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In recent years, Censorship and anti-censorship technology is developing rapidly. The censorship and surveillance systems track traffic on the network; they identify protocols and traffic, block malicious and illegal transportation, and keep the network under control. It can protect the security of network users but also bring risks to their private security, especially that of users chat. In this paper, we introduce MuChat, a free convert chat application for instant communication on mobile, which is designed as censorship as well as surveillance-resistant platform for coverting communication in the censorship region. To evade detection by Internet censors, MuChat uses multi-instant messaging channels provided by public companies to transform messages. It applies end-to-end encryption for information security and transmits data covertly by steganography technology for individual privacy. It also provides perfect forward security protection of users' historical messages. We design and implement MuChat, with this report on the security and performance of MuChat. The evaluation shows that MuChat has proved its high security in terms of running against active attacks, passive attacks, and traffic analysis methods in recent years. It supports all the functions of instant messages with low latency. For short words, it takes only 1–2 s while the base channels take about 0.5 s, and for 20-megabyte files messages with 35–45 s while about 30–40 s for base channels. In our view, this meets the instant communication needs of users. Besides, its architecture can fully support any other public communication channels which can be added by the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberbullying has emerged as a pervasive issue in today's digitally connected society, with detrimental effects on individuals' mental health and well-being. Despite increasing awareness and efforts to address cyberbullying, there remains a significant gap in utilizing wireless network security measures as a means of mitigation. The existing literature predominantly focuses on social and psychological aspects of cyberbullying, overlooking the potential role of wireless network security in prevention and intervention strategies. This research seeks to fill this gap by exploring the effectiveness of leveraging wireless network security to secure cyberspace against cyberbullying incidents. The research employs a multifaceted methodology, beginning with the estimation of expected rates and derivative risks of cyberbullying within wireless networks. These metrics are combined into a risk index value, which serves as a basis for prioritizing mitigation efforts. Additionally, the study explores the application of cyberspace modeling techniques, specifically Support Vector Machines (SVM), to enhance screening processes and identify potential cyberbullying incidents on Wireless Network Security (WNS). The findings of this research demonstrate the efficacy of integrating wireless network security measures into cyberbullying prevention strategies. By combining risk index values and leveraging SVM-based cyberspace modeling, the study identifies and prioritizes cyberbullying risks effectively. Furthermore, the implementation of wireless network security protocols contributes to a reduction in cyberbullying incidents, fostering safer digital environments for users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of cybersecurity and opportunistic networks has ushered in a new era of innovation in the realm of wireless communications. In an increasingly interconnected world, where seamless data exchange is pivotal for both individual users and organizations, the need for efficient, reliable, and sustainable networking solutions has never been more pressing. Opportunistic networks, characterized by intermittent connectivity and dynamic network conditions, present unique challenges that necessitate innovative approaches for optimal performance and sustainability. This paper introduces a groundbreaking paradigm that integrates the principles of cybersecurity with opportunistic networks. At its core, this study presents a novel routing protocol meticulously designed to significantly outperform existing solutions concerning key metrics such as delivery probability, overhead ratio, and communication delay. Leveraging cybersecurity's inherent strengths, our protocol not only fortifies the network's security posture but also provides a foundation for enhancing efficiency and sustainability in opportunistic networks. The overarching goal of this paper is to address the inherent limitations of conventional opportunistic network protocols. By proposing an innovative routing protocol, we aim to optimize data delivery, minimize overhead, and reduce communication latency. These objectives are crucial for ensuring seamless and timely information exchange, especially in scenarios where traditional networking infrastructures fall short. By large-scale simulations, the new model proves its effectiveness in the different scenarios, especially in terms of message delivery probability, while ensuring reasonable overhead and latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity and isomerization of communication networks have put forth new requirements for cryptographic schemes to ensure the operation of network security protocols. Robust cryptographic schemes have been gradually favored. The robust initialization vector (RIV) instead of the synthetic initialization vector (SIV) was first introduced to support strong security and robust authenticated encryption. This paper first introduces RIV to GCM-SIV1, proposes a robust variant, GCM-RIV1, and proves that it ensures birthday-bound subtle AE (SAE) security and nonce-misuse resistance. Then, to support beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security with graceful degradation, we introduce another, stronger security variant, GCM-RIV2, and prove that it allows gracefully degrading BBB SAE security in the faulty nonce setting. Finally, the performance of GCM-RIV1 and GCM-RIV2 is discussed and compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is used to resolve a host’s MAC address, given its IP address. ARP is stateless, as there is no authentication when exchanging a MAC address between the hosts. Hacking tactics using ARP spoofing are constantly being abused differently; many previous studies have prevented such attacks. However, prevention requires modification of the underlying network protocol or additional expensive equipment, so applying these methods to the existing network can be challenging. In this paper, we examine the limitations of previous research in preventing ARP spoofing. In addition, we propose a defence mechanism that does not require network protocol changes or expensive equipment. Before sending or receiving a packet to or from any device on the network, our method checks the MAC and IP addresses to ensure they are correct. It protects users from ARP spoofing. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method is secure, efficient, and very efficient against various threat scenarios. It also makes authentication safe and easy and ensures data and users’ privacy, integrity, and anonymity through strong encryption techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network security protocols are implemented to address network security challenges. Computer networks and applications have advanced and developed significantly in recent years, but consumers 'excitement for network technology and high‐tech devices has been dampened by continual exposure to data security vulnerabilities. As of now, some individuals refuse to use smart devices due to concerns about the authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of data security leaks. This not only prompts Internet service providers to follow market protection mechanisms but also requires software developers to apply appropriate security protocols to protect computer network security. These applications' dependability and integrity are dependent not just on the effectiveness of cryptographic algorithms, but also on key management protocols. Understanding network security protocols and implementing high‐quality standards to govern the transmission of data in the network are critical components of guaranteeing network security. The article explores data security, primarily at the application layer, various attack methods for different network security protocols and highlights the potential security implications. The study also looks at the corresponding, practical security measures and future research prospects for certain kinds of attacks. Finally, some technical challenges that remain unsolved at the time of writing are summarised, and future trends in cybersecurity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hidden transmission of information takes place via covert channels. Contrary to encryption, which just shields data from unauthorized eyes, covert channels work to conceal the communication's actual existence. The Internet is a perfect high-capacity platform for clandestine communication because of the sheer volume of data it contains and the wide variety of network protocols it supports. Because they may be used by criminals to conceal their communication activity, covert channels offer a severe security risk. In this study, we introduce a unique covert channel that operates within the Time To Live (TTL) field of the IP header. The sender modifies the TTLs of subsequent packets to convey hidden information to the receiver. This channel relies on "natural" TTL variation for its capacity and covertness since network nodes along the path likewise vary the TTL. We investigate this fluctuation over many traffic traces and suggest an encoding method. We also discuss the detection of real andfake messages send by the sender and it is detected by warden in covert channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network protocols, as the communication rules among computer network devices, are the foundation for the normal operation of networks. However, security issues arising from design flaws and implementation vulnerabilities in network protocols pose significant risks to network operations and security. Network protocol fuzzing is an effective technique for discovering and mitigating security flaws in network protocols. It offers unparalleled advantages compared to other security analysis techniques thanks to the minimal requirement for prior knowledge of the target and low deployment complexity. Nevertheless, the randomness in test case generation, uncontrollable test coverage, and unstable testing efficiency introduce challenges in ensuring the controllability of the testing process and results. In order to comprehensively survey the development of network protocol fuzzing techniques and analyze their advantages and existing issues, in this paper, we categorized and summarized the protocol fuzzing and its related techniques based on the generation methods of test cases and testing conditions. Specifically, we overviewed the development trajectory and patterns of these techniques over the past two decades according to chronological order. Based on this analysis, we further predict the future directions of fuzzing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the problem that there are a large number of unknown protocols on the network, which affect the network management and network security in varying degrees, an unknown binary protocol identification method is proposed. On the premise that the center cluster of unknown protocols is obtained by the clustering algorithm, the unknown protocols for network traffic are identified by combining one-class of classification with one-dimensional CNN classification technology. At first, a class of classification algorithm is used to select the unknown protocols, and then, the labeled protocol data obtained by clustering are used to train the one-dimensional CNN model, and the classified binary protocol packets are directly used as the input of the one-dimensional convolution neural network. After the classification of the CNN model, the unknown protocols are finally identified. The experimental results show that the proposed classification and recognition method is better than the traditional CNN and SVM algorithms, and the maximum frequency pooling is better than the traditional pooling method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video communication gained wide popularity since it offers a more real-time mode of face-to-face interaction. This paper mainly aims to enhance the video transmission quality of multimedia applications via communication network security improvement and an adaptive resource allocation strategy. The main aim of the resource allocation strategy is to achieve efficient usage of spectrum resources since video communication utilizes the orthogonal subcarriers for data transmission and the need for conversion of non-flat channels to flat. An optimized Hybrid Deep Random Neural Network (HDRaNN) architecture is used to overcome the adaptive spectrum resource allocation problem in the single-frequency network transmission by taking into account the different time–frequency resources and regions for overlapping areas and the same time–frequency for non-overlapping areas. The Sheep Flock Optimization algorithm is used to minimize the network error rate of the HDRaNN architecture by optimizing the weights and biases. The basic purpose of communication network security in this paper is to ensure that data communicated over a network connection are safe and secure. The network security protocol offers protection from unauthorized data retrieval and attempts to obtain data. The protocols utilized for secure communication in the proposed technique are Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Secure Socket Layer, Simple Network Management Protocol, and Secure File Transfer Protocol. This protocol also assures that unauthorized users, devices, or services do not have access to your network data and works on all network mediums and data types. The extensive experiments conducted using the proposed methodology show improvements in the video transmission quality in terms of high diversity gain, security, increased throughput, and minimized bit error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things networks (IoT) are becoming very important in industrial, medical, and commercial applications. The security aspect of IoT networks is critical, especially the authentication of the devices in the network. The current security model in IoT networks uses centralized key exchange servers that present a security weak point. IoT networks need decentralized management for network security. Blockchain, with its decentralized model of authentication, can provide a solution for decentralized authentication in IoT networks. However, blockchain authentication models are known to be computationally demanding because they require complex mathematical calculations. In this paper, we present an Authentication-Chains protocol which is a lightweight decentralized protocol for IoT authentication based on blockchain distributed ledger. The proposed protocol arranges the nodes in clusters and creates an authentication blockchain for each cluster. These cluster chains are connected by another blockchain. A new consensus algorithm based on proof of identity authentication is adapted to the limited computational capabilities of IoT devices. The proposed protocol security performance is analyzed using cryptographic protocols verifier software and