Security Logs Research Articles

The paradox of critical security and the African solutions to African problems

AbstractIn this article, I attempt to theorise the nature of the African multilateral security system. In doing so, I interrogate the question: how does the emancipatory logic of critical security relate to the post-colonial ideal of self-determination within the context of the African multilateral security system? The question is worthy of an attempt, for it brings the post-colonial concerns of African security into the discussion of critical security. For the empirical exposition, I draw on the idea of African solutions to African problems (Afsol to Afprob) as the hallmark of Africa’s collective security system to argue that at the ideational level, the emancipatory logic converges with self-determination. However, I observe that, at the level of operationalisation, the emancipatory logic of critical security diverges from the post-colonial ideal of self-determination. This is owing to the privileges of power reflected in the representational and financial capacity of the actors involved. This facilitates the reproduction of the Eurocentric dependency which Afsol to Afprob sought to supplant. The outcome is a paradox of critical security in post-colonial contexts exemplified in the disaggregation of emancipation into three emancipatory logics: the urgent, preferred, and desired.

Enhancing Microsoft 365 Security: Integrating Digital Forensics Analysis to Detect and Mitigate Adversarial Behavior Patterns

This research article investigates the effectiveness of digital forensics analysis (DFA) techniques in identifying patterns and trends in malicious failed login attempts linked to public data breaches or compromised email addresses in Microsoft 365 (M365) environments. Pattern recognition techniques are employed to analyze security logs, revealing insights into negative behavior patterns. The findings contribute to the literature on digital forensics, opposing behavior patterns, and cloud-based cybersecurity. Practical implications include the development of targeted defense strategies and the prioritization of prevalent threats. Future research should expand the scope to other cloud services and platforms, capture evolving trends through more prolonged and extended analysis periods, and assess the effectiveness of specific mitigation strategies for identified tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

Matters of care or matters of security: feminist reflections on prosecuting terrorism financing

ABSTRACT International treaties and European directives have put new legal responsibilities on EU member states to pre-emptively monitor and prosecute terrorist activities and offences. In particular, the prosecution of terrorism financing has been an important focus to prevent material and ideological support for terrorist organisations. Yet, a clear distinction between humanitarian aid and terrorism financing in a complex war zone is not always easy to draw: Which of the involved parties is perceived as a terrorist threat, and what is exactly considered humanitarian aid work? In this paper, we empirically unpack how EU counter-terrorism laws and policies are actually practiced during court trials. We investigate the legal distinction between humanitarian aid and terrorism financing in Syria, specifically centring on trials from the Netherlands and Germany. Drawing on the growing debates in critical security and legal studies on materiality, we focus on how materials presented during trials such as baby products, weapons, and money, are inscribed with a particular security logic to reach a legal verdict. Introducing the concept of “matters of care/security”, we connect these debates and findings to insights from feminist and post-colonial studies to critically inquire how racialised and gendered assumptions on terrorist threat impact terrorism trials.

A different logic of polity building? The Russian invasion of Ukraine and EU citizens’ demand for social security

ABSTRACT The present study considers whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes an opportunity for EU policy centralisation and polity-building in non-military domains, according to a social security logic. It argues that the war and growing concerns about energy security and prices have presented EU policymakers with a transboundary policy puzzle on how to ensure autonomy in energy supply, fight climate change and protect household disposable income. Then, it examines public preferences on energy and social policy options, evaluating whether the war contributed to increasing demand for supra-national capacity building and investigating the priorities (and divides) across and within EU countries in these policy areas. The findings show that social security concerns related to the war in Ukraine have been translated into greater support for policy centralisation, but they have not helped to overcome divides over conflicting policy goals, leaving policymakers with some difficult decisions.

