cybersecurity – ISIF ASIA

Announcing the ISIF Asia Awards 2022!

You are invited to join us in celebrating this year’s ISIF Asia Awardees!

The 2022 awards will be presented at the APNIC54 conference during the APNIC Foundation conference session, and you can join the session in person or online, by following the information about the session on the conference program.

The ISIF Asia Awards were first introduced in 2011 to celebrate the outstanding organizations and individuals supporting community needs through innovative uses of Internet technologies. Awardees receive USD 5,000 and support to attend the APNIC54 conference in Singapore.

This year’s awards will recognize two exceptional contributions:

The Network coded tunnels for satellite links project, led by the University of Auckland (New Zealand) that lets remote island communities in the Pacific make more efficient use of the satellite Internet connections they rely on. Project leader Dr. Ulrich Speidel will accept the award.

The Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform, designed by Swiss German University (Indonesia), collects, categorizes, and distributes cybersecurity threat information from malicious traffic discovered in partner “honeypots” around the world. Project leader Dr. Charles Lim, will accept the award.

We look forward to seeing you at the Foundation session at APNIC54!

Report available! Collaborative Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform

With the continuous rise of cyber security threats, monitoring security potential threats and attacks become essential to plan for cyber defense. Honeypot, a decoy system designed to lure attackers, has been used to track and learn attacker’s behavior. Collecting attacker’s interactions with honeypot at different locations inside different organization’s premises provide useful and more complete picture of the landscape of current cyber security threats. The log of the attacks to the honeypots become an essential cyber security threat information that could be shared to many of the security incident analysts at different organizations to provide relevant and contextual threat intelligence. The goal of this project is to develop and implement a collaborative honeynet threat sharing platform that could collect, store, add contextual information pertaining to the threat and share these threat information to the relevant organization. This project continues on the previous year project with additional type of honeypots are being added to the collection of honeypot sensors. In addition, new type of threat categories, threat purpose and threat phases are added to define more fine-grained secure shell (ssh) attacks seen in our honeypots. With the new public dashboard is now ready for public view, our hope is more organizations in Indonesia as well as organizations in ASEAN countries would be interested to participate in the project in a collaborative effort to share and exchange threat information, which potentially could be used as a cyber defense platform for each of the participating organizations.

The project achieved the following objectives:

Develop a collaborative repository platform for storing honeynet-based threat information. The project allows anyone or organization to participate in a community-based threat information sharing based on the honeynet system. There are 4 honeypots currently implemented, i.e., cowrie, Dionaea, Elastichoney, and conpot.
Redesign and develop a more robust repository and visualization platform that allows security analysts to add and enrich existing security threat information with the results of the analysis of the security events or objects related to the events. The robust repository platform utilized the cluster database of MongoDB while the visualization platform also uses cluster setup to distribute search tasks over cluster servers, improving overall user experience of using the platform.
An enhanced platform that allows organizations to share and exchange security threat information with other organizations. The platform enables the threat information to be exchanged with the cyber security community through TAXII services in a standardized format or through open-source threat intelligence Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP).

The project was lead by the Charles Lim, from Swiss German University (SGU) and builds on years of collaboration to support the Honeynet project Indonesia Chapter (IHP), in partnership with the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (KOMINFO) and Badan Siber & Sandi Negara (BSSN). It is also an expansion of a previous ISIF Asia grant allocated in 2019.

The final report is available here.

Report Available! Experiment and improve reinforcement learning algorithms to enhance anomalous network behaviour detection

Cybersecurity is a significant research area because all of the operations based on government, military, commercial, financial and civilians gather, process, transfer and store tremendous volume of data on computers and others. Cyber-attacks have imposed increasing threats and damages on our modern society at all levels. Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is one of the major techniques in preventing cyber-attacks occurred in network traffic. Over the past decade, a lot of research work has been conducted to explore the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in developing NIDS solutions. The previous studies suggested that AI algorithms have promising potentials in developing effective solutions to detect the increasing attacks.

