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In this study, the authors consider the physical‐layer security for transmission in underlay cognitive radio networks, where consisting of a primary source–destination pair, a secondary transmitter–receiver pair and a common eavesdropper (E). To transmit data in a secure and reliable manner, they propose a transmission protocol for an underlay cognitive radio network. In particular, the secondary user is allowed to operate on the primary spectrum bandwidth when the interference threshold is satisfied. To protect the transmission confidentiality of primary system, PS node transmits a signal, which is linearly combined with the jamming signal (as artificial noise) and expectation signal, to interfere E. Furthermore, they propose a superimposed coding to combine with the artificial noise and expectation signal at PS node. We also analyse the performance of the proposed transmission protocol. We obtain the outage probability of secondary and primary systems. Simultaneously, they derive the closed‐form expression of intercept probability for primary system. In addition, they verify the performance of their proposed transmission protocol by numerical experiment. The numerical results show that their proposed transmission protocol not only has the better outage performance for secondary system but also has the better intercept performance for primary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The next-generation network provides state-of-the-art access-independent services over converged mobile and fixed networks. Security in the converged network environment is a major challenge. Traditional packet and protocol-based intrusion detection techniques cannot be used in next-generation networks due to slow throughput, low accuracy and their inability to inspect encrypted payload. An alternative solution for protection of next-generation networks is to use network flow records for detection of malicious activity in the network traffic. The network flow records are independent of access networks and user applications. In this paper, we propose a two-stage flow-based intrusion detection system for next-generation networks. The first stage uses an enhanced unsupervised one-class support vector machine which separates malicious flows from normal network traffic. The second stage uses a self-organizing map which automatically groups malicious flows into different alert clusters. We validated the proposed approach on two flow-based datasets and obtained promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, robotics systems have not been built with an emphasis on security. Their main purpose has been to complete a specific objective, such as to deliver the correct dosage of a drug to a patient, perform a swarm algorithm, or safely and autonomously drive humans from point A to point B. As more and more robotic systems become remotely accessible through networks, such as the Internet, they are more vulnerable to various attackers than ever before. To investigate remote attacks on networked robotic systems we have leveraged HoneyPhy, a physics-aware honeypot framework, to create the HoneyBot. The HoneyBot is the first software hybrid interaction honeypot specifically designed for networked robotic systems. By simulating unsafe actions and physically performing safe actions on the HoneyBot we seek to fool attackers into believing their exploits are successful, while logging all the communication to be used for attacker attribution and threat model creation. In this paper, we present the HoneyBot and discuss our proof of concept implementation. Our HoneyBot prototype swaps between physical actuation and using prebuilt models of sensor behavior for simulation at runtime given user input commands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Device‐to‐device (D2D) communication is a promising technology for the next generation mobile communication networks (5G). Indeed, it is expected to allow high throughput, reduce communication delays and reduce energy consumption and traffic load. D2D technology will enhance the capacity and the performance of traditional cellular networks. Security issues must be considered in all types of communications, especially when it comes to wireless communication between devices involved in controlling critical infrastructures and/or dealing with personal data. The authors propose taxonomy based on the review of recent works which have addressed the security issues in D2D communications. This taxonomy is more practical since it gives, on the one hand, a better readability and a good understanding of all the works that have addressed the security issues in the literature, and on the other hand, a roadmap towards a global security solution that combines the best techniques and security solutions inherent to each layer: physical, MAC, network and application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication security is one of the focus issues of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Trust model is commonly used to identify malicious attackers or filter false messages in the network, which effectively guarantees secure communication between vehicles. Constrained by the distributed network architecture of VANETs, trust evaluation results may be biased due to uneven data distribution and lack of reference. By colluding with the partners, malicious vehicle launches imbalance attack and zigzag attack to bypass the detection of the trust model. To address these new intelligent attacks, we propose a multi-dimensional trust model (MDT) in this paper, which