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In distributed systems there is often a need to store and share sensitive information (e.g., encryption keys, digital signatures, login credentials etc.) among the devices. It is also generally the case that this piece of information cannot be entrusted to any individual device since the malfunction or compromising of one node could jeopardize the security of the entire system. Even if the information is split among the devices, there is still a risk when an attacker can compromise a group of them. Therefore we have designed and implemented a secure and robust secret sharing scheme to enable a more resilient sharing of confidential information. This solution provides three important features: (i) it uses threshold secret sharing to split the information into shares to be kept by all devices in the system; so the information can only be retrieved collaboratively by groups of devices; (ii) it guarantees the privacy of the confidential information under a certain number of passive hijacking attacks; and (iii) it ensures the integrity of the confidential information against any number of hijackers who actively and collusively attack the devices. It is able to identify all the compromised devices, while still keeping the secret unforgeable to attackers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things assisted vehicular ad‐hoc network VANET (I‐VANET) is one of the preferred technologies to provide fast and reliable communication in smart transportation systems. With the goal of preserving security, I‐VANET is characterised by field‐programmable gate array‐based remote dynamic partial reconfiguration (RDPR) and security providing entity as a washable physical unclonable function (WPUF). In this specific work, an efficient WPUF‐based unknown authentication scheme is proposed to identify and avoid malicious vehicles entering into the I‐VANET. In addition to that, the proposed work provides a conditional tracing mechanism to hint the vehicles or roadside units that misuse the I‐VANET. This system reveals the malicious vehicles to efficiently provide conditional privacy through I‐VANET, by enabling a situation where the entities are unknown to each other until they depart from the network. Finally, I2 attacks were analysed from possible attacks that can emanate from the availability of RDPR at I‐VANET nodes, and WPUF circuit was used to prevent such attacks. The proposed WPUF‐based authentication scheme takes only around 120 ms for verifying 100 tokens but other conventional techniques take >900 ms for verifying 100 tokens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concealing the time delay signature and enhancing the complexity of electro‐optic (EO) chaotic system is important for practical applications. Therefore, in this study, the authors propose a new coupled EO chaotic system based on the classical one. In the new model, the electrical signals are mixed by using nonlinear coupling functions. Some simulation experiments are used to illustrate its chaotic performances and complexity. All results indicate that the new coupled model has a high complexity level, and can be competitive to other proposed EO systems. Furthermore, the time‐delay signature can be effectively concealed with a smaller gain coefficient than other systems. All these results demonstrate that this new system is more potential to be used in random number generation and chaotic secure communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution in communication techniques has created wide threats for crucial information transfer through a communication channel. Covert communication with steganography is a skill of concealing secret information within cover object and hence shields the data theft over rapidly growing network. Recently, diverse steganography techniques using edge identification have been proposed in literature. Numerous methods however utilize certain pixels in the cover image for inserting edge information, resulting in significant deformation. The conventional edge detection method limits the deployment of edge detection in steganography as concealing the information would introduce some variations to the cover image. Hence inserting data in pixel areas recognized by existing conventional edge detection techniques like canny cannot ensure the recognition of the exact edge locations for the cover and stego images. In this paper, an Adaptive steganography method based on novel fuzzy edge identification is proposed. The method proposed is proficient of estimating the precise edge areas of a cover image and also ensures the exact edge location after embedding the secret message. Experimental results reveal that the technique has attained good imperceptibility compared to the Hayat Al-Dmour and Ahmed Al- Ani Edge XOR method in spatial domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steganography is an important branch of information hiding, which is an effective way to solve the problem of communication security. Steganography can hide specific secret information in some kind of public information, such as images, documents, audio and video, without any suspicion. Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compressed image is the most widely used image format on the Internet. Recently, a series of JPEG image steganographic algorithms have been proposed. However, the existing JPEG steganography usually designs the cost function based on the statistical distribution in the DCT domain. In this paper, with the help of a "Microscope", which can enhance the JPEG images in the spatial domain and highlight the texture regions, we design the steganographic cost function based on the statistical distribution of JPEG images in spatial domain and work out a JPEG image steganography with high security performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed designing strategy is a practical approach to against several existing state-of-the-art steganalytic tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is considered as the resource constraint network, in which the entire nodes have limited resources. In WSN, prolonging the lifetime of the network remains as the unsolved point. Accordingly, this study intends to propose a hybrid GGWSO (Grouped Grey Wolf Search Optimisation) algorithm to improve the performance of a cluster head selection in WSN, so that the network's lifetime can be extended. The proposed method concerns the main constraints associated with distance, delay, energy, and security. This study compares the performance of the proposed GGWSO with several traditional algorithms like artificial bee colony (ABC), fractional ABC, group search optimisation and Grey Wolf optimisation‐based cluster head selection. During the performance analysis, the various ranges of risk, such as 20, 60, and 100% are added to validate the performance variations, by evaluating the number of alive nodes, and normalised network energy remained in the network. The simulation results have shown that there is a need for a hybrid model for attaining the superior results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast growth in internet and communication technology has facilitated an increase in the exchange of digital multimedia content like audio, video, images, etc. It is necessary to accomplish secure communication for digital information in open networks. The art of hiding information has become a major issue in the late years, the security of information has become a big interest in this internet era. Encoding information using QR codes were done, as they have greater potential to carry different types of information in a smaller space. Due to these properties, they have gained popularity in various fields of application and are used for both human interaction and automated systems. This paper includes two phases, i.e.; generating a QR code and hiding the QR code inside a color image. In the embedding process, binary image is converted into a corresponding digitally invisible watermark that is inserted in a QR code. The Quick response (QR) code (watermark) is embedded by using the Discrete Wavelet Transform in YCbCr color space, which should be extracted blindly without the host image or original watermark after applying different image processing attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Proportional delay, which is different from time-varying delays and distributed delay, is a kind of unbounded delay. The proportional delay system as an important mathematical model often rises in some various fields such as control theory, physics and biology systems. This paper is concerned with the finite-time and the fixed-time synchronization problem for a class of inertial neural networks with multi-proportional delays. First, by constructing a proper variable substitution, the original inertial neural networks with multi-proportional delays can be rewritten as a first-order differential system. Second, by constructing Lyapunov functionals and by using analytical techniques, and together with novel control algorithms, some new and effective criteria are established to achieve finite-time and fixed-time synchronization of the master/slave of addressed systems. Finally, several examples and their simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Furthermore, a secure communication synchronization problem is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless Communication technologies are growing rapidly to meet increasing demands of users. This creates overhead in existing wireless systems. This manifests in the continuous development of wireless systems to keep pace with the increasing capacity demand. Increase in the number of users increases congestion in cellular bands, hence Extremely High Frequency (EHF) bands such as mmWave are attracting growing attention for use in cellular networks. Millimeter Wave (mmWave) bands can support multi‐Gigabit rates for large bandwidth applications in Next generation networks. These bands have certain limitations like, these cannot travel long distances and cannot penetrate buildings and other objects. These limitations can be advantageously exploited to provide more secure communication and permit high‐frequency reuse. This will facilitate efficient spectrum utilization and support design of densely packed networks. This paper reviews the propagation characteristics of mmWaves and effect of external factors like atmospheric gases, rain, foliage, and diffraction. Our main focus will be to study the effect of these factors on the propagation of mmWave frequencies to be used for 5G cellular networks. We evaluate the losses due to atmospheric gases, rain and foliage at 28, 30 and 60 GHz frequencies which are supposed to be used in 5G cellular networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information security risk analysis has increased the number of complex issues of information security, requiring the participation of specialists in different areas of knowledge. This leads to inability of such systems to evaluate the security state of computer system thoroughly. Present paper on the intellectual to risk analysis and vulnerability of information systems. The aim of the study is to eliminate subjectivity in the assessment of risks and reduction of time for the process of risk analysis and vulnerability of the computer system. The mathematical tools of artificial neural network and probabilistic attack tree were used in the research. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the developed system, the security assessment for the Windows systems was performed. As the result the conformity between the real security of the information system and the assigned evaluations was proved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Accurately locating an indoor unknown radio emitter (URE) is a challenging target to ensure telecommunication security. The URE positioning method based on received signal strength difference (RSSD) has attracted considerable attention due to the advantage of not being affected by transmit power and frequency. However, the RSSD-based fingerprint technique cannot accurately express the constraint equations between signal characteristics and geographic coordinates because of redundant databases and false matching. In this paper, a novel RSSD-based indoor positioning method using factor graph (FG) for an URE is proposed to improve positioning accuracy and reduce computational complexity. Firstly, the databases are reconstructed by singular value decomposition (SVD) to eliminate redundant factor nodes. Secondly, Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is utilized to determine the sub-positioning area. Combing SVD with PCC, the hyperplane equations are reconstructed to build an optimized FG model, called SP-FG. Considering simulation and experiment, the proposed SP-FG algorithm improves the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of average positioning error within 0.5 m by 10% and 14% compared with conventional FG algorithm and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, respectively. In addition, this paper discusses the superiority of proposed SP-FG algorithm in positioning accuracy under different reference side lengths, access point (AP) coordinates and numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several gaps and errors in Fang et al. (2015) are identified. Their corrections as well as new results are reported. After these corrections, the successive convex approximation algorithm in Fang et al. (2015) is shown to generate an increasing, converging sequence of secrecy rates, which, for a degraded channel, converges to its secrecy capacity. The failure of the popular convex solver CVX to maximise secrecy rate is illustrated. Alternative algorithms are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A closed-form expression of the achievable secrecy rate is derived in this study, which is used as the objective function to find the optimal time allocation of channel estimation and transmission. Theory analysis and numerical results demonstrate that the maximum secrecy capacity depends on the total time budget as well as the power at the transmitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, a new method for robust image hashing is presented. The objectives of image hash are robustness and uniqueness. Exact Gaussian–Hermite moments and their invariants are used to extract highly accurate features for grey‐scale images. The hash value is estimated by the sender from the features of the given image and then appended to the image to be sent. On the other hand, the authenticity of the received image has been checked by decrypting the hash value at the receiver side. To increase the level of security, a pre‐shared key is used between the sender and the receiver. This process is to encrypt the hash value using a secret key before attaching with the image and then transmitting it. The similarity between different hashes is calculated by using Euclidean distance. Numerical simulation ensures the robustness of the proposed method against different kinds of attacks and preserves the image content. Hash different images exhibit very low collision probability which proves the suitability of the proposed method for robust image hash. The proposed method is compared with the existing hash methods where the obtained results clearly show the superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible light communication (VLC) technologies are becoming a method to communicate with a wide range of devices. One of VLC's biggest proposed advantages is the inherent security that this technology provides. The concept of securing on VLC is based on its indoor use since optical radiation is confined by walls. However, doors and windows are usually present in any inhabited structure through which the optical signal can leak and be detected by external devices. In this study, the signal leaked through such a window and the risk of eavesdropping the VLC‐based channel may have is studied. In this way, a risk evaluation parameter, which includes different variables, is proposed and analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the issues underlying the use by authorities of cell-site location information to locate cell phones and explain their significance. In order to do so, Section I. introduces the overall context, referring to the important precedent issued by the US Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States, and to how this ruling recently "spread" to Argentina. Section II. focuses on explaining the importance of cell-site records and how they can be used to locate individuals. Section III. provides an overview of Carpenter explaining its facts and line of argument. Lastly, Section IV. describes two court decisions in Argentina which generally follow the guidance established by the US Supreme Court in Carpenter, and leads to closing comments in Section V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to describe the authors' efforts to accomplish the green vehicular ad hoc network (GVANET) project. The goal is to realise the concept of a self 'renewably' powered communication infrastructure appropriate for intelligent transportation systems. The work in this project was started in 2009 with the intention of representing the necessary steps must be taken to achieve such system and to declare the usefulness of adopting environmental energy resources in building mission critical systems. The other