Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) is a paradigm of vehicular networks that has a set of advantages such as agility, efficiency, and reduced latency. The VFC is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, and existing security measures in traditional networks are not necessarily applicable to VFC. Among these attacks, we can find the Sybil attack that allows a vehicle to create multiple identities to perform malicious operations. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based mechanism to detect Sybil attacks in VFC networks. The detection process consists of two levels; the first one is targeted toward the verification of the vehicle’s position by the FN using the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) technique. The FN delivers a position proof, if its position is valid, and stores it in the blockchain. At this point, the set of the obtained position proofs constitutes a trajectory. The second level is projected toward a comparison between the trajectories of the vehicles reporting an event. Two trajectories that pass through the same FNs at the same time, will be considered as Sybil trajectories. The objective of these two-level detections is to identify the Sybil attack in several attack scenarios performed by a powerful adversary. Our analysis shows that existing proposals cannot deal with such an adversary. Moreover, simulation results show the efficiency of our proposal in terms of communication, computation, and detection rate. Indeed, our system can reach a detection rate of 98% when the malicious vehicle generates several aliases simultaneously and sends position requests to the FN for each generated pseudonym.
With the development of 5G and the Internet of things (IoT), the multi-domain access of massive devices brings serious data security and privacy issues. At the same time, most access systems lack the ability to identify network attacks and cannot adopt dynamic and timely defenses against various security threats. To this end, we propose a blockchain-based access control and behavior regulation system for IoT. Relying on the attribute-based access control model, this system deploys smart contracts on the blockchain to achieve distributed and fine-grained access control and ensures that the identity and authority of access users can be trusted. At the same time, an inter-domain communication mechanism is designed based on the locator/identifier separation protocol and ensures the traffic of access users are authorized. A feedback module that combines traffic detection and credit evaluation is proposed, ensuring real-time detection and fast, proactive responses against malicious behavior. Ultimately, all modules are linked together through workflows to form an integrated security model. Experiments and analysis show that the system can effectively provide comprehensive security protection in IoT scenarios.
The industrial internet of things (IIoT) is considered a new paradigm in the era of wireless communication for performing automatic communication in the network. However, automatic computation and data recognition may invite several security and privacy threats into the system during the sharing of information. There exist several intrusion detection systems (IDS) that have been proposed by several researchers. However, none of them is able to maintain accuracy while identifying the threats and give a high false-positive rate in the network. Further, the existing IDS are not able to recognize the new patterns or anomalies in the network. Therefore, it is necessary to propose a new IDS. The aim of this paper is to propose an IDS using the Viterbi algorithm, indirect trust, and blockchain mechanism for IIoT to ensure the required security levels. The Viterbi algorithm and indirect trust mechanism are used to measure the probability of malicious activities occurring in the network while generating, recording, and shipping products in an IIoT environment. Further, the transparency of the system is maintained by integrating blockchain mechanisms with Viterbi and indirect methods. The proposed framework is validated and analyzed against various security measures by comparing it with the existing approaches.
Francisco Assis Moreira do Nascimento, Fabiano Hessel
Internet of Things-based systems are typically distributed systems and thus inherit all issues related to the need to guarantee confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Moreover, IoT-based systems are vulnerable to several attacks, mainly due to the weakness of IoT devices, which have little computational and memory power, necessary for more sophisticated security features. To build robust infrastructures, one of the traditional strategies to deal with these problems involves intrusion detection and prevention techniques. Implementing them in a centralized way is usual, which leads to not being scalable for IoT systems with an increasing number of devices. Moreover, it implies an unacceptable single point of failure. Besides, sending all collected data to a centralized server in the cloud poses a significant risk to the privacy of information. Recently, machine learning techniques, as decentralized federated learning, combined with distributed ledger technologies, have been used to implement more robust and privacy-preserving intrusion detection systems for IoT-based systems. However most current decentralized federated learning approaches depend on a centralized server, and so have a single point of failure. The centralized server is used to aggregate the local trained models obtained by means of deep learning algorithms performed on edge and fog devices. This paper reviews state of the art on intrusion detection based on totally decentralized federated learning and distributed ledger techniques applied to minimize IoT security threats, identifies open problems, and recommends future research directions to cope with them.