makes a combined evaluation of different trust attributes from vehicles. In MDT, data collection and trust calculation are deployed in vehicles and trust authority (TA), respectively. Since the model dynamically adjusts the corresponding weight coefficient according to the data fluctuations of each trust indicator by adopting entropy weight method and filters anomalous evaluation results by using the median absolute deviation (MAD) algorithm, it can effectively deal with complex and variable intelligent attacks. The legitimate identity of a vehicle will be revoked from the network by TA once its trust value is less than the threshold. We have conducted extensive experimental studies to evaluate the performance of MDT. The experimental results show that the MDT model can accurately and effectively calculate the global trust of vehicles and detect malicious attacks in the network under different scenarios and tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, cyber-physical system (CPS) applications have been extensively utilised in the electric power grid to enable wide-area protection, control, and monitoring of power systems. Many of these applications in a smart grid CPS depend on reliable time synchronisation. For example, synchrophasor data from geographically distributed phasor measurement units (PMU) utilise global positioning system (GPS) for precise timing. However, these units are exposed to GPS time spoofing attacks that can lead to inaccurate monitoring and trigger unnecessary, and possibly destabilising, remedial control actions. The authors develop an end-to-end case study demonstrating the effect of GPS spoofing attacks on the phase angle monitoring and control functions of a PMU-based load shedding scheme. The evaluation of authors attack strategy is performed in a hardware-in-the-loop real-time digital simulator-enabled power system testbed.

In this study, the authors propose a state space modelling approach for trust evaluation in wireless sensor networks. In their state space trust model (SSTM), each sensor node is associated with a trust metric, which measures to what extent the data transmitted from this node would better be trusted by the server node. Given the SSTM, they translate the trust evaluation problem to be a non-linear state filtering problem. To estimate the state based on the SSTM, a component-wise iterative state inference procedure is proposed to work in tandem with the particle filter (PF), and thus the resulting algorithm is termed as iterative PF (IPF). The computational complexity of the IPF algorithm is theoretically linearly related with the dimension of the state. This property is desirable especially for high-dimensional trust evaluation and state filtering problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by both simulations and real data analysis.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) help create new services and applications by revolutionising our world in different fields through their tight interactions and automated decisions. This is especially true with the ongoing increase in the number of physical things (sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets, and so on) along with the explosive increase in the usage of online networking services and applications. Future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will facilitate the enabling of CPS communications over current network infrastructure through different technologies such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. In this study, the authors discuss about the main challenges that cellular providers will face as the massive number of CPS devices attempt to access the cellular spectrum. A case study is presented on how to ease the spectrum access of these devices through D2D spatial spectrum sensing. Furthermore, the authors discuss about protecting these D2D links from eavesdropping, since security is becoming a critical aspect in the cyber-physical space, especially with the large amount of traffic that is constantly flowing through the network.

In this paper, we consider both energy efficiency and security issues in a wireless power transfer (WPT) enabled relay system. In the considered system, the multiple-antenna decode-and-forward relay node (RN) has both information decoding and wireless power recycling capabilities, and thus can be empowered by WPT and assist the transmission from the multiple-antenna base station (BS) to the mobile terminals (MTs). In addition, we consider that there is an eavesdropper between the BS and the RNs, which tries to overhear the information sent to the MTs. We formulate a joint optimization problem with the objective to optimize energy efficiency of the presented system by considering WPT time allocation, power allocation, and secrecy data rate. In particular, we propose to select RNs based on different assigned priorities so that the physical layer security of information transmission can be guaranteed. Moreover, we take into consideration of the cases that the RNs adopt the half- and full-duplex protocols, and study the corresponding system performance analytically. The proposed schemes are evaluated by extensive simulations and it is demonstrated that the proposed resource allocation schemes can obtain energy efficiency maximization, and have superior performance over other schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theft of personal information to fake the identity of a person is a common threat normally performed by individual criminals, terrorists, or crime rings to commit fraud or other felonies. Recently, the Spanish