arXiv subjects

Leandros Maglaras

Publications and source records attributed to Leandros Maglaras.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Distance-Only Task Orchestration Algorithm for Energy Efficiency in Satellite-Based Mist Computing

This paper addresses the challenge of efficiently offloading heavy computing tasks from ground mobile devices to the satellite-based mist computing environment. With ground-based edge and cloud servers often being inaccessible, the exploitation of satellite mist computing becomes imperative. Existing offloading algorithms have shown limitations in adapting to the unique characteristics of heavy computing tasks. Thus, we propose a heavy computing task offloading algorithm that prioritizes satellite proximity. This approach not only reduces energy consumption during telecommunications but also ensures tasks are executed within the specified timing constraints, which are typically non-time-critical. Our proposed algorithm outperforms other offloading schemes in terms of satellites energy consumption, average end-to-end delay, and tasks success rates. Although it exhibits a higher average VM CPU usage, this increase does not pose critical challenges. This distance-based approach offers a promising solution to enhance energy efficiency in satellite-based mist computing, making it well-suited for heavy computing tasks demands.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Reliability Analysis of Fault Tolerant Memory Systems

This paper delves into a comprehensive analysis of fault-tolerant memory systems, focusing on recovery techniques modeled using Markov chains to address transient errors. The study revolves around the application of scrubbing methods in conjunction with Single Error Correction and Double Error Detection (SEC-DED) codes. It explores three primary models: 1) Exponentially distributed scrubbing, involving periodic checks of memory words within exponentially distributed time intervals; 2) Deterministic scrubbing, featuring regular, periodic word checks; and 3) Mixed scrubbing, which combines both probabilistic and deterministic scrubbing approaches. The research encompasses the estimation of reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) values for each model. Notably, the findings highlight the superior performance of mixed scrubbing over simpler scrubbing methods in terms of reliability and MTTF.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Double Public Key Signing Function Oracle Attack on EdDSA Software Implementations

EdDSA is a standardised elliptic curve digital signature scheme introduced to overcome some of the issues prevalent in the more established ECDSA standard. Due to the EdDSA standard specifying that the EdDSA signature be deterministic, if the signing function were to be used as a public key signing oracle for the attacker, the unforgeability notion of security of the scheme can be broken. This paper describes an attack against some of the most popular EdDSA implementations, which results in an adversary recovering the private key used during signing. With this recovered secret key, an adversary can sign arbitrary messages that would be seen as valid by the EdDSA verification function. A list of libraries with vulnerable APIs at the time of publication is provided. Furthermore, this paper provides two suggestions for securing EdDSA signing APIs against this vulnerability while it additionally discusses failed attempts to solve the issue.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Scalable Multi-domain Trust Infrastructures for Segmented Networks

Within a trust infrastructure, a private key is often used to digitally sign a transaction, which can be verified with an associated public key. Using PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), a trusted entity can produce a digital signature, verifying the authenticity of the public key. However, what happens when external entities are not trusted to verify the public key or in cases where there is no Internet connection within an isolated or autonomously acting collection of devices? For this, a trusted entity can be elected to generate a key pair and then split the private key amongst trusted devices. Each node can then sign part of the transaction using their split of the shared secret. The aggregated signature can then define agreement on a consensus within the infrastructure. Unfortunately, this process has two significant problems. The first is when no trusted node can act as a dealer of the shares. The second is the difficulty of scaling the digital signature scheme. This paper outlines a method of creating a leaderless approach to defining trust domains to overcome weaknesses in the scaling of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm. Instead, it proposes the usage of the Edwards curve digital signature algorithm for the definition of multiple trust zones. The paper shows that the computational overhead of the distributed key generation phase increases with the number of nodes in the trust domain but that the distributed signing has a relatively constant computational overhead.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Digital Twin-Empowered Smart Attack Detection System for 6G Edge of Things Networks

