Chafika BENZAID | Université des Sciences et Technologie Houari Boumediene (USTHB) (original) (raw)

Papers by Chafika BENZAID

2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)

The Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture decouples the control functionality from the forw... more The Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture decouples the control functionality from the forwarding devices and implements it in a separate entity known as the controller. This raises new concerns on securing the control messages exchanged between the controller and the forwarding devices. In this paper, we propose TopoTrust, a novel fully trustless authenticity and integrity verification mechanism that relies on a Blockchain protocol to detect network topology poisoning attacks, namely Host Tracking Service (HTS) and OpenFlow Discovery Protocol (OFDP). The key merit of TopoTrust is its ability to operate in a zero trust SDN environment where no controller or switch is trusted. The evaluation of our protocol shows that it can successfully detect any spoofing-based and packet tampering attacks; and up to 96% and 100% of Fast Relocation and Link Fabrication attacks respectively within a short detection time, while introducing small overhead to the network.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging technology in the 5G and beyond systems with the ... more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging technology in the 5G and beyond systems with the promise of assisting cellular communications and supporting IoT deployment in remote and density areas. Safe and secure navigation is essential for UAV remote and autonomous deployment. Indeed, the open-source simulator can use commercial software-defined radio tools to generate fake GPS signals and spoof the UAV GPS receiver to calculate wrong locations, deviating from the planned trajectory. Fortunately, the existing mobile positioning system can provide additional navigation for cellular-connected UAVs and verify the UAV GPS locations for spoofing detection, but it needs at least three base stations at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel deep ensemble learning-based, mobile network-assisted UAV monitoring and tracking system for cellular-connected UAV spoofing detection. The proposed method uses path losses between base stations and UAVs communication to indicate the UAV trajectory deviation caused by GPS spoofing. To increase the detection accuracy, three statistics methods are adopted to remove environmental impacts on path losses. In addition, deep ensemble learning methods are deployed on the edge cloud servers and use the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks to analyze path losses statistical features for making a final decision, which has no additional requirements and energy consumption on UAVs. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method in detecting GPS spoofing, achieving above 97% accuracy rate under two BSs, while it can still achieve at least 83% accuracy under only one BS.

2021 International Conference on Networking and Network Applications (NaNA), 2021

Cellular-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are a promising paradigm to provide reliable... more Cellular-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are a promising paradigm to provide reliable and fast Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS) communication services for UAV operations. However, such systems are facing a serious GPS spoofing threat for UAV's position. To enable safe and secure UAV navigation BVLoS, this paper proposes a cellular network assisted UAV position monitoring and anti-GPS spoofing system, where deep learning approach is used to live detect spoofed GPS positions. Specifically, the proposed system introduces a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model which is trained on the statistical properties of path loss measurements collected from nearby base stations to decide the authenticity of the GPS position. Experiment results indicate the accuracy rate of detecting GPS spoofing under our proposed approach is more than 93% with three base stations and it can also reach 80% with only one base station.

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT), 2017

In some cases, being able to appeal to a nearby assistance could be a determining factor possibly... more In some cases, being able to appeal to a nearby assistance could be a determining factor possibly saving lives. In fact, a person can at any time encounter a problem or a danger, such as getting lost, falling, having a cardiovascular accident, facing a danger of aggression or theft or having a road accident, which becomes more critical if the person is being far from the eyes. From this perspective, this work aims to study the design of an effective mobile solution focusing on community involvement, cost and reactivity factors-with the help of a set of today's technologies in particular Smartphone, Cloud and sensors-allowing notifying users as well as competent services neighboring a person in need of help.

