Sophisticated cyberattacks require the expertise of forensic investigators to examine massive volumes of log data and uncover the intricacies of interconnected adversarial techniques across different attack stages. Due to variations in adversarial techniques and fragmented information, investigators often struggle with limited visibility in reconstructing events along the cyber kill chain. We identify statistical correlations of adversarial techniques by modeling their co-occurrences in advanced persistent threats as weighted connections in a graph. Our automated solution includes weighted knowledge graph construction, extraction of adversarial patterns through graph traversal, and detection of adversarial techniques guided by these patterns. Through attack simulations in two case studies, we validate the effectiveness of this approach in detecting adversarial techniques, supporting the identification of attack vectors and the reconstruction of partial kill chains even when some techniques bypass forensic investigation. This research highlights the potential to systematically investigate adversarial patterns, suggesting that future work could improve knowledge graph construction and extraction methods using advanced machine learning techniques for even better results.

In recent years, Blockchain, underpinned by distributed ledger technology (DLT) has been touted as the next disruptive technology with the potential to revolutionise various industry verticals and horizontals. Plagiarism and Intellectual Property Infringements of copyrights of artifacts, trade secrets, etc., are often fought in courts of law. There is an inherent need to adduce reliable evidence to establish a prima facie tort case or even beyond. In this paper we aim to leverage on the Blockchain technology to provide a digital transformation in the post-Covid world by offering a new platform to aid in the protection of one's intellectual property rights through a Proof of Existence (PoE) framework using Ethereum smart contracts. We have developed a seamless web platform to allow users experience a simple yet secure Proof of Existence (PoE) service by allowing the users to (i) certify, (ii) manage and (iii) view their documents securely through a digital portfolio. This PoE service leverages on the Blockchain characteristics to provide a reliable and transparent means to record a tamper-proof evidence of copyright information with timestamp as proof of existence for all its transactions through smart contracts.

Drones are usually associated with the military but in recent times, they are also used for public and commercial interests such as transporting of goods, communications, agriculture, disaster mitigation and environment preservation. However, like any system, drones have vulnerabilities that can be exploited which can jeopardise a drone's operation and may lead to loss of lives, property and money. Thus drones deployed must be carefully evaluated and selected. Pen-testing is a way to assess the vulnerabilities of drones but it may require multiple commands, files or scripts. In this work, we propose a tool to allow easy pen-testing and assessment of drones. Vulnerability assessment of the DJI Mavic 2 Pro is discussed extensively as well. Future work includes addressing the vulnerabilities of other drones and expanding the tool to conduct pen-testing on other drones.

Modern processors use out-of-order and speculative execution to maximize performance. However, these types of optimization executions may leak users' confidential information to another malicious party through a side channel, as can be seen from the notorious Meltdown and Spectre poC attacks. Although some big companies have released software patches and updates to work around the hardware problems, however, they might inadvertently cause some stability or performance issues, especially for Windows systems. Furthermore, some legacy systems are never going to be patched, such as XP systems. Therefore, we provide a more proactive method, a multi-agent way of detecting Meltdown and Spectre on Windows (including the XP System), Linux and OS X Systems. Experiments show that our detection mechanism is very effective in detecting these attacks for all the major existing operating systems.

In information security, web application scanners detect and provide some diagnoses for specific vulnerabilities. However, scanner performance as well as the damage potential of different vulnerabilities varies. This undermines the development of effective remediation solutions and the reliable sharing of vulnerability information. This paper describes an approach based on soft computing technology for the development of metrics that are used to grade web application scanners and vulnerabilities so that scanner performance can be evaluated and confidence levels can be computed for vulnerability reports. These metrics help derive a level of assurance that will support security management decisions, enhance effective remediation efforts, and could serve as security tool design metrics.

This work presents an empirical property-based model to describe web-based vulnerability. We define a web application using a new descriptive model with pre-condition, behavior, entity and communication property sets. The Vulnerable Property Relationship Graph (VPRG) defines a vulnerability as vulnerable properties in application with relations to other properties in cause- and consequence-relationships. The Vulnerable Property Relationship Matrix (VPRM) is used to quantify the existence vulnerability and to measure its impact according to the relations of vulnerable properties to other properties in execution of the web application. A severity score calculation is proposed based on VPRM: the vulnerability severity score is typically the sum of consequence as a result of state changes of every evolving property in the vulnerable property relationship model. The prototype model is applied to a case study involving specified web vulnerabilities.

Fixed-power wireless sensor networks are prevalent and cost-effective. However, they face mote failures, RF interference from environmental noise and energy constraints. Routing protocols for such networks must overcome these problems to achieve reliability, energy efficiency and scalability in message delivery. Achievement of these requirements, however, poses conflicting demands. In this paper, we propose an efficient and reliable routing protocol (EAR) that achieves reliable and scalable performance with minimal compromise of energy efficiency. The routing design of EAR is based on four parameters - expected path length and a weighted combination of distance traversed, energy levels and link transmission success history, to dynamically determine and maintain the best routes. Simulation experiments of EAR with four existing protocols demonstrate that a design based on a combination of routing parameters exhibits collectively better performance than protocols based on just hop-count and energy or those using flooding.

Several vulnerability analysis techniques in web-based applications detect and report on different types of vulnerabilities. However, no single technique provides a generic technology-independent handling of Web-based vulnerabilities. In this paper we present our experience with and experimental exemplification of using the application vulnerability description language (AVDL) to realize a unified data model for technology-independent vulnerability analysis of Web applications. This work is part of a project that is funded by the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies, Ministry of Defence Singapore.

This paper presents the exchanged hypercube, a new interconnection network obtained by systematically removing links from a binary hypercube. It maintains several desirable properties of the binary hypercube yet with reduced interconnection complexity. We also introduce the extended binomial tree, a spanning tree of the exchanged hypercube that preserves many desirable properties of the original binomial tree. A fault-tolerant routing strategy is also proposed for the exchanged hypercube.

Software prototyping offers a fast, flexible and cost-effective alternative to physical prototyping during the analysis and design stages of commercial electronic products. This paper describes a software platform implemented to facilitate the virtual prototyping of cellular phone models at the analysis and design stages. In order to discuss the application of the platform, an example of a basic cellular phone is considered. The features and functions of a standard cellular phone have been implemented as primitives in a Parts library, and its behavioural characteristics can be dynamically simulated via script files. The prototyping platform provides modularity, and requires minimal implementation effort to accommodate new cellular phone model specifications. In addition, the platform is able to demonstrate the practical usefulness of software prototyping in reducing the complexity of product analysis and design. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.