With advancements in chip technology, the number of cores in modern commercial processors continues to rise, leading to increased complexity in interconnects and on-chip networks. This complexity, however, exposes significant security vulnerabilities, primarily in the form of side-channel and covert-channel exploits. Unlike other microarchitectural side-channel attacks, those leveraging on-chip interconnects utilize unique characteristics, allowing attackers to develop novel methods that can bypass existing effective defenses. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of current side-channel and covert-channel attacks based on processor-on-chip interconnects. We categorize these attacks into three types: contention-based, distance-based, and layout-based, according to the specific interconnect characteristics they exploit, and discuss corresponding countermeasures for each. Finally, we provide an outlook on future development trends in processor interconnect side channels. This survey is the first to specifically focus on interconnect-based side channels in processors.

Due to characteristics, such as the openness and exposure of intersatellite links, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks are subject to heightened vulnerability to malicious attacks compared to ground-based networks. Given various security risks, implementing trust management in LEO satellite networks becomes imperative. However, existing trust management schemes tailored for this scenario are vulnerable to a spectrum of attacks, resulting in low detection rates and poor network performance. To address the above issues, we propose BiTrust, a hybrid trust management scheme for secure data transmission in LEO satellite networks. BiTrust introduces two distinct types of trust: 1) state trust and 2) behavior trust. State trust leverages remote attestation technology to verify the authenticity of node identities and the integrity of their functions, ensuring that nodes consistently disseminate reliable behavior trust announcements to safeguard the trust plane. Behavior trust, on the other hand, utilizes a trust model to quantify the real-time data forwarding behavior characteristics of nodes, thereby maintaining the reliability of the data plane. To precisely quantify behavior trust, we design a trust model based on multipath trust propagation. By integrating an unstable penalty term, the proposed trust model can effectively defend against dynamic dropping misbehavior. Besides, to facilitate the deployment of BiTrust in a distributed manner, we introduce a two-hop rely message mechanism and a query-answer mechanism to support the construction of behavior trust. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of BiTrust, demonstrating a significant improvement of up to 64.3% in data transmission rate under highly untrusted environments while maintaining affordable overhead.

Image security faces increasing challenges with the widespread application of computer science and artificial intelligence. Although chaotic systems are employed to encrypt images and prevent unauthorized access or tampering, the degradation that occurs during the binarization process in chaotic systems reduces security. The chaos- and DNA-based image encryption schemes increases its complexity, while the integration of deep learning with image encryption is still in its infancy and has several shortcomings. An image encryption scheme with high security and efficiency is required for the protection of the image. To address these problems, we propose a novel image encryption scheme based on the lightweight VGG (LVGG), referred to as LVGG-IE. In this work, we design an LVGG network with fewer layers while maintaining a high capacity for feature capture. This network is used to generate a key seed, which is then employed to transform the plaintext image into part of the initial value of a chaotic system, ensuring that the chaos-based key generator correlates with the plaintext image. A dynamic substitution box (S-box) is also designed and used to scramble the randomly shuffled plaintext image. Additionally, a single-connected (SC) layer is combined with a convolution layer from VGG to encrypt the image, where the SC layer is dynamically constructed by the secret key and the convolution kernel is set to $1\times 2$. The encryption efficiency is simulated, and the security is analyzed. The results show that the correlation coefficient between adjacent pixels in the proposed scheme achieves ${10}^{-4}$. The NPCR exceeds 0.9958, and the UACI falls within the theoretical value with a significance level of 0.05. The encryption quality, the security of the dynamic S-box and the SC layer, and the efficiency are tested. The result shows that the proposed image encryption scheme demonstrates high security, efficiency, and robustness, making it effective for image security in various applications.

In cloud-edge collaboration scenarios, attackers pose significant security risks by compromising computational nodes and using them to infiltrate other nodes and networks. Ensuring the security of cloud-edge collaboration is crucial for protecting sensitive data, preventing disruptions to critical services, and safeguarding infrastructure in increasingly interconnected and digitized societies. Traditional passive defense mechanisms are often inadequate in dealing with the complex and dynamic nature of modern network threats. In recent years, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has become an important research direction, disrupting adversaries’ reconnaissance and exploitation phases by dynamically shuffling the attack surface. However, existing MTD strategies have some shortcomings, such as single-dimensional movement strategies, poor flexibility and a lack of historical information analysis. To overcome these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach for host address and port hopping (RLAPH). First, the approach strengthens system security through coordinated decision-making across IP address and port, leveraging both historical data and current information to make accurate and adaptive decisions. Second, a reward function is carefully designed to balance the trade-off between system overhead and security. Finally, validation experiments conducted in a simulated environment show that the proposed method effectively enhances defense performance while minimizing system overhead, highlighting its robustness and applicability.

Rapid advancements in the Internet have presented new demands for next-generation communication networks. Despite promising techniques such as APN6 and SRV6 have been proposed, research on multi-objective optimal routing, which serves as the fundamental basis for differentiated service delivery, remains limited. Consequently, this paper aims to bridge this research gap by introducing an efficient routing algorithm, NDRA, for multi-objective optimization. The proposed algorithm utilizes the Dijkstra algorithm as the backbone. Besides, a pruning process referring to the term of Pareto domination is introduced to avoid unnecessary path exploration. Evaluations demonstrate that compared to existing methods, our algorithm guarantees that a set of optimal solutions will be found and the computational overhead is affordable across different network scenarios.