identity card, which provides enough information to hire online products such as mortgages or loans, was updated to incorporate a near‐field communication chip as electronic passports do. This contactless interface brings a new attack vector for criminals, who might take advantage of the radio‐frequency identification communication to virtually steal personal information. In this study, the authors consider as case study the recently deployed contactless Spanish identity card assessing its security against identity theft. In particular, they evaluated the security of one of the contactless access protocol as implemented in the contactless Spanish identity card, and found that no defences against online brute‐force attacks were incorporated. They then suggest two countermeasures to protect against these attacks. Furthermore, they also analysed the pseudo‐random number generator within the card, which passed all the performed tests with good results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed in various commercial, scientific, and military applications for surveillance and critical data collection. A serious threat to sensor nodes is malicious code injection attack that results in fake data delivery or private data disclosure. Memory attestation used for verifying the integrity of a device's firmware is a promising solution for detecting an infected sensor node; particularly, low‐cost software‐based schemes are suitable for protecting resource‐constrained sensor nodes. However, a software‐based attestation usually requires some additional mechanisms for providing reliable integrity evidence when the sensor nodes communicate with the verifier through a multihop setting. Alternative hardware‐based attestation (e.g. trusted platform module) ensures a reliable integrity measurement that, however, is impractical for certain WSN applications primarily because of the high computational overhead and high hardware cost. The authors propose a lightweight hardware‐based memory attestation scheme against the malicious code injection attack, and the proposed scheme employs a lightweight tamper‐resistant hardware security module, which is free from any complicated cryptographic computation and is particularly suitable for low‐cost sensor nodes. In addition, experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed scheme are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are prone to emerging coexistence security threats such as primary user emulation attack (PUEA). Specifically, a malicious CRN may mimic licensees' [primary users (PUs)] signal characteristics to force another CRN to vacate its channels thinking that PUs have returned. While existing schemes are promising to some extent on detecting PUEAs, they are not able to prevent the attacks. In this article, the authors propose a PUEA deterrent (PUED) algorithm that can provide PUEAs' commission details: offender CRNs and attacks' time and bandwidth. There are many similarities between PUED and closed‐circuit television (CCTV) in terms of: deterrence strategy, reason for use, surveillance characteristics, surveillance outcome, and operation site. According to the criminology literature, robust CCTV systems have shown a significant reduction in visible offences (e.g. vehicle theft), reducing crime rates by 80%. Similarly, PUED will contribute the same effectiveness in deterring PUEAs. Furthermore, providing PUEAs' details will prevent the network's cognitive engine from considering the attacks as real PUs, consequently avoiding devising unreliable spectrum models for the attacked channels. Extensive simulations show the effectiveness of the PUED algorithm in terms of improving CRNs' performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In opportunistic networks (OppNets), routing and data forwarding among mobile devices are facilitated by relays or next‐hop forwarders. To guarantee end‐to‐end data delivery it is important to provide participation. However, in sparsely connected OppNets, it is extremely challenging to monitor the behaviour of the relays and identify selfish/malicious relays cooperating with each other in order to forge routing information or drop useful data. Cooperation enforcement schemes are seen as a lightweight alternative to conventional secure forwarding techniques that involve cryptographically signed certificate exchanges, providing a 'softer' security layer to protect basic networking operations. In general, cooperation enforcement schemes fall into two broad categories: trust establishment via a reputation system and pricing or credit‐based schemes. This study offers a comprehensive survey of representative cooperation enforcement schemes that exploit a reputation system. The authors analyse their distinct features, identify and discuss critical challenges that should be efficiently addressed when designing such mechanisms, indicating at the same time potential solutions and provide an informative table to display the authors' findings. From this analysis, they examine issues and concerns surrounding the field of cooperation enforcement in OppNets, and provide guidelines and directions for future researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure and stable routing is a critical issue in a conventional network environment, as the control and data planes are integrated. An intelligent routing is highly essential to provide an attack free network to its intended users. The programmable software defined network is an emerging network paradigm in which the security policies and the forwarding rules are implemented in the controller via North