Generating instability? The impact of the EU's hybrid migration governance in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan

AbstractThis article analyses the migration agreements between the European Union (EU) and Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. These international policy frameworks were negotiated in tandem with one another, and all were announced in 2016. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the three countries, the article argues that they fuse humanitarian elements with a bloc‐based security logic in an ad‐hoc mix that lacks substantive legitimacy in the three states, rendering the frameworks unstable. The article introduces the idea of hybrid migration governance which we have developed inductively to conceptualise the empirical findings from our fieldwork, building on existing work on hybridity in the conflict and security studies literature and Nora Stel's conception of governance as the ability to shape the field of action of others. In our usage, hybrid migration governance refers to the efficacy of EU intervention in the institutional management of migration in the three case study countries (‘shaping the field of action’), the ‘frozen’ character of the societal relations formed through this process and their underlying lack of domestic legitimacy. In conclusion, we argue that hybrid migration governance poses problem for the EU's ‘Barcelona’ conception of human security, because rather than expanding the bloc's ‘zone of security’ to the international neighbourhood, these policies have generated downstream security‐risks.

LCHAIN: A Secure Log Storage Mechanism using IPFS and Blockchain Technology

Data security is a very important and crucial part of Cloud storage. Day by day, thousands of operations function over the Cloud, verify logs generated from all transactions is very difficult. The attacker may temper or remove targeted logs or attack traces on the system with stealthy techniques. It is required to maintain the security of the log to trace back all the transactions to identify such tempering and loss of logs. Temper-proof log storage is a challenging issue on the Cloud. To overcome the issue, we propose strong and secure log storage using Blockchain technology and IPFS. Detecting log tempering and tracing is challenging due to large log volumes. We recommend the usage of Blockchain technology due to its inherent feature of immutability to address the issue of log tempering. We present LChain which provides immutable storage of logs with tracing. Blockchain technology helps yp create immutable logs but also offers non-repudiation and scalability. Smart contracts are used for efficient searching and enhancing computational power.

Naïve no more: Foreign direct investment screening in the European Union

AbstractThis paper asks what explains the creation and comparative features of national Investment Screening Mechanisms (ISMs) in Europe. After providing a brief history and definition of ISMs, we provide descriptive patterns about the similarities and differences in the investment screening features of national ISMs in EU member states. We then explain differences in national screening policies by focusing on the role of public debt, Chinese investment, R&D expenditures and various geographic groupings. Finally, we make three policy arguments about the rise of ISMs in Europe: (1) ISMs have not been designed as protectionist instruments, (2) the politics of inward investment screening reflects a shift from economic to security logic in addressing the fundamental tension between the benefits and vulnerabilities of open markets and (3) the EU can use the ‘commercialisation’ of security to extend its own competence in the security sphere. We conclude by considering how the rapid expansion of investment screening in Europe could affect economic openness, as well as the role of the EU as a global actor.

Māori perspectives on justice for Pacific Islanders at risk of climate-induced displacement

Anthropogenic climate change is causing ocean acidification and sea levels to rise, threatening the economic, food and physical security of low-lying Pacific Islands. Debates ensue as to whether these effects will force islanders to migrate and, if so, how the international community should conceive of and provide justice for climate-induced displacees. These debates pivot around questions of causality, agency, justice and state security. By focusing on the Indigenous intercultural dynamics that permeate the South Pacific, especially with regard to Polynesian solidarity, this study aims to add further nuance to the debate on how to govern climate-induced migration in the Pacific. Māori environmental activists and experts were interviewed for their views on justice for at-risk Pacific Islanders. Analysis revealed that interviewees conceptualized justice through a holistic prism, accounting for short- and long-term spiritual, psychological and socio-economic impacts of displacement. Drawing on Māori genealogy and principles, interviewees expressed a strong preference and perceived obligation to assist Polynesian displacees. A three-pronged paradigm of justice for Pacific Island displacees emerged based on the concepts of whakapapa, whakamana and rangatiratanga, promoting empowerment, epistemological equity and sovereignty. Rooted in Māori philosophy, this paradigm departs from the state security logic currently dominating climate change and migration discourses.

