This paper presents a Ph.D. research plan that focuses on solving the existing problems in risk management of critical infrastructures, by means of a novel DevSecOps-enabled framework. Critical infrastructures are complex physical and cyber-based systems that form the lifeline of a modern society, and their reliable and secure operation is of paramount importance to national security and economic vitality. Therefore, this paper proposes DevSecOps technology for managing risk throughout the entire development life cycle of such systems.

This article analyzes Risk management (RM) activities against different ISO standards. The aim is to improve the coordination and interoperability of risk management activities in IT, IT services management, quality management, project management, and information security management. The ISO 31000: 2018 standard was chosen as a structured input for ISO 20000-1: 2018, ISO 21500: 2021, ISO 27000: 2018, ISO 9001: 2015 and ISO Annex SL standards relative to RM. The PDCA cycle has been chosen as one of the main methods for planning, implementing, and improving quality management systems and their processes. For a management system to be more effective, more reliable, and capable of preventing negative results, it must deal with the possible resulting risks.

Information Technology (IT) governance crosses the organization practices, culture, and policy that support IT management in controlling five key functions, which are strategic alignment, performance management, resource management, value delivery, and risk management. The line of sight is extended from the corporate strategy to the risk management, and risk controls are assessed against operational goals. Thus, the risk management model is concerned with ensuring that the corporate risks are sufficiently controlled and managed. Many organizations rely on IT services to facilitate and sustain their operations, which mandate the existence of a risk management model in their IT governance. This paper examines prior research based on IT governance by using a risk management framework. It also proposes a new method for calculating and classifying IT-related risks. Additionally, we assessed our technique with one of the critical IT services that proves the reliability and accuracy of the implemented model.

The article deals with the issues of improving the quality of corporate information systems functioning and ensuring the information security of financial organizations that have a complex structure and serve a significant number of customers. The formation of the company's informational system and its integrated information security system is studied based on the process approach, methods of risk management and quality management. The risks and threats to the security of the informational system functioning and the quality of information support for customer service of a financial organization are analyzed. The methods and tools for improving the quality of information services and ensuring information security are considered on the example of an organization for social insurance. Recommendations are being developed to improve the quality of the informational system functioning in a large financial company.

Cybersecurity insurance is one of the important means of cybersecurity risk management and the development of cyber insurance is inseparable from the support of cyber risk assessment technology. Cyber risk assessment can not only help governments and organizations to better protect themselves from related risks, but also serve as a basis for cybersecurity insurance underwriting, pricing, and formulating policy content. Aiming at the problem that cybersecurity insurance companies cannot conduct cybersecurity risk assessments on policyholders before the policy is signed without the authorization of the policyholder or in legal, combining with the need that cybersecurity insurance companies want to obtain network security vulnerability risk profiles of policyholders conveniently, quickly and at low cost before the policy signing, this study proposed a non-intrusive network security vulnerability risk assessment method based on ensemble machine learning. Our model uses only open source intelligence and publicly available network information data to rate cyber vulnerability risk of an organization, achieving an accuracy of 70.6% compared to a rating based on comprehensive information by cybersecurity experts.

This document takes an in-depth approach to identify WhatsApp's Security risk management, governance and controls. WhatsApp is a communication mobile application that is available on both android and IOS, recently acquired by Facebook and allows us to stay connected. This document identifies all necessary assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and risks to WhatsApp and further provides mitigations and security controls to possibly utilize and secure the application.

Currently, many organizations are moving to new digital management systems, which is accompanied not only by the introduction of new approaches based on the use of information technology, but also by a change in the organizational and management environment. Risk management is a process necessary to maintain the competitive advantage of an organization, but it can also become involved in the course of digitalization itself, which means that risk management also needs to change to meet modern conditions and ensure the effectiveness of the organization. This article discusses the risk management process in the digital environment. The main approach to the organization of this process is outlined, taking into account the use of information tools, together with the stages of this process, which directly affect the efficiency of the company. The risks that are specific to a digital organization are taken into account. Modern requirements for risk management for organizations are studied, ways of their implementation are outlined. The result is a risk management process that functions in a digital organization.

Effective information security risk management is essential for survival of any business that is dependent on IT. In this paper we present an efficient and effective solution to find best parameters for managing cyber risks using artificial intelligence. Genetic algorithm is use as it can provide our required optimization and intelligence. Results show that GA is professional in finding the best parameters and minimizing the risk.

