Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging in many application domains, e.g., military surveillance. To perform collaborative tasks, the involved UAVs exchange several types of information, e.g., sensor data and commands. The major question here is how to schedule the tasks under dynamic traffic flows to provide network services. Existing solutions use the Round-Robin Strategy (RRS), where the tasks are scheduled statistically by dividing the time into fixed-length rounds. However, the RRS wastes significant network and device resources due to task scheduling in each round. This paper proposes DROVE-a novel clustering approach that allows the UAVs for dynamic task scheduling. However, determining the task scheduling is crucial, as it significantly affects several network parameters, e.g., throughput. Therefore, we devise the problem of distributed task scheduling under dynamic traffic flow scenarios to optimize the throughput. We propose a clustering task scheduling algorithm to serve dynamic traffic flows. Particularly, we integrate the dynamic traffic flows into the Lyapunov drift analysis framework, and determine the throughput optimality of our proposed scheduling algorithm. We perform extensive simulations to validate the effectiveness of DROVE. The results show that DROVE outperforms the state-of-The-Art solutions in terms of energy consumption, clustering overhead, throughput, end-To-end delay, flow success rate and packet drop rate.

Modern vehicles comprise hundreds of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and sensors for enhancing numerous security and comfort-related functionalities. The ECUs perform real-time information exchange, such as automotive instructions over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. However, the CAN bus architecture supports very limited security features. Thus, in-vehicle communications over CAN are vulnerable to critical security threats. Also, as ECUs are resource-constrained in nature, the continuous message transmissions lead to drain out of energy during inter-ECU communication if the authentication scheme is not cost-effective. This paper proposes AutoSec, a lightweight scheme, exploiting low-cost bit-wise XOR and concatenation operations to facilitate secure and efficient in-vehicle communications for connected vehicles. We show through qualitative analysis that AutoSec preserves the security properties of message integrity, user authentication, and message confidentiality. We implemented AutoSec on Raspberry Pi 3B+ and performed exhaustive experiments to validate the security robustness and lightweightness of AutoSec. The results show that AutoSec reduces the computation time by and energy consumption by .

Microsoft Office may be by far the most widely used suite for processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Due to its popularity, it is continuously utilised to carry out malicious campaigns. Threat actors, exploiting the platform's dynamic features, use it to launch their attacks and penetrate millions of hosts in their campaigns. This work explores the modern landscape of malicious Microsoft Office documents, exposing the means that malware authors use. We leverage a taxonomy of the tools used to weaponise Microsoft Office documents and explore the modus operandi of malicious actors. Moreover, we generated and publicly shared a specially crafted dataset, which relies on incorporating benign and malicious documents containing many dynamic features such as VBA macros and DDE. The latter is crucial for a fair and realistic analysis, an open issue in the current state of the art. This allows us to draw safe conclusions on the malicious features and behaviour. More precisely, we extract the necessary features with an automated analysis pipeline to efficiently and accurately classify a document as benign or malicious using machine learning with an F₁ score above 0.98, outperforming the current state of the art detection algorithms.

Current trends forecast that Over-the-Air (OTA) software updates will be highly significant for future connected vehicles. The OTA software updates will enable upgrading vehicle functionalities or bug fixations in embedded software installed on electronic control units remotely. However, in terms of security, OTA updates are highly critical as they need complete access to the in-vehicle communication network. Furthermore, scheduling OTA software updates at a massive scale over a cellular network is highly challenging. This paper proposes STRIDE, a novel technique for secure and scalable software updates using cloud through cellular network. STRIDE ensures end-to-end security using ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. To enable fast and reliable distribution of update package, we then propose a software update scheduling algorithm to serve dynamic traffic flow. Particularly, we integrate dynamic traffic flow with the Lyapunov-drift analysis framework, and establish throughput optimality of our proposed scheduling algorithm. We evaluate the performance of STRIDE through extensive experiments. Experimental results show that STRIDE reduces more than 52% computation and storage overheads, 60% propagation delay and increases throughput by 35% than the state-of-the-art solutions, in addition to enjoying the stronger security properties.