Review of the book by Smirnov A.A. "Formation of the system of legal support of information and psychological security in the Russian Federation"

This review is devoted to the book by Smirnov A.A. «Formation of the system of legal support of information and psychological security in the Russian Federation». The author reviews the existing approaches to the classification of types of information and psychological impact, presents the results of the analysis of the current Russian legislation, identifies problematic areas of domestic law, and presents recommendations regarding the improvement of legal mechanisms for ensuring information and psycho- logical security in Russia, taking into account foreign experience.

Militarized urbanism in the cold war era: The resettlement of the refugees in Khan Younis

The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives—rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid—to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel’s resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering ‘militarized urbanism’ as a novel description of the violence of resettlement. Situated at the junction between military technologies and cultural practices, ‘militarized urbanism’ represents the transformation of the geopolitics of colonial warfare to the colonization of the everyday, where urban and architectural knowledge are reshaped by security logics in the mediation of conflicting civilian and political agendas.

Bourdieu the ethnographer: Grounding the habitus of the ‘far-right’ voter

This article pushes the work of Bourdieu to more ethnographic directions within international social sciences, particularly studies of everyday (in)security. Thematically, it looks at how transformations in global politics towards increased xenophobia and the normalisation of ‘far-right’ politics can be examined through mobilising ‘Bourdieu the ethnographer’ (Blommaert, 2005). Using the example of Sweden, and an ethnography of everyday life around a refugee resettlement facility in 2013 and 2014, the article argues that Bourdieu the ethnographer provides important conceptual tools for understanding the way in which logics of (in)security shifted ever further into everyday life. This thus offers an interesting way to think about the normalisation of far-right and xenophobic politics more broadly. Through conducting this specific type of Bourdieu-inspired ethnography, the article empirically grounds the ‘habitus’ of the so-called ‘far-right’ voter. Taking seriously the temporal dimension of habitus, Bourdieu the ethnographer orients analysis towards transformation, evolution and flux, allowing ‘far-right’ to be conceived relationally. In the Swedish case, we are thus able to trace the shift from a ‘welcoming’ to an ‘exclusionary’ type of politics.

Redundancy Attack: Breaking Logic Locking Through Oracleless Rationality Analysis

During the last decade, logic locking has been proposed to protect integrated circuits against piracy and reverse engineering threats. Functional pruning attacks, such as the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attack, have greatly challenged the security of logic locking techniques, yet they require access to an oracle and suffer from muted efficacy on inherently SAT-hard circuits. In this article, we present a novel oracleless attack on both XOR and MUX-based logic locking by analyzing the redundancy level deviation under different keys. Our fundamental insight is that incorrect keys would produce circuits that violate universally followed design principles, prominent among which stands the minimization of logic redundancy. We leverage the redundancy-level deviation produced by individual and pairs of key bits to recover key bit values and establish pairwise equivalence, leading to an efficient nearly linear time attack algorithm. We experimentally verify that the proposed attack quickly unveils more than half of the key bits with high accuracy on 21 ISCAS’85 and MCNC circuits locked with a variety of locking techniques. To fortify logic locking in the face of this successful redundancy attack, we supplement this article with a key gate insertion methodology that smooths the deviation in redundancy level. We achieve this goal by selecting key gates that exhibit pairwise dissociation among a set of individually secure locations, which effectively breaks down correlations in arbitrary sets of key gates and, thus, imposes a consistent redundancy level throughout the key space. Experimental results confirm the strong redundancy attack resilience of the proposed defense strategy.

The New Pact on Migration and Asylum: Another Step in the EU Migration-Security Continuum or Preservation of the Status Quo?

