Information Centric Networks - This work expands on our prior work on an architecture and supporting protocols to efficiently integrate constrained devices into an Information-Centric Network-based Internet of Things in a way that is both secure and scalable. In this work, we propose a scheme for addressing additional threats and integrating trust-based behavioral observations and attribute-based access control by leveraging the capabilities of less constrained coordinating nodes at the network edge close to IoT devices. These coordinating devices have better insight into the behavior of their constituent devices and access to a trusted overall security management cloud service. We leverage two modules, the security manager (SM) and trust manager (TM). The former provides data confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorization, while the latter analyzes the nodes behavior using a trust model factoring in a set of service and network communication attributes. The trust model allows trust to be integrated into the SM s access control policies, allowing access to resources to be restricted to trusted nodes.

Information Centric Networks - Named Data Networking (NDN) has been viewed as a promising future Internet architecture. It requires a new access control scheme to prevent the injection of unauthorized data request. In this paper, an access control supported by information service entity (ACISE) is proposed for NDN networks. A trust entity, named the information service entity (ISE), is deployed in each domain for the registration of the consumer and the edge router. The identity-based cryptography (IBC) is used to generate a private key for the authorized consumer at the ISE and to calculate a signature encapsulated in the Interest packet at the consumer. Therefore, the edge router could support the access control by the signature verification of the Interest packets so that no Interest packet from unauthorized consumer could be forwarded or replied. Moreover, shared keys are negotiated between authorized consumers and their edge routers. The subsequent Interest packets would be verified by the message authentication code (MAC) instead of the signature. The simulation results have shown that the ACISE scheme would achieve a similar response delay to the original NDN scheme when the NDN is under no attacks. However, the ACISE scheme is immune to the cache pollution attacks so that it could maintain a much smaller response delay compared to the other schemes when the NDN network is under the attacks.

Information Centric Networks - Tactical Data Link (TDL) is one of the important elements in Network Centric Warfare (NCW). TDL provides the means for rapid exchange of tactical information between air, ground, sea units and command centers. In military operations, TDL has high demands for resilience, responsiveness, reliability, availability and security. MANET has characteristics that are suitable for the combat environment, namely the ability to self-form and self-healing so that this network may be applied to the TDL system. To produce high performance in MANET adapted for TDL system, an efficient MAC Protocol method is needed. This paper provides a survey of several MAC Protocol methods on a tactical MANET. In this paper also suggests some improvements to the MANET MAC protocol to improve TDL system performance.

Information Centric Networks - Traffic in a backbone network has high forwarding rate requirements, and as the network gets larger, traffic increases and forwarding rates decrease. In a Software Defined Network (SDN), the controller can manage a global view of the network and control the forwarding of network traffic. A deterministic network has different forwarding requirements for the traffic of different priority levels. Static traffic load balancing is not flexible enough to meet the needs of users and may lead to the overloading of individual links and even network collapse. In this paper, we propose a new backbone network load balancing architecture - EDQN (Edge Deep Q-learning Network), which implements queue-based gate-shaping algorithms at the edge devices and load balancing of traffic on the backbone links. With the advantages of SDN, the link utilization of the backbone network can be improved, the delay in traffic transmission can be reduced and the throughput of traffic during transmission can be increased.

Information Centric Networks - Named in-network computing is an emerging technology of Named Data Networking (NDN). Through deploying the named computing services/functions on NDN router, the router can utilize its free resources to provide nearby computation for users while relieving the pressure of cloud and network edge. Benefitted from the characteristic of named addressing, named computing services/functions can be easily discovered and migrated in the network. To implement named in-network computing, integrating the computing services as Virtual Machines (VMs) into the software router is a feasible way, but how to effectively deploy the service VMs to optimize the local processing capability is still a challenge. Focusing on this problem, we first give the design of NDN-enabled software router in this paper, then propose a service earning based named service deployment scheme (SE-NSD). For available service VMs, SE-NSD not only considers their popularities but further evaluates their service earnings (processed data amount per CPU cycle). Through modelling the deployment problem as the knapsack problem, SE-NSD determines the optimal service VMs deployment scheme. The simulation results show that, comparing with the popularity-based deployment scheme, SE-NSD can promote about 30\% in-network computing capability while slightly reducing the service invoking RTT of user.