Digitization in the power industry enables wide connectivity among multiple new entrants such as DERs, prosumers, and P2P counterparts within or outside the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The use of DLT to improve resilience in the power grid has growing support, but new technology provides new opportunities for adversaries to cause harm. This work completed by the Cybersecurity focused task force of IEEE SA P2418.5 evaluates the potential risks by applying the MITRE ATT&CK ICS matrix to the DLT Engineering and Cybersecurity Stack designed for power systems applications.
Yaser Issam Aljanabi, Aso Ahmed Majeed, Kamal H. Jihad, Banaz Anwer Qader
The key target of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks is to interrupt and suspend any available online services either executed for professional or personal gains. These attacks originate from the fast advancement in the number of insecure technologies. The attacks are caused due to the easy access to internet and advent of technology resulting to exponential growth of traffic volumes. DDoS attack remains most leading security risks to provisioning services. Also, the current embraced security mechanism for defense lacks flexibility and adequate resources to combat these attacks. Hence, there is need to embrace various other critical resources, where they can share the problem of mitigation. In addition, emerging technologies for instance smart contracts and blockchain offers for the sharing of these potential attacks information in an entirely automated and distributed manner. This paper recommends for a blockchain design which combines smart contracts and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, by presenting new ideal opportunities towards efficient DDoS mitigation solutions in variety of cooperative domains. Furthermore, the key advantage and benefits of this structure is deployment of still existing distributed and public infrastructure to blacklisted IP address or even advertise white, and the application of such an infrastructure with further defense mechanisms to current attacks of DDoS, deprived of considering distribution mechanisms or specialized registries, which facilitates the implementation of procedures across diverse domains. This paper further presents the demonstration and implementation features of this blockchain structure, discussion and study findings over these smart contracts and ML technologies. The study further concludes by recommending use of smart contract in collaborative block-chain design with ML for mitigating future attack of DDoS.
Rickard Elsen, Muhammad Rikza Nashrulloh, Ade Sutedi
Since the widespread use of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology start to be adapted in various applications. Some businesses are already adopting blockchain technology because of its advantages such as data integrity and privacy. One of them is Web 3.0. Web 3.0 puts forward data decentralization so that users can choose what data will be sent to the server. User data is provided locally with the help of a crypto wallet and the server just receives wallet info. With this mechanism, user privacy can be maintained directly by the user himself. All data will be processed at the users' end first before being sent to the server. With the new mechanism of web 3.0 and the advantages of blockchain, we build an application to authenticate students' login activities and grant roles to them based on their wallets. In this paper, we use the prototyping model as the method to build the application. We managed to utilize students’ wallet addresses as credentials. And with the help of Web3 module, we managed to decentralize the authentication process. And as a result of the successful authentication process, students can access their data based on their roles.
Due to the high integration of wireless communication and networking technologies, the communication-based train control (CBTC) systems are exposed to additional cyber-attack surfaces, allowing sophisticated attackers to combine cyber attack vectors with physical attack means to achieve malicious goals. Notably, the decentralized authentication features are missing in existing communication protocols which make the CBTC be easily compromised by data tampering attacks, and lead to serious operational accidents. With outstanding advantages in decentralized authentication, blockchain provides new effective solutions for decentralized identity authentication in CBTC. Consequently, it is critical to study the complex physical consequences of cyber breaches from a cross-layer defense perspective. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer defense method for cyber security in blockchain empowered CBTC against data tampering attacks. In the physical layer, the joint Kalman filter and$\chi ^{2} $detector is proposed for the train state estimation and detection. In the cyber layer, an asymmetric encryption-based secure communication protocol with identity authentication and the blockchain-based distributed key management system with the adaptive consensus mechanism are designed for data communication security. Considering the unavailable direct observation of the CBTC cyber security states, a partially observable Markov (POMDP) decision model is constructed to derive the optimal adaptive consensus strategies for balancing cyber security and efficiency. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed blockchain empowered CBTC cross-layer defense method can effectively improve the cyber security protection capability and minimize the impact of data tampering attacks on the train operation.