TeleMARS R&D team commits to advance AI-based methods, explore realistic approaches of deploying the research outcomes in real network environment, and support on-going research in wider community to achieve long term sustainable development. The key objectives of this project were to:

contribute to the development of NIDS;
contribute to research community in the subject of anomaly detection;
establish a practical collaboration framework to enable scientists and IT professionals from diverse background to work together to continuously contribute to NIDS research;
test and prove TeleMARS operation and technical frameworks, and the team capabilities; and
inspire and enable the participation of broader research community in cybersecurity domain supporting gender equality and inclusion

This project started in September 2020 and finalized in June 2021. The main activities included:

Literature review and project design.
Data analysis and preparation.
Anomaly detection model development using Machine Learning methods including Reinforcement Learning method.
Model experimentation.
Established evaluation pipelines to simulate real application environment.
Model capability evaluation applying different datasets.
Implementation of a collaboration framework supporting the research activities conducted by researchers and professionals with various backgrounds.

The final technical report is available for review here.

Report available! NextGen Girls – Internet Security Ambassadors Project

The NextGen Girls initiative included creating an IoT and Security Curriculum including Internet governance, Privacy, IPV6, IoT, Networking, Information Security and open web technologies and training 40 female University students to become Internet Security Educators. They in turn, trained 160 of their peers, and make awareness to 800 high school girls in IoT safety. The training was delivered through 8 workshops at 4 universities, 24 live online training sessions, 2 meetups and an IoT hackathon among girls.

The main outcome of the NextGen Girls project is the development of a sustainable network of women specializing in IoT and security, advocating IoT safety and enable support for victims while increasing women participation in IoT and Security field. In the long term, the NextGen Girls community will support women to show leadership in the emerging IoT industry, increase safety and advancement of women.

Shilpa Sayura partners, AlgoHack community, Google education, Computer Society and ISOC Sri Lanka worked together to implement NextGen Girls initiative.

NextGen Girls aims to scale up the project “Respect Girls on Internet” which was awarded the ISOC 25 Under 25 Award and received an ISOC Beyond The Net Community Grant. The project developed a network of university and high school girls studying ICT. The goal of the project is to support young women professional development to pursue emerging IoT security careers, that in turn will help build safer and secure IoT environment at homes, workplaces and communities.

The emergence of pocket-sized computing devices, capable of electronic switching, sensing, controlling equipment, video, and audio has created a new paradigm shift in home automation, business, agriculture, transport, environmental technologies. IoT systems use internet to interconnect. Unsecure home uses of IoT can endanger safety and breach privacy of individuals and families. Women are particularly vulnerable as IoT misuse has facilitated revenge porn incidents, harassment, data breach, as well as scams. Online safety activitists recommend that women seek suppor from other women in the event of IoT breach, as seeking support from a male technician can pose additional risks. The project proposed approach is to develop IoT and security skills among women to safeguard their homes, workplaces, and community from IoT breaches. Women becoming IoT security experts immensely contributes to gender equality, diversity, and growth in female participation in the IoT economy.

The report is publicly available.

Congratulations to the ISIF Asia Grants and Awards winners for 2018

This year ISIF Asia will award USD 210,000 to 10 organizations in the Asia Pacific to support research and development of Internet technologies for the benefit of the region. This year’s funding round marks our 10th anniversary of operation in the Asia Pacific.

We received 236 applications in total for the four funding categories that were announced earlier this year. The applications came from 28 economies across the region. We were very excited to see that around 60% of the applications received were submitted for our new “Gender Empowerment and Innovation” category. It was also very encouraging to receive applications from economies that have never applied for our funding before. Similarly, the application process reflected a variety of stakeholders working towards the development of the Internet. We see those as great indicators about the relevance of ISIF Asia as a mechanism to support the development of the Internet across the region.

The funding will be distributed among organizations representing a wide variety of stakeholders: Government (1), Civil Society (3), Private Sector (2), Social Enterprise (1), and Academia (3) as well as very interesting geographical spread across 9 economies: Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, The Philippines, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Awards

The ISIF Asia 2018 Award winners will each receive USD 3,500 plus a travel grant to the 2018 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) that will be held in Paris, France from 12 to 14 November 2018. Their work will be featured as part of the Seed Alliance Awards ceremony, which will be held on 13 November 2018.

“The 2018 ISIF Asia Award winners are truly innovative initiatives, where access to Internet technologies with a social purpose, clearly show a positive impact to improve the lives of people in the communities they serve in the Philippines and Myanmar. Their experiences and knowledge help overcome the challenges that the developing world faces,” Duncan Macintosh, APNIC Foundation CEO said.

Award winners

Community Networks

Community Cellular Networks in Rural Aurora, University of the Philippines – Diliman, The Philippines.