Information Centric Networks - The 6G wireless communication networks are being studied to build a powerful networking system with global coverage, enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligent level and security. This paper presents a four-in-one networking paradigm named 3CL-Net that would broaden and strengthen the capabilities of current networking by introducing ubiquitous computing, caching, and intelligence over the communication connection to build 6G-required capabilities. To evaluate the practicability of 3CL-Net, this paper designs a platform based on the 3CL-Net architecture. The platform adopts leader-followers structure that could support all functions of 3CL-Net, but separate missions of 3CL-Net into two parts. Moreover, this paper has implemented part of functions as a prototype, on which some experiments are carried out. The results demonstrate that 3CL-Net is potential to be a practical and effective network paradigm to meet future requirements, meanwhile, 3CL-Net could motivate designs of related platforms as well.

Information Centric Networks - The 5G research community is increasingly leveraging the innovative features offered by Information Centric Networking (ICN). However, ICN’s fundamental features, such as in-network caching, make access control enforcement more challenging in an ICN-based 5G deployment. To address this shortcoming, we propose a Blockchain-based Decentralized Authentication Protocol (BDAP) which enables efficient and secure mobile user authentication in an ICN-based 5G network. We show that BDAP is robust against a variety of attacks to which mobile networks and blockchains are particularly vulnerable. Moreover, a preliminary performance analysis suggests that BDAP can reduce the authentication delay compared to the standard 5G authentication protocols.

Information Centric Networks - This paper proposes a Mobile IoT optimization method for Next-Generation networks by evaluating a series of named-based techniques implemented in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). The idea is based on the possibility to have a more suitable naming and forwarding mechanism to be implemented in IoT. The main advantage of the method is in achieving a higher success packet rate and data rate by following the proposed technique even when the device is mobile / roaming around. The proposed technique is utilizing a root prefix naming which allows faster process and dynamic increase for content waiting time in Pending Interest Table (PIT). To test the idea, a simulation is carried out by mimicking how IoT can be implemented, especially in smart cities, where a user can also travel and not be static. Results show that the proposed technique can achieve up to a 13\% interest success rate and an 18.7\% data rate increase compared to the well-known implementation algorithms. The findings allow for possible further cooperation of data security factors and ensuring energy reduction through leveraging more processes at the edge node.

Information Centric Networks - Internet architecture has transformed into a more complex form than it was about a decade back. Today the internet comprises multimedia information where services and web applications have started to shift their focus on content. In our perspective of communication systems, content-centric networking (CCN) proposes a new methodology. The use of cache memory at the network level is an important feature of this new architecture. This cache is intended to store transit details for a set period, and it is hoped that this capability will aid in network quality, especially in a rapidly increasing video streaming situation. Information-centric networking (ICN) is the one architecture that is seen as a possible alternative for shifting the Internet from a host-centric to a content-centric point-of-view. It focuses on data rather than content. CCN is more reliable when it comes to data delivery as it does not need to depend on location for data. CCN architecture is scalable, secure and provides mobility support. In this paper, we implement a ccnchat, a chat testing application, which is created with the help of libraries provided by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on local area network (LAN) between two users and demonstrate the working of this local chat application over CCN network that works alongside existing IP infrastructure.

