Browsers are one of the most widely used types of software around the world. This prevalence makes browsers a prime target for cyberattacks. To mitigate these threats, users can practice safe browsing habits and take advantage of the security features available to browsers. These protections, however, could be severely crippled if the browser itself were malicious. Presented in this paper is the concept of the evil-twin browser (ETB), a clone of a legitimate browser that looks and behaves identically to the original browser, but discreetly performs other tasks that harm a user's security. To better understand the concept of the evil-twin browser, a prototype ETB named ChroNe was developed. The creation and installation process of ChroN e is discussed in this paper. This paper also explores the motivation behind creating such a browser, examines existing relevant work, inspects the open-source codebase Chromium that assisted in ChroNe's development, and discusses relevant topics like ways to deliver an ETB, the capabilities of an ETB, and possible ways to defend against ETBs.
Authored by Mathew Salcedo, Mehdi Abid, Yoohwan Kim, Ju-Yeon Jo
In the recent development of the online cryptocurrency mining platform, Coinhive, numerous websites have employed “Cryptojacking.” They may need the unauthorized use of CPU resources to mine cryptocurrency and replace advertising income. Web cryptojacking technologies are the most recent attack in information security. Security teams have suggested blocking Cryptojacking scripts by using a blacklist as a strategy. However, the updating procedure of the static blacklist has not been able to promptly safeguard consumers because of the sharp rise in “Cryptojacking kidnapping”. Therefore, we propose a Cryptojacking identification technique based on analyzing the user's computer resources to combat the assault technology known as “Cryptojacking kidnapping.” Machine learning techniques are used to monitor changes in computer resources such as CPU changes. The experiment results indicate that this method is more accurate than the blacklist system and, in contrast to the blacklist system, manually updates the blacklist regularly. The misuse of online Cryptojacking programs and the unlawful hijacking of users' machines for Cryptojacking are becoming worse. In the future, information security undoubtedly addresses the issue of how to prevent Cryptojacking and abduction. The result of this study helps to save individuals from unintentionally becoming miners.
Authored by Min-Hao Wu, Jian-Hung Huang, Jian-Xin Chen, Hao-Jyun Wang, Chen-Yu Chiu
Key challenges faced in the Internet today can be enumerated as follows: (1) complex route discovery mechanisms (2) latency and instability during link or device failure recovery (3) inadequacy in extending routing and addressing to limited domains, (4) complex interworking of multiple routing protocols at border routers. Routing table sizes increase with increasing number of networks indicating a scalability issue. One approach to address this spiraling complexity and performance challenges is to start fresh and re-think Internet routing and addressing. The Expedited Internet Bypass protocol (EIBP) is such a clean slate approach. In the interim, EIBP works in parallel with IP and has no dependency on layer 3 protocols. We demonstrated EIBP for routing and forwarding in an Autonomous system (AS) in our earlier work. In this article, we demonstrate EIBP for inter-AS routing. We compare EIBP's inter-AS operations and performance to Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) deployed in an intra-AS, inter-AS communications scenario with two AS.
Authored by Nirmala Shenoy, Shreyas Chandraiah, Peter Willis
The strategy of permanently allocating a frequency band in a wireless communication network to one application has led to exceptionally low utilization of the vacant spectrum. By utilizing the unused licensed spectrum along with the unlicensed spectrum, Cognitive Radio Sensor Network (CRSNs) ensures the efficiency of spectrum management. To utilize the spectrum dynamically it is important to safeguard the spectrum sensing. Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) is recommended for this task. CSS aims to provide reliable spectrum sensing. However, there are various vulnerabilities experienced in CSS which can influence the performance of the network. In this work, the focus is on the Byzantine attack in CSS and current security solutions available to avoid the Byzantines in CRSN.
Authored by Siddarama Patil, Rajashree Rajashree, Jayashree Agarkhed
This paper investigates the secrecy outage performance of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) secondary nodes for underlay Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) over α–μ fading channel. Here, the proposed system consists of one active eavesdropper and two primary nodes each with a single antenna. The power of the secondary transmitter depends on the harvested energy from the primary transmitter to save more energy and spectrum. Moreover, a Transmit Antenna Selection (TAS) scheme is adopted at the secondary source, while the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) technique is employed at the secondary receiver to optimize the quality of the signal. A lower bound closed-form phrase for the secrecy outage performance is derived to demonstrate the effects of the channel parameters. In addition, numerical results illustrate that the number of source transmit antennas, destination received antenna, and the eavesdropper received antenna have significant effects on improving the secrecy performance.
