The competition between hackers and defenders is the game of spear and shield in cybersecurity. The field of cybersecurity has been studied for decades, yet it remains a severe and critical topic. One of the main reasons is the fast evolution of hacking techniques. To stay stealthy in the compromised network environment, hackers tend to use system built-in tools and legitimate software to launch the attack by imitating normal activities. These behaviors are seemingly normal but malicious, making it difficult to distinguish them from legitimate activities and leading to a high volume of false alarms raised by detection tools. Countless approaches have been proposed to address these problems. However, conventional evaluation methods for detection approaches have limited capability of handling evolving hacking techniques, thereby hindering the evaluation effectiveness in real-world network environments. The gap between the lab evaluation and real-world practice is significant and should not be overlooked. In this article, the competition between cybersecurity attacks and defenses will be introduced. The current state, approaches, and challenges from both sides will be included to illustrate the gap. Finally, research opportunities for the next era of the game of spear and shield will be proposed.

Seventy-five years ago, visionaries in the field of reliability engineering came together to establish the IEEE Reliability Society, marking the commencement of a remarkable journey toward enhancing the dependability, resilience, and security of technological systems. As we celebrate this significant milestone, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the society's illustrious history, achievements, and the enduring impact it has had on the world of technology.

The convergence of technologies is happening across various aspects, such as communication, computing, medicine, and transportation. The smartphone is a perfect example of convergence, packing features, such as a camera, GPS, artificial intelligence, and Internet connectivity into one sleek device. Autonomous driving is another good example. In a time of rapidly converging technologies, reliability engineering must take into account the potential for cyber threats, the need for cyber trust, the importance of cyber security, and the criticality of cyber resilience. In this way, reliability engineers can ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of computer systems and networks in the face of evolving threats and changing technologies. In this article, we introduce the challenges and current progress of reliability engineering in emerging technologies, including practices and applications of cyber trust and security, AI-empowered autonomous driving systems, modern mobile networks, blockchains and distributed ledger technologies, prognostic and health management, integrated circuit and hardware, and enterprise cybersecurity and threat hunting.

In recent years, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises have been forced to adapt their operation patterns to ensure resilience, transitioning from traditional office-based work to remote work from home. However, this sudden and unforeseen change has made enterprises unprepared, resulting in a dramatic increase in cybersecurity threats. The most significant challenge arises from the adjustment from working in previously trusted areas to that beyond the boundaries of protection. While employees used to work within the company's defense perimeter, malicious attacks were blocked and detected by boundary security gateways. Shifting to remote work moves employees out of the protective environment, thereby their devices connecting to the internal resources of a company become exploitable targets for threat actors, and weaknesses in the internal authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms become evident. The zero trust architecture (ZTA) approach is primarily focused on resource protection. When users or services attempt to access resources, ZTA requires precise authentication, minimal authorization, and continuous verification (trust inference) to ensure legitimacy and authorization of the resource usage, eliminating any space for assumed or inherited trust. In this article, we will address the challenges in handling the threats and propose the strategies, implementation, and limitation of ZTA, aiming to shed light on its effectiveness and applicability in mitigating cybersecurity risks.

The prevalence of Android platform has attracted adversaries to craft malicious payloads for illegal profit. Such malicious artifacts are frequently reused and embedded in benign, paid apps to lure victims that the apps have been cracked for free. To discover these fraudulent apps, administrators of app markets desire an automated scanning process to maintain the health of app ecosystem. However, conventional approaches cannot be efficiently applied due to the lack of a scalable, effective approach to malware characteristics aggregation. On the other hand, the vast number of apps significantly increases the analysis complexity. In this paper, we propose Petridish which generates discriminative models against the repacked malicious apps. These representative models of malicious semantics can be progressively distilled with malign and benign samples. These models can further detect repacked malicious apps. Our experiment shows that, after two retraining rounds, Petridish achieved an average of 28 percent progressive detection improvement from 63 to 91.2 percent for the large families, exceeding 38 test samples in size. With noise reduction, it accomplished 88 percent detection rate and 1.7 percent false alarm rate. The characteristics aggregation approach will become critical in the age of app explosion.

VM-based inspection tools generally implement probes in the hypervisor to monitor events and the state of kernel of the guest system. The most important function of a probe is to carve information of interest out of the memory of the guest when it is triggered. Implementing probes for a closed-source OS demands manually reverse-engineering the undocumented code/data structures in the kernel binary image. Furthermore, the reverse-engineering result is often non-reusable between OS versions or even kernel updates due to the rapid change of these structures. In this paper, we propose ProbeBuilder, a system automating the process to inference kernel data structures. Based on dynamic execution, ProbeBuilder searches for data structures matching the “pointer-offset-pointer” pattern in guest memory. The sequences of these offsets, which are referred to as dereferences, are then verified by ProbeBuilder with instruction evidence that traverse them. The experiment on Windows kernel shows that ProbeBuilder efficiently narrows thousands of choices for kernel-level probes down to dozens. The finding allows analysts to quickly implement probes, facilitating rapid development/update of inspection tools for different OSes. With these features, ProbeBuilder is the first system capable of automatically generating practical probes that extracts information through dereferences to opaque kernel data structures.