Smart fire detection and insurance systems have gained considerable attention from researchers and industries. At the same time, automatic requests for fire brigade services to cure fire and instant claims settlement to defend insurance fraud are lacking in literatures. We propose a trusted fire brigade service and insurance claim (FLAME) framework using blockchain for enterprises to provide immediate fire brigade services and prevent insurance frauds. A system model is presented to explain architecture, and overall functionality of FLAME using blockchain. Further, a sensing network and connectivity model is proposed to detect true fire and send an emergency service request to monitoring station. Smart contracts are designed to automate fire brigade service and insurance claim processes. A prototype of the FLAME is implemented on hyperledger besu blockchain using Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance 2.0 consensus protocol. Simulation results show that latency and throughput of the FLAME are better compared to state-of-the-art models.
The organization of free, democratic, and transparent elections requires on the one hand an independent national electoral authority that manages all the stages of the electoral process and on the other hand the use of new information and communication techniques to manage the election process. E-voting offers the ability to vote online anytime and from anywhere using a computer, smartphone, or tablet. In addition, it saves time and reduces costs and effort spent in the process. However, the security of e-voting applications deployed on the internet is a difficult task due to the increasing number of cyber-attacks and application vulnerabilities. On the other hand, blockchain technology is an emerging technology with a strong cryptographic foundation. In this paper, the authors propose a new secure e-voting system based on Ethereum blockchain. In addition, they propose a hierarchical coloured petri net (HCPN) model for their e-voting system using CPN Tools. They verify by means of simulation techniques and state space analysis important properties such as absence of deadlocks and livelocks.
Coinhive released its browser-based cryptocurrency mining code in September 2017, and vicious web page writers, called vicious miners hereafter, began to embed mining JavaScript code into their web pages, called mining pages hereafter. As a result, browser users surfing these web pages will benefit mine cryptocurrencies unwittingly for the vicious miners using the CPU resources of their devices. The above activity, called Cryptojacking, has become one of the most common threats to web browser users. As mining pages influence the execution efficiency of regular programs and increase the electricity bills of victims, security specialists start to provide methods to block mining pages. Nowadays, using a blocklist to filter out mining scripts is the most common solution to this problem. However, when the number of new mining pages increases quickly, and vicious miners apply obfuscation and encryption to bypass detection, the detection accuracy of blacklist-based or feature-based solutions decreases significantly. This paper proposes a solution, called MinerGuard, to detect mining pages. MinerGuard was designed based on the observation that mining JavaScript code consumes a lot of CPU resources because it needs to execute plenty of computation. MinerGuard does not need to update data used for detection frequently. On the contrary, blacklist-based or feature-based solutions must update their blocklists frequently. Experimental results show that MinerGuard is more accurate than blacklist-based or feature-based solutions in mining page detection. MinerGuard’s detection rate for mining pages is 96%, but MinerBlock, a blacklist-based solution, is 42.85%. Moreover, MinerGuard can detect 0-day mining pages and scripts, but the blacklist-based and feature-based solutions cannot.
In recent years, sharing threat information has been one of the most suggested solutions for combating the ever-increasing number of cyberattacks, which stem from the system-wide adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and consequently endangers the digital and physical assets of organizations. Several solutions, however, were proposed to facilitate data exchange between different systems, but none were able to address the main challenges of threat sharing such as trust, privacy, interoperability, and automation in a single solution. To address these issues, this paper presents a secure and efficient threat information sharing system that leverages Trusted Automated Exchange of Intelligence Information (TAXIITM) standard and private blockchain technology to automate the threat sharing procedure while offering privacy, data integrity, and interoperability. The extensive evaluation of the solution implementation indicates its capability to offer secure communication between participants without sacrificing data privacy and overall performance as opposed to existing solutions.
