Mengmeng Ge

Xuanyu Duan, Mengmeng Ge, Triet H. M. Le et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) based applications face an increasing number of potential security risks, which need to be systematically assessed and addressed. Expert-based manual assessment of IoT security is a predominant approach, which is usually inefficient. To address this problem, we propose an automated security assessment framework for IoT networks. Our framework first leverages machine learning and natural language processing to analyze vulnerability descriptions for predicting vulnerability metrics. The predicted metrics are then input into a two-layered graphical security model, which consists of an attack graph at the upper layer to present the network connectivity and an attack tree for each node in the network at the bottom layer to depict the vulnerability information. This security model automatically assesses the security of the IoT network by capturing potential attack paths. We evaluate the viability of our approach using a proof-of-concept smart building system model which contains a variety of real-world IoT devices and potential vulnerabilities. Our evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of automatically predicting the vulnerability metrics of new vulnerabilities with more than 90% accuracy, on average, and identifying the most vulnerable attack paths within an IoT network. The produced assessment results can serve as a guideline for cybersecurity professionals to take further actions and mitigate risks in a timely manner.

Mengmeng Ge, Jin-Hee Cho, Charles A. Kamhoua et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be exploited by the attackers as entry points to break into the IoT networks without early detection. Little work has taken hybrid approaches that combine different defense mechanisms in an optimal way to increase the security of the IoT against sophisticated attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to generate the strategic deployment of adaptive deception technology and the patch management solution for the IoT under a budget constraint. We use a graphical security model along with three evaluation metrics to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed defense mechanisms. We apply the multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) to compute the {\em Pareto optimal} deployments of defense mechanisms to maximize the security and minimize the deployment cost. We present a case study to show the feasibility of the proposed approach and to provide the defenders with various ways to choose optimal deployments of defense mechanisms for the IoT. We compare the GA with the exhaustive search algorithm (ESA) in terms of the runtime complexity and performance accuracy in optimality. Our results show that the GA is much more efficient in computing a good spread of the deployments than the ESA, in proportion to the increase of the IoT devices.

Mengmeng Ge, Huy Kang Kim, Dong Seong Kim

In most of modern enterprise systems, redundancy configuration is often considered to provide availability during the part of such systems is being patched. However, the redundancy may increase the attack surface of the system. In this paper, we model and assess the security and capacity oriented availability of multiple server redundancy designs when applying security patches to the servers. We construct (1) a graphical security model to evaluate the security under potential attacks before and after applying patches, (2) a stochastic reward net model to assess the capacity oriented availability of the system with a patch schedule. We present our approach based on case study and model-based evaluation for multiple design choices. The results show redundancy designs increase capacity oriented availability but decrease security when applying security patches. We define functions that compare values of security metrics and capacity oriented availability with the chosen upper/lower bounds to find design choices that satisfy both security and availability requirements.