Information Forensics - Digital forensics is essential when performing in-depth crime investigations and evidence extraction, especially in the field of the Internet of Things, where there is a ton of information every second boosted with latest and smartest technological devices. However, the enormous growth of data and the nature of its complexity could constrain the data examination process since traditional data acquisition techniques are not applicable nowadays. Therefore, if the knowledge gap between digital forensics and the Internet of Things is not bridged, investigators will jeopardize the loss of a possible rich source of evidence that otherwise could act as a lead in solving open cases. The work aims to introduce examples of employing the latest Internet of Things forensics approaches as a panacea in this regard. The paper covers a variety of articles presenting the new Blockchain, fog, and video-based applications that can aid in easing the process of digital forensics investigation with a focus on the Internet of Things. The results of the review indicated that the above current trends are very promising procedures in the field of Internet of Things digital forensics and need to be explored and applied more actively.

Information Forensics - Access control includes authorization of security administrators and access of users. Aiming at the problems of log information storage difficulty and easy tampering faced by auditing and traceability forensics of authorization and access in cross-domain scenarios, we propose an access control auditing and traceability forensics method based on Blockchain, whose core is Ethereum Blockchain and IPFS interstellar mail system, and its main function is to store access control log information and trace forensics. Due to the technical characteristics of blockchain, such as openness, transparency and collective maintenance, the log information metadata storage based on Blockchain meets the requirements of distribution and trustworthiness, and the exit of any node will not affect the operation of the whole system. At the same time, by storing log information in the blockchain structure and using mapping, it is easy to locate suspicious authorization or judgment that lead to permission leakage, so that security administrators can quickly grasp the causes of permission leakage. Using this distributed storage structure for security audit has stronger anti-attack and anti-risk.

Information Forensics - With the inundation of more cost effective and improved flight performance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into the consumer market, we have seen more uses of these for both leisure and business purposes. As such, demand for digital forensic examination on these devices has seen an increase as well. This research will explore and discuss the forensic examination process on one of the more popular brands of UAV in Singapore, namely DJI. The findings are from the examination of the exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) channel and the extraction of the Data-at-Rest on the memory chip of the drone. The extraction was done using the Chip-Off and Chip-On technique.

Information Forensics - With large advancements in image display technology, recapturing high-quality images from high-fidelity LCD screens becomes much easier. Such recaptured images can be used to hide image tampering traces and fool some intelligent identification systems. In order to prevent such a security loophole, we propose a recaptured image detection approach based on generalized central difference convolution (GCDC) network. Specifically, by using GCDC instead of vanilla convolution, more detailed features can be extracted from both intensity and gradient information from an image. Meanwhile, we concatenate the feature maps from multiple GCDC modules to fuse low-, mid-, and high-level features for higher performance. Extensive experiments on three public recaptured image databases demonstrate the superior of our proposed method when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Information Forensics - Frame deletion forensics has been a major area of video forensics in recent years. The detection effect of current deep neural network-based methods outperforms previous traditional detection methods. Recently, researchers have used residual features as input to the network to detect frame deletion and have achieved promising results. We propose an IReF (Improved Residual Feature) by analyzing the effect of residual features on frame deletion traces. IReF preserves the main motion features and edge information by denoising and enhancing the residual features, making it easier for the network to identify the tampered features. And the sparse noise reduction reduces the storage requirement. Experiments show that under the 2D convolutional neural network, the accuracy of IReF compared with residual features is increased by 3.81 \%, and the storage space requirement is reduced by 78\%. In the 3D convolutional neural network with video clips as feature input, the accuracy of IReF features is increased by 5.63\%, and the inference efficiency is increased by 18\%.

Information Forensics - There are a large number of illegal websites on the Internet, such as pornographic websites, gambling websites, online fraud websites, online pyramid selling websites, etc. This paper studies the use of crawler technology for digital forensics on illegal websites. First, a crawler based illegal website forensics program is designed and developed, which can detect the peripheral information of illegal websites, such as domain name, IP address, network topology, and crawl key information such as website text, pictures, and scripts. Then, through comprehensive analysis such as word cloud analysis, word frequency analysis and statistics on the obtained data, it can help judge whether a website is illegal.

