Improving future society trustworthiness through security research

BEURAN Laboratory
Associate Professor：BEURAN Razvan

E-mail：
［Research areas］
Network security, Security training, Computer networks
［Keywords］
Cybersecurity, IoT/CPS security, AI, Trustworthiness assurance, Cyber range

Skills and background we are looking for in prospective students

We welcome students with interests and abilities related to networks and network security, and good programming or mathematical skills. Independent thinking and a strong motivation to learn and develop oneself are a must.

What you can expect to learn in this laboratory

Students who graduate from our lab will have deep knowledge regarding cybersecurity and IoT/CPS security. They will be able to develop network-related software, and to perform various kinds of network security experiments and assessments. Through their involvement in cybersecurity, the students will also gain hands-on network security experience; thus, they will become able to deal with cybersecurity issues in the real world. Their English paper reading, writing, as well as their presentation skills will also improve significantly.

【Job category of graduates】 Cybersecurity, ICT, embedded system manufacturing

Research outline

Overview

According to the vision put forward by the Japanese government regarding the future digital society, also known as Society 5.0, the cyber and physical spaces will be tightly integrated to build this human-centered society. Moreover, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have already started to become an integral part of our daily life, leading to new challenges and issues regarding their use.
All these complex conditions place strong requirements regarding the trustworthiness of Society 5.0, and to address these issues our lab focuses on the following key research question: How to ensure the future Society 5.0 is a safe and secure environment?

Research directions towards a trustworthy digital society

To answer this research question, our activity follows four research directions, as it will be described next.

Cybersecurity

The increase of cybersecurity threats in the current society makes it necessary to create new defense mechanisms that are dynamic and adaptive. We leverage modern techniques such as AI and machine learning to develop such adaptive defense systems by extending the work on AI-based penetration testing that we have conducted in the past. This research direction also includes the experimental evaluation of end-to-end security and privacy mechanisms, with the goal of verifying objectively that relevant requirements and constraints are met.

IoT/CPS Security

To ensure the security characteristics of IoT/CPS systems one must consider their computation resource constraints, and the complexity of their System of Systems nature. We are addressing these issues via design automation, and via formal and experimental verification at the design stage, thus making it possible to fully meet the “security by design” requirement.

Trustworthiness Assurance

Society 5.0 challenges must be thoroughly considered from the perspective of the five components of trustworthiness: safety, security, privacy, reliability and resilience. For this purpose, we have envisioned an assurance framework that proposes an objective methodology to provide guarantees for all the five trustworthiness components.

Security Education and Training

The human factor is an important component of modern security, and we conduct research in the areas of technical security training and awareness security training. One of the goals of this research direction is to extend the integrated cybersecurity training framework CyTrONE we developed to provide more effective education and training capabilities.

Key publications

1. S. E. Ooi, R. Beuran, T. Kuroda, T. Kuwahara, R. Hotchi, N. Fujita, Y. Tan, “Intent-Driven Secure System Design: Methodology and Implementation”, Elsevier Computers & Security, vol. 124, January 2023, 102955.
2. T. D. Le, A. Anwar, S. W. Loke, R. Beuran, Y. Tan, “GridAttackSim: Cyber Attack Simulation Framework for Smart Grids”, MDPI Electronics, Special Issue on Applications of IoT for Microgrids, vol. 9, no. 8, August 2020, 1218.
3. R. Beuran, D. Tang, C. Pham, K. Chinen, Y. Tan, Y. Shinoda, “Integrated Framework for Hands-on Cybersecurity Training: CyTrONE”, Elsevier Computers & Security, vol. 78C, June 2018, pp. 43-59.

Equipment

Large-scale network emulation testbed StarBED
https://starbed.nict.go.jp/en/