tested. Additionally, a test bed consisting of a Raspberry Pi network is presented to analyze the performance of the proposed protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving low-cost and high-performance network security communication is necessary for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including intelligent sensors and mobile robots. Designing hardware accelerators to accelerate multiple computationally intensive cryptographic primitives in various network security protocols is challenging. Different from existing unified reconfigurable cryptographic accelerators with relatively low efficiency and high latency, this paper presents design and analysis of a reconfigurable cryptographic accelerator consisting of a reconfigurable cipher unit and a reconfigurable hash unit to support widely used cryptographic algorithms for IoT Devices, which require block ciphers and hash functions simultaneously. Based on a detailed and comprehensive algorithmic analysis of both the block ciphers and hash functions in terms of basic algorithm structures and common cryptographic operators, the proposed reconfigurable cryptographic accelerator is designed by reusing key register files and operators to build unified data paths. Both the reconfigurable cipher unit and the reconfigurable hash unit contain a unified data path to implement Data Encryption Standard (DES)/Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)/ShangMi 4 (SM4) and Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1)/SHA-256/SM3 algorithms, respectively. A reconfigurable S-Box for AES and SM4 is designed based on the composite field Galois field (GF) GF(((22)2)2), which significantly reduces hardware overhead and power consumption compared with the conventional implementation by look-up tables. The experimental results based on 65-nm application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation show that the achieved energy efficiency and area efficiency of the proposed design is 441 Gbps/W and 37.55 Gbps/mm2, respectively, which is suitable for IoT devices with limited battery and form factor. The result of delay analysis also shows that the number of delay cycles of our design can be reduced by 83% compared with the state-of-the-art design, which shows that the proposed design is more suitable for applications including 5G/Wi-Fi/ZigBee/Ethernet network standards to accelerate block ciphers and hash functions simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network communication protocol reverse engineering is useful for network security, including protocol fuzz testing, botnet command infiltration, and service script generation. Many models have been proposed to generate field boundary, field semantic, state machine, and some other format information from network trace and program execution for text-based protocol and hybrid protocols. However, how to extract format information from network trace data for binary-based protocol still remains a challenging issue. Existing network-trace-based models focus on text-based and hybrid protocols, using tokenization and some other heuristic rules, like field identification, to perform reverse engineering, which makes it hard to apply to binary-based protocol. In this paper, we propose a whole mechanism for binary-based protocol reverse engineering based on auto-encoder models and other clustering algorithms using only network trace data. After evaluation, we set some metrics and compare our model with existing other models, showing its necessity to the field of protocol reverse engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing specifically on sensing devices with restricted resources, heterogeneous internet of things (HIoT) is an attractive scenario for IoT networks. Nonetheless, the very nature of wireless channels in these networks has given rise to a series of security challenges, which need to be considered while developing authentication protocols. Here, we scrutinized Yu and Park's, Kumari et al.'s, and Ostad-sharif et al.'s protocols and illustrated their weaknesses against key compromise attacks, insider attacks, and violation of anonymity. Furthermore, for heterogeneous IoT contexts, a lightweight and secure authentication and key agreement protocol for heterogeneous IoT environments is presented. Concerning the restricted resources of sensing devices, an attempt is made to provide an efficient HIoT-based authentication protocol to enhance network security and performance. The gateway as a trusted authority with the maximum workload and sensing devices with the highest restrictions on resources are considered in the suggested protocol. As a result, the user bears the brunt of the workload in the individual session. The Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic is used to validate the proposed protocol, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is utilized to demonstrate resilience to existing active attacks. Simulation findings and performance assessment revealed that our protocol improved communication overheads by up to 110%, computation overheads by up to 83%, and sensing device maximum storage capacity by up to 51%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of communication technology, the optimization of communication protocol, as a new generation of intelligent traffic system technology, has attracted more and more attention, in particular, the communication technology in traffic. In the authentication protocol of this paper, the symmetric cipher algorithm ZUC and the asymmetric cryptographic algorithm RSA are used as the cryptographic algorithms of the protocol. RSA is used to decrypt digital signatures for messages. In the current communication scheme, node communication does not have scalability and communication requirements in different scenarios, and a population key negotiation communication protocol was proposed in this paper. Employing the kana and random key parameters of the nodes in the roadside cell group, 3 communication protocols for group broadcasting, group to vehicle communication, and RSU communication between groups were designed. The results show that the protocol can meet the security requirements of network communication. The results show that the communication protocol in this paper is safe and reliable. At last, the communication efficiency of communication protocol is analyzed using communication overhead and average delay. The proposed protocol is an efficient communication protocol and the scheme is superior to other schemes in terms of communication overhead and average delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth in the integration and use of standards and protocols common to computer networks has seen industrial networks increasingly subject to attacks and invasions. Modbus is an example of a widely used industrial protocol, and like others, does not possess native tools for secure communication. Security for Modbus is achieved generally by use of security techniques on the lower layers of the communication stack. This study highlights vulnerabilities associated with Modbus, with its focus on Modbus TCP, while offering a protection proposal through use of Master and Slave authentication at the application layer level. The technique was implemented with the HB-MP* protocol, which focused on protection against invading Masters or Slaves. The main contribution of this paper is found through providing Modbus communications greater security at the application layer level, as a single security implementation or increasing security in conjunction with other lower layer security techniques. A Modbus TCP network was set up with Master and Slave nodes performing Modbus communication that authenticates one another. Results showed it was possible to detect intruders and avoid some attacks, whereas suffering only a small cost