objectives of this project are presenting a reasonably cost, reliable, secured and easy to install communication infrastructure. Their plan to implement the GVANET was achieved after passing two design levels: device level and system level. In the device level, they suggest that the architecture of a road side unit (RSU) must be enhanced to maintain its robustness and availability against the different failure events which may occur due to many reasons such as power supply shortage or denial of service attacks. The design philosophy in the system level concentrates on building a sustainable, secured, reliable and scalable communication infrastructure to solve the different systematic problems raised when implementing the RSU as a member of the GVANET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart or intelligent sensors are integrated physical units embedded with sensors, processors, and communication devices. The sensors also known as edge nodes form the lower‐most tier in the internet of things architecture. These devices rely on cryptographic technique to ensure 'root of trust' for the users. The implementation attacks namely side‐channel attacks (SCAs) pose a dangerous threat for the cryptographic implementation in the edge nodes since the attacks are undetectable by nature. Among the different categories of SCAs proposed in the literature, power analysis attacks (PAAs) are vastly studied and widely employed because it can be mounted with relatively inexpensive equipment. In this study, the different categories of PAAs along with the countermeasures are reviewed in detail. The impact of the SCA on the edge nodes is examined along with a case study on medical sensor nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a single-cell downlink time-division duplex-based massive MIMO communication in the presence of an adversary capable of jamming and eavesdropping simultaneously. We show that the massive MIMO communication is naturally resilient to no training-phase jamming attack in which the adversary jams only the data communication and eavesdrops both the data communication and the training. Specifically, we show that the secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) attained in the presence of such an attack are identical to the maximum DoF attainable under no attack. Furthermore, we evaluate the number of base station (BS) antennas necessary in order to establish information theoretic security without even a need for Wyner encoding for a given rate of information leakage to the attacker. Next, we show that things are completely different once the adversary starts jamming the training phase. Specifically, we consider the pilot contamination attack, called training-phase jamming in which the adversary jams and eavesdrops both the training and the data communication. We show that under such an attack, the maximum achieved SDoF is identical to zero. Furthermore, the maximum achievable secure rates of users also vanish, even in the asymptotic regime in the number of the BS antennas. We finally address this attack and show that, under training-phase jamming, if the number of pilot signals is scaled in a certain way and the pilot signal assignments can be hidden from the adversary, the users achieve an SDoF identical to the maximum achievable DoF under no attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensors with IoT assistance provides secured communication and data integrity inside HAN. Energy reading and information flow from the smart grid, together with sensors, bring about a new perspective on energy management. This paper primarily investigates the secured data flow in HAN and assures data privacy of customers during critical and emergency operations. Data are made available in real time with minimum transit time delay. Devices are continuously monitored for vital and emergency services. This paper focuses on machine to machine data flow and packet delivery using IoT. It helps in making user's power consumption data available over the cloud and also in customised electronic devices in real‐time. This research work showcases the requirements for developing a cost‐effective IoT‐HAN connected with smart grid for energy aware routing. The advanced design scheme helps to place sensors, and control gateway in a well‐defined boundary, consuming less energy for data transfer and data processing. Data flow pattern and packet delivery rate is tested using both simulated and actual data from sensors and concentrators. The obtained results and flow pattern is evaluated using MATLAB and network simulator. The developed IoT‐HAN setup is optimally helpful in secured data exchange among different connected devices inside HAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital world, watermarking technology is a solution for data hiding and completely essential for management and secure communications of digital data propagated over the internet-based platforms. Reversible watermarking is a quality-aware type of watermarking which has been applied in managing digital contents such as digital images, texts, audios and videos. Reversible watermarking is also known as lossless watermarking due to its preservation of all details of host and hidden data. One of the important uses of this kind of watermarking is to manage medical data regarding DICOM images. In the recent years, a new type of reversible watermarking technology entitled interpolation-based reversible watermarking has been introduced, and we are going to enhance it for DICOM images by using a hybrid approach based on computing error histogram and by applying an image interpolation with greedy weights (adaptive weighting). In practice, simulation results clearly show better performance of the proposed scheme compared to the previous techniques using interpolation-based reversible watermarking