The cybersecurity domain faces a critical disparity between the escalating demand for skilled professionals and the limited talent pool. This gap is primarily driven by the surge in cyberattacks perpetrated by malicious actors seeking financial gain or disruption. These attacks, encompassing tactics like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) and ransomware, pose significant threats to data security and public safety. To bridge this gap, several challenges must be addressed. We need to prioritize initiatives that enhance people’s awareness and education in cybersecurity. Additionally, exploring innovative training methods and leveraging technology to equip cybersecurity professionals with the necessary skillsets is crucial.

This poster presents an ongoing study that takes a diverse and inclusive approach to designing a practical group work assessment for an undergraduate cybersecurity course delivered to third year university cohorts. Students were given the choice to either work individually or as part of a group to complete the assignment in virtual laboratories. The study evaluates how student grouping preferences change when the teaching structure adapts in response to the the Covid-19 pandemic and how grouping preference impacts upon academic performance. Students reflected positively on the assignment and demonstrated a preference for treating group information as private. No disputes regarding group marks or contributions from different group members arose despite the number of groups involved. Students have taken responsibility for their choices and have accepted the outcomes of their teamwork.

This paper presents a new Intrusion Detection System (IDS) using a 3 layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), capable of identifying malicious network traffic. We employ a new injective algorithm to encode network traffic without loss of information. We also include a new algorithm to decode, encoded RGB images back into network traffic. We evaluate the proposed IDS in terms of its computational complexity in for example: time, memory and CPU utilisation for the encoding and decoding algorithms, and its accuracy and loss during training and detection. Lastly, we compare the proposed IDS against a significant IDS algorithm that uses a different approach for encoding, decoding and CNN detection.

Service providers have now entered the implementation phase for 5G mobile telecommunication networks. With this, the concept of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) will play a crucial role when providing services on-the-go with low latency, high availability and high bandwidth. However, due to the low processing power of MEC nodes, adversaries may target the platform for malevolent purposes. In this paper we focus on building a realistic 5G-MEC testbed to run legitimate traffic and network attacks, and to collect 5G datasets for 5G-MEC. We also apply a Convolutional Neural Network to the dataset created on our testbed and to publicly available datasets. Our datasets and detection rate suggest that the employment of current public datasets for research based on 5G-MEC security, is now inappropriate.

The current trend in developing smart technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) has motivated a lot of research interest in optimizing data transmission or minimizing energy consumption, but with little evidence of proposals for achieving both objectives in a single model. Using the concept of game theory, we develop a new MAC protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 and IoT networks in which we formulate a novel expression for the players' utility function and establish a stable Nash equilibrium (NE) for the game. The proposed IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol is modeled as a smart game in which analytical expressions are derived for channel access probability, data transmission probability, and energy used. These analytical expressions are used in formulating an optimization problem (OP) that maximizes data transmission and minimizes energy consumption by nodes. The analysis and simulation results suggest that the proposed scheme is scalable and achieves better performance in terms of data transmission, energy-efficiency, and longevity, when compared with the default IEEE 802.15.4 access mechanism.

SIP DDoS attack is growing and has a real threat to crippling public communication infrastructure. The standard approach to building the defense is at or near the attack destination (i.e. victim's location). This approach is struggling to keep up with the growing volume and attack sophistication. To be better prepared for future attacks, the workload needs to be distributed, and the attack needs to be mitigated as close to the attack source as possible. This paper experiments with data plane programming (P4) and control plane programming of Ethernet switches to provide first-hop detection and mitigation capability for SIP INVITE DDoS attack at every switchport. This approach creates a distributed or source-based defense component which could be added to the existing destination-based components to create a more comprehensive overall solution that is extensible, economical, and scalable against SIP DDoS attack of the future.