Information Forensics - WhatsApp is one of the rare applications that has managed to become one of the most popular instant messaging applications all over the world. While inherently designed for simple and fast communication, privacy features such as end-to-end encryption have made confidential communication easy for criminals aiming to commit illegal acts. However, as it meets many daily communication and communication needs, it has a great potential to be digital evidence in interpersonal disputes. In this study, in parallel with the potential of WhatsApp application to contain digital evidence, the abuse of this situation and the manipulation method of multimedia files, which may cause wrong decisions by the judicial authorities, are discussed. The dangerous side of this method, which makes the analysis difficult, is that it can be applied by anyone without the need for high-level root authority or any other application on these devices. In addition, it is difficult to detect as no changes can be made in the database during the analysis phase. In this study, a controlled experimental environment was prepared on the example scenario, the manipulation was carried out and the prepared system analysis was included. The results obtained showed that the evidence at the forensic analysis stage is open to misinterpretation.

Information Forensics - As an important branch of computer forensics, network forensics technology, whether abroad or at home, is in its infancy. It mainly focuses on the research on the framework of some forensics systems or some local problems, and has not formed a systematic theory, method and system. In order to improve the network forensics sys-tem, have a relatively stable and correct model for refer-ence, ensure the authenticity and credibility of network fo-rensics from the forensics steps, provide professional and non professional personnel with a standard to measure the availability of computer network crime investigation, guide the current network forensics process, and promote the gradual maturity of network forensics theories and methods, This paper presents a fuzzy decision tree reason-ing method for network forensics analysis.

Information Forensics - With the advent of information and communication technology, the digital space is becoming a playing ground for criminal activities. Criminals typically prefer darkness or a hidden place to perform their illegal activities in a real-world while sometimes covering their face to avoid being exposed and getting caught. The same applies in a digital world where criminals prefer features which provide anonymity or hidden features to perform illegal activities. It is from this spirit the Darkweb is attracting all kinds of criminal activities conducted over the Internet such as selling drugs, illegal weapons, child pornography, assassination for hire, hackers for hire, and selling of malicious exploits, to mention a few. Although the anonymity offered by Darkweb can be exploited as a tool to arrest criminals involved in cybercrime, an in-depth research is needed to advance criminal investigation on Darkweb. Analysis of illegal activities conducted in Darkweb is in its infancy and faces several challenges like lack of standard operating procedures. This study proposes progressive standard operating procedures (SOPs) for Darkweb forensics investigation. We provide the four stages of SOP for Darkweb investigation. The proposed SOP consists of the following stages; identification and profiling, discovery, acquisition and preservation, and the last stage is analysis and reporting. In each stage, we consider the objectives, tools and expected results of that particular stage. Careful consideration of this SOP revealed promising results in the Darkweb investigation.

Information Theoretic Security - From an information-theoretic standpoint, the intrusion detection process can be examined. Given the IDS output(alarm data), we should have less uncertainty regarding the input (event data). We propose the Capability of Intrusion Detection (CID) measure, which is simply the ratio of mutual information between IDS input and output, and the input of entropy. CID has the desirable properties of (1) naturally accounting for all important aspects of detection capability, such as true positive rate, false positive rate, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and base rate, (2) objectively providing an intrinsic measure of intrusion detection capability, and (3) being sensitive to IDS operation parameters. When finetuning an IDS, we believe that CID is the best performance metric to use. In terms of the IDS’ inherent ability to classify input data, the so obtained operation point is the best that it can achieve.