on different DICOM images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled secure communication systems where a mobile UAV wishes to send confidential messages to multiple ground users. To improve the security performance, a cooperative UAV is additionally considered that transmits the jamming signal. In this system, we maximize the minimum secrecy rate among the ground users by jointly optimizing the trajectory and the transmit power of the UAVs as well as the user scheduling. To efficiently solve this nonconvex problem, we adopt block successive upper bound minimization techniques, which address a sequence of approximated convex problems for each block of variables. Numerical results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, for multiple different chaotic systems with fully unknown parameters, a novel synchronization scheme called 'modified function projective multi-lag generalized compound synchronization' is put forward. As an advantage of the new method, not only the addition and subtraction, but also the multiplication of multiple chaotic systems are taken into consideration. This makes the signal hidden channels more abundant and the signal hidden methods more flexible. By virtue of finite-time stability theory and an adaptive control technique, a finite-time adaptive control scheme is established to realize the finite-time synchronization and to properly evaluate the unknown parameters. A detailed theoretical derivation and a specific numerical simulation demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the advanced scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a robust defence strategy in reaction to destabilising cyber‐physical attacks launched against linear time invariant systems and its application to power systems. The proposed protection scheme aims at making the dynamics of a selected subsystem decoupled from the dynamics of the subsystem targeted by the attack. The standard decoupling methods are made robust, in spite of poor information about plant parameters and lack of state measurement, with the aid of an extended observer. In this way, it is possible to keep the protected dynamics arbitrarily close to the one of a suitably chosen stable system, so long as the dynamics being targeted by the attack remain within the prescribed bounds. The proposed defence strategy is presented in the context of modern power systems, wherein generators and transmission networks are operated by different players and shown to be effective using the Western System Coordinating Council 9‐bus test power network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the design of a fractional-order chaotic secure communication scheme. On the emitter side, a fractional-order Chua’s system is used as the drive system to generate the encrypted message signal. The input secret message is modulated in the chaotic dynamics by inclusion rather than being directly added to the chaotic signal on the transmission line. A single channel is used for transmission of the encrypted signal. At the receiver side, a step-by-step sliding mode fractional-order chaotic observer subject to unknown input is proposed as the response system to obtain robust synchronization between the emitter and the receiver. After chaos synchronization is achieved at the receiver side, an estimation of the state variables is obtained and the plaintext is recovered. Finite-time convergence of both state and unknown input estimation errors is established. The efficiency of this proposed secure communication scheme is illustrated by numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the finite-time chaos synchronization of Chua chaotic oscillators based on the secure communication scheme in wireless sensor networks. The modified Chua oscillators are added to the base station and sensor nodes to generate the chaotic signals. Two methods are proposed for the finite-time synchronization of the modified Chua systems with uncertain parameters. In the first method, by using the Lyapunov stability theory, control law is suggested to achieve finite-time chaos synchronization. In order to increase the robustness of the controller, in the second method, a sliding mode controller is applied to the wireless sensor network. Synchronization between the base station and each of the sensor nodes is realized by multiplying a selection matrix by the specified chaotic signal, which is broadcasted by the base station to the sensor nodes. The mathematical proofs confirm that the proposed control law is correct and finally, the simulation results are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure socket layer/transport layer security (TLS) is the de facto protocol for providing secure communications over the Internet. It relies on the web PKI[AQ ID=Q1]model for authentication and secure key exchange. Despite its relatively successful past, the number of web PKI incidents observed have increased recently. These incidents revealed the risks of forged certificates issued by certificate authorities without the consent of the domain owners. Several solutions have been proposed to solve this problem but no solution has yet received widespread adoption due to complexity and deployability issues. In this study, the authors propose[AQ ID=Q2]an effective solution for this problem that allows a TLS server to detect a certificate substitution attack against its domain across the Internet. The proposed solution is practical and allows a smooth and gradual transition. They also give a triangulation algorithm enabling the server to find out the origin of the attack. They conducted simulation experiments using real‐world BGPdata and showed that their proposal can be effective for detecting and locating attacks using relatively few vantage points over the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi‐hop