As global Internet of Things (IoT) devices connectivity surges, a significant portion gravitates towards the Edge of Things (EoT) network. This shift prompts businesses to deploy infrastructure closer to end-users, enhancing accessibility. However, the growing EoT network expands the attack surface, necessitating robust and proactive security measures. Traditional solutions fall short against dynamic EoT threats, highlighting the need for proactive and intelligent systems. We introduce a digital twin-empowered smart attack detection system for 6G EoT networks. Leveraging digital twin and edge computing, it monitors and simulates physical assets in real time, enhancing security. An online learning module in the proposed system optimizes the network performance. Our system excels in proactive threat detection, ensuring 6G EoT network security. The performance evaluations demonstrate its effectiveness, robustness, and adaptability using real datasets.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Data-Driven Intelligence can Revolutionize Today's Cybersecurity World: A Position Paper

As cyber threats evolve and grow progressively more sophisticated, cyber security is becoming a more significant concern in today's digital era. Traditional security measures tend to be insufficient to defend against these persistent and dynamic threats because they are mainly intuitional. One of the most promising ways to handle this ongoing problem is utilizing the potential of data-driven intelligence, by leveraging AI and machine learning techniques. It can improve operational efficiency and saves response times by automating repetitive operations, enabling real-time threat detection, and facilitating incident response. In addition, it augments human expertise with insightful information, predictive analytics, and enhanced decision-making, enabling them to better understand and address evolving problems. Thus, data-driven intelligence could significantly improve real-world cybersecurity solutions in a wide range of application areas like critical infrastructure, smart cities, digital twin, industrial control systems and so on. In this position paper, we argue that data-driven intelligence can revolutionize the realm of cybersecurity, offering not only large-scale task automation but also assist human experts for better situation awareness and decision-making in real-world scenarios.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

A Blockchain-based two Factor Honeytoken Authentication System

This paper extends and advances our recently introduced two-factor Honeytoken authentication method by incorporating blockchain technology. This novel approach strengthens the authentication method to prevent many attacks including tampering attacks. Evaluation results show that integrating blockchain into the Honeytoken method could improve performance and operational efficiency.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Generative Adversarial Networks-Driven Cyber Threat Intelligence Detection Framework for Securing Internet of Things

While the benefits of 6G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) are numerous, providing high-speed, low-latency communication that brings new opportunities for innovation and forms the foundation for continued growth in the IoT industry, it is also important to consider the security challenges and risks associated with the technology. In this paper, we propose a two-stage intrusion detection framework for securing IoTs, which is based on two detectors. In the first stage, we propose an adversarial training approach using generative adversarial networks (GAN) to help the first detector train on robust features by supplying it with adversarial examples as validation sets. Consequently, the classifier would perform very well against adversarial attacks. Then, we propose a deep learning (DL) model for the second detector to identify intrusions. We evaluated the proposed approach's efficiency in terms of detection accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks. Experiment results with a new cyber security dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in detecting both intrusions and persistent adversarial examples with a weighted avg of 96%, 95%, 95%, and 95% for precision, recall, f1-score, and accuracy, respectively.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Review of the NIST Light-weight Cryptography Finalists

Since 2016, NIST has been assessing lightweight encryption methods, and, in 2022, NIST published the final 10: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD, ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. At the time that the article was written, NISC announced ASCOn as the chosen method that will be published as NIST'S lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023. In this article, we provide a comparison between these methods in terms of energy efficiency, time for encryption, and time for hashing.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Inferring probabilistic Boolean networks from steady-state gene data samples

Probabilistic Boolean Networks have been proposed for estimating the behaviour of dynamical systems as they combine rule-based modelling with uncertainty principles. Inferring PBNs directly from gene data is challenging however, especially when data is costly to collect and/or noisy, e.g., in the case of gene expression profile data. In this paper, we present a reproducible method for inferring PBNs directly from real gene expression data measurements taken when the system was at a steady state. The steady-state dynamics of PBNs is of special interest in the analysis of biological machinery. The proposed approach does not rely on reconstructing the state evolution of the network, which is computationally intractable for larger networks. We demonstrate the method on samples of real gene expression profiling data from a well-known study on metastatic melanoma. The pipeline is implemented using Python and we make it publicly available.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

A Health Focused Text Classification Tool (HFTCT)