Authored by Mahmoud Khodeir, Saja Alquran
Cognitive radio (CR) networks are an emerging and promising technology to improve the utilization of vacant bands. In CR networks, security is a very noteworthy domain. Two threatening attacks are primary user emulation (PUE) and spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF). A PUE attacker mimics the primary user signals to deceive the legitimate secondary users. The SSDF attacker falsifies its observations to misguide the fusion center to make a wrong decision about the status of the primary user. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on clustering the secondary users to counter SSDF attacks. Our focus is on detecting and classifying each cluster as reliable or unreliable. We introduce two different methods using an artificial neural network (ANN) for both methods and five more classifiers such as support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression (LR), and decision tree (DR) for the second one to achieve this goal. Moreover, we consider deterministic and stochastic scenarios with white Gaussian noise (WGN) for attack strategy. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms a recently suggested scheme.
Authored by Nazanin Parhizgar, Ali Jamshidi, Peyman Setoodeh
There has been a significant rise in the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the past few years. It is evident that WSNs operate in unlicensed spectrum bands [1]. But due to the increasing usage in unlicensed spectrum band this band is getting overcrowded. The recent development of cognitive radio technology [2, 3] has made possible the utilization of licensed spectrum band in an opportunistic manner. This paper studies an introduction to Cognitive Radio Technology, Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Networks, its Advantages & Challenges, Cognitive Radio Technology Applications and a comparative analysis of node clustering techniques in CWSN.
Authored by Ranjita Joon, Parul Tomar
This paper investigates the physical layer security of a cognitive radio (CR) non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) network supported by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In a CR network, a secondary base station (BS) serves a couple of users, i.e., near and far users, via NOMA transmission under eavesdropping from a malicious attacker. It is assumed that the direct transmission link from the BS and far user is absent due to obstacles. Thus, an IRS is utilized to support far user communication, however, the communication links between the IRS and near/primary users are neglected because of heavy attenuation. The exact secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the near user and approximate SOP for the far user are then derived in closed-form by using the Gauss-Chebyshev approach. The accuracy of the derived analytical SOP is then verified through Monte Carlo simulations. The simulation results also provide useful insights on the impacts of the number of IRS reflecting elements and limited interference temperature on the system SOP.
Authored by Tu-Trinh Nguyen, Xuan-Xinh Nguyen, Ha Kha
In this paper, we study an underlay Cognitive Radio (CR) system with energy harvesting over Nakagami-m fading channel. This system consists of a secondary source, a secondary receiver, a primary receiver and a single eavesdropper. The source in the secondary network has one antenna and transmits information to the secondary receiver equipped with two separated antennas to operate in a Full-Duplex (FD) mode. The upper and lower bounds for the Strictly Positive Secrecy Capacity (SPSC) are derived and the numerical results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed system can be improved by increasing the average channel power gain between the source and the destination. Here, the lower and upper bounds are merged to form the exact SPSC when the total interference is below a predefined limit.
Authored by Mahmoud Khodeir, Wesam Alrayahneh
Cognitive Radio Network makes intelligent use of the spectrum resources. However, spectrum sensing is vulnerable to numerous harmful assaults. To lower the network's performance, hackers attempt to alter the sensed result. In the fusion centre, blockchain technology is used to make broad judgments on spectrum sensing in order to detect and thwart hostile activities. The sensed local results are hashed using the SHA 3 technique. This improves spectrum sensing precision and effectively thwarts harmful attacks. In comparison to other established techniques like equal gain combining, the simulation results demonstrate higher detection probability and sensing precision. Thus, employing Blockchain technology, cognitive radio network security can be significantly enhanced.
Authored by Evelyn Ezhilarasi, Christopher Clement
This Cognitive radio networks are vulnerable to specific intrusions due to the unique cognitive characteristics of these networks. This DoS attacks are known as the Primary User Emulation Attack and the Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification. If the intruder behavior is not statistically identical to the behavior of the primary users, intrusion detection techniques based on observing the energy of the received signals can be used. Both machine learning-based intrusion detection and sequential statistical analysis can be effectively applied. However, in some cases, statistical sequential analysis has some advantages in dealing with such challenges. This paper discusses aspects of using statistical sequential analysis methods to detect attacks in Cognitive radio networks.