wireless network (MHWN) can be easily attacked by jammers for its shared nature and open access to the wireless medium. Jamming attack may pose a significant threat to MHWN by occupying wireless channel used by legitimate users. A number of anti‐jamming countermeasures have been put forward to eliminate the impact of communication disruption caused by jamming attacks. As an important building block of anti‐jamming strategies, jammer localisation attracts much attention in recent years and several algorithms have been presented. However, how to locate multiple co‐existing jammers receives little attention, and the efficiency and accuracy of the existing methods are still unsatisfactory. In this study, the authors focus on the localisation of sequential opening multi‐jammers and put forward the multi‐jammers localisation algorithm based on time series analysis (MLTSA) algorithm. The main process of MLTSA consists of four steps: detection of jamming attack, collection of received jamming signal strength, anomaly detection and separation of nodes, the existence determination and localisation of jammers. Finally, a series of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the localisation accuracies of MLTSA are better than those of several state‐of‐the‐art solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Czech Republic belongs to the most "internetised" countries in the world, its information and communication security policy (as well as the protection of the critical information infrastructure) lagged behind for a relatively long time, when compared to most of the remaining European countries. Building the hierarchy regarding the umbrella teams of the Cybernetic Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) type (regardless of whether we call them governmental, national or otherwise) was unthinkable without the contribution of the private sector that substituted many functions of the state in this field. The whole process can be understood as an interaction of international and national pressures appealing to the solution of the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep packet inspection (DPI) acts as a tool to control and classify incoming network traffic depending on users,content, applications and becomes a very important aspect of every network today. Instead of utilising only incoming packet header information, Internet service providers utilise DPI for security purposes, flow management, and routing. The high‐performance challenges that face DPI techniques to manage line‐speed packet processing with restricted available memory are the increasing traffic volumes and link rates. Bloom (BF) and quotient (QF) filters are effective randomised data structures for performing approximate membership queries. They have been employed in many networking applications including DPI. Nevertheless, they consume more calculations which degrade the system performance. Consequently, in this paper, the authors propose a new variant of membership query data structure, called quotient‐based Cuckoo filter (QCF), that reflects a merging process between QF and CF to minimise the calculation overhead and employing it in a DPI system. QCF employs only two hash functions and consumes less calculation overhead than BF, QF, and CF. The implementation results show that using QCF as an identification tool in a DPI system result in a time improvement up to 77% over CF and up to 98% over BF and QF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used for many applications such as surveillance and security applications. Every simple sensor in a WSN plays a critical role and it has to be protected from any attack and failure. The self‐protection of WSNs focuses on using sensors to protect themselves to resist against attacks targeting them. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a certain level of protection to each sensor. The authors propose an irregular cellular learning automaton (ICLA)‐based algorithm, which is called SPLA, to preserve sensors protection. Learning automaton at each cell of ICLA with proper rules aims at investigating the minimum possible number of nodes in order to guarantee the self‐protection requirements of the network. To evaluate the performance of SPLA, several simulation experiments were carried out and the obtained results show that SPLA performs on average of 50% better than maximum independent set and minimum connected dominating set algorithms in terms of active node ratio and can provide two times reduction in energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the problem of secure communication in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels from the perspective of physical layer security (PLS). We focus on the design of joint transceiver, which aims at maximizing the difference of mean-squared errors (MSE) between legitimate users and the eavesdropper. To reduce the complexity, the problem is formulated as a noncooperative game, and an asynchronous algorithm is proposed to obtain the Nash equilibrium solution. In each iteration, the closed-form solution is obtained by using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Furthermore, the performance of the joint transceiver, including both the secrecy rate and the MSE, is evaluated by simulations. Experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm has fast convergence speed and the security performance in different scenarios is effectively improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, random codes are applied to the classical syndrome coding scheme to achieve secrecy of communications. By analysing the effect of the values of the columns of the parity check matrix on the resulting security level of communications, a code design method is presented which constructs a class of random codes, termed random permutation codes, which