Abstract The trend towards intelligent control processes has introduced the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies to factories. IoT devices can sense data and send it to a cloud for further analysis in a factory. Consequently, the quantity of such valuable data flowing in an industrial cyber‐physical system has gradually increased. Tailoring a risk assessment system for Industrial IoT (IIoT) is essential, particularly for a cloud platform that handles the IIoT data flow. In this study, we leverage analytic hierarchy processes (AHPs) and propose Hierarchical Risk Assessment Model (HiRAM) for an IIoT cloud platform. The proposed model allows the platform to self‐evaluate its security status. Furthermore, a modular and responsive Risk Assessment System based on HiRAM, called HiRAM‐RAS, is realized and evaluated in a real‐world IIoT cloud platform. We deploy HiRAM‐RAS to a sample application and introduce the practical deployment procedures. We then estimate the practicality of the HiRAM‐RAS by injecting different degrees of errors and launching Distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) attacks. The results demonstrate the changes in integrity and availability scores evaluated by HiRAM.

Abstract Advances in healthcare systems require faster data transmission between medical instruments and hospital information systems (HISs) and cloud migration for better computing capability and scalability. Old medical instruments should be integrated with modern HISs to provide real‐time examination service to patients. Still, such integration carries some problems, especially when novel services are involved, such as real‐time fall detection and mobile healthcare. Some hospitals have formulated standard operating procedures (SOPs) in response, requiring the electronic health record generated by an old instrument to be manually converted and uploaded to the HIS by medical personnel. However, such SOPs may compromise the real‐time performance and increase medical personnel workload and complexity. Thus, this article proposes a framework named Cross, which comprises an embedded bridging module, CrossBridger, and a server‐side software program, CrossServer, to integrate old instruments into a modern HIS using an edge computing paradigm. With Cross, users can solve system integration problems and deploy more protective strategies in existing HISs to fulfill the demands of novel services relatively cheaply. Based on the proposed framework, we implement a solution that can automate most existing SOPs and lighten the workload of medical personnel so that they can provide better care and service to patients. We summarize the practical experience of the implementation based on the solution. As a case study, we deploy the implementation to a real‐world hospital to demonstrate the feasibility of Cross. Furthermore, we evaluate Cross's efficacy under various network statuses in three experiments.

This paper proposes a dual Autoencoder-based Intrusion Detection System (duAE-IDS) for the ever-changing network attacks. duAE-IDS is a protocol-based IDS, which divides traffic by its application-layer protocol. duAE-IDS determines the traffic's abnormality by considering both the criteria and the application-layer protocol. The criteria are obtained by training our neural network model (duAE model) with traffic containing only one type of application-layer protocol. duAE-IDS represents each traffic flow with 67 features with eight new features for TCP traffic to improve detection accuracy. duAE-Idsuses two sparse autoencoders and one 1D CNN to extract features from traffic for every application-layer protocol. We conduct several experiments to prove the abilities and flexibilities of duAE-IDS. We prove that duAE-Idstrained with the known datasets can reach an F1-score of 0.87 for detecting attack traffic in an unknown network. We can run duAE-Idsin any network without pre-collecting the traffic of the network.

This paper presents a wireless risk assessment method to help an administrator manage wireless network security. The assessment method consists of a risk model and an assessment measure. The risk model is in charge of modeling the wireless network risk. Security requirements, wireless attacks, and system configurations are considered in the model. The assessment measure is an algorithm which determines the risk value of the wireless network according to the risk model. Our risk model is developed upon an extended analytic hierarchy process, which contains the 4 layers: the risk layer, the requirement layer, the attack layer, and the configuration layer. The separate layers of the risk model are helpful in dealing with the dynamics of a wireless network because only the related layers are introduced to the assessment measure when changes of the network are detected. Based on the risk model per device, our assessment measure evaluates the wireless network risk in consideration of the relations between devices, attacks, and configurations. Hence, our risk assessment method, composed of the risk model and the assessment measure, can determine the wireless network risk efficiently while considering the dependencies in the wireless network. Two examples are introduced in this paper to examine the feasibility of our method. In the first example, we demonstrate that the risk values derived by our method meet the ground truth by performing practical experiments. The second example shows that our method can evaluate the risk of a changing wireless network with efficiency, and can distinguish disparities in different wireless networks.