Authored by Vladimir Shakhov
In this paper, physical-layer security (PLS) of an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) operating over cascaded Rayleigh fading channels is examined. In this scenario, a secondary user (SU) transmitter communicates with a SU receiver through a cascaded Rayleigh fading channel while being exposed to eavesdroppers. By harvesting energy from the SU transmitter, a cooperating jammer attempts to ensure the privacy of the transmitted communications. That is, this harvested energy is utilized to generate and spread jamming signals to baffle the information interception at eavesdroppers. Additionally, two scenarios are examined depending on the manner in which eavesdroppers intercept messages; colluding and non-colluding eavesdroppers. These scenarios are compared to determine which poses the greatest risk to the network. Furthermore, the channel cascade effect on security is investigated. Distances between users and the density of non-colluding eavesdroppers are also investigated. Moreover, cooperative jamming-based energy harvesting effectiveness is demonstrated.
Authored by Deemah Tashman, Walaa Hamouda
Cognitive Radio (CR) is an attractive solution in mobile communication for solving the spectrum scarcity problem. Moreover, security concerns are not yet fully satisfied. This article focuses on attacks such as the Primary user emulation attack (PUE) and the jammer attack. These attacks create anomalous spectrum access thereby disturbing the dynamic spectrum usage in the CR networks. A framework based on cross-layer has been designed effectively to determine these attacks in the CR networks. First, each secondary user will sense the spectrum in the physical layer and construct a feature space. Using the extracted features, the clusters are formed effectively for each user. In the network layer, multipath routing is employed to discover the routes for the secondary user. If the node in the path identifies any spectrum shortage, it will verify that location with the help of constructed cluster. If the node does not belong to any of the clusters, then it will be identified as the attacker node. Simulation results and security analysis are performed using the NS2 simulations, which show improvement in detection of the attacks, decrease in the detection delay, and less route dis-connectivity. The proposed cross-layer framework identifies the anomalous spectrum access attack effectively.
Authored by Arun S, Sanjana Prasad, G Umamaheswari
The authors' industry experiences suggest that compiler warnings, a lightweight version of program analysis, are valuable early bug detection tools. Significant costs are associated with patches and security bulletins for issues that could have been avoided if compiler warnings were addressed. Yet, the industry's attitude towards compiler warnings is mixed. Practices range from silencing all compiler warnings to having a zero-tolerance policy as to any warnings. Current published data indicates that addressing compiler warnings early is beneficial. However, support for this value theory stems from grey literature or is anecdotal. Additional focused research is needed to truly assess the cost-benefit of addressing warnings.
Authored by Gunnar Kudrjavets, Aditya Kumar, Nachiappan Nagappan, Ayushi Rastogi
TVM(tensor virtual machine) as a deep learning compiler which supports the conversion of machine learning models into TVM IR(intermediate representation) and to optimise the generation of high-performance machine code for various hardware platforms. While the traditional approach is to parallelise the cyclic transformations of operators, in this paper we partition the implementation of the operators in the deep learning compiler TVM with parallel scheduling to derive a faster running time solution for the operators. An optimisation algorithm for partitioning and parallel scheduling is designed for the deep learning compiler TVM, where operators such as two-dimensional convolutions are partitioned into multiple smaller implementations and several partitioned operators are run in parallel scheduling to derive the best operator partitioning and parallel scheduling decisions by means of performance estimation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, multiple examples of the two-dimensional convolution operator, the average pooling operator, the maximum pooling operator, and the ReLU activation operator with different input sizes were tested on the CPU platform, and the performance of these operators was experimentally shown to be improved and the operators were run speedily.
Authored by Zhiyu Li, Xiang Zhou, Wenbin Weng
Binary analysis is pervasively utilized to assess software security and test vulnerabilities without accessing source codes. The analysis validity is heavily influenced by the inferring ability of information related to the code compilation. Among the compilation information, compiler type and optimization level, as the key factors determining how binaries look like, are still difficult to be inferred efficiently with existing tools. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study on the binary's appearance under various compilation settings and propose a lightweight binary analysis tool based on the simplest machine learning method, called DIComP to infer the compiler and optimization level via most relevant features according to the observation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that DIComP can fully recognize the compiler provenance, and it is effective in inferring the optimization levels with up to 90% accuracy. Also, it is efficient to infer thousands of binaries at a millisecond level with our lightweight machine learning model (1MB).