Cybersecurity attacks, which have many business impacts, continuously become more intelligent and complex. These attacks take the form of a combination of various attack elements. APT attacks reflect this characteristic well. To defend against APT attacks, organizations should sufficiently understand these attacks based on the attack elements and their relations and actively defend against these attacks in multiple dimensions. Most organizations perform risk management to manage their information security. Generally, they use the information system risk assessment (ISRA). However, the method has difficulties supporting sufficiently analyzing security risks and actively responding to these attacks due to the limitations of asset-driven qualitative evaluation activities. In this paper, we propose a threat-driven risk assessment method. This method can evaluate how dangerous APT attacks are for an organization, analyze security risks from multiple perspectives, and support establishing an adaptive security strategy.

A formal modeling language MCD for concurrent systems is proposed, and its syntax, semantics and formal definitions are given. MCD uses modules as basic components, and that the detection rules are not perfect, resulting in packets that do not belong to intrusion attacks being misjudged as attacks, respectively. Then the data detection algorithm based on MCD concurrency model protects hidden computer viruses and security threats, and the efficiency is increased by 7.5% Finally, the computer network security protection system is researched based on security modeling.

With the growing number of IoT applications and devices, IoT security breaches are a dangerous reality. Cost pressure and complexity of security tests for embedded systems and networked infrastructure are often the excuse for skipping them completely. In our paper we introduce SecLab security test lab to overcome that problem. Based on a flexible and lightweight architecture, SecLab allows developers and IoT security specialists to harden their systems with a low entry hurdle. The open architecture supports the reuse of existing external security test libraries and scalability for the assessment of complex IoT Systems. A reference implementation of security tests in a realistic IoT application scenario proves the approach.

As the voucher for identity, digital certificates and the public key infrastructure (PKI) system have always played a vital role to provide the authentication services. In recent years, with the increase in attacks on traditional centralized PKIs and the extensive deployment of blockchains, researchers have tried to establish blockchain-based secure decentralized PKIs and have made significant progress. Although blockchain enhances security, it brings new problems in scalability due to the inherent limitations of blockchain’s data structure and consensus mechanism, which become much severe for the massive access in the era of 5G and B5G. In this paper, we propose ScalaCert to mitigate the scalability problems of blockchain-based PKIs by utilizing redactable blockchain for "on-cert" revocation. Specifically, we utilize the redactable blockchain to record revocation information directly on the original certificate ("on-cert") and remove additional data structures such as CRL, significantly reducing storage overhead. Moreover, the combination of redactable and consortium blockchains brings a new kind of attack called deception of versions (DoV) attack. To defend against it, we design a random-block-node-check (RBNC) based freshness check mechanism. Security and performance analyses show that ScalaCert has sufficient security and effectively solves the scalability problem of the blockchain-based PKI system.

The growing maturity of orchestration languages is contributing to the elaboration of cloud composite services, whose resources may be deployed over different distributed infrastructures. These composite services are subject to changes over time, that are typically required to support cloud properties, such as scalability and rapid elasticity. In particular, the migration of their elementary resources may be triggered by performance constraints. However, changes induced by this migration may introduce vulnerabilities that may compromise the resources, or even the whole cloud service. In that context, we propose an automated SMT1-based security framework for supporting the migration of resources in cloud composite services, and preventing the occurrence of new configuration vulnerabilities. We formalize the underlying security automation based on SMT solving, in order to assess the migrated resources and select adequate counter-measures, considering both endogenous and exogenous security mechanisms. We then evaluate its benefits and limits through large series of experiments based on a proof-of-concept prototype implemented over the CVC4 commonly-used open-source solver. These experiments show a minimal overhead with regular operating systems deployed in cloud environments.

In this paper we propose a novel integrated DC/DC converter featuring a single-input-multiple-output architecture for emerging System-on-Chip applications to improve load transient response and power side-channel security. The converter is able to provide multiple outputs ranging from 0.3V to 0.92V using a global 1V input. By using modularized circuit blocks, the converter can be extended to provide higher power or more outputs with minimal design complexity. Performance metrics including power efficiency and load transient response can be well maintained as well. Implemented in 32nm technology, single output efficiency can reach to 88% for the post layout models. By enabling delay blocks and circuits sharing, the Pearson correlation coefficient of input and output can be reduced to 0.1 under rekeying test. The reference voltage tracking speed is up to 31.95 V/μs and peak load step response is 53 mA/ns. Without capacitors, the converter consumes 2.85 mm2 for high power version and only 1.4 mm2 for the low power case.