Bound Interface. This study incorporates a cognitive neural network learning algorithm namely restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), to detect the routing‐based distributed denial of service attacks in dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. RBM is a stochastic and unsupervised learning algorithm that self‐learns the network conditions by using its reasoning capability and segregates malicious routes in the route cache using context‐aware trust metrics such as reputation and energy consumption implemented in North Bound Application Programming Interface. The results show that a cognitive DSR protocol provides secure routing by increased packet delivery ratio, decreased end‐to‐end delay, reduced energy consumption and accurate detection of malicious routes compared with the conventional DSR protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of advancement and validation of smart grid technologies and systems calls for the availability of diverse expertise and resources. In response to this consideration, the virtual smart grid laboratory (VSGL) was developed as described in this study. At the core of the VSGL is a novel communication platform for seamlessly connecting geographically distributed laboratories with distinct competences. The platform has the dual purpose of opening access to resources of remote partner laboratory sites and offering the capability to emulate, analyse, and test smart grid communication networks involved in linking the distributed laboratory resources. The VSGL implementation is validated through a use case, in which the resources of R&D laboratories in three European countries are connected to form an aggregated system of distributed energy resources. The operation of the latter was coordinated through an energy management system based on model predictive control (MPC). The VSGL was found to be very suitable to meet the communication‐specific requirements of such type of study. In addition, for this particular case the effectiveness of the MPC subject to diverse implementations of communication links was substantiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network function virtualization (NFV) yields numerous benefits, particularly the possibility of a cost-efficient transition of telco hardware functionalities on the software platform to break the vendor lock-in problem. These benefits come at the price of some security flaws. Indeed, with NFV, virtual mobile networks become vulnerable to a number of security threats. These threats can be leveraged using some available mitigation techniques and also through other emerging solutions. This article presents critical security threats that exist in the NFV infrastructure, proposes best security practices to protect against them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent hardware developments have made it possible for the Internet of Things (IoT) to be built. A wide variety of industry sectors, including manufacturing, utilities, agriculture, transportation, and healthcare are actively seeking to incorporate IoT technologies in their operations. The increased connectivity and data sharing that give IoT systems their advantages also increase their vulnerability to attack. In this study, the authors explore the automated generation of attacks using genetic programming (GP), so that defences can be tested objectively in advance of deployment. In the authors' system, the GP‐generated attackers targeted publish–subscribe communications within a wireless sensor networks that was protected by an artificial immune intrusion detection system (IDS) taken from the literature. The GP attackers successfully suppressed more legitimate messages than the hand‐coded attack used originally to test the IDS, whilst reducing the likelihood of detection. Based on the results, it was possible to reconfigure the IDS to improve its performance. Whilst the experiments were focussed on establishing a proof‐of‐principle rather than a turnkey solution, they indicate that GP‐generated attackers have the potential to improve the protection of systems with large attack surfaces, in a way that is complementary to traditional testing and certification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advancement in communication technologies is enabling the design and implementation of a range of different types of networks. One such network that becomes a great attention from the research community is Vehicular ad-hoc Network (VANET). VANET provides road safety, traffic efficiency and congestion control to the users. Because of open source network more security attacks and threats occur during communication, so security becomes a major issue in VANET. Many of the researchers are working on these security problems, but these problems can be solved by implementing new type of routing protocols over existing routing protocols. So, the present work focuses on working, Architecture and previously used routing protocols in VANET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors propose a time‐modulated frequency diverse array (FDA) by combining time‐modulated array (TMA) and FDA for physical‐layer security. The proposed scheme has two‐folds: first, the information codes are specifically designed for the FDA elements switching alternatively, which produces a specified directional pattern projecting the phase‐modulation signal as a constellation in the desired range–angle section while distorting in other areas. Second, a switching scheme is adapted for the TMA according to the spreading sequence associated with the transmitted signal