IoT (Internet of Things) diversifies the future Internet, and has drawn much attention. As more and more gadgets (i.e. Things) connected to the Internet, the huge amount of data exchanged has reached an unprecedented level. As sensitive and private information exchanged between things, privacy becomes a major concern. Among many important issues, scalability, transparency, and reliability are considered as new challenges that differentiate IoT from the conventional Internet. In this paper, we enumerate the IoT communication scenarios and investigate the threats to the large-scale, unreliable, pervasive computing environment. To cope with these new challenges, the conventional security architecture will be revisited. In particular, various authentication schemes will be evaluated to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the exchanged data.

Bluetooth is a popular wireless communication technique, providing connection between portable or stationary devices in close range. A procedure called pairing needs to be performed when two devices intend to connect with each other in order to form a trusted pair and generate secret keys to protect the link. There are several modes of Bluetooth pairing, and password-based is the most convenient and prevalent way. In this paper, we discover a potential vulnerability in the password-based pairing protocol of the latest Bluetooth v4.0 proposed in 2010, which makes password guessing possible. To cope with the problem, a new scheme is proposed which can mitigate the network threats, and is compatible with the hardware of legacy Bluetooth devices. Note that our modification does not affect Bluetooth users' custom. This makes it a suitable replacement for the new Bluetooth pairing protocol.

The Annual Technical Report this year is focused on infrastructure reliability. Infrastructure constitutes those things that are apparent only in their absence. We take the infrastructure for granted, assuming it will always be there. We turn on our water facet, and drinkable water has always flowed out, for most of us, most of the time. Our infrastructure is subject to environment breakages (e.g., earthquakes), accidents (e.g., dig ups of cables), sabotage, intrusion, and compromise. Also everyday component, software or system failures can bring our infrastructure down. Our global connectivity and communications, as well as our world wide distributed development and maintenance systems, increase our productivity and efficiency, but can also increase our vulnerabilities. Our critical infrastructures can be found in many places.

In a flooding-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an adversary attempts to exhaust a target's computing resource. To detect DDoS attacks in a network environment, IP traceback methods are deployed to determine the origin of attacking packets. With the increase in bandwidth of wireless networks, attackers may choose this medium from which to launch attacks. However, tracing the attackers in wireless networks is more difficult since intermediate nodes may move or attackers may change their location to hide themselves. Thus, conventional traceback schemes for wired networks cannot apply directly to the wireless network infrastructure because the intermediate routers could be compromised by an adversary. Therefore, we propose a flexible and lightweight traceback scheme to determine the source of attacking packets in a mobile ad-hoc environment. We will demonstrate our method's ability to track the movement of an attacker and recognize attack traffic launched by the same attacker from different locations.

Keystroke typing characteristics is considered as one of the important biometric features that can be used to protect users against malicious attacks. In this paper we propose a statistical model for web authentication with keystroke typing characteristics based on Hidden Markov Model and Gaussian Modeling from Statistical Learning Theory. Our proposed model can substantially enhance the accuracy of the identity authentication by analyzing keystroke timing information of the username and password. Results of the experiments showed that our scheme achieved by far the best error rate of 2.54%.

A broadcast authentication mechanism is important in wireless sensor networks, assuring receivers of a packet’s validity. To provide authentication, some researchers utilize one way key chains and delayed disclosure of keys; however, such an approach requires time synchronization and delayed authentication. Another technique uses one-time signature schemes. Unfortunately, such schemes suffer from large key sizes and a limited number of uses per key. To cope with these problems, we propose an efficient, one-time signature-based broadcast authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks that reduces storage usage and includes a re-keying mechanism.

Authentication is an important security measure for multicast applications, providing receivers with confidence that the packets they receive are valid. Simply signing every multicast packet with a digital signature incurs high overhead; therefore, a scheme such as signature amortization helps reduce this overhead. To tolerate packet loss, erasure codes are employed to enhance signature amortization. However, the use of erasure codes introduces pollution attack, an attack in which the adversary injects packets to disrupt the erasure decoding procedure and consequently denies the authentication service to the receiver. Unfortunately, current solutions to pollution attack are computationally intensive and inefficient. To cope with this problem, we propose a new lightweight, pollution-attack resistant multicast authentication scheme (PARM), which generates evidence that receivers can validate on a fast, per-packet basis. This approach effectively resists pollution attacks and has better performance than previously proposed solutions.

Ad hoc routing protocols are vulnerable due to the absence of security mechanisms, allowing attacks such as forged routing advertisements to disrupt the routing scheme. Research work has been proposed for securing the routing protocol in ad hoc networks; however, solutions that utilize asymmetric cryptographic primitives are often infeasible in a constrained mobile environment. In this paper, we discover a strict, cooperative disruption attack on the route path and identify the deficiency of present security mechanisms for protecting routing information. We then propose a path authentication scheme which relies on efficient symmetric cryptographic primitives. The random assignment path authentication (RAPA) scheme guarantees the integrity of a complete request route path in the route discovery procedure and helps the current on-demand routing protocol in resisting routing disruption attacks.