Network Time Security (NTS) standardizes mechanisms that allow clients to authenticate timing information received via Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTS includes a new key establishment protocol, NTS-KE, and extension fields for NTPv4 which, when utilized together, allow clients to authenticate messages from time servers. Utilizing an open source implementation of each, we determine the existence and severity of any performance or scalability impact introduced by NTS when compared to NTP. We found that conducting individual authenticated time transfer takes approximately 116% longer when utilizing NTS over NTP. Additionally, we found that NTS-KE can only support approximately 2000 requests per second before a substantial and consistent increase in turnaround time is observed.

he growing trend towards network “softwarization” allows the creation and deployment of even complex network environments in a few minutes or seconds, rather than days or weeks as required by traditional methods. This revolutionary approach made it necessary to seek automatic processes to solve network security problems. One of the main issues in the automation of network security concerns the proper and efficient modeling of network traffic. In this paper, we describe two optimized Traffic Flows representation models, called Atomic Flows and Maximal Flows. In addition to the description, we have validated and evaluated the proposed models to solve two key network security problems - security verification and automatic configuration - showing the advantages and limitations of each solution.

Simulations have gained paramount importance in terms of software development for wireless sensor networks and have been a vital focus of the scientific community in this decade to provide efficient, secure, and safe communication in smart cities. Network Simulators are widely used for the development of safe and secure communication architectures in smart city. Therefore, in this technical survey report, we have conducted experimental comparisons among ten different simulation environments that can be used to simulate smart-city operations. We comprehensively analyze and compare simulators COOJA, NS-2 with framework Mannasim, NS-3, OMNeT++ with framework Castalia, WSNet, TOSSIM, J-Sim, GloMoSim, SENSE, and Avrora. These simulators have been run eight times each and comparison among them is critically scrutinized. The main objective behind this research paper is to assist developers and researchers in selecting the appropriate simulator against the scenario to provide safe and secure wired and wireless networks. In addition, we have discussed the supportive simulation environments, functions, and operating modes, wireless channel models, energy consumption models, physical, MAC, and network-layer protocols in detail. The selection of these simulation frameworks is based on features, literature, and important characteristics. Lastly, we conclude our work by providing a detailed comparison and describing the pros and cons of each simulator.

Blockchain as a tamper-proof, non-modifiable and traceable distributed ledger technology has received extensive attention. Although blockchain's immutability provides security guarantee, it prevents the development of new blockchain technology. As we think, there are several arguments to prefer a controlled modifiable blockchain, from the possibility to cancel the transaction and necessity to remove the illicit or harmful documents, to the ability to support the scalability of blockchain. Meanwhile, the rapid development of quantum technology has made the establishment of post-quantum cryptosystems an urgent need. In this paper, we put forward the first lattice-based redactable consortium blockchain scheme that makes it possible to rewrite or repeal the content of any blocks. Our approach uses a consensus-based election and lattice-based chameleon hash function (Cash and Hofheinz etc. EUROCRYPT 2010). With knowledge of secret trapdoor, the participant could find the hash collisions efficiently. And each member of the consortium blockchain has the right to edit the history.

This paper presents a scalable single-input-multiple-output DC/DC converter targeting load transient response and security improvement for low-power System-on-Chips (SoCs). A two-stage modular architecture is introduced to enable scalability. The shared switched-capacitor pre-charging circuits are implemented to improve load transient response and decouple correlations between inputs and outputs. The demo version of the converter has three identical outputs, each supporting 0.3V to 0.9V with a maximum load current of 150mA. Based on post-layout simulation results in 32nm CMOS process, the converter output provides 19.3V/μs reference tracking speed and 27mA/ns workload transitions with negligible voltage droops or spikes. No cross regulation is observed at any outputs with a worst-case voltage ripple of 68mV. Peak efficiency reaches 85.5% for each output. With variable delays added externally, the input-output correlations can change 10 times and for steady-state operation, such correlation factors are always kept below 0.05. The converter is also scaled to support 6 outputs with only 0.56mm2 more area and maintains same load transient response performance.