Abstract In 2020 the New Pact on Migration and Asylum was presented as a normalization of EU migration, asylum and border management policies in the EU, a much-needed reform which is supposed to strike a balance between security, solidarity and protection of human lives. The aim of this article is to investigate to what extent the proposed reform is changing the modes and trajectories of the securitization of migration in the EU. In doing so, it focuses on specific security logics promoted in the text, discussing how different iterations of security are strengthened and/or marginalized in the EU securitizing framework. Building on the approach of ‘securitization as the work of framing’, the article indicates that the pact has strengthened the risk-management and resilience-centred security logics while at the same time downplaying the role of humanitarianism. It also reveals a strong role for ‘exceptionality’ as a security logic, which has gained prominence especially in relation to crisis management and a wider application of militarized and robust measures.

A New Optimal Method for the Secure Design of Combinational Circuits against Hardware Trojans Using Interference Logic Locking

Effective resistance to intellectual property theft, reverse engineering, and hardware Trojan insertion in integrated circuit supply chains is increasingly essential, for which many solutions have been proposed. Accordingly, strong attacks are also designed in this field. One way to achieve the above goal is obfuscation. The hardware obfuscation method hides the primary function of the circuit and the normal Netlist from the attacker by adding several key gates in the original Netlist. The functionality circuit is correct only if the correct key is applied; otherwise, the circuit is obfuscated. In recent years, various obfuscation methods have been proposed. One is logic locking, the most prominent hardware protection technique since it can protect against untrusted items. Logic locking induces functional and structural changes to a design even before the layout generation. We secured the circuit against hardware Trojan insertion with a secure logic locking method based on the insertion of key gates in interference mode. We call our proposed method Secure Interference Logic Locking, SILL. SILL is based on minimum controllability in paths with maximum fan-out. In this method, we have reduced the number of key gates required for circuit obfuscation and created the maximum Hamming distance between normal and obscure outputs. In addition, the key gates are added to the circuit’s complete interference, and the AES algorithm is used to generate the key. Our proposed method, SILL, was simulated in the Vivado simulation environment; the algorithms used in this method were prepared in VHDL language and designed to allow parallel execution, then applied on the original Netlist of the ISCAS85 benchmark circuits. By analyzing and comparing the results of this simulation to recent works, the amount of hardware consumption has decreased (about 5% space consumption and about a 0.15-nanosecond time delay). Then, the SAT attack algorithm was tested on ISCAS85 benchmark circuits that were obfuscated with SILL. The execution time of the attack in the second attempt was 0.24 nanoseconds longer compared to similar recent works, and it timed out in the fourth attempt. The resistance of our proposed method, having less hardware overhead and higher speed is more effective against SAT attacks than the existing conventional methods.

Trust in interagency collaboration: The role of institutional logics and hybrid professionals

AbstractInteragency collaboration among social workers, teachers, and police is key to countering violent extremism in the Nordic countries by securing comprehensive assessment of cases of concern. Yet, previous research indicates that different institutional logics—perceptions of fundamental goals, strategies, and grounds for attention in efforts to counter violent extremists—exist across professions and challenge collaboration and trust building in practice. In this article, we empirically investigate these claims across social workers (n = 1,105), teachers (n = 1,387), and police (n = 1,053) in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Using results from online surveys with professionals, we investigate the distribution of a ‘societal security logic’ and a ‘social care logic’ across professions and the degree to which these institutional logics translate into mutual trust. Through a comparison of institutional logics among practitioners with and without practical experience of interagency collaboration, we investigate whether and how institutional logics tend to mix and merge in hybrid organizational spaces. We conclude that differences in institutional logics across professions are differences in degree rather than in kind, but that such differences are important in shaping mutual trust and that experiences of interagency collaboration are correlated with a convergence toward a ‘social care logic’ conception of countering violent extremism.

Law and politics in posmodernity: internationalist liberalism

The most popular stream in international relations studies is associated with political realism as such emphasizes competition between States always seeking an advantageous position, whose description shows that such a rivalry can be ruthless. However, internationalist Liberalism explores alternatively the association tactics that help States to position themselves strategically on the international stage by seeking allies with those who share common interests. The promotion of cooperation agencies enables the study of the growing influence of actors other than national States, and recognizes the relative independence of the international environment with its own and distinct logic, although associated with the traditional logic of national interest and security. The paper aim is to explore the positions that John Rawls, Norberto Bobbio and Luigi Ferrajoli put forward. The method is qualitative, using documentary analysis techniques on secondary sources. It is concluded that the agreements and institutions arising from international liberalism restrict the action of States, seeking limitation to armed conflicts, the protection of human rights and the conditions for a more distributive global justice.

