Over the past three decades, standardizing organizations (e.g., the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Internet Engineering Task Force) have investigated the efficiency of cryptographic algorithms and provided (technical) guidelines for practitioners. For example, the (Datagram) Transport Layer Security “(D)TLS” 1.2/1.3 was designed to help industries implement and integrate such methods through underpinning infrastructures of Internet of Everything (IoE) environments with efficiency and efficacy in mind. The main goal underpinning such protocols is to protect the Internet connections between IoE machines from malicious activities such as unauthorized eavesdropping, monitoring, and tampering with messages. In theory, these protocols are supposed to be secure. Still, most existing implementations partially follow the standard features of (D)TLS 1.2/3, leaving them vulnerable to risks such as side-channel and network attacks. In this paper, we critically review the standard protocols deployed for the security management of data and connected machines, and also examine the recently discovered vulnerabilities that lead to successful zero-day attacks in IoE environments. Then, we discuss various potential countermeasures in the form of organizational policy enforcement strategies and mitigation approaches that can be used by cybersecurity practitioners, decision- and policy-makers. Finally, we identify both proactive and reactive solutions for further consideration and study, as well as propose alternative mechanisms and e-governance policies for standardizing organizations and engineers in future solution designs.

While encryption can prevent unauthorized access to a secret message, it does not provide undetectability of covert communications over the public network. Implementing a highly latent data exchange, especially with low eavesdropping/discovery probability, is challenging for practical scenarios, such as social and political movements in authoritarian regimes, military operations, and privacy preservation. Moreover, the current literature suffers from a low embedding capacity and monolingual applicability, limiting the amount of hiding secret data within short text messages using state-of-the-art algorithms, e.g., linguistic-based, structural-based, or coverless-based solutions. In this paper, we present a systematic covert communication technique called CovertSYS that enables a multilingual secure end-to-end conversation via messaging or social network platforms. The CovertSYS functions by encrypting a confidential message using a multi-factor authentication scheme and converting the encoded binary data into hidden Unicode symbols to be transmitted under cover of short text messages. We then conduct extensive experiments to confirm the security and validity of the proposed technique against state-of-the-art approaches. Our experimental results show that the CovertSYS provides a superior mean performance of 91.53% by improving the criteria scores: embedding capacity rate of 100%, imperceptibility rate of 76.4%, and distortion robustness rate of 98.2%. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of the proposed technique compared to the existing text steganography methods.

It is increasingly challenging to deal with the volume,variety, velocity, and veracity of misinformation (e.g., dissemination of fake news contents, spurious posts, and fabricated images/videos) from different online platforms. In this article, we present an overview of existing machine learning and information hiding-based misinformation detection techniques and discuss the current threats and limitations of these approaches. Based on the discussion, we identify a number of potential countermeasures.

User authentication remains a challenging issue, despite the existence of a large number of proposed solutions, such as traditional text-based, graphical-based, biometrics-based, Web-based, and hardware-based schemes. For example, some of these schemes are not suitable for deployment in an Internet of Things (IoT) setting, partly due to the hardware and/or software constraints of IoT devices. The increasing popularity and pervasiveness of IoT equipment in a broad range of settings reinforces the importance of ensuring the security and privacy of IoT devices. Therefore, in this article, we conduct a comprehensive literature review and an empirical study to gain an in-depth understanding of the different authentication schemes as well as their vulnerabilities and deficits against various types of cyberattacks when applied in IoT-based systems. Based on the identified limitations, we recommend several mitigation strategies and discuss the practical implications of our findings.

Secure cloud storage, an emerging cloud service, guarantees the confidentiality of outsourced data while providing flexible data access control for cloud users whose data are out of their physical control. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is one of the promising secure mechanisms to support fine-grained access control on encrypted data in cloud settings. However, due to its inherent "all-or-nothing" decryption control characteristic, there is a risk for the misuse of access credentials. In this paper, we consider the two main types of access credential misuse, namely: semi-trusted authority's illegal access credential (re-)distribution, and cloud user's illegal access credential leakage. To mitigate these two types of access credential misuse, we propose the first accountable authority revokable CP-ABE based cloud storage system with white-box traceability and auditing, referred to as CryptCloud+. We also prove the security of our system and present the experimental results to demonstrate the utility of our system.

With the increasing popularity of online social networks (OSNs) and the ability to access and exchange sensitive user information, user privacy concerns become an important issue which have attracted the attention of researchers and policymakers. For example, deleted pictures or pictures in deleted posts may not be deleted from the OSN server immediately, and hence accessible to another unauthorized user. In this paper, we highlight the deletion delay issue in seven popular OSNs, namely: Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, Tumblr, Flickr, Google+ and Weibo, which can be exploited by another unauthorized user to gain access to these pictures. To ensure OSN users are able to achieve a higher level of privacy, we propose a conceptual privacy-preserving tool for photo sharing, without compromising on transparency and real-time sharing features. We demonstrate the utility of the tool by prototyping a browser extension, which does not require modification of existing OSN systems.

Attribute-based encryption has the potential to be deployed in a cloud computing environment to provide scalable and fine-grained data sharing. However, user revocation within ABE deployment remains a challenging issue to overcome, particularly when there is a large number of users. In this work, we introduce an extended proxy-assisted approach, which weakens the trust required of the cloud server. Based on an all-or-nothing principle, our approach is designed to discourage a cloud server from colluding with a third party to hinder the user revocation functionality. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by presenting a construction of the proposed approach, designed to provide efficient cloud data sharing and user revocation. A prototype was then implemented to demonstrate the practicality of our proposed construction.