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The Internet of Things is spreading significantly in every sector, including the household, a variety of industries, healthcare, and emergency services, with the goal of assisting all of those infrastructures by providing intelligent means of service delivery. An Internet of Vulnerabilities (IoV) has emerged as a result of the pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT), which has led to a rise in the use of applications and devices connected to the IoT in our day-to-day lives. The manufacture of IoT devices are growing at a rapid pace, but security and privacy concerns are not being taken into consideration. These intelligent Internet of Things devices are especially vulnerable to a variety of attacks, both on the hardware and software levels, which leaves them exposed to the possibility of use cases. This master’s thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with regard to security and privacy in the area of applications, security architecture frameworks, a taxonomy of various cyberattacks based on various architecture models, such as three-layer, four-layer, and five-layer. The fundamental purpose of this thesis is to provide recommendations for alternate mitigation strategies and corrective actions by using a holistic rather than a layer-by-layer approach. We discussed the most effective solutions to the problems of privacy and safety that are associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and presented them in the form of research questions. In addition to that, we investigated a number of further possible directions for the development of this research.
Annotated training data is essential for supervised learning methods. Human annotation is costly and laborsome especially if a dataset consists of hundreds of thousands of samples and annotators need to be hired. Crowdsourcing emerged as a solution that makes it easier to get access to large amounts of human annotators. Introducing paid external annotators however introduces malevolent annotations, both intentional and unintentional. Both forms of malevolent annotations have negative effects on further usage of the data and can be summarized as spam. This work explores different approaches to post-hoc detection of spamming users and which kinds of spam can be detected by them. A manual annotation checking process resulted in the creation of a small user spam dataset which is used in this thesis. Finally an outlook for future improvements of these approaches will be made.
Privacy is the capacity to keep some things private despite their social repercussions. It relates to a person’s capacity to control the amount, time, and circumstances under which they disclose sensitive personal information, such as a person’s physiology, psychology, or intelligence. In the age of data exploitation, privacy has become even more crucial. Our privacy is now more threatened than it was 20 years ago, outside of science and technology, due to the way data and technology highly used. Both the kinds and amounts of information about us and the methods for tracking and identifying us have grown a lot in recent years. It is a known security concern that human and machine systems face privacy threats. There are various disagreements over privacy and security; every person and group has a unique perspective on how the two are related. Even though 79% of the study’s results showed that legal or compliance issues were more important, 53% of the survey team thought that privacy and security were two separate things. Data security and privacy are interconnected, despite their distinctions. Data security and data privacy are linked with each other; both are necessary for the other to exist. Data may be physically kept anywhere, on our computers or in the cloud, but only humans have authority over it. Machine learning has been used to solve the problem for our easy solution. We are linked to our data. Protect against attackers by protecting data, which also protects privacy. Attackers commonly utilize both mechanical systems and social engineering techniques to enter a target network. The vulnerability of this form of attack rests not only in the technology but also in the human users, making it extremely difficult to fight against. The best option to secure privacy is to combine humans and machines in the form of a Human Firewall and a Machine Firewall. A cryptographic route like Tor is a superior choice for discouraging attackers from trying to access our system and protecting the privacy of our data There is a case study of privacy and security issues in this thesis. The problems and different kinds of attacks on people and machines will then be briefly talked about. We will explain how Human Firewalls and machine learning on the Tor network protect our privacy from attacks such as social engineering and attacks on mechanical systems. As a real-world test, we will use genomic data to try out a privacy attack called the Membership Inference Attack (MIA). We’ll show Machine Firewall as a way to protect ourselves, and then we’ll use Differential Privacy (DP), which has already been done. We applied the method of Lasso and convolutional neural networks (CNN), which are both popular machine learning models, as the target models. Our findings demonstrate a logarithmic link between the desired model accuracy and the privacy budget.
Linux and Linux-based operating systems have been gaining more popularity among the general users and among developers. Many big enterprises and large companies are using Linux for servers that host their websites, some even require their developers to have knowledge about Linux OS. Even in embedded systems one can find many Linux-based OS that run them. With its increasing popularity, one can deduce the need to secure such a system that many personnel rely on, be it to protect the data that it stores or to protect the integrity of the system itself, or even to protect the availability of the services it offers. Many researchers and Linux enthusiasts have been coming up with various ways to secure Linux OS, however new vulnerabilities and new bugs are always found, by malicious attackers, with every update or change, which calls for the need of more ways to secure these systems.
This Thesis explores the possibility and feasibility of another way to secure Linux OS, specifically securing the terminal of such OS, by altering the commands of the terminal, getting in the way of attackers that have gained terminal access and delaying, giving more time for the response teams and for forensics to stop the attack, minimize the damage, restore operations, and to identify collect and store evidence of the cyber-attack. This research will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various security measures and compare and contrast with the method suggested in this research.
This research is significant because it paints a better picture of what the state of the art of Linux and Linux-based operating systems security looks like, and it addresses the concerns of security enthusiasts, while exploring new uncharted area of security that have been looked at as a not so significant part of protecting the OSes out of concern of the various limitations and problems it entails. This research will address these concerns while exploring few ways to solve them, as well as addressing the ideal areas and situations in which the proposed method can be used, and when would such method be more of a burden than help if used.