and the desired receiver position. In such a fashion, only the receiver located at the pre‐specified range–angle position can demodulate the received signal successfully but the distorted signals radiated to other undesired range–angle positions will be difficult to demodulate by the eavesdroppers even if with the knowledge of the spread sequence. Numerical results show that, due to the range–angle‐dependent characteristics, the proposed method offers more secure transmission performance and outperforms the traditional phased‐array‐based directional modulation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is a major concern for the communication sector. The technique presented in this paper provides a novel security key generation mechanism. The proposed technique aims to generate a security key using the biological characteristics of the human body and the mathematically generated pseudo random sequences, thus producing different keys for different individuals. The final key is produced through the fusion of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence of 1024 characters and Bernoulli Random Number Generator sequence of 256 bits. The performance of produced keys is evaluated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests and uniqueness is verified through avalanche test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoofing attacks is one of the most critical attacks in wireless communication security. Traditional solutions are based on cryptology which is performed in the upper layers, and face many challenges especially in resource‐limited application. To overcome this hurdle, physical‐layer security has been received a lot of attention recently. In this study, the authors propose a physical‐layer spoofing detecting scheme, where signal processing and feature recognition are utilised to improve the detection performance. In this study, they present a pretreatment process based on sparse representation (SR) to reinforce the characteristic of the signal. Furthermore, they formulate the problem of spoofing detection as one of the feature extraction and recognition, and employ a developed fuzzy C‐mean algorithm to further increase the recognition accuracy. In addition, in order to verify the proposed method, they conduct experiments and use numerical simulation and analysis to evaluate the detection performance. Results showed that the proposed approach can improve the recognition accuracy significantly (increased by one order of magnitude) and the complexity is acceptable (polynomial complexity). Their findings showed that combining SR and feature extraction and recognition, the proposed method provided a good access to achieve a higher accuracy scheme of spoofing detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have emerged as a promising technology for the next generation mobile communication networks and wireless systems (5G). As an underlay network of conventional cellular networks (LTE or LTE-Advanced), D2D communications have shown great potential in improving communication capability and fostering multifarious new applications and services. However, new application scenarios and system architecture expose establishment of D2D communications into unique security threats. Therefore, it is necessary to take security requirements into the design of D2D communications in order to ensure security and correct operations of the network. In this paper, we proposed a Universal Authentication and Key Agreement protocol for D2D communications (UAKA-D2D) to achieve secure communication session establishment, where user roaming and inter-operator operation are considered. Our protocol adopts Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange algorithm (DHKE) to achieve privacy preserving session key generation and employs message authentication code to achieve mutual authentication between D2D users. The security of the proposed protocol is analyzed theoretically and verified by a formal security verification tool. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the protocol in terms of computation and communication costs based on extensive analysis and simulations. The results show the efficiency and practicality of the proposed protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the blooming era of the Internet of Things (IoT), trust has been accepted as a vital factor for provisioning secure, reliable, seamless communications and services. However, a large number of challenges still remain unsolved due to the ambiguity of the concept of trust as well as the variety of divergent trust models in different contexts. In this research, we augment the trust concept, the trust definition and provide a general conceptual model in the context of the Social IoT (SIoT) environment by breaking down all attributes influencing trust. Then, we propose a trust evaluation model called REK, comprised of the triad of trust indicators (TIs) Reputation, Experience and Knowledge. The REK model covers multi-dimensional aspects of trust by incorporating heterogeneous information from direct observation (as Knowledge TI), personal experiences (as Experience TI) to global opinions (as Reputation TI). The associated evaluation models for the three TIs are also proposed and provisioned. We then come up with an aggregation mechanism for deriving trust values as the final outcome of the REK evaluation model. We believe this article offers better understandings on trust as well as provides several prospective approaches for the trust evaluation in the SIoT environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen active research that utilizes information combining geographic data and sensor data, called geospatial information, in urban planning, medical care and marketing. In this study, we focus on RFID technology that records position information (i.e., spatial information) of shopping carts in a supermarket, and estimate the latent space-time structure of the store as observation data of customers’ visits. Then, we propose a dynamic Bayesian model for sales analysis, which extends the conventional state-space model to include the spatiotemporal structure. From the results of the model analysis, it is obvious that supermarkets have clear periodic structures in units of time periods and weekly structures, and they are dynamically related to the adjacency of each sales area. By utilizing the visualization of the space-time structure of the sales area, it is possible to easily inform the store manager about the influence of customers’ visits on sales outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless technology has brought many changes in the way of communication in modern days. With the increased world wide employment of wireless technology, there is raising concern about the security standards of the technology. Many encryptions and decryption techniques have been implemented today to transmit data over the networks. Despite that, many authentication methods have also been applied. However, such methods must be validated to ensure the security of wireless networks. [1] Penetration testing is the one which can be used to identify the unknown void in the network. This makes pen test crucial to validate the security mechanisms of the system and outcomes of penetration testing could be used to secure the network. This paper will present an overview of penetration testing and tools. For this purpose, this paper will review the previous work done on the security of wireless networks using penetration testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical layer security has emerged as a promising approach to strengthen security of wireless communications. Particularly, extracting secret keys from channel randomness has attracted an increasing interest from both academic and industrial research groups. In this paper, we present a complete implantation of a secret key generation (SKG) protocol which is compliant with existing widespread Radio Access Technologies. This protocol performs the quantization of the channel state information, then information reconciliation and privacy amplification. We also propose an innovative algorithm to reduce the correlation between quantized channel coefficients that significantly improves the reliability and the resilience of the complete SKG scheme. Finally we assess the performance of our protocol by evaluating the quality of secret keys generated in various propagation environments from real single sense LTE signals, and real single and dual sense WiFi signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a new scheme combining artificial noise beam forming and secrecy coding to strengthen the security of existing wireless communication systems. Artificial noise and beam forming guarantee a radio advantage to legitimate users, enabling the use of our secrecy coding scheme to provide reliability and secrecy. This overall security protocol is compliant with existing widespread radio access technologies and it can be considered as a key-free add-on to improve security of the physical layer of wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses about the wireless networks, we are using now-a-days. The most widely used, standard of wireless network nowa- days is Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a standard which is open and used for short term range at a low cost, low power and low profile. The types of networks related to Bluetooth- Pico net and Scatter net. It also explains the four major components used in the Bluetooth Architecture. It specifies the range, benefits and security enforces in Bluetooth. The main three security services offered are Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity. It also explains the requirements to ensure the security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new encryption scheme implemented at the physical layer of wireless networks employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The new scheme obfuscates the subcarriers by randomly reserving several subcarriers for dummy data and resequences the training symbol by a new secure sequence. Subcarrier obfuscation renders the OFDM transmission more secure and random, whereas training symbol resequencing protects the entire physical layer packet but does not affect the normal functions of synchronization and channel estimation of legitimate users while preventing eavesdroppers from performing these functions. The security analysis shows that the system is robust to various attacks by analyzing the search space using an exhaustive key search. Our scheme is shown to perform better in terms of search space, key rate, and complexity in comparison with other OFDM physical layer encryption schemes. The scheme offers options for users to customize the security level and the key rate according to the hardware resource. Its low complexity nature also makes the scheme suitable for resource-limited devices. Details of practical design considerations are highlighted by applying the approach to an IEEE 802.11 OFDM system case study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2013 Snowden revelations ignited a vehement debate on the legitimacy and breadth of intelligence operations