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.

Trucks form a platoon, where they align in a lane on freeways, in order to save fuel. The trucks positioned behind the first truck in the platoon can save fuel because their air drag reduces. In a truck platoon, various technologies such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication protocol are exploited to control the trucks in the platoon effectively. The camera sensors measure distance between contiguous trucks in the platoon and these sensor measurements are provided to the ACC system. By using these sensor measurement, the ACC system controls the truck speed via in-vehicle network protocols such as the controller area network, which does not encrypt data or authenticate messages. Also, the V2V communication protocol is vulnerable to cyber attacks that disable the wireless channels among the trucks in the platoon. As a result, the ACC system and V2V communication protocol may introduce attack surfaces in a truck platoon. In this survey, we analyze the attack surfaces of a truck platoon under different perspectives. Then, we summarize the defense systems corresponding to the discussed attacks in terms of detection mechanisms, response countermeasures, and proactive defenses. Finally, we provide the research issues that need to be addressed in future.

Current trends forecast that Over-the-Air (OTA) software updates will be highly significant for future connected vehicles. The OTA update will enable upgrading the vehicle functionalities or bug fixations in the embedded software installed on its Electronic Control Units (ECUs) remotely. The introduction of OTA updates in the automotive industry has brought many advantages for both the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and the driver/owner. However, in terms of security, OTA updates are highly critical as they need complete access to the in-vehicle communication network. This survey highlights and discusses OTA software updates in the automotive sector, mainly from the security perspective. The major objective of this survey is to deliver a comprehensive outline of various research directions and approaches in OTA update technologies in vehicles. At first, we discuss the connected vehicle technology and then integrate the relationship of OTA update features with the connected vehicle. We further discuss both promising and secure OTA update approaches, that have gained a lot of attention recently. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive comparative study of the existing OTA update approaches on the basis of strengths, weaknesses and evaluation setup. The survey also focuses on the existing vehicle features that support OTA updates, and customer satisfaction and usability. Finally, we identify possible future research directions of OTA updates for automobiles, particularly in the area of security.

Current trends forecast that Over-The-Air (OTA) software updates will be highly significant for future autonomous vehicles. The OTA update will enable fast distribution of software updates and fixing bugs in the embedded software installed on its electronic control units. However, in terms of security, OTA updates are highly critical due to complexity, numerous attack surfaces, and unsafe and old techniques. In addition, OTA updates must be scalable to large number of vehicles without incurring additional network bandwidth. In this work, we propose STRIDE, a scheme for OTA software updates over cloud that is secure against malicious attacks while being scalable to concurrent software updates in a large number of vehicles. STRIDE enables fast and secure distribution of update packages from software providers to vehicles. STRIDE ensures end-to-end security using ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. We evaluate the performance of our proposal through extensive experiments. Experimental results show that STRIDE significantly reduces the overheads, without compromising the network load and software update retrieval time than the best performed scheme in the state-of-the-art.

In its latest report, the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) registered some 37,300 fatalities for the yearly victims of motor vehicle accidents in 2017. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is playing an important role in improving road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment systems. With the growth of the connected vehicle technology, V2X is emerging as a key component in the rapid rise of this technology. Therefore, researchers think that development of robust wireless communication through efficient V2X technologies can significantly improve the vehicular environment. The highly dynamic environment and the mobility factor appear to be challenging for implementation of V2X technology. Similar to other wireless technology, the security issues are also key concerns in V2X. In this survey, we highlight and discuss the main security issues of V2X. Particularly, the main objective of this survey is providing for a comprehensive and structured outline of different research directions and approaches, mostly emphasizing on the security issues and challenges in V2X communication technologies. At first, we discuss the key features of V2X and focus on the standardization techniques used for communication technologies. Then, we introduce the security challenges and requirements of V2X. We also classify present state-of-the-art works dealing with implementing different secured techniques in V2X. We further discuss the project implementation that concentrated on the various applications in V2X. Finally, we identify possible future research directions of V2X, particularly in the area of security.