Online examinations are an integral component of many online learning environments, which face many security challenges. Collusion is seen as a major security threat to such examinations, when a student invites a third party to impersonate or abet in a test. This work aims to strengthen the authentication of students via the use of dynamic profile questions. The study reported in this paper involved 31 online participants from five countries over a five-week period. The results of usability and security analysis are reported. The dynamic profile questions were more usable than both the text-based and image-based questions (p < 0.01). An impersonation abuse scenario was simulated using email and mobile phone. The impersonation attack via email was not successful, however, students were able to share answers to dynamic profile questions with a third party impersonator in real time, which resulted in 93% correct answers. The sharing of information via phone took place in real time during an online test and the response time of an impersonator was significantly different (p < 0.01) than a student. The study also revealed that a response time factor may be implemented to identify and report impersonation attacks.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol used to establish and terminate calls that are deployed globally. A flood of SIP INVITE packets sent by an attacker causes a Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) incident, during which legitimate users are unable to use telephony services. Legacy TDoS defense is typically implemented as network appliances and not sufficiently deployed to enable early detection. To make TDoS defense more widely deployed and yet affordable, this paper presents TDoSD@DP where TDoS detection and mitigation is programmed at the data plane so that it can be enabled on every switch port and therefore serves as distributed SIP sensors. With this approach, the damage is isolated at a particular switch and bandwidth saved by not sending attack packets further upstream. Experiments have been performed to track the SIP state machine and to limit the number of active SIP session per port. The results show that TDoSD@DP was able to detect and mitigate ongoing INVITE flood attack, protecting the SIP server, and limiting the damage to a local switch. Bringing the TDoS defense function to the data plane provides a novel data plane application that operates at the SIP protocol and a novel approach for TDoS defense implementation.

Wireless network security requirements are becoming more important and critical. The modern network security architectures require more attention to provide security in each network layer. This will require understanding of protocol vulnerabilities in existing protocol architectures. However, providing security requirements are not just limited to confidentiality and integrity, also availability and fairness are important security elements. IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is one of the most common standard in modern day networks and has been designed without a consideration for providing security protection at MAC layer. IEEE 802.11 assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to obtain extra bandwidth, conserve resources and disrupt network performance. This research proposes a Misbehaviour Detection MAC protocol (MD-MAC) to address the problematic scenarios of MAC layer misbehaviours, which takes a novel approach to detect misbehaviours in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). The MD-MAC modifies the CSMA/CA protocol message exchange and uses verifiable backoff value generation mechanism with an incorporated trust model which is suitable for distributed networks. The MD-MAC protocol has been implemented and evaluated in ns2, simulation results suggest that the protocol is able to detect misbehaving wireless nodes in a distributed network environment.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted much interest in the research community because of their wide range of applications. An emerging application for WSNs involves their use in healthcare where they are generally termed wireless medical sensor networks. In a hospital, outfitting every patient with tiny, wearable, wireless vital sign sensors would allow doctors, nurses, and other caregivers to continuously monitor the state of their patients. In such a scenario, patients are expected to be treated in reasonable time, so an access control model is needed, which will provide both real-time access to comprehensive medical records and detect unauthorized access to sensitive data. In emergency situations, a doctor or nurse needs to access data immediately. The loss in data availability can result in further decline in the patient's condition or can even lead to death. Therefore, the availability of data is more important than any security concern in emergency situations. To address that research issue for medical data in WSNs, we propose the break-the-glass access control (BTG-AC) model that is a modified and redesigned version of the break-the-glass role-based access control (BTG-RBAC) model to address data availability issue and to detect the security policy violations from both authorized and unauthorized users. Several changes within the access control engine are made in BTG-RBAC in order to make the new BTG-AC to apply and fit in WSNs. This paper presents the detailed design and development of the BTG-AC model based on a healthcare scenario. The evaluation results show that the concepts of BTG, prevention and detection mechanism, and obligation provide more flexible access than other current access control models in WSNs. Additionally, we compare the BTG-AC model with an adaptive access control (A2C) model, which has similar properties, for further evaluation. Alongside with the comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of BTG-AC over current WSN access control models are presented.

The vulnerability of wireless networks to selfish and misbehaving nodes is a well known problem. The Tit-For-Tat (TFT) strategy has been proposed as a game theoretic solution to the problem, however the TFT suffers from a deadlock vulnerability. We present a modified TFT algorithm, the Resilient Tit-For-Tat (RTFT) algorithm in which we introduce the concept of alternative strategies to complement the default strategy. This combination enables us to model a non-cooperative game in which nodes are able change their strategies in order to maximize their utilities in selfish and misbehaviour scenarios. We demonstrate the viability of our proposal with simulation results.

Wireless network security has received tremendous attention due to the vulnerabilities exposed in the open communication medium. The most common wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is IEEE 802.11, which assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to disrupt network performance, obtain extra bandwidth and conserve resources. These MAC layer misbehaviours can lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which can disrupt the network operation. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis of MAC layer misbehaviour driven DoS attacks for the IEEE 802.11 protocol in MANETs. This research studied possible MAC layer DoS attack strategies that are driven by the MAC layer malicious/selfish nodes on IEEE 802.11 protocol. Such DoS attacks could caused by malicious and selfish nodes by violating their backoff timers associated with the MAC protocol. Therefore, these attacks are experimentally analysed and evaluated the impact on the network performance and stability in MANETs. The simulation results show that introducing DoS attacks at MAC layer could significantly affect the network throughput and data packet collision rate. This paper concludes that DoS attacks with selfish/malicious intend can obtain at least 50% larger throughput by denying well-behaved nodes to obtain deserved throughput, also DoS attacks with the intend of complete destruction which allow only less than 5% throughput for well-behaved nodes which eventually led to shut-down of the network.