Securing cloud configurations is an elusive task, which is left up to system administrators who have to base their decisions on "trial and error" experimentations or by observing good practices (e.g., CIS Benchmarks). We propose a knowledge, AND/OR, graphs approach to model cloud deployment security objects and vulnerabilities. In this way, we can capture relationships between configurations, permissions (e.g., CAP\_SYS\_ADMIN), and security profiles (e.g., AppArmor and SecComp). Such an approach allows us to suggest alternative and safer configurations, support administrators in the study of what-if scenarios, and scale the analysis to large scale deployments. We present an initial validation and illustrate the approach with three real vulnerabilities from known sources.

A unified cloud management platform is the key to efficient and secure management of cloud computing resources. To improve the operation effect of the power cloud service platform, power companies can use the micro-service architecture technology to carry out data processing, information integration, and innovative functional architecture of the power cloud service platform, realize the optimal design of the power cloud service platform and improve the power cloud service platform-security service quality. According to the technical requirements of the power cloud security management platform, this paper designs the technical architecture of the power unified cloud security management platform and expounds on the functional characteristics of the cloud security management platform to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the cloud security management platform.

We continue to tackle the problem of poorly defined security metrics by building on and improving our previous work on designing sound security metrics. We reformulate the previous method into a set of conditions that are clearer and more widely applicable for deriving sound security metrics. We also modify and enhance some concepts that led to an unforeseen weakness in the previous method that was subsequently found by users, thereby eliminating this weakness from the conditions. We present examples showing how the conditions can be used to obtain sound security metrics. To demonstrate the conditions' versatility, we apply them to show that an aggregate security metric made up of sound security metrics is also sound. This is useful where the use of an aggregate measure may be preferred, to more easily understand the security of a system.

This article focuses on analyzing the application characteristics of electric power big data, determining the advantages that electric power big data provides to the development of enterprises, and expounding the power information security protection technology and management measures under the background of big data. Focus on the protection of power information security, and fundamentally control the information security control issues of power enterprises. Then analyzed the types of big data structure and effective measurement modeling, and finally combined with the application status of big data concepts in the construction of electric power information networks, and proposed optimization strategies, aiming to promote the effectiveness of big data concepts in power information network management activities. Applying the creation conditions, the results show that the measurement model is improved by 7.8%

This paper belongs to a sequence of manuscripts that discuss generic and easy-to-apply security metrics for Strong PUFs. These metrics cannot and shall not fully replace in-depth machine learning (ML) studies in the security assessment of Strong PUF candidates. But they can complement the latter, serve in initial PUF complexity analyses, and are much easier and more efficient to apply: They do not require detailed knowledge of various ML methods, substantial computation times, or the availability of an internal parametric model of the studied PUF. Our metrics also can be standardized particularly easily. This avoids the sometimes inconclusive or contradictory findings of existing ML-based security test, which may result from the usage of different or non-optimized ML algorithms and hyperparameters, differing hardware resources, or varying numbers of challenge-response pairs in the training phase.This first manuscript within the abovementioned sequence treats one of the conceptually most straightforward security metrics on that path: It investigates the effects that small perturbations in the PUF-challenges have on the resulting PUF-responses. We first develop and implement several sub-metrics that realize this approach in practice. We then empirically show that these metrics have surprising predictive power, and compare our obtained test scores with the known real-world security of several popular Strong PUF designs. The latter include (XOR) Arbiter PUFs, Feed-Forward Arbiter PUFs, and (XOR) Bistable Ring PUFs. Along the way, our manuscript also suggests techniques for representing the results of our metrics graphically, and for interpreting them in a meaningful manner.

In this study, the effect of surface treatment on the boding strength between Quad flat package (QFP) and quartz was investigated for establishing a QFP/quartz glass bonding technique. This bonding technique is necessary to prevent bond failure at the nano-artifact metrics (NAM) chip and adhesive interface against physical attacks such as counterfeiting and tampering of edge AI devices that use NAM chips. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between surface roughness and tensile strength by applying surface treatments such as vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and Ar/O2 plasma. All QFP/quartz glass with surface treatments such as VUV and Ar/O2 plasma showed increased bond strength. Surface treatment and bonding technology for QFP and quartz glass were established to realize NAM chip mounting.