Cybersecurity

ACES team

To enhance digital security, the team aims at defining robust protocols for secure object management, developing adversarial methods to challenge intrusion detection systems, and devising optimal defense strategies for critical systems using game theory.

đź”—Team activity between 2018 and 2023

The following text has been written by the ACES team as part of the 2018-2023 periodic HCÉRES evaluation of the LTCI lab and reflects the past activities of the team on the "Cybersecurity" topic.

A first cybersecurity research line, within the joint SEIDO laboratory, aims at defining secure object management protocols. This work has resulted in two patents ("Pairing Method", "Procédé et système d'authentification par un équipement vérificateur d'un dispositif à authentifier équipé d'un circuit PUF"). We also developed an adversarial method for generating network packets to invalidate Deep Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems in IoT ("Adversarial Attacks Against Network Intrusion Detection in IoT Systems").

Another line of research develops optimal defense strategies for critical systems through game theory. Detailed survey in "A survey on game-theoretic approaches for intrusion detection and response optimization". Furthermore, in the C3S chair, this has led to improved Moving Target Defense deployment strategies ("Finding Optimal Moving Target Defense Strategies: A Resilience Booster for Connected Cars"). New approaches toward modeling and solving security games were explored. In "Obstruction Logic: A Strategic Temporal Logic to Reason About Dynamic Game Models", Obstruction Logics were introduced, enabling the development of a model-checking procedure for security.

Lastly, focus has been given toward securing the global software supply chain, leveraging Software Heritage for free/open source components (FOSS) security. This has led to better identification of FOSS components in unknown code bases ("Using the Uniqueness of Global Identifiers to Determine the Provenance of Python Software Source Code", "Efficient Prior Publication Identification for Open Source Code") and detecting anomalies in open source repositories. The recently funded SWHSec project explores the potential of Software Heritage in open source security. ACES is also active in the Reproducible Builds project with a team member on the board ("Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains", IEEE Software best paper award for 2022). Further ongoing work covers modeling explicit supply chain attacks ("Assessing the Threat Level of Software Supply Chains with the Log Model") and exploring reproducible builds for enhanced security ("Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time").