Junhyeong Ryu, Aeri Kim, Meryam Essaid, Hongtaek Ju
This paper presents the development results for the Wireshark dissector of the Ethereum Node Discovery Protocol for monitoring and analyzing Ethereum P2P networks. The new version v5 of the Ethereum Node Discovery Protocol applied encryption to the traffic. Therefore, the Wireshark Node Discovery Protocol based on previous versions, such as the v4 dissector, can no longer be used to analyze the network. This paper develops a dissector that interprets encrypted packets of the Node Discovery Protocol based on Ethereum Node Discovery Protocol v5. Node Discovery Protocol analysis can be used to research network properties and improve network performance.
Blockchain merges technology with the Internet of Things (IoT) for addressing security and privacy-related issues. However, conventional blockchain suffers from scalability issues due to its linear structure, which increases the storage overhead, and Intrusion detection performed was limited with attack severity, leading to performance degradation. To overcome these issues, we proposed MZWB (Multi-Zone-Wise Blockchain) model. Initially, all the authenticated IoT nodes in the network ensure their legitimacy by using the Enhanced Blowfish Algorithm (EBA), considering several metrics. Then, the legitimately considered nodes for network construction for managing the network using Bayesian-Direct Acyclic Graph (B-DAG), which considers several metrics. The intrusion detection is performed based on two tiers. In the first tier, a Deep Convolution Neural Network (DCNN) analyzes the data packets by extracting packet flow features to classify the packets as normal, malicious, and suspicious. In the second tier, the suspicious packets are classified as normal or malicious using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Finally, intrusion scenario performed reconstruction to reduce the severity of attacks in which Improved Monkey Optimization (IMO) is used for attack path discovery by considering several metrics, and the Graph cut utilized algorithm for attack scenario reconstruction (ASR). UNSW-NB15 and BoT-IoT utilized datasets for the MZWB method simulated using a Network simulator (NS-3.26). Compared with previous performance metrics such as energy consumption, storage overhead accuracy, response time, attack detection rate, precision, recall, and F-measure. The simulation result shows that the proposed MZWB method achieves high performance than existing works
Recently, security issues of smart contracts are arising great attention due to the enormous financial loss caused by vulnerability attacks. There is an increasing need to detect similar codes for hunting vulnerability with the increase of critical security issues in smart contracts. Binary similarity detection that quantitatively measures the given code diffing has been widely adopted to facilitate critical security analysis. However, due to the difference between common programs and smart contract, such as diversity of bytecode generation and highly code homogeneity, directly adopting existing graph matching and machine learning based techniques to smart contracts suffers from low accuracy, poor scalability and the limitation of binary similarity on function level. Therefore, this paper investigates graph neural network to detect smart contract binary code similarity at the program level, where we conduct instruction-level normalization to reduce the noise code for smart contract pre-processing and construct contract control flow graphs to represent smart contracts. In particular, two improved Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) models are explored to encode the contract graphs into quantitatively vectors, which can capture the semantic information and the program-wide control flow information with temporal orders. Then we can efficiently accomplish the similarity detection by measuring the distance between two targeted contract embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficient of our proposed method, extensive experiments are performed on two real-world datasets, i.e., smart contracts from Ethereum and Enterprise Operation System (EOS) blockchain-based platforms. The results show that our proposed approach outperforms three state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, achieving a great improvement up to 6.1% and 17.06% in accuracy.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain. All historical Bitcoin transactions are stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, but Bitcoin owners are generally unknown. This is the reason for Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity, therefore it is often used for illegal transactions. Bitcoin addresses are related to Bitcoin users' identities. Some Bitcoin addresses have the potential to be analyzed due to the behavior patterns of Bitcoin transactions. However, existing Bitcoin analysis methods do not consider the fusion of new blocks' data, resulting in low efficiency of Bitcoin address analysis. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes an incremental Bitcoin address cluster method to avoid re-clustering when new block data is added. Besides, a heuristic Bitcoin address clustering algorithm is developed to improve clustering accuracy for the Bitcoin Blockchain. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases Bitcoin address cluster efficiency and accuracy.