achieve high security levels and are easily generated. A theoretical analysis method is presented which determines the security level achieved by randomly chosen, linear binary codes, and compared with simulation results obtained by Monte Carlo analysis. The results verify the theoretical approach. In particular, the theoretical method is also suitable for analysis of long codes having a large number of parity check bits which are beyond evaluation by computer simulation. The results show that the security performance of any randomly chosen permutation code is close to that of the best equivocation code having the same code parameters. This has the practical advantage in syndrome coding of being able to use an ephemeral code for each communication session, thereby providing forward secrecy, a desired feature of modern, secure communication systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the application of orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes for enhancing radio communications. It is shown that OAM modes can enhance the spectral efficiency of line-of-sight links where there is limited or no diversity gain, and also increase physical layer security. Multiple-input multiple-output systems, in comparison, can struggle to give spectral efficiency improvements in line-of-sight links because they are not typically configured to exploit OAM modes. The concept of specifically using OAM modes shows great promise provided that several challenges are addressed. This study aims to clarify OAM in the context of applications to which it is well suited, such as high-capacity point-to-point links alongside transport infrastructure, within data centres, and between buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure communication networks enabled by commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) are already available. However, their widespread deployment will require great efforts towards reducing the currently prohibitive cost of QKD systems. Here, we propose a compact and cost-effective alternative to the asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer commonly used to implement phase encoding in the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) QKD protocol. Our solution consists of an all-fiber, in-line, highly birefringent interferometer (HBI). The HBI shows improved tolerance to length mismatches and a simpler assembly, making it particularly desirable for the fabrication of multi-user systems where several interferometers must have matched delays and where cost and space considerations can be most critical, such as quantum access networks. As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate point-to-point QKD operation with HBIs over 15.5 km drop fiber and an 8-port passive optical network splitter. We achieve a secure key generation rate of 299.4 ± 16.4 kbit/s with a quantum bit error rate of 2.89 ± 0.31% for a continuous 25 h operation period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a communication system, security and reliability have an important impact on the quality of services. In this study, the authors investigate power and subcarrier allocation of a transmitter over the downlink of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access system with security considerations among users in the presence of a jammer. This study considers the interaction between the jammer and the transmitter as a zero-sum game where the objective function is the transmitter's secrecy sum-rate. To allocate the available resources, they solve the optimisation problem of each player to characterise its optimal strategies. Considering the intractability of the closed form Nash equilibrium for general power regime, they study a matrix game for obtaining maxmin and minmax solutions and demonstrate the validity of inequality maxmin ≥ minmax. Moreover, they show the existence of pure Nash equilibrium point for low total power regimes of the transmitter and the jammer and attain an expression for each regime. Finally, they examine the jamming power effect on the secrecy sum-rate and acquire lower and upper bounds of this rate using simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, the authors propose an energy‐efficient strategy using multiple antennas for secure distributed detection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In multiple access channel, it is possible to communicate between sensors and ally fusion centre with perfect secrecy by an encryption with channel state information (CSI). However, the sensors in an active group may need to constantly report in the encryption as long as the CSI remains unchanged, which deteriorates the energy efficiency in terms of the lifetime of WSN. The authors solve the problem by using random beamforming (e.g. antenna subset modulation). Furthermore, the authors investigate the impact of the number of active antennas on the network lifetime. Through the analysis and simulation, the authors demonstrate that the proposed strategy has a higher energy efficiency than the conventional strategy, while maintaining the same reliability and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secure communication through synchronization between two identic chaotic systems have recently gained a lot of interest. To implement a robust secure system based on synchronization, there is always a need to generate new discrete dynamical systems and investigate their performances in terms of amount of randomness they have and the ability to achieve synchronization smoothly. In this work, a new chaotic system, named Nahrain, is proposed and tested for the possible use in secure transmission via chaos synchronization as well as in cryptography applications. The performance of the proposed chaotic system is tested using 0-1 test, while NIST suite tests are used to check the