2021 Joint European Conference on Networks and Communications & 6G Summit (EuCNC/6G Summit), 2021

The envisioned massive deployment of network slices in 5G and beyond mobile systems makes the shi... more The envisioned massive deployment of network slices in 5G and beyond mobile systems makes the shift towards zerotouch, scalable and secure slice lifecycle management a necessity. This is to harvest the benefits of network slicing in enabling profitable services. These benefits will not be attained without ensuring a high level security of the created network slices and the underlying infrastructure, above all in a zero-touch automated fashion. In this vein, this paper presents the architecture of an innovative network slicing security orchestration framework, being developed within the EU H2020 MonB5G project. The framework leverages the potential of Security as a Service (SECaaS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to foster fully-distributed, autonomic and fine-grained management of network slicing security from the node level to the end-to-end and inter-slice levels.

Computer Networks, 2017

One important issue in wireless sensor networks is the area coverage problem. It describes how we... more One important issue in wireless sensor networks is the area coverage problem. It describes how well a sensing field is supervised by sensors. In fact, an appropriate coverage strategy needs simultaneous activation of a large number of nodes as each location should be covered by at least k sensors, with k > 1 for many applications. Some sensors may be redundant because of overlaps in the nodes' regions. Therefore, scheduling techniques alternate the redundant sensors' activity to reduce uniformly their energy consumption. However, frequent alternation between states and repetitive eligibility executions during the scheduling process itself, lead to significant energy waste. In this paper, we propose the Stable and Predictive Energy-aware Coverage Scheduling (SPEC) protocol. It does not only reduce the scheduling energy waste but it extends the coverage lifetime as well. Indeed, SPEC removes useless transitions from the scheduling strategy and prevents the run of unnecessary eligibility executions. Simulation results confirm that SPEC outperforms existing well-known periodic scheduling protocols, in terms of energy preservation, network lifetime and coverage preservation.

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, 2016

In 802.11, all devices are uniquely identified by a Media Access Control (MAC) address. However, ... more In 802.11, all devices are uniquely identified by a Media Access Control (MAC) address. However, legitimate MAC addresses can be easily spoofed to launch various forms of attacks, such as Denial of Service attacks. Impersonating the MAC address of a legitimate user poses a big challenge for cyber crime investigators. Indeed, MAC spoofing makes the task of identifying the source of the attack very difficult. Sequence number analysis is a common technique used to detect MAC spoofing attack. Existing solutions relying on sequence number analysis, adopt a threshold-based approach where the gap between consecutive sequence numbers is compared to a threshold to decide the presence of a MAC spoofing attack. Nevertheless, threshold-based approach may lead to a high rate of false alerts due to lost or duplicated frames.

2014 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM), 2014

Topology control-based sleep-scheduling aims at exploiting node redundancy to save energy and ext... more Topology control-based sleep-scheduling aims at exploiting node redundancy to save energy and extend the network lifetime, by putting as many nodes as possible in sleep mode, while maintaining a connected network. In this paper, we propose a redundancy aware topology control protocol (RTCP) for a wireless sensor network which exploits the sensor redundancy in the same region. This is achieved by dividing the network into groups so that a connected backbone can be maintained by keeping a necessary set of working nodes and turning off the redundant ones. RTCP allows applications to parameterise the desired connectivity degree. It identifies node redundancy, in terms of communication; it groups redundant nodes together according to their redundancy degrees and threshold of connectivity level. Finally, it schedules nodes in groups for active or sleep mode. The simulation results illustrate that RTCP outperforms some other existing algorithms, in terms of energy conservation, network lifetime and connectivity guarantee.

5G's capabilities and flexibility hold the promise of further facilitating the society's ... more 5G's capabilities and flexibility hold the promise of further facilitating the society's digitalization by enabling new services (e.g. remote surgery, advanced industrial applications) and communication modes (e.g. gestures, facial expressions and haptics). Current wireless communication systems do not meet the performance requirements of these new services, such as bandwidth, latency and reliability. Furthermore, the current COVID-19 crisis has fundamentally changed the way the world communicates and operates, accelerating the shift towards a more digital world. Such shift and the new requirements make the need of reliable and high-quality digital services promised by 5G more crucial than ever.<br> To fulfil 5G promises, a shift towards full automation of network and service management and operation is a necessity. However, a major challenge facing full automation is the protection of the network and system assets – services, data and network infrastructure – against ...