In partnership with a local telecom, the team has developed and deployed a GSM Community Cellular Network in rural Philippines to bridge ‘last mile’ connectivity issues in isolated and relatively poor communities. As of 2017, they have also begun deploying them in partnership with local NGOs, primarily cooperatives, to provide basic cellular services to subscribers.

Gender Empowerment and Innovation

Tech Age Girls Myanmar, Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation, Myanmar.

This initiative has successfully supported female community leaders (aged between 16-20) through the ‘Tech Age Girls’ program from community libraries that have been playing a key role in digital inclusion and gender equality in Myanmar. The finalists are selected to implement their own community projects ideas to support their communities.

Grants

As Head of Programs for the APNIC Foundation, I am really impressed by the proposals selected for the ISIF Asia 2018 Grants and how they highlight the main technical, operational and development issues that concern the Asia Pacific Internet community. I am confident the outcomes of their work will continue to support an open, stable, and secure Internet that serves the needs of the people in our region. The APNIC Foundation is particularly glad to see how the distribution of funds reflect regional and stakeholder diversity and the clear links that every project has to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Grant winners

Network Operations Research

Measuring and Detecting Network Interference in Southeast Asia, Sinar Project, Malaysia. Grant award: USD 20,000.

This network measurement research aims to show current and past Internet censorship and network interference in media, political criticism, religion, gender and social media networks in South East Asian economies using network monitoring nodes around the region. There will also be a pilot gender gap social audit conducted for a marginalized urban community in Malaysia to research and measure non-technical gaps in Internet access such as affordability, Internet literacy, knowledge or rights, and accessibility and availability of gender-related content.

Establishment of a Carrier Neutral Software-Defined Internet Exchange (IXP) Point and Training Programs for Capacity Building in Managing IXPs, Lahore University of Management Sciences – LUMS, Pakistan. Grant award: USD 30,000.

This project aims to deploy a Software-Defined IXP and training programs for IXP development in Pakistan to assist operators to enable new applications such as application-specific testing, traffic redirection through middleboxes, and inbound traffic engineering. While the project centres on a Pakistan IXP, it will eventually be made available to other least developed economies in the region. Another benefit of the project will see costs associated with IXPs reduced via automatic configuration management and dynamic policy assignment.

Community Networks

Community LTE in Papua, Yayasan Noken Baliem Mandiri, Indonesia. Grant award: USD 23,000.

This project seeks to deploy the first locally-owned and operated handset to support LTE networks in the world to rural Papua, Indonesia, using low-cost eNodeBs and a custom developed enhanced packet core. YNBM was granted a special experimental cellular license to explore this new rural access technology in Indonesia by the Indonesian Telecom Ministry.

Connecting the Unserved – Bhutan’s First Trial with TV White Space Technology, NANO, Bhutan. Grant award: USD 30,000.

Given Bhutan’s challenging physical environment and Internet connectivity issues, this project aims to explore the feasibility and suitability of TV white space technology as an alternative broadband option to unserved areas in the economy.

Cybersecurity

RPKI Monitor and Visualizer for Detecting and Alerting for RPKI Errors, ZDNS Labs, China. Grant award: USD 30,000.

This project will implement a RPKI security mechanism to offer a distributed, stakeholder-based counter to the power imbalances arising from RPKI’s hierarchical system. The proposed mechanism detects adverse actions in the RPKI and alerts resource holders to these actions that adversely affect their holding, so that errors can be quickly fixed. The mechanism also enables each ISP to decide whether to accept or defer accepting PRKI database changes that appear to be adverse.

A novel graph analytics theory model to mitigate IoT botnets attacks for big data, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), Malaysia. Grant award: USD 13,000.

This research aims to use the Graph Analytics Theory model to analyse the behaviour of IoT botnets using a reverse engineering approach to distinguish IoT botnets from raw infection codes and develop a new Graph Analytics Theory model for detecting IoT botnet attacks. The expected outcome of the research is to be able to remove and quarantine the suspicious codes as well as be able to detect behaviour changes in IoT devices.

Gender Empowerment and Innovation

NextGen Girls – Internet Security Ambassadors Project, Shilpa Sayura Foundation, Sri Lanka. Grant award: USD 30,000.

This project aims to upscale the ISOC 25 Under 25 Award winner, ‘Respect Girls on Internet’, by developing a network of university and high school girls studying ICT. The goal is to develop females to pursue emerging IoT security careers to help build a safer and secure IoT environment for women, including training 40 female university students to become Internet Security Educators.