Due to the high number of users on social media and the massive amounts of queries requested every second to share a new video, picture, or message, social platforms struggle to manage this humungous amount of data that is endlessly coming in. HFTCT relies on wordlists to classify opinions. It can carry out its tasks reasonably well; however, sometimes, the wordlists themselves fail to be reliable as they are a limited source of positive and negative words.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Cybersecurity Revisited: Honeytokens meet Google Authenticator

Although sufficient authentication mechanisms were enhanced by the use of two or more factors that resulted in new multi factor authentication schemes, more sophisticated and targeted attacks have shown they are also vulnerable. This research work proposes a novel two factor authentication system that incorporates honeytokens into the two factor authentication process. The current implementation collaborates with Google authenticator. The novelty and simplicity of the presented approach aims at providing additional layers of security and protection into a system and thus making it more secure through a stronger and more efficient authentication mechanism.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

A novel Two-Factor HoneyToken Authentication Mechanism

The majority of systems rely on user authentication on passwords, but passwords have so many weaknesses and widespread use that easily raise significant security concerns, regardless of their encrypted form. Users hold the same password for different accounts, administrators never check password files for flaws that might lead to a successful cracking, and the lack of a tight security policy regarding regular password replacement are a few problems that need to be addressed. The proposed research work aims at enhancing this security mechanism, prevent penetrations, password theft, and attempted break-ins towards securing computing systems. The selected solution approach is two-folded; it implements a two-factor authentication scheme to prevent unauthorized access, accompanied by Honeyword principles to detect corrupted or stolen tokens. Both can be integrated into any platform or web application with the use of QR codes and a mobile phone.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Smart Homes: Security Challenges and Privacy Concerns

Development and growth of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has exponentially increased over the course of the last 10 years since its inception, and as a result has directly influenced the popularity and size of smart homes. In this article we present the main technologies and applications that constitute a smart home, we identify the main security and privacy challenges that smart home face and we provide good practices to mitigate those threats.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

From Cyber Terrorism to Cyber Peacekeeping: Are we there yet?

In Cyberspace nowadays, there is a burst of information that everyone has access. However, apart from the advantages the Internet offers, it also hides numerous dangers for both people and nations. Cyberspace has a dark side, including terrorism, bullying, and other types of violence. Cyberwarfare is a kind of virtual war that causes the same destruction that a physical war would also do. In this article, we discuss what Cyberterrorism is and how it can lead to Cyberwarfare.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

ZKPs: Does This Make The Cut? Recent Advances and Success of Zero-Knowledge Security Protocols

How someone can get health insurance without sharing his health information? How you can get a loan without disclosing your credit score? There is a method to certify certain attributes of various data, either this is health metrics or finance information, without revealing the data itself or any other kind of personal data. This method is known as zero-knowledge proofs. Zero-Knowledge techniques are mathematical methods used to verify things without sharing or revealing underlying data. Zero-Knowledge protocols have vast applications from simple identity schemes and blockchains to defense research programs and nuclear arms control

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

A NIS Directive compliant Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Framework

The NIS Directive introduces obligations for the security of the network and information systems of operators of essential services and of digital service providers and require from the national competent authorities to assess their compliance to these obligations. This paper describes a novel cybersecurity maturity assessment framework (CMAF) that is tailored to the NIS Directive requirements and can be used either as a self assessment tool from critical national infrastructures either as an audit tool from the National Competent Authorities for cybersecurity.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Cooperative Speed Estimation of an RF Jammer in Wireless Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of estimating the speed of an RF jammer that moves towards a group/platoon of moving wireless communicating nodes. In our system model, the group of nodes receives an information signal from a master node, that they want to decode, while the Radio Frequency (RF) jammer desires to disrupt this communication as it approaches them. For this system model, we propose first a transmission scheme where the master node remains silent for a time period while it transmits in a subsequent slot. Second, we develop a joint data and jamming estimation algorithm that uses Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) estimation. We develop analytical closed-form expressions that characterize the Mean Square Error (MSE) of the data and jamming signal estimates. Third, we propose a cooperative jammer speed estimation algorithm based on the jamming signal estimates at each node of the network. Our numerical and simulation results for different system configurations prove the ability of our overall system to estimate with high accuracy and the RF jamming signals and the speed of the jammer.

eess.SP↗