Authored by Ligeng Chen, Zhongling He, Hao Wu, Fengyuan Xu, Yi Qian, Bing Mao
Neural program embeddings have demonstrated considerable promise in a range of program analysis tasks, including clone identification, program repair, code completion, and program synthesis. However, most existing methods generate neural program embeddings di-rectly from the program source codes, by learning from features such as tokens, abstract syntax trees, and control flow graphs. This paper takes a fresh look at how to improve program embed-dings by leveraging compiler intermediate representation (IR). We first demonstrate simple yet highly effective methods for enhancing embedding quality by training embedding models alongside source code and LLVM IR generated by default optimization levels (e.g., -02). We then introduce IRGEN, a framework based on genetic algorithms (GA), to identify (near-)optimal sequences of optimization flags that can significantly improve embedding quality. We use IRGEN to find optimal sequences of LLVM optimization flags by performing GA on source code datasets. We then extend a popular code embedding model, CodeCMR, by adding a new objective based on triplet loss to enable a joint learning over source code and LLVM IR. We benchmark the quality of embedding using a rep-resentative downstream application, code clone detection. When CodeCMR was trained with source code and LLVM IRs optimized by findings of IRGEN, the embedding quality was significantly im-proved, outperforming the state-of-the-art model, CodeBERT, which was trained only with source code. Our augmented CodeCMR also outperformed CodeCMR trained over source code and IR optimized with default optimization levels. We investigate the properties of optimization flags that increase embedding quality, demonstrate IRGEN's generalization in boosting other embedding models, and establish IRGEN's use in settings with extremely limited training data. Our research and findings demonstrate that a straightforward addition to modern neural code embedding models can provide a highly effective enhancement.
Authored by Zongjie Li, Pingchuan Ma, Huaijin Wang, Shuai Wang, Qiyi Tang, Sen Nie, Shi Wu
Derivatives are key to numerous science, engineering, and machine learning applications. While existing tools generate derivatives of programs in a single language, modern parallel applications combine a set of frameworks and languages to leverage available performance and function in an evolving hardware landscape. We propose a scheme for differentiating arbitrary DAG-based parallelism that preserves scalability and efficiency, implemented into the LLVM-based Enzyme automatic differentiation framework. By integrating with a full-fledged compiler backend, Enzyme can differentiate numerous parallel frameworks and directly control code generation. Combined with its ability to differentiate any LLVM-based language, this flexibility permits Enzyme to leverage the compiler tool chain for parallel and differentiation-specitic optimizations. We differentiate nine distinct versions of the LULESH and miniBUDE applications, written in different programming languages (C++, Julia) and parallel frameworks (OpenMP, MPI, RAJA, Julia tasks, MPI.jl), demonstrating similar scalability to the original program. On benchmarks with 64 threads or nodes, we find a differentiation overhead of 3.4–6.8× on C++ and 5.4–12.5× on Julia.
Authored by William Moses, Sri Narayanan, Ludger Paehler, Valentin Churavy, Michel Schanen, Jan Hückelheim, Johannes Doerfert, Paul Hovland
With memory safety and security issues continuing to plague modern systems, security is rapidly becoming a first class priority in new architectures and competes directly with performance and power efficiency. The capability-based architecture model provides a promising solution to many memory vulnerabilities by replacing plain addresses with capabilities, i.e., addresses and related metadata. A key advantage of the capability model is compatibility with existing code bases. Capabilities can be implemented transparently to a programmer, i.e., without source code changes. Capabilities leverage semantics in source code to describe access permissions but require customized compilers to translate the semantics to their binary equivalent.In this work, we introduce a complete capabilityaware compiler toolchain for such secure architectures. We illustrate the compiler construction with a RISC-V capability-based architecture, called Zeno. As a securityfocused, large-scale, global shared memory architecture, Zeno implements a Namespace-based capability model for accesses. Namespace IDs (NSID) are encoded with an extended addressing model to associate them with access permission metadata elsewhere in the system. The NSID extended addressing model requires custom compiler support to fully leverage the protections offered by Namespaces. The Zeno compiler produces code transparently to the programmer that is aware of Namespaces and maintains their integrity. The Zeno assembler enables custom Zeno instructions which support secure memory operations. Our results show that our custom toolchain moderately increases the binary size compared to nonZeno compilation. We find the minimal overhead incurred by the additional NSID management instructions to be an acceptable trade-off for the memory safety and security offered by Zeno Namespaces.
Authored by Jacob Abraham, Alan Ehret, Michel Kinsy
Model checking is one of the most commonly used technique in formal verification. However, the exponential scale state space renders exhaustive state enumeration inefficient even for a moderate System on Chip (SoC) design. In this paper, we propose a method that leverages symbolic execution to accelerate state space search and pinpoint security vulnerabilities. We automatically convert the hardware design to functionally equivalent C++ code and utilize the KLEE symbolic execution engine to perform state exploration through heuristic search. To reduce the search space, we symbolically represent essential input signals while making non-critical inputs concrete. Experiment results have demonstrated that our method can precisely identify security vulnerabilities at significantly lower computation cost.
