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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Memory Foreshadow: Memory Forensics Of Hardware Cryptocurrency Wallets – A Tool And Visualization Framework, Tyler Thomas, Mathew Piscitelli, Ilya Shavrov, Ibrahim Baggili Sep 2020

Memory Foreshadow: Memory Forensics Of Hardware Cryptocurrency Wallets – A Tool And Visualization Framework, Tyler Thomas, Mathew Piscitelli, Ilya Shavrov, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present Memory FORESHADOW: Memory FOREnSics of HArDware cryptOcurrency Wallets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the primary account of cryptocurrency hardware wallet client memory forensics. Our exploratory analysis revealed forensically relevant data in memory including transaction history, extended public keys, passphrases, and unique device identifiers. Data extracted with FORESHADOW can be used to associate a hardware wallet with a computer and allow an observer to deanonymize all past and future transactions due to hierarchical deterministic wallet address derivation. Additionally, our novel visualization framework enabled us to measure both the persistence and integrity of artifacts produced by the …


The Free Education Project: Higher Education Funding, E2 Implementation, And Crowdsourcing Crypto Development, Louis Carter, John R. Ziegler, Ovidui Purice, Edward Lehner Ph.D. Dec 2019

The Free Education Project: Higher Education Funding, E2 Implementation, And Crowdsourcing Crypto Development, Louis Carter, John R. Ziegler, Ovidui Purice, Edward Lehner Ph.D.

Publications and Research

This short paper, written in three different sections, explores how a cryptocurrency’s issuance and network effects could fund higher education. Synthesizing research from the Bronx Community College Cryptocurrency Research Lab, Bernard Lietaer’s notion of creating money for the needs of society, lessons learned by Galia Benartzi and the Hearts Project, and an exploration of how communities coalesce around open-source cryptocurrency projects, the authors provide an overview of the problem of funding higher education, the ways in which money that is needed could be created, and the key components to building a highly effective developer community. These three distinct yet vitally …


Frameup: An Incriminatory Attack On Storj: A Peer To Peer Blockchain Enabled Distributed Storage System, Xiaolu Zhang, Justin Grannis, Ibrahim Baggili, Nicole Lang Beebe Mar 2019

Frameup: An Incriminatory Attack On Storj: A Peer To Peer Blockchain Enabled Distributed Storage System, Xiaolu Zhang, Justin Grannis, Ibrahim Baggili, Nicole Lang Beebe

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we present a primary account of frameup, an incriminatory attack made possible because of existing implementations in distributed peer to peer storage. The frameup attack shows that an adversary has the ability to store unencrypted data on the hard drives of people renting out their hard drive space. This is important to forensic examiners as it opens the door for possibly framing an innocent victim. Our work employs Storj as an example technology, due to its popularity and market size. Storj is a blockchain enabled system that allows people to rent out their hard drive space …


Inception: Virtual Space In Memory Space In Real Space, Peter Casey, Rebecca Lindsay-Decusati, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger Jan 2019

Inception: Virtual Space In Memory Space In Real Space, Peter Casey, Rebecca Lindsay-Decusati, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Virtual Reality (VR) has become a reality. With the technology's increased use cases, comes its misuse. Malware affecting the Virtual Environment (VE) may prevent an investigator from ascertaining virtual information from a physical scene, or from traditional “dead” analysis. Following the trend of antiforensics, evidence of an attack may only be found in memory, along with many other volatile data points. Our work provides the primary account for the memory forensics of Immersive VR systems, and in specific the HTC Vive. Our approach is capable of reconstituting artifacts from memory that are relevant to the VE, and is also capable …


Enhancing Trust In The Cryptocurrency Marketplace: A Reputation Scoring Approach, Dan Freeman, Tim Mcwilliams, Sudip Bhattacharyya, Craig Hall, Pablo Peillard Aug 2018

Enhancing Trust In The Cryptocurrency Marketplace: A Reputation Scoring Approach, Dan Freeman, Tim Mcwilliams, Sudip Bhattacharyya, Craig Hall, Pablo Peillard

SMU Data Science Review

Trust is paramount for the effective operation of any monetary system. While the distributed architecture of blockchain technology on which cryptocurrencies operate has many benefits, the anonymity of users on the blockchain has provided criminal users an opportunity to hide both their identities and illicit activities. In this paper, we present a scoring mechanism for cryptocurrency users where the scores represent users’ trustworthiness as safe or risky transactors in the cryptocurrency community. In order to distinguish law-abiding users from potential threats in the Bitcoin marketplace, we analyze historical thefts to profile transactions, classify them into risky and non-risky categories using …


The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow Aug 2018

The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow

All Faculty Scholarship

In this report, Shakow explains how a decentralized autonomous organization functions and interacts with the U.S. tax system and presents the many tax issues that these structures raise. The possibility of using smart contracts to allow an entity to operate totally autonomously on a blockchain platform seems attractive. However, little thought has been given to how such an entity can comply with the requirements of a tax system. The DAO, the first major attempt to create such an organization, failed because of a programming error. If successful examples proliferate in the future, tax authorities will face significant problems in getting …


If I Had A Million Cryptos: Cryptowallet Application Analysis And A Trojan Proof-Of-Concept, Trevor Haigh, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili Jan 2018

If I Had A Million Cryptos: Cryptowallet Application Analysis And A Trojan Proof-Of-Concept, Trevor Haigh, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cryptocurrencies have gained wide adoption by enthusiasts and investors. In this work, we examine seven different Android cryptowallet applications for forensic artifacts, but we also assess their security against tampering and reverse engineering. Some of the biggest benefits of cryptocurrency is its security and relative anonymity. For this reason it is vital that wallet applications share the same properties. Our work, however, indicates that this is not the case. Five of the seven applications we tested do not implement basic security measures against reverse engineering. Three of the applications stored sensitive information, like wallet private keys, insecurely and one was …