International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the system-level architecture and design concept of a communications security (COMSEC) equipment intended for space-based low data rate (< 1 Mbps) command and telemetry applications. The COMSEC Unit is a stand-alone piece of equipment which provides decryption of uplink command and control information and encryption of downlink telemetry data. The system-level architecture is described followed by an overview of the digital design concepts and a discussion of applications. Finally, although specifically targeted for narrowband command and telemetry applications, this design approach is flexible enough to accommodate other algorithms of choice as well as operate in higher data rate applications.

"Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in [Management] from the Naval Postgraduate School, March 2010." / Advisor(s): Ferrer, Geraldo. "March 2010." "Joint applied project"--Cover. Description based on title screen as viewed on April 23, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: Unique Item Identification, UID, Communications Security, COMSEC. Includes bibliographical references (p. 41). Also available in print.

Thesis (M. Sc.)(Electronic Engineering)--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Summaries in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references (125-128).

This dissertation addresses physical layer security concerns, resiliency of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems; the `de-facto' air-interface of most wireless broadband standards including LTE and WiMAX. The major contributions of this dissertation are: 1) developing jamming taxonomy, 2) proposing OFDM and MIMO equalization jamming attacks and countermeasures, 3) developing antijam (AJ) MIMO systems, and 4) designing null space projected overlapped-MIMO radar waveform for spectrum sharing between radar and communications system. First, we consider OFDM systems under various jamming attacks. Previous research is focused on jamming OFDM data transmissions. We focus on energy efficient attacks that can disrupt communication severely by exploiting the knowledge of target waveform. Specifically, these attacks seek to manipulate information used by the equalization algorithm to cause errors to a significant number of symbols, i.e., pilot tones jamming and nulling. Potential countermeasures are presented in an attempt to make OFDM waveform robust and resilient. The threats were mitigated by randomizing the location and value of pilot tones, causing the optimal attack to devolve into barrage jamming. We also address the security aspects of MIMO systems in this dissertation. All MIMO systems need a method to estimate and equalize channel, whether through channel reciprocity or sounding. Most OFDM-based MIMO systems use sounding via pilot tones. Like OFDM attacks, this research introduces MIMO channel sounding attack, which attempts to manipulate pilot tones to skew the channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. We describe methods of designing AJ MIMO system. The key insight is that many of the theoretical concepts learned from transmit beamforming and interference alignment (IA) in MIMO systems can be applied to the field of AJ and robust communications in the presence of jammers. We consider a realistic jamming scenario and provide a `receiver-only' and a transmitter `precoding' technique that allow a pair of two-antenna transceivers to communicate while being jammed by a malicious non-cooperative single-antenna adversary. Finally, we consider designing a collocated MIMO radar waveform, which employs a new MIMO architecture where antenna arrays are allowed to overlap. This overlapped-MIMO radar poses many advantages including superior beampattern and improvement in SNR gain. We combine this radar architecture with a projection-based algorithm that allows the radar waveform to project onto the null space of the interference channel of MIMO communications system, thus enabling the coexistence of radar and communications system. / Ph. D.

Recent innovations in machine learning have paved the way for new capabilities in the field of radio frequency (RF) communications. Machine learning techniques such as reinforcement learning and deep neural networks (DNN) can be leveraged to improve upon traditional wireless communications methods so that they no longer require expertly-defined features. Simultaneously, cybersecurity and electronic warfare are growing areas of focus and concern in an increasingly technology-driven world. Privacy and confidentiality of communication links are both more important and more difficult than ever in the current high threat environment. RF machine learning (RFML) systems contribute to this threat as they have been shown to be successful in gleaning information from intercepted signals, through the use of learning-enabled eavesdroppers. This thesis focuses on a method of defense against such communications threats termed an adversarial evasion attack in which intelligently crafted perturbations of the RF signal are used to fool a DNN-enabled classifier, therefore securing the communications channel. One often overlooked aspect of evasion attacks is the concept of maintaining intended use. In other words, while an adversarial signal, or more generally an adversarial example, should fool the DNN it is attacking, this should not come at the detriment to it's primary application. In RF communications, this manifests in the idea that the communications link must be successfully maintained with friendly receivers, even when executing an evasion attack against malicious receivers. This is a difficult scenario, made even more so by the nature of channel effects present in over-the-air (OTA) communications, as is assumed in this work. Previous work in this field has introduced a form of evasion attack for RFML systems called a communications aware attack that explicitly addresses the reliable communications aspect of the attack by training a separate DNN to craft adversarial signals; however, this work did not utilize the full RF processing chain and left residual indicators of the attack that could be leveraged for defensive capabilities. First, this thesis focuses on implementing forward error correction (FEC), an aspect present in most communications systems, in the training process of the attack. It is shown that introducing this into the training stage allows the communications aware attack to implicitly use the structure of the coding to create smarter and more efficient adversarial signals. Secondly, this thesis then addresses the fact that in previous work, the resulting adversarial signal exhibiting significant out-of-band frequency content, a limitation that can be used to render the attack ineffective if preprocessing at the attacked DNN is assumed. This thesis presents two novel approaches to solve this problem and eliminate the majority of side content in the attack. By doing so, the communications aware attack is more readily applicable to real-world scenarios. / Master of Science / Deep learning has started infiltrating many aspects of society from the military, to academia, to commercial vendors. Additionally, with the recent deployment of 5G technology, connectivity is more readily accessible than ever and an increasingly large number of systems will communicate with one another across the globe. However, cybersecurity and electronic warfare call into question the very notion of privacy and confidentiality of data and communication streams. Deep learning has further improved these intercepting capabilities. However, these deep learning systems have also been shown to be vulnerable to attack. This thesis exists at the nexus of these two problems, both machine learning and communication security. This work expands upon adversarial evasion attacks meant to help elude signal classification at a deep learning-enabled eavesdropper while still providing reliable communications to a friendly receiver. By doing so, this work both provides a new methodology that can be used to conceal communication information from unwanted parties while also highlighting the glaring vulnerabilities present in machine learning systems.