Information Theoretic Security - Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is developing rapidly, permeating every aspect of human life. Although the integration between AI and communication contributes to the flourishing development of wireless communication, it induces severer security problems. As a supplement to the upper-layer cryptography protocol, physical layer security has become an intriguing technology to ensure the security of wireless communication systems. However, most of the current physical layer security research does not consider the intelligence and mobility of collusive eavesdroppers. In this paper, we consider a MIMO system model with a friendly intelligent jammer against multiple collusive intelligent eavesdroppers, and zero-sum game is exploited to formulate the confrontation of them. The Nash equilibrium is derived by convex optimization and alternative optimization in the free-space scenario of a single user system. We propose a zero-sum game deep learning algorithm (ZGDL) for general situations to solve non-convex game problems. In terms of the effectiveness, simulations are conducted to confirm that the proposed algorithm can obtain the Nash equilibrium.

This paper assesses the impact on the performance that information-theoretic physical layer security (IT-PLS) introduces when integrated into a 5G New Radio (NR) system. For this, we implement a wiretap code for IT-PLS based on a modular coding scheme that uses a universal-hash function in its security layer. The main advantage of this approach lies in its flexible integration into the lower layers of the 5G NR protocol stack without affecting the communication s reliability. Specifically, we use IT-PLS to secure the transmission of downlink control information by integrating an extra pre-coding security layer as part of the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) procedures, thus not requiring any change of the 3GPP 38 series standard. We conduct experiments using a real-time open-source 5G NR standalone implementation and use software-defined radios for over-the-air transmissions in a controlled laboratory environment. The overhead added by IT-PLS is determined in terms of the latency introduced into the system, which is measured at the physical layer for an end-to-end (E2E) connection between the gNB and the user equipment.

Information Theoretic Security - Geospatial fog computing system offers various benefits as a platform for geospatial computing services closer to the end users, including very low latency, good mobility, precise position awareness, and widespread distribution. In recent years, it has grown quickly. Fog nodes security is susceptible to a number of assaults, including denial of service and resource abuse, because to their widespread distribution, complex network environments, and restricted resource availability. This paper proposes a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)-based geospatial quantum fog computing environment that offers a symmetric secret key negotiation protocol that can preserve information-theoretic security. In QKD, after being negotiated between any two fog nodes, the secret keys can be given to several users in various locations to maintain forward secrecy and long-term protection. The new geospatial quantum fog computing environment proposed in this work is able to successfully withstand a variety of fog computing assaults and enhances information security.

Information Theoretic Security - Physical layer (PHY) security in decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems is discussed. Based on the types of wiretap links, the secrecy performance of three typical secure DF relay models is analyzed. Different from conventional works in this field, rigorous derivations of the secrecy channel capacity are provided from an information-theoretic perspective. Meanwhile, closed-form expressions are derived to characterize the secrecy outage probability (SOP). For the sake of unveiling more system insights, asymptotic analyses are performed on the SOP for a sufficiently large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The analytical results are validated by computer simulations and are in excellent agreement.

Information Theoretic Security - Measuring the information leakage is critical for evaluating the practical security of cryptographic devices against side-channel analysis. Information-theoretic measures can be used (along with Fano’s inequality) to derive upper bounds on the success rate of any possible attack in terms of the number of side-channel measurements. Equivalently, this gives lower bounds on the number of queries for a given success probability of attack. In this paper, we consider cryptographic implementations protected by (first-order) masking schemes, and derive several information-theoretic bounds on the efficiency of any (second-order) attack. The obtained bounds are generic in that they do not depend on a specific attack but only on the leakage and masking models, through the mutual information between side-channel measurements and the secret key. Numerical evaluations confirm that our bounds reflect the practical performance of optimal maximum likelihood attacks.

Information Theoretic Security - A multi-designated receiver authentication code (MDRA-code) with information-theoretic security is proposed as an extension of the traditional multi-receiver authentication code. The purpose of the MDRA-code is to securely transmit a message via a broadcast channel from a single sender to an arbitrary subset of multiple receivers that have been designated by the sender, and only the receivers in the subset (i.e., not all receivers) should accept the message if an adversary is absent. This paper proposes a model and security formalization of MDRA-codes, and provides constructions of MDRA-codes.