that monitor the Internet and telecommunications worldwide. The ongoing invasion of the private sphere of individuals around the world by governments and companies is an issue that is handled inadequately using current technological and organizational measures. This article 1 1 This article is based on research carried out at the request of the Science and Technology Option Assessment Panel (STOA) and the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) of the European Parliament [11,9] . Its scope is therefore primarily European, however its implications are assumed to be generally applicable. argues that in order to retain a vital and vibrant Internet, its basic infrastructure needs to be strengthened considerably. We propose a number of technical and political options, which would contribute to improving the security of the Internet. It focuses on the debates around end-to-end encryption and anonymization, as well as on policies addressing software and hardware vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the Internet architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the most recent standard in mobile communications, introduced by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Most of the works in literature about LTE security analyze authentication procedures, while handover procedures are far less considered. This paper focuses on the procedures that are activated when a mobile device moves between different LTE cells and between LTE and the older Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks and completes previous results with a deeper formal analysis of these procedures. The analysis shows that security properties (secrecy of keys, including backward/forward secrecy, immunity from off-line guessing attacks, and network components authentication) hold almost as expected in nominal conditions, i.e. when all backhaul links are secured and all backhaul nodes are trusted. The paper also analyses how these security properties are affected by possible anomalous situations, such as a compromised backhaul node or a misconfiguration by which a backhaul link becomes not protected and can be accessed by an attacker. The analysis shows that some security properties hold even in these adverse cases while other properties are compromised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the characteristics of the cognitive radio (CR) and the exponential increase of the vehicles, it is envisioned to deploy CR in vehicular ad‐hoc network (VANET) in near future. Due to the mobility of the vehicles, it is quite challenging to find the vacant band and to reuse it for data transmission purpose without affecting the primary network. Further, the presence of primary user emulation attack (PUEA) in the VANET makes this task more complicated. Hence, an accurate detection technique and proper power allocation to the vehicular secondary users (VSUs) are the two major factors which need to be addressed for reliable data transmission. Hence this study attempts to evaluate the performance metrics of the CR‐VANET considering the spatial correlation among the local decisions of the VSUs in the presence of PUEA. The energy efficiency maximisation with adaptive power allocation to the VSUs is achieved by the authors' proposed scheme based on genetic algorithm under the constraints of interference power to the primary receiver, minimum achievable data rate and maximum transmission power limit. The system performance is investigated in detail through the simulation‐based study and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces a novel architecture for image steganography using reversible logic based on quantum dot cellular automata (QCA). Feynman gate is used to achieve the reversible encoder and decoder for image steganography. A Nanocommunication circuit for image steganography is shown using proposed encoder/decoder circuit. The proposed QCA circuits have lower quantum cost than traditional designs. It shows the cost effectiveness functionality of the proposed designs. The proposed circuit has 28.33% improvement in terms of area over complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor circuit. To perform image steganography LSB technique is used; signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), peak SNR and mean squared error (MSE) are also computed. The proposed QCA encoder/decoder circuit is suitable for reversible computing. To establish this, the heat energy dissipation by the proposed encoder/decoder circuit is estimated. The estimation shows that the encoder/decoder circuit has very low energy dissipation. Single missing/additional cell‐based defect analysis is also explored in this study. Reliability of the circuit is tested against different temperatures. Implementation and testing of the circuit are achieved using QCADesigner tool. MATLAB is used to produce the input to the proposed circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: COVID-19 growing challenges in healthcare ecosystems. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in telemedicine is in interests of researchers, doctors and healthcare providers. Healthcare management by communication engineering and information technology have improved. Microsoft servers, Google search engine, virtual machine, etc. are the samples of real time telemedicine healthcare products. Objective: Expandable telemedicine healthcare ecosystems provide ubiquitous capability. These systems can share health information, medical applications, and fully automated, real time infrastructure. Telecommunication security and confidentiality of personal data exchange things increasing the confidence of users of telemedicine ecosystems. This paper presents a framework for telemedicine with cloud computing in platform of proposed WBAN. Material and Methods: Biosensors on/in/under the body measure the vital signs and bio signals carefully. Health information sending via WBAN to medical databases. In this research, ECG and EEG studding. Results simulating and comparing with the results of other researchers in MATLAB. Results: The scientific work presenting consists of two steps. At first, it attempts to secure biosensors communications by several biometrics encryptions, by small size encryption scheme. Latter, Electronic Medical and Health Records (EMHRs) securely storing in the super hospital database cloud to maintain the confidentiality data after outpatient care in Corona Pandemic. Conclusion: Analyzes show the proposed mechanism, it provides significant security through the random key generation mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A chaos shift parameter synchronisation (CSPS) system based on two different mutually coupled lasers synchronising with another laser is studied while a novel chaos shift orbit (CSO) encoding technique is presented for secret communication. CSPS between the emitter and receiver can still be obtained by shifting the emitter's parameter in real time, where the emitter operates its chaos to vary its orbit or jump across its orbit by using real‐time current changes of one laser. Then, a CSO encoding scheme is implemented successfully. The emitter has numerous real‐time shifting secret keys, so it is highly secure, and the signal is difficult to decipher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of encryption in free‐space optical communication systems has been increasing due to their widespread use. Herein, for the first time, the authors propose a novel two‐dimensional encryption system for free‐space optical communication using two spatial patterns as encryption keys. A data stream is physically encrypted with optical signals to reduce the risk of unauthorised third‐party intrusion into communication. The encryption and restoration of a binary data stream using the proposed encryption system are confirmed by simulation results. The authors believe that, in the future, the proposed system could be used as an encryption method at the physical layer level to achieve the desired level of safety determined by the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The double shadowed Rician model was recently proposed to describe some realistic physical signal propagation phenomena, where a Rician faded signal is impacted by cascaded shadowing processes. In this Letter, the authors study the outage performance of the double shadowed Rician model. More specifically, they investigate the impact of two different shadowing processes on the secrecy performance by deriving novel and exact expressions for secrecy outage performance metrics. The obtained results reveal the following physical implications: (i) when a Rician faded signal undergoes line‐of‐sight shadowing, which is further cascaded by another round of composite shadowing, the latter form of shadowing imposes larger impact on the secrecy performance; (ii) the widely investigated concept of 'protected zone' to improve the secrecy performance should not be limited to the legitimate transmitter but also extended to the legitimate receiver due to the adverse shadowing effect caused by objects in its vicinity; and (iii) the rate of outage performance degradation grows larger as the shadowings become severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital signal processing (DSP) cores (kernels) are key components of modern consumer electronics devices. However, protection of DSP kernels is very crucial considering its vulnerability to hardware threats such as reverse engineering (RE). Functional obfuscation is one of the security mechanisms which provide protection against RE. However, functional obfuscation logic is in itself vulnerable to removal attack. This Letter presents a novel anti‐removal logic (ARL) unit which ensures protection against the removal attack on functional obfuscation logic. Further, the ARL unit is itself safeguarded against removal attack by incorporating design architecture customisation and camouflaging. Designer can customise and camouflage the internal gate structure network of the ARL blocks post‐synthesis (post‐mapping and fitting). The proposed ARL unit integrated with functionally obfuscated DSP design, yielded lightweight and highly secured solution against removal attack when compared to an existing approach. The proposed approach reported on an average 42.57% reduction in gate count and on an average 66.67% enhancement in security compared to a recent existing approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate the secure communication in multigroup multicasting cell‐free massive MIMO systems in the presence of an active pilot spoofing attack. With the imperfect estimated local channels at access points, a distributed conjugate beamforming with normalised power constraint policy is exploited for downlink multicasting transmission. Closed‐form expressions for the per‐user achievable rate and information leakage to eavesdropper are derived, respectively. Numerical results are presented to verify the correctness of their analytical results and quantitatively analyse the impacts of eavesdropper's spoofing pilot power and a number of groups on the secrecy performance of the considered systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]