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has gone from just a step in the evolution of the GSM cellular architecture control core, to being the de-facto framework for Next Generation Network (NGN) implementations and deployments by operators world-wide, not only cellular mobile communications operators, but also fixed line, cable television, and alternative operators. With this transition from standards documents to the real world, engineers in these new multimedia communications companies need to face the task of making these new networks secure against threats and real attacks that were not a part of the previous generation of networks. We present the IMS and other competing frameworks, we analyze the security issues, we present the topic of Security Patterns, we introduce several new patterns, including the basis for a Generic Network pattern, and we apply these concepts to designing a security architecture for a fictitious 3G operator using IMS for the control core. / by Jose M. Ortiz-Villajos. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

In the world of high mobility, there is a growing need for people to communicate with each other and have timely access to information regardless of the location of the individuals or the information. This need is supported by the advances in the technologies of networking, wireless communications, and portable computing devices with reduction in the physical size of computers, lead to the rapid development in mobile communication infrastructure. Hence, mobile and wireless networks present many challenges to application, hardware, software and network designers and implementers. One of the biggest challenge is to provide a secure mobile environment. Security plays a more important role in mobile communication systems than in systems that use wired communication. This is mainly because of the ubiquitous nature of the wireless medium that makes it more susceptible to security attacks than wired communications. The aim of the thesis is to develop an integrated dynamic security and authentication system for mobile transactions. The proposed system operates at the transactions-level of a mobile application, by intelligently selecting the suitable security technique and authentication protocol for ongoing transaction. To do this, we have designed two schemes: the transactions-based security selection scheme and the transactions-based authentication selection scheme. These schemes use transactions sensitivity levels and the usage context, which includes users behaviors, network used, device used, and so on, to decide the required security and authentication levels. Based on this analysis, requisite security technique, and authentication protocols are applied for the trans-action in process. The Behaviors-Observations-Beliefs (BOB) model is developed using cognitive agents to supplement the working of the security and authentication selection schemes. A transaction classification model is proposed to classify the transactions into various sensitivity levels. The BOB model The BOB model is a cognitive theory based model, to generate beliefs over a user, by observing various behaviors exhibited by a user during transactions. The BOB model uses two types of Cognitive Agents (CAs), the mobile CAs (MCAs) and the static CAs (SCAs). The MCAs are deployed over the client devices to formulate beliefs by observing various behaviors of a user during the transaction execution. The SCA performs belief analysis, and identifies the belief deviations w.r.t. established beliefs. We have developed four constructs to implement the BOB model, namely: behaviors identifier, observations generator, beliefs formulator, and beliefs analyser. The BOB model is developed by giving emphasis on using the minimum computation and minimum code size, by keeping the resource restrictiveness of the mobile devices and infrastructure. The knowledge organisation using cognitive factors, helps in selecting the rational approach for deciding the legitimacy of a user or a session. It also reduces the solution search space by consolidating the user behaviors into an high-level data such as beliefs, as a result the decision making time reduces considerably. The transactions classification model This model is proposed to classify the given set of transactions of an application service into four sensitivity levels. The grouping of transactions is based on the operations they perform, and the amount of risk/loss involved if they are misused. The four levels are namely, transactions who’s execution may cause no-damage (level-0), minor-damage (level-1), significant-damage (level-2) and substantial-damage (level-3). A policy-based transaction classifier is developed and incorporated in the SCA to decide the transaction sensitivity level of a given transaction. Transactions-based security selection scheme (TBSS-Scheme) The traditional security schemes at application-level are either session or transaction or event based. They secure the application-data with prefixed security techniques on mobile transactions or events. Generally mobile transactions possesses different security risk profiles, so, empirically we may find that there is a need for various levels of data security schemes for the mobile communications environment, which face the resource insufficiency in terms of bandwidth, energy, and computation capabilities. We have proposed an intelligent security techniques selection scheme at the application-level, which dynamically decides the security technique to be used for a given transaction in real-time. The TBSS-Scheme uses the BOB model and transactions classification model, while deciding the required security technique. The selection is purely based on the transaction sensitivity level, and user behaviors. The Security techniques repository is used in the proposed scheme, organised under three levels based on the complexity of security techniques. The complexities are decided based on time and space complexities, and the strength of the security technique against some of the latest security attacks. The credibility factors are computed using the credibility module, over transaction network, and transaction device are also used while choosing the security technique from a particular level of security repository. Analytical models are presented on beliefs analysis, security threat analysis, and average security cost incurred during the transactions session. The results of this scheme are compared with regular schemes, and advantageous and limitations of the proposed scheme are discussed. A case study on application of the proposed security selection scheme is conducted over mobile banking application, and results are presented. Transactions-based authentication selection scheme (TBAS-Scheme) The authentication protocols/schemes are used at the application-level to authenticate the genuine users/parties and devices used in the application. Most of these protocols challenges the user/device to get the authentication information, rather than deploying the methods to identify the validity of a user/device. Therefore, there is a need for an authentication scheme, which intelligently authenticates a user by continuously monitoring the genuinity of the activities/events/ behaviors/transactions through out the session. Transactions-based authentication selection scheme provides a new dimension in authenticating users of services. It enables strong authentication at the transaction level, based on sensitivity level of the given transaction, and user behaviors. The proposed approach intensifies the procedure of authentication by selecting authentication schemes by using the BOB-model and transactions classification models. It provides effective authentication solution, by relieving the conventional authentication systems, from being dependent only on the strength of authentication identifiers. We have made a performance comparison between transactions-based authentication selection scheme with session-based authentication scheme in terms of identification of various active attacks, and average authentication delay and average authentication costs are analysed. We have also shown the working of the proposed scheme in inter-domain and intra-domain hand-off scenarios, and discussed the merits of the scheme comparing it with mobile IP authentication scheme. A case study on application of the proposed authentication selection scheme for authenticating personalized multimedia services is presented. Implementation of the TBSS and the TBAS schemes for mobile commerce application We have implemented the integrated working of both the TBSS and TBAS schemes for a mo-bile commerce application. The details on identifying vendor selection, day of purchase, time of purchase, transaction value, frequency of purchase behaviors are given. A sample list of mobile commerce transactions is presented along with their classification into various sensitivity levels. The working of the system is discussed using three cases of purchases, and the results on trans-actions distribution, deviation factor generation, security technique selection, and authentication challenge generation are presented. In summary, we have developed an integrated dynamic security and authentication system using, the above mentioned selection schemes for mobile transactions, and by incorporating the BOB model, transactions classification model, and credibility modules. We have successfully implemented the proposed schemes using cognitive agents based middleware. The results of experiments suggest that incorporating user behaviors, and transaction sensitivity levels will bring dynamism and adaptiveness to security and authentication system. Through which the mobile communication security could be made more robust to attacks, and resource savvy in terms of reduced bandwidth and computation requirements by using an appropriate security and authentication technique/protocol.