‘2011 unshackled the space’: spatial analysis of diverging youth political agency in the Syrian conflict

ABSTRACT Despite the passing in 2015 of UNSCR 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security, the study of young people’s political agency in conflict, and the possibilities for empowerment and transformative change, remains sparse. This article investigates generative processes of youth political agency in the Syrian war since 2011 and under what conditions conflict has politically empowered/disempowered youth. Drawing on 72 interviews carried out with youth inside the country in the period 2019–2021, the article conducts spatial analysis to assess how the different spaces the conflict has produced inform youth agency. The article finds that the different degrees of agency are mediated by space-specific logics of security, autonomy and control. While some youth have experienced political empowerment, this has been limited to zones of autonomous governance; meanwhile, in regime-held zones, the spatial logic of authoritarian consolidation mediates political disappropriation. The article argues that this divergence has important implications for Syrian youth’s political subjectivities and the emergence of new inequalities that are further compounded by everyday tactics of movement restriction. Given the conflict’s likely denouement, transformative potential appears dim.

RESNETCNN: An abnormal network traffic flows detection model

Intrusion detection is an important means to protect system security by detecting intrusions or intrusion attempts on the system through operational behaviors, security logs, and data audit. However, existing intrusion detection systems suffer from incomplete data feature extraction and low classification accuracy, which affects the intrusion detection effect. To this end, this paper proposes an intrusion detection model that fuses residual network (RESNET) and parallel crossconvolutional neural network, called RESNETCCN. RESNETCNN can efficiently learn various data stream features through the fusion of deep learning and convolutional neural network (CNN), which improves the detection accuracy of abnormal data streams in unbalanced data streams, moreover, the oversampling method into the data preprocessing, to extract multiple types of unbalanced data stream features at the same time, effectively solving the problems of incomplete data feature extraction and low classification accuracy of unbalanced data streams. Finally, three improved versions of RESNETCNN networks are designed to meet the requirements of different traffic data processing, and the highest detection accuracy reaches 99.98% on the CICIDS 2017 dataset and 99.90% on the ISCXIDS 2012 dataset.

A double logic analysis of rural security

Since the launch of the rural revitalization strategy, the heat of rural revitalization has intensified. However, the study of rural agricultural modernization or urban-rural integration development is not without the premise of rural security. Therefore, there are obstacles, this paper takes the lead in analyzing the internal and external logic of rural security, and provides a reference for realizing rural security, health and sustainable development.

MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS FOR DETECTION OF CYBER THREATS USING LOGISTIC REGRESSION

The threat of cyberattacks is expanding globally; thus, businesses are developing intelligent artificial intelligence systems that can analyze security and other infrastructure logs from their systems department and quickly and automatically identify cyberattacks. Security analytics based on machine learning the next big thing in cybersecurity is machine data, which aims to mine security data to show the high maintenance costs of static relationship rules and methods. But, choosing the appropriate machine learning technique for log analytics using ML continues to be a significant barrier to AI success in cyber security due to the possibility of a substantial number of false-positive detections in large-scale or global Security Operations Centre (SOC) settings, selecting the proper machine learning technique for security log analytics remains a substantial obstacle to AI success in cyber security. A machine learning technique for a cyber threat exposure system that can minimize false positives is required. Today's machine learning methods for identifying threats frequently use logistic regression. Logistic regression is the first of three machine learning subcategories—supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Any machine learning enthusiast will encounter this supervised machine learning algorithm at the beginning of their machine learning career. It's an essential and often applied classification algorithm.