As information technology continues to advance at a rapid speed around the world, new difficulties emerge. The growing number of organizational vulnerabilities is among the most important issues. Finding and mitigating vulnerabilities is critical in order to protect an organization’s environment from multiple attack vectors.
The study investigates and comprehends the complete vulnerability management process from the standpoint of the security officer job role, as well as potential improvements. Few strategies are used to achieve efficient mitigation and the de- velopment of a process for tracking and mitigating vulnerabilities. As a result, a qualitative study is conducted in which the objective is to create a proposed vulner- ability and risk management process, as well as to develop a system for analyzing and tracking vulnerabilities and presenting the vulnerabilities in a graphical dash- board format. This thesis’s data was gathered through an organized literature study as well as through the use of various web resources. We explored numerous ap- proaches to analyze the data, such as categorizing the vulnerabilities every 30, 60, and 90 days to see whether the vulnerabilities were reoccurring or new. According to our findings, tracking vulnerabilities can be advantageous for a security officer.
We come to the conclusion that if an organization has a proper vulnerability tracking system and vulnerability management process, it can aid security officers in having a better understanding of and making plans for reducing vulnerabilities. In terms of system patching and vulnerability remediation, it will also assist the security officer in identifying areas of weakness in the process. As a result, the suggested ways provide an alternate approach to managing and tracking vulnerabilities in an effective manner, although there is still a small area that needs additional analysis and research to make it even better.
As the Industry 4.0 is evolving, the previously separated Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) is converging. Connecting devices in the industrial setting to the Internet exposes these systems to a broader spectrum of cyber-attacks. The reason is that since OT does not have much security measures as much as IT, it is more vulnerable from the attacker's perspective. Another factor contributing to the vulnerability of OT is that, when it comes to cybersecurity, industries have focused on protecting information technology and less prioritizing the control systems. The consequences of a security breach in an OT system can be more adverse as it can lead to physical damage, industrial accidents and physical harm to human beings. Hence, for the OT networks, certificate-based authentication is implemented. This involves stages of managing credentials in their communication endpoints. In the previous works of ivESK, a solution was developed for managing credentials. This involves a CANopen-based physical demonstrator where the certificate management processes were developed. The extended feature set involving certificate management will be based on the existing solution. The thesis aims to significantly improve such a solution by addressing two key areas that is enhancing functionality and optimizing real-time performance. Regarding the first goal, firstly, an analysis of the existing feature set shall be carried out, where the correct functionality shall be guaranteed. The limitations from the previously implemented system will be addressed and to make sure it can be applied to real world scenarios, it will be implemented and tested in the physical demonstrator. This will lay a concrete foundation that these certificate management processes can be used in the industries in large-scale networks. Implementation of features like revocation mechanism for certificates, automated renewal of the credentials and authorization attribute checks for the certificate management will be implemented. Regarding the second goal, the impact of credential management processes on the ongoing CANopen real-time traffic shall be a studied. Since in real life scenarios, mission-critical applications like Industrial control systems, medical devices, and transportation networks rely on real-time communication for reliable operation, delays or disruptions caused by credential management processes can have severe consequences. Optimizing these processes is crucial for maintaining system integrity and safety. The effect to minimize the disturbance of the credential management processes on the normal operation of the CANopen network shall be characterized. This shall comprise testing real-time parameters in the network such as CPU load, network load and average delay. Results obtained from each of these tests will be studied.
Risk-based Cybermaturity Assessment Model - Protecting the company against ransomware attacks
(2023)
Ransomware has become one of the most catastrophic attacks in the previous decade, hurting businesses of all sorts worldwide. So, no organization is safe, and most companies are reviewing their ransomware defensive solutions to avoid business and operational hazards. IT departments are using cybersecurity maturity assessment frameworks like CMMC, C2M2, CMMI, NIST, CIS, CPP, and others to analyze organization security capabilities. In addition to maturity assessment models for the process layer and human pillar, there are much research on the analysis, identification, and defense of cyber threats in product/software layers that propose state-of-the-art approaches.
This motivates a comprehensive ransomware cyber security solution. Then, a crucial question arises: “How companies can measure the security maturity of controls in a specific danger for example for Ransomware attack?” Several studies and frameworks addressed this subject.
Complexity of understanding the ransomware attack, Lack of comprehensive ransomware defense solutions and Lack of cybermaturity assessment model for ransomware defense solutions are different aspects of problem statement in this study. By considering the most important limitations to developing a ransomware defense cybermaturity assessment method, this study developed a cybermaturity assessment methodology and implemented a Toolkit to conduct cyber security self-assessment specifically for ransomware attack to provide a clearer vision for enterprises to analyze the security maturity of controls regardless of industry or size.
Strong security measures are required to protect sensitive data and provide ongoing service as a result of the rising reliance on online applications for a range of purposes, including e-commerce, social networking, and commercial activities. This has brought to light the necessity of strengthening security measures. There have been multiple incidents of attackers acquiring access to information, holding providers hostage with distributed denial of service attacks, or accessing the company’s network by compromising the application.
The Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) has published a comprehensive set of information security principles and standards that can be utilized as a solid basis for the development of a web application that is secure.
The purpose of this thesis is to build and construct a secure web application that adheres to the requirements established in the BSI guideline. This will be done in order to answer the growing concerns regarding the security of web applications. We will also evaluate the efficacy of the recommendations by conducting security tests on the prototype application and determining whether or not the vulnerabilities that are connected with a web application that is not secure have been mitigated.