Authored by Shibo Tang, Xingxin Wang, Yifei Gao, Wei Hu
Fractional repetition (FR) codes are a special family of regenerating codes with the repair-by-transfer property. The constructions of FR codes are naturally related to combinatorial designs, graphs, and hypergraphs. Given the file size of an FR code, it is desirable to determine the minimum number of storage nodes needed. The problem is related to an extremal graph theory problem, which asks for the minimum number of vertices of an α-regular graph such that any subgraph with k vertices has at most δ edges. In this paper, we present a class of regular graphs for this problem to give the bounds for the minimum number of storage nodes for the FR codes.
Authored by Hongna Yang, Yiwei Zhang
We present a ternary source coding scheme in this paper, which is a special class of low density generator matrix (LDGM) codes. We prove that a ternary linear block LDGM code, whose generator matrix is randomly generated with each element independent and identically distributed, is universal for source coding in terms of the symbol-error rate (SER). To circumvent the high-complex maximum likelihood decoding, we introduce a special class of convolutional LDGM codes, called block Markov superposition transmission of repetition (BMST-R) codes, which are iteratively decodable by a sliding window algorithm. Then the presented BMST-R codes are applied to construct a tandem scheme for Gaussian source compression, where a dead-zone quantizer is introduced before the ternary source coding. The main advantages of this scheme are its universality and flexibility. The dead-zone quantizer can choose a proper quantization level according to the distortion requirement, while the LDGM codes can adapt the code rate to approach the entropy of the quantized sequence. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme performs well for ternary sources over a wide range of code rates and that the distortion introduced by quantization dominates provided that the code rate is slightly greater than the discrete entropy.
Authored by Tingting Zhu, Jifan Liang, Xiao Ma
Nowadays, improving the reliability and security of the transmitted data has gained more attention with the increase in emerging power-limited and lightweight communication devices. Also, the transmission needs to meet specific latency requirements. Combining data encryption and encoding in one physical layer block has been exploited to study the effect on security and latency over traditional sequential data transmission. Some of the current works target secure error-correcting codes that may be candidates for post-quantum computing. However, modifying the popularly used channel coding techniques to guarantee secrecy and maintain the same error performance and complexity at the decoder is challenging since the structure of the channel coding blocks is altered which results in less optimal decoding performance. Also, the redundancy nature of the error-correcting codes complicates the encryption method. In this paper, we briefly review the proposed security schemes on Turbo codes. Then, we propose a secure turbo code design and compare it with the relevant security schemes in the literature. We show that the proposed method is more secure without adding complexity.
Authored by Ahmed Aladi, Emad Alsusa
Vulnerability discovery is an important field of computer security research and development today. Because most of the current vulnerability discovery methods require large-scale manual auditing, and the code parsing process is cumbersome and time-consuming, the vulnerability discovery effect is reduced. Therefore, for the uncertainty of vulnerability discovery itself, it is the most basic tool design principle that auxiliary security analysts cannot completely replace them. The purpose of this paper is to study the source code vulnerability discovery method based on graph neural network. This paper analyzes the three processes of data preparation, source code vulnerability mining and security assurance of the source code vulnerability mining method, and also analyzes the suspiciousness and particularity of the experimental results. The empirical analysis results show that the types of traditional source code vulnerability mining methods become more concise and convenient after using graph neural network technology, and we conducted a survey and found that more than 82% of people felt that the design source code vulnerability mining method used When it comes to graph neural networks, it is found that the design efficiency has become higher.
Authored by Zhenghong Jiang
In this paper, we propose a new ordered statistics decoding (OSD) for linear block codes, which is referred to as local constraint-based OSD (LC-OSD). Distinguished from the conventional OSD, which chooses the most reliable basis (MRB) for re-encoding, the LC-OSD chooses an extended MRB on which local constraints are naturally imposed. A list of candidate codewords is then generated by performing a serial list Viterbi algorithm (SLVA) over the trellis specified with the local constraints. To terminate early the SLVA for complexity reduction, we present a simple criterion which monitors the ratio of the bound on the likelihood of the unexplored candidate codewords to the sum of the hard-decision vector’s likelihood and the up-to-date optimal candidate’s likelihood. Simulation results show that the LC-OSD can have a much less number of test patterns than that of the conventional OSD but cause negligible performance loss. Comparisons with other complexity-reduced OSDs are also conducted, showing the advantages of the LC-OSD in terms of complexity.
Authored by Yiwen Wang, Jifan Liang, Xiao Ma