associated with processing and transmission delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stateful network protocol fuzzing is one of the essential means for ensuring network communication security. However, the existing methods have problems, including frequent auxiliary message interaction, no in-depth state-space exploration, and high shares of invalid interaction time. To this end, we propose SATFuzz, a stateful network protocol fuzzing framework. SATFuzz first prioritizes the states identified by the status codes in response messages, then randomly selects a state to test among the high-priority states, and determines its corresponding optimal test sequence, which is composed of the minimum pre-lead sequence, the test case, and the fittest post-end sequence. Finally, SATFuzz uses a quasi-recurrent neural network (QRNN) to filter the test cases before performing interaction, and only the optimal test sequence, including the valid test case, can be fed to the protocol entity. To verify the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments with the state-of-the-art fuzzer on two popular protocols. The results show that the vulnerability discovery efficiency of the proposed approach increases by at least 1.48 times (at most by 3.06 times), making it superior to the rival methods. This not only confirms the effectiveness of SATFuzz in terms of improving the vulnerability discovery efficiency but also shows that SATFuzz has significant advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the interaction of the programming construct "new," which generates statically scoped names, with communication via messages on channels. This interaction is crucial in security protocols, which are the main motivating examples for our work; it also appears in other programming-language contexts. We define the applied pi calculus, a simple, general extension of the pi calculus in which values can be formed from names via the application of built-in functions, subject to equations, and be sent as messages. (In contrast, the pure pi calculus lacks built-in functions; its only messages are atomic names.)We develop semantics and proof techniques for this extended language and apply them in reasoning about security protocols. This article essentially subsumes the conference paper that introduced the applied pi calculus in 2001. It fills gaps, incorporates improvements, and further explains and studies the applied pi calculus. Since 2001, the applied pi calculus has been the basis for much further work, described in many research publications and sometimes embodied in useful software, such as the tool ProVerif, which relies on the applied pi calculus to support the specification and automatic analysis of security protocols. Although this article does not aim to be a complete review of the subject, it benefits from that further work and provides better foundations for some of it. In particular, the applied pi calculus has evolved through its implementation in ProVerif, and the present definition reflects that evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of society, humans are becoming more and more dependent on the Internet. And there are exploitable vulnerabilities in network sharing protocol vulnerabilities that will cause great risks to individuals and society. Therefore, vulnerability mining technology has developed into an important research problem in the field of information security. To this end, this paper uses fuzzy testing method for vulnerability mining of network protocols. The fuzzy testing technique performs vulnerability mining by sending a large amount of abnormal data to the test target and monitoring whether the software system is working properly. The vulnerability mining approach in this paper prioritizes the need to analyze and model the protocol format and generate a large number of test cases by using fuzzy test values to vary the boundaries of different parts of the protocol. These test cases are then sent to the test target, and the network state and process state of the test target are monitored in real time. Finally, if the test cases trigger a vulnerability, the system automatically records the test case information as well as the vulnerability information. The test cases evaluated by machine learning as easy to trigger vulnerabilities are sent to the test H-target, which can save the time of vulnerability mining for everyone and improve the efficiency of vulnerability mining. The vulnerability mining technology researched in this paper is of great significance to network security, which can prevent problems before they occur, discover vulnerabilities in the network in time, take effective measures to prevent them, and possibly avoid the spread of some major network vulnerability viruses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) is more secure than its forerunner, Internet Protocol version four (IPv4). IPv6 introduces several new protocols, such as the Internet Control Message Protocol version six (ICMPv6), an essential protocol to the IPv6 networks. However, it exposes IPv6 networks to some security threats since ICMPv6 messages are not verified or authenticated, and they are mandatory messages that cannot be blocked or disabled. One of the threats currently facing IPv6 networks is the exploitation of ICMPv6 messages by malicious actors to execute distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep-learning-based approach to detect ICMPv6 flooding DDoS attacks on IPv6 networks by introducing an ensemble feature selection technique that utilizes chi-square and information gain ratio methods to select significant features for attack detection with high accuracy. In addition, a long short-term memory (LSTM) is employed to train the detection model on the selected features. The proposed approach was evaluated using a synthetic dataset for false-positive rate (FPR), detection accuracy, F-measure, recall, and precision, achieving 0.55%, 98.41%, 98.39%, 97.3%, and 99.4%, respectively. Additionally, the results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key challenges in computer networks is network security. For securing the network, various solutions have been proposed, including network security protocols and firewalls. In the case of so-called packet-filtering firewalls, policy rules are implemented to monitor changes to the network and preserve the required security level. Due to the dramatic increase of devices, however, and herewith the rapid increase of the size of the policy rules, firewall policy anomalies occur more frequently. This requires careful implementation of the policy rules to ensure cost-efficient solutions for anomaly detection to support network security. In this study, we present an anomaly detection framework for detecting intrafirewall policy anomaly rules. The framework supports the simulation of packets through the firewall ruleset for validating and enhancing the security level of the network. The framework is validated using four different types of firewall policy anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework is effective and efficient in detecting firewall policy anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) network protocol standard has been developed and regulated based only on trusted partner networks. The SS7 network protocol by design neither secures the communication channel nor verifies the entire network peers. The SS7 network protocol used in telecommunications has deficiencies that include verification of actual subscribers, precise location, subscriber’s belonging to a network, absence of illegitimate message filtering mechanism, and configuration deficiencies in home routing networks. Attackers can take advantage of these deficiencies and exploit them to impose threats such as subscriber or network data disclosure, intercept mobile traffic, perform account frauds, track subscriber location, and deny services. Existing methods are unable to identify suspicious hosts as they use a minimal number of network parameters. So, there is a vital need to overcome these deficiencies to detect the abnormal behaviour of users and hence mitigate security attacks in a mobile network. This research proposes a model for anomaly detection in mobile networks based on Rule-based filtering with stateful correlation. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using synthetic datasets. Results show that the proposed anomaly detection model performs 0.37% better in terms of security attack detection rate, 24.25% better in terms of false alarm rate, and 31.45% better in terms of true positive rate when compared with the existing pattern recognition Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development and practical application of 5G technology, the construction of smart cities has progressed into an entirely new level. Mobile wireless networks in smart cities provide people with ubiquitous network services, thereby making the entire city organic. However, the open character of such wireless networks results in network security issues. As a result, people suffer from potential network threats while enjoying the convenience of wireless networks. To solve this problem, various roaming authentication protocols for mobile network are proposed. We find that a contradiction exists between user anonymity and resistance to denial of service (DoS) attacks. Most current protocols attach importance to user privacy protection. Hence, they are vulnerable to DoS attacks, which cause network paralysis. We put forward an anonymous authentication protocol with DoS resistance for smart cities by overcoming the defects of the protocol of Xie et al. Then, two formal validation tools, namely, ProVerif and BAN logic, are introduced to verify the security of our scheme. Security analyses indicate that our protocol not only meets many known security properties but also shows higher efficiency compared with related works. In addition, the proposed protocol achieves a good balance between user anonymity and DoS attack resistance, while many other schemes failed to do so because they ignore this type of attack. Thus, it is more suitable for smart cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) with the Internet of Things (IoT) play a vital key concept while performing the information transmission process. The WSN with IoT has been effectively utilized in different research contents such as network protocol selection, topology control, node deployment, location technology and network security, etc. Among that, node location is one of the crucial problems that need to be resolved to improve communication. The node location is directly influencing the network performance, lifetime and data sense. Therefore, this paper introduces the Bird Swarm Optimized Quasi-Affine Evolutionary Algorithm (BSOQAEA) to fix the node location problem in sensor networks. The proposed algorithm analyzes the node location, and incorporates the dynamic shrinking space process is to save time. The introduced evolutionary algorithm optimizes the node centroid location performed according to the received signal strength indications (RSSI). The created efficiency in the system is determined using high node location accuracy, minimum distance error, and location error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ZigBee is a popular wireless network protocol for home security systems. It is well known to be quite insecure from a hacker's perspective. However, security professionals often fail to realize that the easiest method for compromising ZigBee home security networks is often overlooked in favor of by more complicated attacks. Jamming is just one out of many various "Deep Penetration" methods. Although there are many different methods for jamming wireless networks, the simplest jamming method for ZigBee is also probably the most effective. An intruder does not need a Ph.D. in computer science to successfully penetrate a ZigBee home security system with basic jamming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet communication protocols define the behavior rules of network components when they communicate with each other. With the continuous development of network technologies, many private or unknown network protocols are emerging in endlessly various network environments. Herein, relevant protocol specifications become difficult or unavailable to translate in many situations such as network security management and intrusion detection. Although protocol reverse engineering is being investigated in recent years to perform reverse analysis on the specifications of unknown protocols, most existing methods have proven to be time-consuming with limited efficiency, especially when applied on unknown protocol state machines. This paper proposes a state merging algorithm based on EDSM (Evidence-Driven State Merging) to infer the transition rules of unknown protocols in form of state machines with high efficiency. Compared with another classical state machine inferring method based on Exbar algorithm, the experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method could run faster, especially when dealing with massive training data sets. In addition, this method can also make the state machines have higher similarities with the reference state machines constructed from public specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network attacks show a trend of increased attack intensity, enhanced diversity, and more concealed attack methods, which put forward higher requirements for the performance of network security equipment. Unlike the SDN (software defined network) switch with a fixed-function data plane, switches with programmable data planes can help users realize more network protocols. Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) is proposed to define the operations of the data plane and to implement user's applications, e.g., data center networks, security, or 5G. This paper provides a review of research papers on solving network security problems with P4-based programmable data plane. The work can be organized into two parts. In the first part, the programming language P4, P4 program, architectures, P4 compilers, P4 Runtime, and P4 target are introduced according to the workflow model. The advantages of P4-based programmable switching in solving network security are analyzed. In the second part, the existing network security research papers are divided into four parts according to the perspectives of passive defense, active defense, and combination of multiple technologies. The schemes in each category are compared, and the core ideas and limitations are clarified. In addition, a detailed comparison is made for the research on the performance of P4 targets. Finally, trends and challenges related to the P4-based programmable data plane are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread application of wireless communication technology brings great convenience to people, but security and privacy problems also arise. To assess and guarantee the security of wireless networks and user devices, discovering and identifying wireless devices become a foremost task. Currently, effective device identification is still a challenging issue, as device fingerprinting requires huge training datasets and is difficult to expand, and rule-based identification is not accurate and reliable enough. In this paper, we propose WND-Identifier, a universal and extensible framework for the identification of wireless devices, which can generate high-precision device labels (vendor, type, and product model) efficiently without user interaction. We first introduce the concept of device-info-related network