2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2020

The expected high bandwidth of 5G and the envisioned massive number of connected devices will ope... more The expected high bandwidth of 5G and the envisioned massive number of connected devices will open the door to increased and sophisticated attacks, such as application-layer DDoS attacks. Application-layer DDoS attacks are complex to detect and mitigate due to their stealthy nature and their ability to mimic genuine behavior. In this work, we propose a robust application-layer DDoS self-protection framework that empowers a fully autonomous detection and mitigation of the application-layer DDoS attacks leveraging on Deep Learning (DL) and SDN enablers. The DL models have been proven vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which aim to fool the DL model into taking wrong decisions. To overcome this issue, we build a DL-based application-layer DDoS detection model that is robust to adversarial examples. The performance results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in protecting against application-layer DDoS attacks even in the presence of adversarial attacks.

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2018

The envisioned key role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in assisting the upcoming mobile netwo... more The envisioned key role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in assisting the upcoming mobile networks calls for addressing the challenge of their secure and safe integration in the airspace. The GPS spoofing is a prominent security threat of UAVs. In this paper, we propose a 5G-assisted UAV position monitoring and anti-GPS spoofing system that allows live detection of GPS spoofing by leveraging Uplink received signal strength (RSS) measurements to cross-check the position validity. We introduce the Adaptive Trustable Residence Area (ATRA); a novel strategy to determine the trust area within which the UAV's GPS position should be located in order to be considered as non-spoofed. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed solution can successfully detect spoofed GPS positions with a rate of above 95%.

Relay node placement can be an effective mean for boosting the performance of a Wireless Sensor N... more Relay node placement can be an effective mean for boosting the performance of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in terms of several metrics such as network connectivity, network lifetime and fault tolerance. In this paper, we consider the problem of deploying relay nodes (RNs) in a WSN to ensure network connectivity. We propose a novel heuristic to find a minimum number of RNs together with their locations needed in order to repair a disconnected network with a grid topology. We first determine the optimal solution for connecting a set of four disconnected nodes and then, by applying our heuristic, we ensure connectivity between these sets via steinerized edges. The runtime complexity of the proposed heuristic is quasilinear in the number of nodes, which is lower than competitive approaches. In addition to that, our heuristic can achieve network connectivity using 32% less of RNs. The performances of the proposed heuristic are validated through simulations.

The global penetration of networked communications has exposed different areas of society to the ... more The global penetration of networked communications has exposed different areas of society to the threats of cybercrimes. These levels of society include, but are not limited to, nations and communities. Today, individual organisations and governments are significantly more likely to be victimised through the use of information and communications technologies than experience conventional forms of victimisation (UNODC 2013).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one of the promising technology in the future. A recent study ... more Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one of the promising technology in the future. A recent study claims that by 2026, the commercial UAVs, for both corporate and customer applications, will have an annual impact of 31 billion to 46 billion on the country's GDP. Shortly, many UAVs will be flying everywhere. For this reason, there is a need to suggest efficient mechanisms for preventing the collisions among the UAVs. Traditionally, the collisions are prevented using dedicated sensors, however, those would generate uncertainty in their reading due to their external conditions sensitivity. From another side, the use of those sensors could create an extra overhead on the UAVs in terms of cost and energy consumption. To deal with these challenges, in this paper, we have suggested a solution that leverages the chance-constrained optimization technique for avoiding the collision in an energy-efficient manner. Building on the expressions for the non-central Chi-square CDF and expected va...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be used everywhere to provision different service... more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be used everywhere to provision different services and applications, impacting different aspects of our daily lives. Basically, UAVs are characterized by their high mobility. Some may remain motionless for a specific time to perform pre-programmed missions. Whilst UAVs would be used for specific applications, they could additionally offer numerous IoT (Internet of Things) value-added services (VAS) when they are equipped with suitable IoT devices. Many IoT VAS applications require high amount of resources and/or diverse IoT devices that cannot be offered by a single UAV. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper aims to explore, i) the diversity of IoT devices on-board UAVs, and ii) the mobility of UAVs for offering UAVs-based IoT VAS. Two solutions are proposed for carrying out different IoT VAS. Both solutions are modeled using linear integer programming. While the first solution aims to reduce the energy consumption, the seco...

