cybersecurity

Security analysis of Docker-based containerized environments

Operating System (OS) virtualization, also known as container-based virtualization, has gained momentum over the past few years thanks to its lightweight nature and support for agility. However, its compelling features come at the price of a reduced isolation level compared to the traditional host-based virtualization techniques, exposing workloads to various faults, such as container escape. Those faults might be manifested as host OS bugs, container runtime vulnerabilities, and/or poor container deployment choices and profile configuration. The latter aspect is particularly critical as

Monitoring containerized environments for security state error detection

Operating System (OS) virtualization, also known as container-based virtualization, has gained momentum over the past few years thanks to its lightweight nature and support for agility. However, its compelling features come at the price of a reduced isolation level compared to the traditional host-based virtualization techniques, exposing workloads to various threats, such as container escape. In those threats, compromised or rogue containers might exploit existing vulnerabilities or poor container deployment choices to successfully inject security state errors (e.g., breaking out of the

Advanced Breach and Attack Simulation using ML

Cybersecurity is becoming a need more than ever. Organizations need to protect their digital assets and are required to earn certifications to prove the compliance to the regulations and rules. For this, these assets must be assessed to ensure the target security posture and to get certified or pass an audit on yearly basis. This is a daunting and costly task as it often requires a third-party tester that tries to penetrate the system, under agreement. Breach and Attack Simulation is a new method that allows to do this penetration testing in-house, using some automation tools. Some of these

Breaking the Vehicle Over-The-Air Update System

A modern vehicle is composed of around 100 Electronic Control Unit (ECU) connected via several types of networks. An ECU is an embedded device, similar to a RaspberryPI, running an operating system, e.g., Linux-based or real-time OS, on top of which different software and firmware may run, depending on the application. Due to the imperfection of humans, software can have faults and vulnerabilities, which can lead to catastrophic failures that threatens human lives. This makes the manufacturers liable to such failures and thus often caused millions of vehicles recalls for repair. A smart

Adaptive Intrusion Management System for Databases

Muhamad Felemban, Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering Department, KFUPM

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B9 L2 H1

With the growing cyber-security threats to governmental and organizational infrastructures, the need to develop high resilient systems that preserve the security and privacy of data is becoming increasingly important. Although there is a large body of work on security and privacy countermeasures, cyber-attacks still persist. A prominent type of such attacks is intrusion attack that aims at data tampering, which can impair the availability and the integrity of data.

Resilient Computing: when Dependability meets Cybersecurity

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B9 L2 H2 R2325

Computing and communications infrastructures have become commodities that transact huge quantities of data and are pervasively interconnected, inside countries, and worldwide. Modern societies largely depend on them.

Finding the linchpins of the dark web: Understanding and detecting malicious infrastructure

Dr. Sumayah Alrwais, Assistant Professor, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA

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B9 L2 H1 R2322

In this talk, Sumayah will survey a number of malicious hosting infrastructures for different services and approaches to detecting them. Among them are works on an emerging trend of Bulletproof hosting services reselling infrastructure from lower-end service providers, use of residential proxy as a service to avoid server-side blocking and DNS based hosting infrastructure.

Practical Cryptographic Framework to Manage Security and Privacy for IoT Endpoint devices

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B1 L4 R4214

In this talk, the speaker will provide a high-level introduction to his recent research on IoT endpoint security. Firstly, he will introduce requirements followed by a discussion on cryptographic algorithm implementation. He will mainly focus on an overview of efficient cryptography for IoT endpoints and system privacy issues. Then he will discuss security management approaches, positives, negatives and challenges to resolve, linking to the endpoint device security section with regards to realistic device needs/capabilities.

Multi-layer Red Team vs. Blue Team Methods towards Secure Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Charalambos (Harrys) Konstantinou, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with Florida A&M University and Florida State University (FAMU-FSU) College of Engineering

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B9 L2 H1

Election hacking, power grid cyber-attacks, troll farms, fake news, ransomware, and other terms have entered our daily vocabularies and are here to stay. Cybersecurity touches nearly every part of our daily lives. Most importantly, national security and economic vitality rely on a safe, resilient, and stable cyber-space. We rely on cyber-physical systems with hardware devices, software platforms, and network systems to connect, travel, communicate, power our homes, provide health care, run our economy, etc. However, cyber-threats and attacks have grown exponentially over the past years, exposing both corporate and personal data, disrupting critical operations, causing a public health and safety impact, and imposing high costs on the economy. In this talk, we will focus on cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) as the backbone of critical infrastructure, and provide a research perspective and present red team security threats, challenges, and blue team countermeasures. We will discuss recent approaches on developing low-budget targeted cyberattacks against CPES, designing resilient methods against false data, and the need for an accurate assessment environment achieved through the inclusion of hardware-in-the-loop testbeds.