Muhammad Umar Nasir, Safiullah Khan, Shahid Mehmood, Muhammad Adnan Khan · 6 authors
The study presents a framework to analyze and detect meddling in real-time network data and identify numerous meddling patterns that may be harmful to various communication means, academic institutes, and other industries. The major challenge was to develop a non-faulty framework to detect meddling (to overcome the traditional ways). With the development of machine learning technology, detecting and stopping the meddling process in the early stages is much easier. In this study, the proposed framework uses numerous data collection and processing techniques and machine learning techniques to train the meddling data and detect anomalies. The proposed framework uses support vector machine (SVM) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) machine learning algorithms to detect the meddling in a network entangled with blockchain technology to ensure the privacy and protection of models as well as communication data. SVM achieves the highest training detection accuracy (DA) and misclassification rate (MCR) of 99.59% and 0.41%, respectively, and SVM achieves the highest-testing DA and MCR of 99.05% and 0.95%, respectively. The presented framework portrays the best meddling detection results, which are very helpful for various communication and transaction processes.
Vikas Rao Vadi, Shafiqul Abidin, Azimuddin Khan, Mohd Izhar
Abstract In general, due to the complexity and limited computation capabilities, the security issues occur in Internet of Things (IoT). Security protocols are required to increase the security of the system. Therefore, in this article, an enhanced Elman spike neural network (EESNN) with green proof of work consensus algorithm (GPoW) is proposed for enhancing the security of IoT network. Initially, the generalized security mechanism as EESNN approach is proposed for the IoT network by categorizing the devices into malicious and benign. Then, the GPoW consensus algorithm is used for enhancing the security of the devices from malicious attacks. Subsequently, a coalition formation (CF) algorithm is used for reducing the excess energy consumption in a network. The proposed EESNN‐GPoW‐CF approach has effectively classified the malicious attacks and enhances the security of the IoT network. The simulation of this work is done in Python. From the simulation, the proposed EESNN‐GPoW‐CF approach attains high efficiency outcomes in terms of accuracy, recall, precision, PDR, PLR, throughput, overhead, computation time, and delay. Moreover, the proposed EESNN‐GPoW‐CF approach attains 3.1%, 5.3%, 7.4% high accuracy rate, and 7.5%, 12.5%, 14.7% lower computation time with 4.8%, 2.3%, 5.7% lower energy utilization than the existing methods, such as deep learning based blockchain for IoT security, deep reinforcement learning based blockchain for IoT security, and deep blockchain‐based trustworthy privacy preserving secured framework in IoT, respectively.
Blockchain is one of the most advanced technologies that play an important role in many different fields such as healthcare, capital markets and logistics. Among the many existing blockchain platforms, the integration of the Turingcomplete virtual programming engine with the blockchain makes the Ethereum blockchain one of the most paramount infrastructures for various types of applications, including but not limited to cryptocurrency trading, smart contracts, decentralised finance and metaverse. Nevertheless, Ethereum like many other computing systems, has fallen victim to vector attacks that exploit its vulnerabilities and have catastrophic consequences. Out of the need to protect Ethereum from such attacks, this paper proposes a novel deep learning model based on convolutional neural networks. The proposed model treats the transaction, which is the atomic entity in this platform, as a stochastic time series and then develops two specific task layers that are compatible with the traditional CNN architecture. The first layer is responsible for detecting the seasonal characteristics of the transactions, while the second layer is used for detecting the trend. These two layers are integrated with the traditional architecture to form a powerful temporal CNN architecture that can classify different types of attacks. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated from a different perspective using real transactions collected from the Ethereum main-net network. The results of the comprehensive evaluations show the ability of the proposed model to perfectly identify malicious transactions in the Ethereum blockchain.