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.

A secret sharing scheme for the prohibited structure is a method of sharing a master key among a finite set of participants in such a way that only certain pre-specified subsets of participants cannot recover the master key. A secret sharing scheme is called perfect if any subset of participants who cannot recover the master key obtain no information regarding the master key. In this paper, we propose an efficient construction of perfect secret sharing schemes for graph-based prohibited structures where a vertex denotes a participant and an edge denotes a pair of participants who cannot recover the master key. The information rate of our scheme is 2/n, where n is the number of participants.

Operational security problems, which are often the result of access authorization misuse, can lead to intrusion in secure computer systems. We motivate the need for pattern-oriented intrusion detection, and present a model that tracks both data and privilege flows within secure systems to detect context-dependent intrusions caused by operational security problems. The model allows the uniform representation of various types of intrusion patterns, such as those caused by unintended use of foreign programs and input data, imprudent choice of default privileges, and use of weak protection mechanisms. As with all pattern-oriented models, this model cannot be used to detect new, unanticipated intrusion patterns that could be detected by statistical models. For this reason, we expect that this model will complement, not replace, statistical models for intrusion detection.

In this paper, we reevaluate the message cost of X. Jia's multicast mechanism (see ibid., vol. 6, no. 6, p. 617-27 (1995)). Our analysis shows that its message cost should be (D+k+1) instead of (D+2), where D is the depth of the subtree and k is the number of metagroups containing the destination multicast group.

Recently, Alencar et al. proposed a private-key encryption scheme based on the use of burst-error-correcting codes.After that, Campello de Souza et al. implemented Alencar et al.'s scheme by array codes which is a class of burst-error-correcting codes.In this paper, we will show that these two schemes are insecure against chosen plaintext attacks.

In this paper we investigate the illicit means of leaking sensitive or private information in operating systems. The leakage cannot be eliminated either by the use of access control and authentication mechanisms or by administrative measures since unauthorized access need not be attempted. In order to resolve the problem, we designed an audit system which is able to detect the illicit leakage of information. This audit system consists of two major components: an enhanced audit-collection mechanism and an audit-analysis tool.

This paper presents a loan balancing algorithm for a time warp discrete event simulation running on non-dedicated heterogeneous processors. This algorithm dynamically balances the load on processors in order to reduce the number of rollbacks, and thus increases the total simulation speed. Simulation processes are allowed to migrate according to the load on processors. An emulated multiprocessor environment was developed in order to evaluate the algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the running time of the time warp simulation can be substantially reduced.

In an (m, n) Information Dispersal Scheme (IDS), the sender node decomposes a message M of length L into n pieces S/sub i/, 1/spl les/i/spl les/n, each of length L/m, such that any m pieces collected by the receiver node over different paths suffice for reconstructing M. Because of variations of network traffic, the number n of available vertex-disjoint paths for the transmission from the sender node to the receiver node may vary in time. It is very difficult to determine the best n and m which gives the highest communication reliability, when given the maximum number of available disjoint paths and an upper bound for the information expansion rate (n/m). In this research, we discovered several interesting features of (m, n) IDSs which can help reduce the complexity for computing the highest communication reliability. From these findings, we propose a method for determining the optimal IDS.

A secret sharing scheme is a method which allows a secret to be shared among a finite set of participants in such a way that only qualified subsets of participants can recover it. A secret sharing scheme is called perfect if unqualified subsets of participants obtain no information about the secret. The authors propose an efficient construction of perfect secret sharing schemes for the access structures consisting of the closure of a graph where a vertex denotes a participant and an edge denotes a minimal qualified pairs of participants. The information rate of the scheme is at least 1/(2|P|), where P denotes the set of the participants, which is better than O(1/|P|/sup 2/) of existing schemes used for graph-based access structures. The authors also present an application of the scheme to the reduction of storage and computation loads on the key distribution server in a secure network.>

Operational security problems can lead to intrusion in secure computer systems. The authors justify the need for, and present, a pattern-oriented intrusion-detection model that can be used to analyze object privilege and data flows in secure computer systems to detect operational security problems. This model can address context-dependent intrusion, such as use of covert-storage channels and virus propagation, and has been used to build an intrusion detection system for Trusted XENIX. Pattern-oriented intrusion detection is expected to complement, not replace, current statistical approaches to intrusion detection.>

Requirements for auditing covert storage channels are defined, and some fundamental problems which appear in most computer systems are illustrated. It is argued that audit subsystems designed to minimally satisfy the TCSEC (the DoD Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria) requirement are unable to detect many instances of covert channel use, and hence require major design and implementation changes before they are able to detect all use of covert storage channels. The design of the Secure Xenix tool for covert-channel audit that has been in operation since July 1989 is presented. Results of experiments indicate that the tool is able to detect all use of covert storage channels without raising false alarms.>