Increasing the Safe Use of Internet by Women and Girls, Child Helpline Cambodia, Cambodia. Grant award: USD 22,000.

This is a project to strengthen the capabilities of 16 existing helpline ambassadors on the safe use of the Internet and how to report online abuse to Child helpline Cambodia. The 16 ambassadors will organize five pilot ‘echo awareness’ sessions on the safe use of the Internet for girls and women in their communities. The project will also support: free helpline telephones; an online question and answer platform, with information on the safe use of the Internet and gender equality; response to reports of online abuse; and refer victims to psycho-social support services.

The APNIC Foundation and ISIF Asia thanks all the applicants for sharing their ideas with us, the Selection Committee members for their hard work to arrive to this great outcome, and to APNIC, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Internet Society for their generous funding contributions for 2018.

Two tools available for network operators for rapid detection of BGP anomalies

Evaluating BGP Replay Tool (BRT) using generated BGP updates and past BGP events

The Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA) from the Swinburne University of Technology, explored a new technique that quickly detects different BGP anomalies as part of their Internet Operations Research Grant they received from ISIF Asia during 2016 and implemented during 2017.

The Internet’s default inter-domain routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is vulnerable to different types of anomalies such as hijacking, misconfiguration, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Although considerable research has been carried out into BGP anomalies, existing approaches were not able to mitigate or identify BGP misconfiguration and lack of ground truth time stamps for BGP events.

In this project, CAIA’s team introduced two new tools, real-time BGP Anomaly Detection Tool (RTBADT) and BGP Replay Tool (BRT), to detect BGP anomalies in real-time. Specifically, RTBADT can be used by ISP operators to monitor and detect BGP anomalies through peering it with the intended peer AS, while BRT is able to replay past BGP updates with time-stamps. These tools enable network operators to protect their network from the worst consequence and mitigate the threats of Internet stability.

Read their technical report to find more about the outcomes of this research project and its contribution to support network operators https://application.isif.asia/theme/default/files/ISIFAsia_2016_Grants_TechReport_SwinburneUni_AU_BGPResearch.pdf

Computer Emergency Response Team established in Tonga

As the first national CERT in the Pacific Islands, certTonga was established in July 2016, in order to provide “A safe and secure digital environment for the Kingdom of Tonga and its citizens”. The team aimed at conducting incident handling, performing vulnerability handling, and providing security consultation and advice at Tonga and greater Pacific.

The Cybersecurity grant, funded by Internet Society, assisted in the setting up of Tonga CERT’s capacity and capability to undertake its mandated function. APNIC and it’s Foundation also helped find opportunities for certTonga Staff to partake in capacity building activities and chances to collaborate and form partnerships with relevant organizations.

During the project implementation, there has been many awareness and educational initiatives in relation to the functions of the CERT and through the better understanding of its security role in the government and society, participation and involvement is being increased from time to time.

certTonga is now playing a vital role in the Tonga Police investigation process which has placed the certTonga in a position to be actively planned to grow in all areas to be able to cope with the demand. There is a particular focus on building capacity of the team as it is now essential to the continuous operation of the CERT as well as obtaining a reliable information obtained from a verified sources and undisturbed evidences.

The Final Technical Report “Developing certTonga” is available for download.

ISIF Asia 2016 grant recipients announced!

ISIF Asia 2016 Grants

The first CERT in the Pacific, a Peering Strategy for the Pacific, and a mobile app reader to access books in Thailand’s Karen dialects are just some of the initiatives that will receive funding.

This year ISIF Asia will award its largest ever grants pool, across four categories, to support research and development of Internet technologies for the benefit of the Asia Pacific.

APNIC Internet Operations Research Grants

Around AUD 115,000 was awarded to support the following projects:

Realistic simulation of uncoded, coded and proxied Internet satellite links with a flexible hardware-based simulator. The University of Auckland, New Zealand. The main focus of this research is to establish realistic satellite simulator of UDP flows. It also automates experiments run on non-coded and coded configurations. The project builds upon a 2014 ISIF Asia grant to improve connectivity in the Pacific islands (see report).
Rapid detection of BGP anomalies. Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA), Swinburne University of Technology, This research focuses on producing techniques for the real-time detection of different types of BGP anomalies that can be used by an operator. The evaluation of this tool will be carried out with a controlled testbed using BGP Replay Tool (BRT) to emulate past BGP events.
A Peering Strategy for the Pacific Islands. Telco2 Limited, New Zealand. This research continues and expands a set of Internet measurements of latency to Pacific Island telecommunications providers from various locations around the world, that when evaluated in conjunction with submarine cable availability, can be used to determine a metric for efficiency of transit that can be considered along with the economic impact of having an efficient transit. The measurements will be made available in real-time via a web interface to help operators, regulators, and funders understand the physical routing of network traffic, availability of content, and benefits of peering to improve availability, reachability and security of the Internet in the Asia Pacific region.