protocols. WND-Identifier makes full use of the natural language features in such protocol messages and combines with the device description in the welcome page, thereby utilizing extraction rules to generate concrete device labels. Considering that the device information in the protocol messages may be incomplete or forged, we further take advantage of the application logic independence and stability of the device-info-related protocol, so as to build a multiprotocol text classification model, which maps the device to a known label. We conduct experiments in homes and public networks and present three application scenarios to verify the effectiveness of WND-Identifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Design flaws and vulnerabilities inherent to network protocols, devices, and services make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a persisting threat in the cyberspace, despite decades of research efforts in the area. The historical vertical integration of traditional IP networks limited the solution space, forcing researchers to tweak network protocols while maintaining global compatibility and proper service to legitimate flows. The advent of Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) and advances in Programmable Data Planes (PDP) changed the state of affairs and brought novel possibilities to deal with such attacks. In summary, the ability of bringing together network intelligence to a control plane, and offloading flow processing tasks to the forwarding plane, opened up interesting opportunities for network security researchers unlike ever. In this article, we dive into recent research that relies on SDN and PDP to detect, mitigate, and prevent DDoS attacks. Our literature review takes into account the SDN layered view as defined in RFC7426 and focuses on the data, control, and application planes. We follow a systematic methodology to capture related articles and organize them into a taxonomy of DDoS defense mechanisms focusing on three facets: activity level, deployment location, and cooperation degree. From the analysis of existing work, we also highlight key research gaps that may foster future research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the advent and rapid development of Internet communication technology, network security protocols with cryptography as their core have gradually become an important means of ensuring secure communications. Among numerous security protocols, certificate authentication is a common method of identity authentication, and hostname verification is a critical but easily neglected process in certificate authentication. Hostname verification validates the identity of a remote target by checking whether the hostname of the communication partner matches any name in the X.509 certificate. Notably, errors in hostname verification may cause security problems with regard to identity authentication. In this study, we use a model-learning method to conduct security testing for hostname verification in internet protocol security (IPsec). This method can analyze the problems entailed in implementing hostname verification in IPsec by effectively inferring the deterministic finite automaton model that can describe the matching situation between the certificate subject name and the hostname for different rules. We analyze two popular IPsec implementations, Strongswan and Libreswan, and find five violations. We use some of these violations to conduct actual attack tests on the IPsec implementation. The results show that under certain conditions, attackers can use these flaws to carry out identity impersonation attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the intelligent era of human-computer symbiosis, the use of machine learning method for covert communication confrontation has become a hot topic of network security. The existing covert communication technology focuses on the statistical abnormality of traffic behavior and does not consider the sensory abnormality of security censors, so it faces the core problem of lack of cognitive ability. In order to further improve the concealment of communication, a game method of "cognitive deception" is proposed, which is aimed at eliminating the anomaly of traffic in both behavioral and cognitive dimensions. Accordingly, a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network of Covert Channel (WCCGAN) model is established. The model uses the constraint sampling of cognitive priors to construct the constraint mechanism of "functional equivalence" and "cognitive equivalence" and is trained by a dynamic strategy updating learning algorithm. Among them, the generative module adopts joint expression learning which integrates network protocol knowledge to improve the expressiveness and discriminability of traffic cognitive features. The equivalent module guides the discriminant module to learn the pragmatic relevance features through the activity loss function of traffic and the application loss function of protocol for end-to-end training. The experimental results show that WCCGAN can directly synthesize traffic with comprehensive concealment ability, and its behavior concealment and cognitive deception are as high as 86.2% and 96.7%, respectively. Moreover, the model has good convergence and generalization ability and does not depend on specific assumptions and specific covert algorithms, which realizes a new paradigm of cognitive game in covert communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the proxy threshold signature scheme with the application of elegant construction of verifiable delegating key in the ID-based infrastructure, and also with the bilinear pairings. The protocol satisfies the classical security requirements used in the proxy delegation of signing rights. The description of the system architecture and the possible application of the protocol in edge computing designs is enclosed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to develop reliable safety standards for 5G sensor networks (SN) and the Internet of Things, appropriate verification tools are needed, including those offering the ability to perform automated symbolic analysis process. The Tamarin prover is one of such software-based solutions. It allows to formally prove security protocols. This paper shows the modus operandi of the tool in question. Its application has been illustrated using an example of an exchange of messages between two agents, with asynchronous encryption. The scheme may be implemented, for instance, in the TLS/DTLS protocol to create a secure cryptographic key exchange mechanism. The aim of the publication is to demonstrate that automated symbolic analysis may be relied upon to model 5G sensor networks security protocols. Also, a use case in which the process of modeling the DTLS 1.2 handshake protocol enriched with the TCP SYN Cookies mechanism, used to preventing DoS attacks, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile Internet and 5G technology, great changes have been brought to our lives, and human beings have stepped into the era of big data. These new features and techniques in 5G support many different types of mobile applications for users, which makes network security extremely challenging. Among them, more and more applications involve users' private data, such as location information, financial information, and biological information. In order to prevent users' privacy disclosure, most applications choose to use private protocols. However, such private protocols also provide a means for malware and malicious applications to steal users' privacy and confidential data. From a more secure point of view, we need to provide a way for users to know how many private protocols are running on their mobile phones and distinguish which are authorized applications and which are not. Therefore, the