Modern obfuscation techniques are intended to discourage reverse engineering and malicious tampering of software programs. We study control-flow obfuscation, which works by modifying the control flow of the program to be obfuscated, and observe that it is difficult to evaluate the robustness of these obfuscation techniques. In this paper, we present a framework for quantitative analysis of control-flow obfuscating transformations. Our framework is based upon the control-flow graph of the program, and we show that many existing control-flow obfuscation techniques can be expressed as a sequence of basic transformations on these graphs. We also propose a new measure of the difficulty of reversing these obfuscated programs, and we show that our framework can be used to easily evaluate the space penalty due to the transformations.

The paper presents a control flow obfuscation method to discourage reverse engineering and malicious tampering of software codes. Given the original source codes and desired obfuscation criteria, the proposed method works by decomposing the source codes into fragments and then applying various transforms to the code fragments. As the output of our method, the transformed fragments are re-assembled and obfuscated with the designated obfuscation criteria. Moreover, since only control flows are obfuscated with a sequence of transformations that produce equivalent results of the original fragments, the final output can still preserve the same execution results as the original codes. The proposed method can be combined with other security technologies like watermarking or fingerprinting and thus help discouraging software piracy by making watermarked information embedded in software codes difficult to be reverse engineered or tampered.

A team of researchers including computer scientists, electrical and control engineers, architects, industrial designers, human factor engineers, and cognitive scientists in the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan, along with their overseas collaborators launched the project Kannon, a multi-disciplinary effort to develop Adaptive Assistive Technologies that can be deployed incrementally into existing private/public spaces and collaborate opportunistically to offer monitoring, assisting, communicating and rejuvenating services to healthy elders. The team combined the state-of-art information, communication and robotic know-how with the activity oriented method for product design and the modular functional approach in modern architecture in order to devise a holistic support for successful aging. This paper presents the philosophy, approach and first fruits of this project.

To provide secure media delivery in pay-TV systems, a large number of messages are exchanged for key updates in the conventional key distribution schemes. This is inefficient and costly when the client side (set-top box) uses a smart card with limited computing power. In this paper, we present three key distribution schemes for channel protection and secure media delivery in pay-TV systems. With the proposed schemes, encryption keys of the subscribed programs can be efficiently and securely distributed to the authorized subscribers. Only one message is needed to renew key in the key distribution schemes for subscription channel protection. In addition, we use simpler computation functions, including one-way hash function and exclusive-OR operation, for key updates to reduce the computation cost. With our key distribution schemes, only authorized subscribers can watch the subscribed programs correctly. Unauthorized subscribers have no information to retrieve the correct programs over the networks. Thus, service providers can charge their subscribers according to their subscriptions, and the illegal access of the media and video programs from networks can be prevented, based on the proposed schemes.

The (m,n) wireless information dispersal scheme (WIDS) is useful for fault-tolerant parallel wireless communications, where it can be used to tolerate up to n-m path (sub-channel) failures. This paper constructs a performance model of (m,n) WIDS used in wireless communications, and proposes an algorithm to find the optimal set of (m,n) with the highest reliability. This algorithm reduces the complexity of finding the candidate set of (m,n) from O(N/sup 2/) to O(N);N is the maximum number of available sub-channels.

The paper presents three key distribution schemes for channel protection. With the proposed schemes, encryption keys of the ordered programs can be distributed to the authorized subscribers efficiently and securely. In these schemes, for key updates, at most two messages are transmitted and simpler computation functions, including one-way hash function and XOR operation, are used to reduce the computation cost compared to existing solutions. With our key distribution schemes, only the authorized subscribers can decrypt the ordered programs. Thus, the service provider in a Pay-TV system can charge his subscribers according to their subscriptions and the intelligent property rights of TV programs can be protected by the proposed schemes.