IEEE Network

5G and beyond ecosystem will be characterized by a growing set of stakeholders and an increasing ... more 5G and beyond ecosystem will be characterized by a growing set of stakeholders and an increasing number of interconnected devices and services, not necessarily under the administration of the same entity. Establishing trust in such an open and diverse ecosystem is a cornerstone for a global adoption of the technology. In this vein, it is important to tackle security and privacy risks stemming from this rich ecosystem. In this paper, we shed light on the trust concept in 5G and beyond networks and its dimensions, while pointing out potential emerging trust enablers and research directions. Furthermore, we propose a blockchain-based data integrity framework to foster trust in data used by a machine learning pipeline.

IEEE Network

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is envisioned to play a pivotal role in empowering intelligent, adap... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) is envisioned to play a pivotal role in empowering intelligent, adaptive and autonomous security management in 5G and beyond networks, thanks to its potential to uncover hidden patterns from a large set of timevarying multi-dimensional data, and deliver faster and accurate decisions. Unfortunately, AI's capabilities and vulnerabilities make it a double-edged sword that may jeopardize the security of future networks. This paper sheds light on how AI may impact the security of 5G and its successive from its posture of defender, offender or victim, and recommends potential defenses to safeguard from malevolent AI while pointing out their limitations and adoption challenges.

2018 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Dec 1, 2018

Several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (U... more Several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) collision avoidance problem. Most of these solutions consider that the ground controller system (GCS) determines the path of a UAV before starting a particular mission at hand. Furthermore, these solutions expect the occurrence of collisions based only on the GPS localization of UAVs as well as via object-detecting sensors placed on board UAVs. The sensors' sensitivity to environmental disturbances and the UAVs' influence on their accuracy impact negatively the efficiency of these solutions. In this vein, this paper proposes a new energy-and delay-aware physical collision avoidance solution for UAVs. The solution is dubbed EDC-UAV. The primary goal of EDC-UAV is to build in-flight safe UAVs trajectories while minimizing the energy consumption and response time. We assume that each UAV is equipped with a global positioning system (GPS) sensor to identify its position. Moreover, we take into account the margin error of the GPS to provide the position of a given UAV. The location of each UAV is gathered by a cluster head, which is the UAV that has either the highest autonomy or the greatest computational capacity. The cluster head runs the EDC-UAV algorithm to control the rest of the UAVs, thus guaranteeing a collisionfree mission and minimizing the energy consumption to achieve different purposes. The proper operation of our solution is validated through simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of EDC-UAV in achieving its design goals.

2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

2021 International Conference on Networking and Network Applications (NaNA), 2021

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT), 2017

2021 Joint European Conference on Networks and Communications & 6G Summit (EuCNC/6G Summit), 2021

Computer Networks, 2017

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, 2016

2014 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM), 2014

2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2020

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2018

IEEE Network

2018 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Dec 1, 2018

The course introduces students to basic principles of operating systems, such as Processes, Inter... more The course introduces students to basic principles of operating systems, such as Processes, Interrupts, Physical I/O, Scheduling, Main and virtual memory management, File systems …etc. Throughout the proposed Labs, students learn the basic Linux commands and put into practice the theoretical concepts taught (e.g. Process management, Interrupt management, I/O…etc.) by using both C and Shell programming.