Internet Society Cybersecurity Grant

With the support from the Internet Society, one grant of AUD 56,000 was allocated for this category, plus additional Monitoring , Evaluation and Communications support valued at AUD 2,500 and a travel grant to participate at the Internet Governance Forum in Guadalajara, Mexico where they will be one of the speakers at the workshop “Cybersecurity – Initiatives in and by the Global South“.

Developing Tonga National CERT to the Department of Information & ICT under the Ministry of Meteorology, Energy, Environment, Climate Change, Information, Communication, Disaster Management (MEIDECC), Tonga. The Tonga Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) launched recently, is the first national CERT in the Pacific region. Tonga CERT was launch with a long-term goal to expand its services to the greater Pacific once fully operational. Tonga CERT will conduct incident handling; perform vulnerability handling; and provide security consultation and advice. Read more from Andrew Toimoana, Director of MEIDECC, Tonga.

Community Impact Grant

The AUD 50,000 Community Impact Grant was awarded to:

Equal Access to the Information Society in Myanmar, the Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation, Myanmar. This project focuses on women and youth, and benefits 500 people through 20 libraries across the country. The curriculum, developed specifically for Myanmar, focuses on critical thinking in a digital environment of smartphones and tablets. It develops the skills of young female leaders by providing them with specialized information technology training, leadership and job skills, and opportunities to engage in critical public discussion. Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation will also participate in a three-week mentoring program in Singapore, facilitated by JFDI.Asia, valued at AUD 25,000 plus expenses during their stay.

Technical Innovation Grants

Just over 195,000 AUD was allocated to support five projects under the Technical Innovation category.

Khushi Baby, India. This project improves digital medical records for mothers and children by streamlining data collection, improving decision making in the field, aiding in district resource management, and delivering effective dialect-specific voice call reminders to mothers. Khushi Baby will also participate in a three-week mentoring program in Singapore, facilitated by JFDI.Asia, valued at AUD 25,000 plus expenses during their stay.

Four small technical innovation grants of up to AUD 30,000 were awarded to:

My Community Reader: a Mobile-First Distributed Translation Tool and Reader for Ethnic Minority Languages. The Asia Foundation, Thailand. This project will build, test, and deploy a tool to translate text into minority languages books, significantly expanding the available online library of digital and printable mother-tongue children’s books. It will also deliver a mobile app so people can search the library and download titles on local Android devices.
UAV-Aided Resilient Communications for Post Disaster Applications: Demonstrations and Proofs of Concept. Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. This project will design and demonstrate UAV-borne radio payloads as critical network nodes in the development of a post-disaster resilient, delay tolerant communications system, using both multi-rotor and fixed wing platforms with long range radio payload to demonstrate the concept. The UAV will act as data aggregators and wireless store-and-forward relays for collecting important information and providing connectivity to evacuation centers, ground teams and concerned agencies. Data can be gathered from multiple sources below and delivered to another ground team or to a central station, while it can use the wireless link to broadcast messages to the ground nodes. Relayed information can include survivor profiles, food supply audits, medicine requests, and images of victims. This system will be used to assist response team coordination, hasten rescue efforts, and deliver timely updates, among others.
Legalese. Legalese Pte. Ltd. Singapore. This is a web application that will enable the growing Asian population of first-time entrepreneurs and first-time investors to transact seed-stage financing with confidence and without expensive legal fees. The app educates end-users about entrepreneurial finance, facilitates choosing and configuring investment agreements, manage signatures through to completion, and develops libraries of contract templates for Asian languages and Asian jurisdictions.
Deployment of Collaborative Modern HoneyNet to improve Regional Cybersecurity Landscape (CMoHN). Institute of Systems Engineering, Riphah International University, Pakistan. The project will deploy and establish the core skills required to manage and integrate different honeynets and design new honeypots for countering cyber-attacks. The project will connect with other honeynets in the region to form a regional collaborative honeynet network, and promote R&D activities to secure network infrastructure through publications and conducting community awareness seminars.

Tag: cybersecurity