# Awards & Success Stories

## Best Paper Student Award - TRUSTY: A Solution for Threat Hunting UsingData Analysis in Critical Infrastructures

#### Paper Title: "TRUSTY: A Solution for Threat Hunting UsingData Analysis in Critical Infrastructures"

The rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays a crucial role in the era of hyper-connected digital economies. Despite the valuable benefits, such as increased resiliency, self-monitoring and pervasive control, IIoT raises severe cybersecurity and privacy risks, allowing cyberattackers to exploit a plethora of vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can lead to disastrous consequences. Although the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) constitute valuable solutions, they suffer from several gaps, such as zero-day attacks, unknown anomalies and false positives. Therefore, the presence of supporting mechanisms is necessary. To this end, honeypots can protect real assets and trap cyberattackers. In this paper, we provide a web-based platform called $TRUSTY$, which is capable of aggregating, storing and analysing the detection results of multiple industrial honeypots related to Modbus/Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), IEC 60870-5-104, BACnet, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and EtherNet/IP. Based on this analysis, we provide a dataset related to honeypot security events. Moreover, this paper provides a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method, which decides about the number of honeypots that can be deployed in an industrial environment in a strategic way. In particular, this decision is converted into a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB), which is solved with the \textit{e-Greedy} method. The evaluation analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method.

## Best Oral Presentation in 10th International Conference on Modern Circuits and Systems Technologies (MOCAST)

#### Paper Title: "Dual-hop Blockchain Radio Access Networks for Advanced Coverage Expansion"

Dynamic dual-hop relaying network topologies that enable access to end-users through intermediate individual and commercial, static as well as moving, infrastructures are expected to become fundamental pillars of the sixth generation wireless systems. The main requirement of such topologies is to ensure end-user’s information privacy. Motivated by this, the current contribution focuses on introducing a dual-hop blockchain radio access network (DH-BRAN) topology for dynamic coverage expansions. To analyze the performance of this topology, we present the theoretical framework that captures the characteristics of the proposed topology. Building upon it, the performance of DH-BRAN, in terms of latency and waiting probability, are quantified. The results reveal that DH-BRAN can be employed in several realistic use-cases and that there exists a trade-off between latency and security.

## Best Oral Presentation Award in the 3rd World Symposium on Communication Engineering (WSCE 2020)

#### Paper Title: "Big Data against Security Threats: The SPEAR Intrusion Detection System"

Smart Grid is a new power grid paradigm that aims to intelligently coordinate the behaviours of all entities involved in energy generation, distribution, and consumption. Smart Grid consists of multiple smart devices that have limited processing capabilities. As a result, conventional attack detection and mitigation mechanisms cannot efficiently protect large-scale deployments.

## Best Paper Award in the 9th International Conference on Modern Circuits and Systems Technologies (MOCAST 2020)

#### Paper Title: “A Novel LoRaWAN Scheduling Scheme for Improving Reliability and Collision Avoidance”

The utilization of low power but long range communication links of the LoRaWAN technology promises low energy consumption, while ensuring sufficient throughput. However, due to LoRa’s original scheduling process there is a high chance of packet collisions, compromising the technology’s reliability. In this paper, we propose a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, entitled the RCA-LoRa towards improving reliability and collision avoidance in LoRa wide-area networks. The novel scheduling process that is introduced is based on the broadcasting of beacon frames by the network’s gateway in order to synchronize communication with end devices.

## Best Oral Presentation Award in the 9th International Conference on Modern Circuits and Systems Technologies (MOCAST 2020)

#### Paper Title: "Trust Management in Smart Grid: A Markov Trust Model"

Over the last years, the threat of cyberattacks against critical infrastructures, especially on power systems, has been significantly increased. Cyberattacks against critical infrastructures are exerting a significant impact on society. Smart Grid is an emerging paradigm that leverages the advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to deliver a novel power generation, distribution, and consumption network.

## ARRANGE-ICT is awarded and selected among the top Erasmus+ project in Europe!

ARRANGE-ICT: pArtneRship foR AddressiNG mEgatrends in ICT, which was driven and prepared by the University of Western Macedonia, while it is coordinated by the Technical University of Sofia received the first prize of quality from the Bulgarian national agency, while it was selected among the 8 top Erasmus+ projects to be presented in Bologna, Italy!

## Best Paper Award in the 24th IEEE International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (IEEE CAMAD 2019)

#### Paper Title: "Operational Data Based Intrusion Detection System for Smart Grid"

In the era of hyper-connected digital economies, the smart technologies play a vital role in the operation of the electrical grid, transforming it into a new. This new reality introduces severe cybersecurity issues due to insecure, legacy protocols. This work provides an anomaly-based IDS especially designed for the smart grid, utilising operational data from a real power plant.

Internet of Things and Applications Lab
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Western Macedonia Campus
ZEP Area, Kozani 50100
Greece

##### Contact Information

tel: +30 2461 056527

Email: ithaca@uowm.gr