The addition of social networking to Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT). It is where digital devices called objects mimic the social behavior of their human counterparts and build up social relationships with other objects in order to provide services to the humans. One of the obstacles in realizing this idea is trust management. The most complex question in trust building is `How can objects trust the information provided by other objects?' This paper proposes a new trust model based on Guarantor and Reputation for SIoT. The former requests an object to find a guarantor at an agreed commission rate in order to get service from another object; the latter uses reputation of a node to measure its trustworthiness. By simulating this model using an architecture based on real world scenarios, it was concluded that the trust model can be employed in different scenarios in SIoT and the use of penalties for malicious activity enables the model to detect and isolate malicious nodes.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of attention in the research community because it is easy to deploy them in the physical environment and collect and disseminate environmental data from them. The collected data from sensor nodes can vary based on what kind of application is used for WSNs. Data confidentiality and access control to that collected data are the most challenging issues in WSNs because the users are able to access data from the different location via ad-hoc manner. Access control is one of the critical requirements to prevent unauthorised access from users. The current access control models in information systems cannot be applied straightforwardly because of some limitations namely limited energy, resource and memory, and low computation capability. Based on the requirements of WSNs, we proposed the Break-The-Glass Access Control (BTG-AC) model which is the modified and redesigned version of Break-The-Glass Role-Based Access Control (BTG-RBAC) model. The several changes within the access control engine are made in BTG-RBAC to apply and fit in WSNs. We developed the BTG-AC model in Ponder2 package. Also a medical scenario was developed to evaluate the BTG-AC model for medical data in WSNs. In this paper, detail design, implementation phase, evaluation result and policies evaluation for the BTG-AC model are presented. Based on the evaluation result, the BTG-AC model can be used in WSNs after several modifications have been made under Ponder2 Package.

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are composed of moving mobile nodes that are battery operated. This paper proposes a set of performance metrics in evaluating energy efficiency in MANETs, and studies the energy consumption of MANET from a variety of aspects: at different network layers including application layer, network layer and MAC layer, at different operation mode including idle, transmit and receive, and with different routing protocols including DSR, DSDV and AODV. Extensive simulations were run in the network simulator ns2 for various scenarios. The results and analysis reveal some important findings. A substantial amount of energy is consumed at MAC layer, especially at idle mode. IEEE 802.11 achieves completely different pattern in terms of its energy efficiency when combined with different routing protocols. DSR and DSDV are significant efficient than AODV in terms of energy consumption per successful data packet delivery.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community. The security mechanism with large overhead of computation and communication, are infeasible to apply in WSNs due to many constraints such as limited energy, resource and memory, and low computation capability. Current access control models cannot make an effective access decision in many events because access decisions are based on predefined access policies and roles. Sometimes, users may need to access important data urgently but apart from those predefined access policies, other user request will not be granted. An adaptive access control model is proposed aiming to provide a flexible and an effective access decision on user access request at any time. The proposed model is developed in Ponder2 framework with additional extensions to adapt the unexpected events by using privilege overriding and also adjust its decision based on users' behaviour trust value. A medical scenario is used as an example application to develop and evaluate the proposed model in Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) and WSNs. In this paper, detailed design, implementation phase, evaluation result and policies testing for the proposed adaptive access control model are presented. Based on an evaluation result, all the modules in the proposed access control model are cooperated to make an effective access decision.

Original article can be found at: http://portal.acm.org/ Copyright ACM [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Integrating intelligent medical microsensors into a wireless communication network makes it possible to remotely collect physiological signals of a patient, release the patient from being tethered to monitoring medical instrumentations, and facilitate the patient's early hospital discharge. This can further improve life quality by providing continuous observation without the need of disrupting the patient's normal life, thus reducing the risk of infection significantly, and decreasing the cost of the hospital and the patient. This paper discusses the implementation issues, and describes the overall system architecture of our developed Bluetooth sensor network for patient monitoring and the corresponding heart activity sensors. It also presents our approach to developing the intelligent physiological sensor nodes involving integration of Bluetooth radio technology, hardware and software organization, and our solutions for onboard signal processing.

