum Damage Battery Depletion Attack in Mobile Sensor Networks

Developing reliable security measures against outbreaks of malware will facilitate the proliferation of wireless sensing technologies. The first step toward this goal is to investigate potential attack strategies and the extent of damage they can incur. The malware at each infective node may seek to contact more susceptible nodes by amplifying the transmission range and the media scanning rate and thereby accelerate its spread. This may however lead to (a) easier detection of the malware and thus more effective counter-measure by the network, and (b) faster depletion of the battery which may in turn thwart further spread of the infection and/or exploitation of that node. We assume the viewpoint of the malware and cast the problem of dynamically selecting the transmission range and media access rate of the infective nodes as an optimal control problem. We utilize Pontryagin's maximum principle to find an optimum solution, and prove that the maximum damage can be attained using simple three-phase bang-bang strategies.

Optimal propagation of security patches in mobile wireless networks

Reliable security measures against outbreaks of malware is imperative to enable large scale proliferation of wireless technologies. Immunization and healing of the nodes through dissemination of security patches can counter the spread of a malware upon an epidemic outbreak. The distribution of patches however burdens the bandwidth which is scarce in wireless networks. The trade-offs between security risks and resource consumption can be attained by activating at any given time only fractions of dispatchers and dynamically selecting their packet transmission rates. We formulate the above trade-offs as an optimal control problem that seek to minimize the aggregate network costs that depend on security risks and resource consumed by the countermeasures. Using Pontryagin's maximum principle, we prove that the dynamic control strategies have simple structures. When the resource consumption cost is concave, optimal strategy is to use maximum resources for distribution of patches until a threshold time, upon which, the patching should halt. When the resource consumption cost is convex, the above transition is strict but continuous.