randomness statistical properties. The nonlinear control laws are used to verify the synchronization of master-slave parts of the proposed system. The simulation results show that Nahrain system has chaotic behavior and synchronizable, while the equivalent binary sequence of the system has excellent randomness statistical properties. The numerical results obtained using MATLAB for 0-1 test was 0.9864, and for frequency test was 0.4202, while for frequency test within a block was 0.4311. As a result, the new proposed system can be used to develop efficient encryption and synchronization algorithms for multimedia secure transmission applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considers a model that a centralised sensor network is attacked by an invader, who launches the denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack on the network. To understand the behaviour of the invader and propose necessary protection accordingly, the authors study how the invader optimises his attack. In the model, the sensors take a measurement of a process and send the measurements to a remote estimator for state estimation. The invader intends to block the communication channels from the sensors to the estimator by the DoS attack in order to degrade the estimation performance. Constrained by a power budget, the invader needs to decide which sensors and at which time instances to attack, with the target that the estimation performance is mostly deteriorated. In this study, two scenarios that the system has a single sensor and has multiple sensors are investigated, respectively. For the system with a single sensor, the analytical result of the optimal attack schedules is given. For the system with multiple sensors, numerical methods are proposed, where the problem is relaxed and transformed into a convex optimisation problem which can be solved by efficient numerical algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When wireless sensor network (WSN) is running, it needs data acquisition, fusion, and transmission, which makes the attacker distribute the malware code to the network to destroy the normal operation of the network. In this study, an improved two‐dimensional (2D) cellular automata model and a multi‐player evolutionary game model are proposed to describe the propagation process of malware propagation, aiming at the shortcomings of research on malware propagation in WSN. First, the authors introduce the node diversity model according to the difference between the cluster‐head node and the terminal node in WSN. Then, based on the existing 2D cellular automata malware model, an improved mechanism of epidemiological transmission is improved. To make the model more complete, a multi‐player evolutionary game model is established according to the different attack methods and the different coping strategies adopted by the cluster‐head node and the terminal node in WSN. The replication dynamic equation of the strategy evolution is also given. Simulation results show that the proposed model can accurately describe the propagation behaviour of malware in WSN and provide a basis for security defence research of WSN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring the desired level of security is an important issue in all communicating systems, and it becomes more challenging in wireless environments. Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) are an emerging type of mobile network that is built using energy-restricted devices. Hence, the communications interface used and that computation complexity are additional factors to consider when designing secure protocols for these networks. In the literature, various solutions have been proposed to ensure secure and reliable internode communications, and these FANET nodes are known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In general, these UAVs are often detected as malicious due to an unintentional misbehavior related to the physical features of the UAVs, the communication mediums, or the network interface. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware trust-based solution to distinguish between intentional and unintentional UAV misbehavior. The main goal is to minimize the generated error ratio while meeting the desired security levels. Our proposal simultaneously establishes the inter-UAV trust and estimates the current context in terms of UAV energy, mobility pattern, and enqueued packets, in order to ensure full context awareness in the overall honesty evaluation. In addition, based on computed trust and context metrics, we also propose a new inter-UAV packet delivery strategy. Simulations conducted using NS2.35 evidence the efficiency of our proposal, called UNION, at ensuring high detection ratios > 87% and high accuracy with reduced end-to-end delay, clearly outperforming previous proposals known as RPM, T-CLAIDS, and CATrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this survey, we review the existing game-theoretic approaches for cyber security and privacy issues, categorizing their application into two classes, security and privacy. To show how game theory is utilized in cyberspace security and privacy, we select research regarding three main applications: cyber-physical security, communication security, and privacy. We present game models, features, and solutions of the selected works and describe their advantages and limitations from design to implementation of the defense mechanisms. We also identify some emerging trends and topics for future research. This survey not only demonstrates how to employ game-theoretic approaches to security and privacy but also encourages researchers to employ game theory to establish a comprehensive understanding of emerging security and privacy problems in cyberspace and potential solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]