While online shopping are becoming more accepted by people in modern life, cardholders are more concerned about card fraud and the lack of cardholder authentication in the current online credit card payment. This paper proposes a purchase protocol with live cardholder authentication for online transaction which combines telephone banking and online banking together. The order information and payment information are sent though the Internet and encrypted by asymmetric key encryption. The cardholder is authenticated by the card issuing bank ringing back to the customer's phone number and the cardholder inputting the secure PIN and the amount to pay. The live cardholder authentication makes the cardholder feel securer and card fraud difficult. Furthermore, the protocol does not require the cardholder to obtain a public key certificate or install additional software for the online transaction.

The unique characteristics of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), such as dynamic topology, shared wireless medium and open peer-to-peer network architecture, pose various security challenges. This paper compares three routing protocols, DSDV, DSR, and AODV under security attack where two types of node misbehaviour have been investigated. Network performance is evaluated in terms of normalized throughput, routing overhead, normalized routing load, and average packet delay, when a percentage of nodes misbehave. Simulation results show that although the performance of all three routing protocols degrades, DSDV is the most robust routing protocol under security attacks. This reveals that a proactive routing protocol has the potential of excluding misbehaving nodes in advance and reducing the impact of security attack.

Conventional entity authentication is not enough to build a secure pervasive computing environment. Being sure that you are talking to the expected entity does not guarantee it is going to do what you expect him to do, and only that. This paper introduces a concept of "trustworthy authentication" in pervasive computing which is defined as entity authentication accompanied by an assurance of trustworthy behaviour of the authenticated entity. It discusses how to provide trustworthy authentication in pervasive computing using the example of a roaming customer wishing to print his email on a public printer. A two-level hierarchical trustworthy authentication scheme is proposed where local and higher-level authorization servers issue trustworthiness certificates after receiving trustworthiness records from the printer, signed by its users. The proposed scheme may be generalized for trustworthy authentication of security devices such as firewalls.

Researchers have used extensive simulation and experimental studies to understand TCP performance in adhoc wireless networks. In contrast, the objective of this paper is to theoretically analyze TCP performance in this environment. By examining the case of running one TCP session over a string topology, a system model for analyzing TCP performance in adhoc wireless networks is proposed, which considers packet buffering, nodes' contention for access to the wireless channel, and spatial reuse of the wireless channel. Markov chain modelling is applied to analyze this system model. Analytical results show that when the number of hops that the TCP session crosses is fixed, the TCP throughput is independent of the TCP congestion window size. When the number of hops increases from one, the TCP throughput decreases first, and then stabilizes when the number of hops becomes large. The analysis is validated by comparing the numerical and simulation results

This paper presents our creation and evaluation of multi-modal interface for a virtual assembly environment. It involves implementing an assembly simulation environment with multi-sensory feedback (visual and auditory), and evaluating the effects of multi-modal feedback on assembly task performance. This virtual environment experimental platform brought together complex technologies such as constraint-based assembly simulation, optical motion tracking technology, and real-time 3D sound generation technology around a virtual reality workbench and a common software platform. A peg-in-a-hole and a Sener electronic box assembly tasks have been used as the task cases to perform human factor experiments, using sixteen subjects. Both objective performance data (task completion time, and human performance error rates) and subjective opinions (questionnaires) have been gathered from this experiment.

A relative bandwidth service differentiation scheme is proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The service profile for a traffic session is defined as a relative target rate, which is a fraction of the effective link capacity of nodes. To calculate the effective link capacity of nodes in a randomly moving topology MANET, two methods are presented: one is parameter based and the other is measurement based calculations work effectively to estimate the effective link capacity of nodes and the relative service differentiation is consistent. Furthermore, the differentiation is more consistent when nodes use the measurement based calculation of link capacity because it is more accurate.

The aim of service prioritization is to give resource priority to certain traffic types. For example, the voice service can have higher priority than the data service, Web surfing can have higher priority than FTP and e-mail applications, or some users can have higher priority than others. This paper investigates the performance of service prioritization in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Two schemes, priority buffer management and priority scheduling, are applied to realize service prioritization and three service profiles are discussed as well as simulation results are presented to show that the priority schemes work well with TCP traffic but not with constant bit rate (CBR) traffic. Besides this, the priority scheduling scheme outperforms the priority buffer management scheme in terms of average end-to-end delay of TCP packets and average throughput of TCP sessions.

An analytical model of a single TCP session based on a string topology in wireless multihop networks is presented. The model for the communication process also considers buffering, propagation delay and channel access probability. A Markov chain technique is adopted in analyzing the TCP behavior. Full analysis is given for the case where the TCP source and destination are one hop away and the maximum TCP window size is less than the buffer size in each node. Consideration is also given to the case when the maximum TCP window size is larger than the buffer size in each node. The analytical results are validated against results using the NS simulator.