analysis and identification of private protocols have become a hot topic in current research. How to extract the characteristics of network protocol effectively and identify the private protocol accurately becomes the most important part of this research. In this paper, we combine genetic algorithm and association rule algorithm and then propose a set of feature extraction algorithm and protocol recognition algorithm for unknown protocols. The experimental analysis based on the actual data shows that these methods can effectively solve the problems of feature extraction and recognition for unknown protocols and can greatly improve the accuracy of private protocol recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication devices communicate and exchange information with each other in an independent manner to perform necessary tasks. The machine communicates with another machine over a wireless network. Wireless communication opens up the environment to huge vulnerabilities, making it very easy for hackers to gain access to sensitive information and carry out malicious actions. This paper proposes an M2M communication system through the internet in Tele-Robotics and provides network performance security. Tele-robotic systems are designed for surgery, treatment and diagnostics to be conducted across short or long distances while utilizing wireless communication networks. The systems also provide a low delay and secure communication system for the tele-robotics community and data security. The system can perform tasks autonomously and intelligently, minimizing the burden on medical staff and improving the quality and system performance of patient care. In the medical field, surgeons and patients are located at different places and connected through public networks. So the design of a medical sensor node network with LEACH protocol for secure and reliable communication ensures through the attack and without attack performance. Finally, the simulation results show low delay and reliable secure network transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, unscrupulous hacker attacks have led to the information leakage of enterprise and individual network users, which makes the network security issue unprecedented concerned. Botnet and dark network, which use C & C channel of unknown protocol format to communicate, are the important parts. With the development of wireless mobile networks technology, this problem becomes more prominent. Classifying and identifying the unknown protocol features can help us to judge and predict the unknown attack behavior in the Internet of things environment, so as to protect the network security. Firstly, this paper compares the protocol features to be detected with the existing protocol features in the feature base through the vectorization operation of protocol features, selects the feature set with high recognition rate, and judges the similarity between protocols. The extracted composite features are digitized to generate 0-1 matrix, then Principal Component Analysis (PCA) dimension reduction is processed, and finally clustering analysis is carried out. A Clique to Protocol Feature Vectorization (CPFV) algorithm is designed to improve the efficiency of protocol clustering and finally generate a new protocol format. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional Clique and BIRCH algorithms, the proposed optimization algorithm improves the accuracy by 20% and the stability by 15%. It can cluster and identify unknown protocols accurately and quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bloom filters (BF) are widely used in (wireless) network security protocols, searchable encryptions, and many other places. For performance and implementation issues, these applications prefer to use as few hash functions and as small sizes as possible. However, these designs lead to higher false-positive rates. In this article, we propose a split BF that divides the original BF into two small ones without increasing the number of hash functions. In comparison with the original BF, the split BF lowers false-positive rates and the filter sizes at the same time. For demonstration purpose, we implemented both the split BF and the original BF by using cryptographic hash functions MD5 and SHA512. We conducted a series experiments, and the results confirmed our theoretical findings.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attacks against Neighbour Discovery Protocol (NDP) is a major security issue in Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). It demands security expert attention because the availability of attacking toolkits has amplified the risk of NDP attack in IPv6 network. Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) attack is a type of NDP attack exploited by attacker to launch MiTM and DoS attack. Researcher have proposed IPSec, Secure NDP (SeND), SAVI, RA-Guard, Trust-ND and other methods but have not been implemented widely due to enormous resources requirement for cryptographic process and alteration of original NDP. This paper proposes a detection mechanism named SADetection to detect SLAAC attack. SADetection incorporated enhanced ongoing packet verification and authentication mechanism. SADetection has been implemented in testbed and has detected three (3) variants of SLAAC attack which are attack using ICMPv6 packet, using fragment packet and using packet with extension header. SADetection has been found to be lightweight, platform-independence and interoperable. SADetection does not alter original NDP thus resource practical to SLAAC attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid based sensor networks are significant for applications such as monitoring goods in a warehouse, studying traffic level of city streets, monitoring energy consumptions through smart meters deployed in a colony of houses. We propose a novel Key Predistribution Scheme (KPS) for networks where objects being monitored form a square grid. The confidentiality and integrity of the data being communicated in grid based sensor networks are critical since, compromise to the same could reveal the personal traits of the consumer and any alteration of data could yield erroneous results. On the other hand, since the deployment of such a network is on the nodes that are typically resource constrained, devising the security protocols for such networks is challenging. Our focus in this work is on designing a KPS that requires less storage in terms of number of keys and providing same level of resilience as other existing KPSs. The proposed KPS requires only 3 keys per node for providing the same level of resilience as a pairwise KPS (considered to provide maximum resilience) that requires O (N - 1) keys (N is the total number of nodes). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at considering linearity for designing a lightweight KPS and proposing a scheme that requires O(1) keys per node, and yet offering maximum resilience in grid based sensor networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provide a more reliable security for the network privacy, the access control protocol Priccess design of network privacy protection was studied. First of all, this paper presented the problems in wireless network security, and points out the key technologies, including privacy protection, user authentication, trust management, network security communication architecture and other technologies. Then, it made a brief analysis of the composition of the Priccess protocol, a wireless communication network in the roaming authentication scheme and wireless sensor network privacy data protection scheme. Furthermore, the roaming authentication scheme and wireless sensor networks data privacy protection in a wireless communication network was established. Finally, the results of the evaluation of the message load of Priccess protocol proved it was efficient for most of the user access devices, which could provide more efficient protection for the privacy of the network communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computer network security evaluation simulation model is analyzed based on neural network. Firstly, based on the system security experimental platform, the system security detection algorithm is constructed, and the selection strategy of calculation scale is analyzed. The Prefix Span algorithm is introduced, improving its algorithm. Data mining based on Prefix is carried out, with the relationship between intrusions and their relationships analyzed. Secondly, the implementation steps of the algorithm are explained. Finally, the algorithm is tested, and the results are analyzed from three aspects: entropy value feature, active entropy algorithm and cloud platform performance. The conclusion is that the algorithm designed in this paper has good accuracy and adaptability, and it can play a good supporting role in system safety practice training, and the encryption protocol in the network security protocol is further improved, which has laid a solid foundation for the security development of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum networks can extend the advantages of quantum key distribution protocols to more than two remote participants. Based on Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme, a new quantum key agreement protocol on a quantum network with any number of participants is proposed. First, each participant and distributor negotiate a sub-secret key using a kind of quantum key distribution protocol, and then each of these participants, as distributor, shares these sub-secret keys with other participants using Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme. Furthermore, each participant combines all these shared sub-secret keys and his own sub-secret key in sequence to form secret key, and sends the hash function values of this secret key to the master distributor to authenticate, finally they obtain the security key. Our scheme is practical and secure, and it can also prevent fraudulent from participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the limited computation and memory capabilities of the identification tags, RFID systems are susceptible to various attacks. In 2014, a lightweight mutual authentication RFID protocol that supports key update was proposed by Qian et al., and it was claimed to be secure against several known attacks. In this paper, however, we show that their protocol cannot resist key recovery attack, where an adversary, after interacting with the tag several times, can recover the authentication keys of the system in polynomial time with non-negligible probability. Additionally, we also prove that their protocol cannot provide strong backward security or strong forward security: an adversary who has compromised some continuous authentication keys, can successfully recover all the future authentication keys and some of the previous authentication keys, which completely breaks the security of the authentication protocol. We then propose a new protocol which provides key recovery resilience, both strong backward security and strong forward security, and also resistance against various known types of attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an up-and-coming technology. The major limitations of RFID technology are security and privacy concerns. Many methods, including encryption, authentication and hardware techniques, have been presented to overcome security and privacy problems. This paper focuses on authentication protocols. The combination of RFID technology being popular but unsecure has led to an influx of mutual authentication protocols. Authentication protocols are classified as being fully fledged, simple, lightweight or ultra-lightweight. Since 2002, much important research and many protocols have been presented, with some of the protocols requiring further development. The present paper reviews in detail recently proposed RFID mutual authentication protocols, according to the classes of the authentication protocols. The protocols were compared mainly in terms of security, the technique that they are based on, protocols that the presented protocol has been compared with, and finally, the method of verifying the protocol. Important points of the comparisons were collected in two tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Bit commitment is an important tool in the design of many secure cryptographic protocols, such as coin flipping, zero-knowledge proof, and secure computation. In this paper, we present a computationally light-weight bit commitment protocol over a noisy channel. For the security of the proposed protocol, we show that the receiver has almost no information about the committer's secret due to unpredictability of the noises in the communication channel. Hence, the security of our bit commitment protocol does not depend on hard problems; it is information-theoretically secure. Furthermore, the protocol needs only exclusive-or operations. Thus, it is computationally light-weight, and it can be used in the devices whose computing resources are limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a relatively new technology widely deployed in many applications. Due to several advantages of the technology including decreased costs and increased speed, different organizations and industries show interest in it, and its application range is gradually developing. Some of the main problems of RFID are security and privacy. The implementation of authentication protocols is a flexible and effective way to solve these problems. Several authentication protocols of RFID are based on hash functions or symmetric cryptography. According to the small size of the key, efficient computations, and high security in the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), its use has increased. Recently some certain ECC-based authentication protocols have been represented. In this paper, a RFID authentication protocol is presented using ECC for mutual authentication to overcome weaknesses of the existing authentication protocols. It has been shown that the proposed protocol satisfies security requirements of RFID authentication protocol and prevents different attacks on RFID systems. Also, the proposed authentication protocol has been analyzed in terms of computational costs, communication costs, and storage requirements. The results revealed that the proposed authentication protocol is an appropriate model for RFID tags with limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure and efficient authentication protocols are necessary for cloud service. Multifactor authentication protocols taking advantage of smart card, user’s password, and biometric, are more secure than password-based single-factor authentication protocols which are widely used in practice. However, most of the multiserver authentication protocols may have weak points, such as smart card loss attack, man-in-the-middle attack, anonymity, and high computation cost of authentication center. In order to overcome the above weaknesses, we propose a novel multiserver multifactor authentication protocol based on the Kerberos protocol using the extended Chebyshev chaotic mapping as a cryptographic algorithm. The proposed protocol achieves anonymity without sharing secret keys in advance and needs the user to register with the authentication center only once. Finally, we prove the security of the new protocol with BAN logic and compare it with other multifactor authentication protocols for multiserver environment. The results show that our proposed protocol is more secure and efficient and better for practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]