Cybersecurity of Industrial Control Systems - Challenges and Research Directions

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B9 L2 H2 H2.

This Distinguished Lecture is part of the CS Graduate Seminars. Abstract Industrial Control Systems play an important role in monitoring, controlling, and automating critical infrastructure such as water, gas, oil, and electricity. Recent years have seen a number of high-profile cyber attacks on such infrastructure, exemplified by Triton, Colonial Pipeline, and the Ukrainian Power Grid attacks. This naturally begs the question: how should we manage cyber security risks in such infrastructure on which the day-to-day functioning of our society relies? What are the complexities of managing

Towards Cyber Resilient Autonomous Vehicle Ecosystems: Pitfalls and Enablers

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B9 L2 H2 H2

Currently, there is a substantial push towards autonomous vehicles in the market. However, fully autonomous vehicles, using extensive fault-tolerance e.g., in x-by-wire functions, are still not quite safe from an accidental faults perspective. Furthermore, they present an even greater threat surface to combined accidental and malicious faults. This pitfall has been very slowly recognized by car makers. The consequences of such accidents or attacks are likely to be severe, life-threatening included. This talk will discuss this threat surface in an analysis including the whole ecosystem.

Security, Privacy, and Human

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B4 L5 R5209

Security and privacy systems are often composed of complex components and details. However, users’ experience shouldn’t be as complex. In this seminar, Eman will discuss the human factor in the security and privacy chain. While human privacy perceptions and behaviors have been investigated in Western societies, little is known about these issues in non-Western societies.

Scheduling tasks in energy harvesting IoT

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B4 L5 R5209

Internet of Things (IoT) applications can exploit energy harvesting systems to guarantee virtually uninterrupted operations. However, the use of energy harvesting poses issues concerning the optimization of the utility of the application while guaranteeing energy neutrality of the devices.

Memory Forensics 2.0

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B9 L2 H2 H2

The risk of security breaches is now higher than ever, and attackers routinely break into corporate networks, government services, and even critical infrastructures. As a result, it is not a matter of `if' a system will be compromised, but only a matter of `when' -- thus making the way we handle computer incidents and investigations of paramount importance.

The SCION Research and Education Network

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B9 L2 H2 H2

Imagining a new Internet architecture enables us to explore new networking concepts without the constraints imposed by the current Infrastructure. In this presentation, we invite you to join us on our 14-year-long expedition of creating the SCION next-generation secure Internet architecture.

Security and privacy in centralized and decentralized machine learning

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B4 L5 R5209

Machine learning (ML) is vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. Whereas security attacks aim at preventing model convergence or forcing convergence to wrong models, privacy attacks attempt to disclose the data used to train the model.

RC3 Advisory Board Distinguished Lectures Workshop

RC3 Advisory Board

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B5 L5 R5220

Machine learning (ML) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, demonstrating its effectiveness in a wide array of applications, including intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, when operating in adversarial environments, ML-based systems are susceptible to a range of attacks.

Towards Transparency of IoT Device Presence

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B9 L2 H2 H2

As many types of IoT devices worm their way into numerous settings and many aspects of our daily lives, awareness of their presence and functionality becomes a source of major concern. Hidden IoT devices can snoop (via sensing) on nearby unsuspecting users, and impact the environment where unaware users are present, via actuation.

Data, AI and Cybersecurity: Synergies and Interconnection

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B9 L2 H2 H2

This Dean's Distinguished Lecture is part of the ECE Graduate Seminar. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, led by deep learning, have gained unprecedented momentum over the past decade.

Securing Cyber-Physical and IoT Systems in Smart Living Environments

Prof. Sajal K. Das is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA.

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B4 L5 R5220

Our daily lives are becoming increasingly dependent on smart cyber-physical infrastructures, such as smart homes and cities, smart grid, smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart agriculture, and so on.

Dependability assessment work at City, University of London and possible synergies with RC3 at KAUST

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B4 L5 R5209

Abstract The talk will give an overview of research at the Department of Computer Science at the City University of London, focusing on the past and current dependability work at the Centre for Software Reliability. The talk will conclude with an overview of related research that is continuing or planned to start at City in 2024 and possible synergies and opportunities for collaboration with RC3 at KAUST. Brief Biography Ilir Gashi holds PhD (2007) and BEng (Honours) (2003) degrees in Software Reliability and Computing, respectively, from the City, University of London, where he is currently a

ML-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems: Resilience threats and a mitigation approach

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B4 L5 R5220

With the ever-increasing amount of cyberthreats out there, securing IT and OT infrastructures against these threats has become not only desirable, but fundamental. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are key assets for system protection, providing early alerts of network attacks. An important class of NIDS are those based on ML techniques, around which a substantial amount of research is being done these days. Unfortunately, being ML-based, these NIDS can be targeted by adversarial evasion attacks (AEA), which malicious parties try to exploit to perform network attacks without being detected.

