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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Usable Security And Privacy For Secure Messaging Applications, Elham Vaziripour
Usable Security And Privacy For Secure Messaging Applications, Elham Vaziripour
Theses and Dissertations
The threat of government and corporate surveillance around the world, as well as the publicity surrounding major cybersecurity attacks, have increased interest in secure and private end-to-end communications. In response to this demand, numerous secure messaging applications have been developed in recent years. These applications have been welcomed and publically used not just by political activists and journalists but by everyday users as well. Most of these popular secure messaging applications are usable because they hide many of the details of how encryption is provided. The strength of the security properties of these applications relies on the authentication ceremony, wherein …
Securing Critical Infrastructure: A Ransomware Study, Blaine M. Jeffries
Securing Critical Infrastructure: A Ransomware Study, Blaine M. Jeffries
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis reviews traditional ransomware attack trends in order to present a taxonomy for ransomware targeting industrial control systems. After reviewing a critical infrastructure ransomware attack methodology, a corresponding response and recovery plan is described. The plan emphasizes security through redundancy, specifically the incorporation of standby programmable logic controllers. This thesis goes on to describe a set of experiments conducted to test the viability of defending against a specialized ransomware attack with a redundant controller network. Results support that specific redundancy schemes are effective in recovering from a successful attack. Further experimentation is conducted to test the feasibility of industrial …
Smartphone User Privacy Preserving Through Crowdsourcing, Bahman Rashidi
Smartphone User Privacy Preserving Through Crowdsourcing, Bahman Rashidi
Theses and Dissertations
In current Android architecture, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not. Expert users can make savvy decisions to avoid unnecessary private data breach. However, the majority of regular users are not technically capable or do not care to consider privacy implications to make safe decisions. To assist the technically incapable crowd, we propose a permission control framework based on crowdsourcing. At its core, our framework runs new apps under probation mode without granting their permission requests up-front. It provides recommendations on whether to accept or not the permission requests based on decisions from peer …