We study the problem of secure key establishment. We critically examine the security models of Bellare and Rogaway (1993) and Canetti and Krawczyk (2001) in the computational complexity approach, as these models are central in the understanding of the provable security paradigm. We show that the partnership definition used in the three-party key distribution (3PKD) protocol of Bellare and Rogaway (1995) is flawed, which invalidates the proof for the 3PKD protocol. We present an improved protocol with a new proof of security. We identify several variants of the key sharing requirement (i.e., two entities who have completed matching sessions, partners, are required to accept the same session key). We then present a brief discussion about the key sharing requirement. We identify several variants of the Bellare and Rogaway (1993) model. We present a comparative study of the relative strengths of security notions between the several variants of the Bellare-Rogaway model and the Canetti-Krawczyk model. In our comparative study, we reveal a drawback in the Bellare, Pointcheval, and Rogaway (2000) model with the protocol of Abdalla and Pointcheval (2005) as a case study. We prove a revised protocol of Boyd (1996) secure in the Bellare-Rogaway model. We then extend the model in order to allow more realistic adversary capabilities by incorporating the notion of resetting the long-term compromised key of some entity. This allows us to detect a known weakness of the protocol that cannot be captured in the original model. We also present an alternative protocol that is efficient in both messages and rounds. We prove the protocol secure in the extended model. We point out previously unknown flaws in several published protocols and a message authenticator of Bellare, Canetti, and Krawczyk (1998) by refuting claimed proofs of security. We also point out corresponding flaws in their existing proofs. We propose fixes to these protocols and their proofs. In some cases, we present new protocols with full proofs of security. We examine the role of session key construction in key establishment protocols, and demonstrate that a small change to the way that session keys are constructed can have significant benefits. Protocols that were proven secure in a restricted Bellare-Rogaway model can then be proven secure in the full model. We present a brief discussion on ways to construct session keys in key establishment protocols and also prove the protocol of Chen and Kudla (2003) secure in a less restrictive Bellare-Rogaway model. To complement the computational complexity approach, we provide a formal specification and machine analysis of the Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway model using an automated model checker, Simple Homomorphism Verification Tool (SHVT). We demonstrate that structural flaws in protocols can be revealed using our framework. We reveal previously unknown flaws in the unpublished preproceedings version of the protocol due to Jakobsson and Pointcheval (2001) and several published protocols with only heuristic security arguments. We conclude this thesis with a listing of some open problems that were encountered in the study.