KAUST SENTRY team wins 2021 Cybersecurity Games & Conference Embedded Security Challenge

1 min read ·
The SENTRY Lab team wins the 18th annual CSAW Cybersecurity Games & Conference’s (CSAW '21) Embedded Security Challenge (ESC).

Blocking microgrid cyberattacks to keep the power flowing

1 min read ·
Power grids have become far more complex in recent decades due to energy demands, environmental regulations and small-scale renewable energy systems that turn businesses and individuals into combined consumer-producers. One way to ensure that power supplies remain resilient is to create small groups of sources and loads called microgrids. Microgrids can operate independently of the main grid when required, such as supporting hospitals during natural disasters, for example. As microgrids grow more complex, they require sophisticated computer networks to coordinate, control and distribute

Simple hardware to defend microgrid attacks

1 min read ·
An inexpensive piece of hardware integrated with solar panel controllers can protect isolated power networks from cyberattacks.

Xiaojie Zhu

Xiaojie Zhu is a staff research scientist at KAUST. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, College of Engineering, Abu Dhabi University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, University of Oslo, Norway. Xiaojie's research interests are data security and privacy, software security, decentralized trust and infrastructure, and applied cryptography. He has published in prestigious journals such as IEEE TDSC, IEEE TPDS, JNCA, and JOS. One of his articles was included in the 21st annual

Roberto Di Pietro

Professor, Computer Science
Professor Di Pietro is a cybersecurity expert who excels in building and leading research and innovation labs in the private sector, government and academia. He works on critical infrastructure protection, adopting an artificial intelligence-driven approach in collaboration with major stakeholders.

Michał Forystek

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Computer Science Master's student at the Secure Next Generation Resilient Systems Lab (SENTRY) under the supervision of Professor Charalambos Konstantinou.

Marc Dacier

Professor, Computer Science
Leveraging 20+ years of international experience, Professor Dacier leads the charge in uncovering internet vulnerabilities and developing robust defenses, building a more secure digital future for all.

Mahmoud Attia

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Mahmoud Attia is currently an MS/PHD student working with the SeRBER research group led by Prof. Marc Dacier. His research interests are in network security, within the areas of IT and OT security. He previously joined KAUST as a visiting student in the summer of 2023.

Ines Pinto Gouveia

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cyber Resilience Research Group
Working towards building safe, secure and resilient systems.

Ilies Benhabbour

Ilies is working with professor Marc Dacier on the following subject: Fingerprinting of intra network semi active components in end-to-end communications. That is to say that we want to be able to identify components which may exist between two devices. It can be either something normal like a firewall or a proxy, but it can also be something malicious like a man in the middle attack. The project's goal will thus be to identify how we can do so, and what kind of experiments can be done over the packets to see if these semi active components exist. Another aim would be to create some code that

Hugo Bertin

Hugo is a Visiting Student from the University of Rennes, France. He is interested in the network and system aspects inherent in distributed systems, which often involve a trade-off between security and performance. He joined the SeRBER research group to work on EGaming Security under the supervision of Professor Marc Dacier. The research project aims to investigate the security aspects leveraged by the gaming industry, which experienced unprecedented growth, especially with the surge of Esports and is expected to continue to shape tomorrow's virtual worlds. Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Erick Rodrigues E Silva

Education Erick pursued his education in Control and Automation Engineering at CEFET-RJ, where he was awarded a Motion of Praise for his victory in a national robotics championship. He authored a thesis titled "Platform for Simulation and Generation of Synthetic Data for Autonomous Inspections by UAVS in Solar Plants." Experience During the thesis composition, Erick made a significant contribution to the paper "Virtual Reality Simulation of Autonomous Solar Plant Inspections with Unmanned Aerial Systems." This paper was published at ICUAS, a conference held in Dubrovnik, Croatia in 2021. After

Charalambos (Harrys) Konstantinou

Professor Konstantinou is an expert in critical infrastructure security and resilience, focusing on smart grid technology, renewable energy integration and real-time simulation.

Alya AlShaikh

Alya AlShaikh is currently an undergraduate student at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, KSA. She is pursuing a Software Engineering BSc specializing in Cyber Security and Machine Learning. Alya joined the Secure Next Generation Resilient Systems Lab (SENTRY) led by Professor Konstantinou as an Accelerated Bachelor’s and Master's (ABM) student. Her research interests include applying machine learning techniques to enhance cyber defense strategies.

Ali Shoker

Senior Research Scientist, Computer Science
I am a Senior Staff Scientist, working on Cyber Security and Resilience. My research is focused on studying and using Byzantine and Intrusion Fault tolerance, Hardware (FPGA), Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain, for critical applications like Autonomous Vehicles, Small Satellite constellations, SOC, and Fintech. I love and plan to build practical things that manifest in the society.