Digital Commons Network^™

Why Penetration Testing Is A Limited Use Choice For Sound Cyber Security Practice, Craig Valli, Andrew J. Woodward, Peter Hannay, Michael N. Johnstone

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Penetration testing of networks is a process that is overused when demonstrating or evaluating the cyber security posture of an organisation. Most penetration testing is not aligned with the actual intent of the testing, but rather is driven by a management directive of wanting to be seen to be addressing the issue of cyber security. The use of penetration testing is commonly a reaction to an adverse audit outcome or as a result of being penetrated in the first place. Penetration testing used in this fashion delivers little or no value to the organisation being tested for a number of …

Predics: A New Go-Po-Based Ray Launching Simulator For The Calculation Of Electromagnetic Scattering And Rcs From Electrically Large And Complex Structures, Caner Özdemi̇r, Betül Yilmaz, Özkan Kirik

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this paper, we present a new simulator called pRediCS for the calculation of electromagnetic scattering and radar cross-section (RCS) from electrically large and complex targets. The simulator utilizes the geometric optics (GO) theory and launching of electromagnetic rays for tracing and calculating the electric field values as the electromagnetic waves bounce around the target. The physical optics (PO) theory is also exploited to calculate the final scattered electric field by calculating the far-field PO integration along the observation direction. The simulator is first tested with known objects of canonical shapes, whose analytical solutions are available in the literature. Next, …

The Effectiveness Of Internet Activity Erasure Tools To Protect Privacy, Brian Cusack, Andrew Woodward, Scott Butson, Benjamin Leber

Australian Information Security Management Conference

When most people go to the trouble of getting erasure tools to remove data from their hard drives they expect the job is done correctly. Using erasure tools is a step to protect privacy by assuming the applied tools erase data rather than simply delete data that may be recovered using forensic tools. In this research we tested the performance of the delete function on three web browsers against the performance of eight erasure tools with alarming results. It was found that the erasure tools had almost the same capability to delete data as the web browsers delete function; and …

Towards Detection And Control Of Civilian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Matthew Peacock, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Considering the significant number of non‐military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be purchased to operate in unregulated air space and the range of such devices, the potential for security and privacy problems to arise is significant. This can lead to consequent harm for critical infrastructure in the event of these UAVs being used for criminal or terrorist purposes. Further, if these devices are not being detected, there is a privacy problem to be addressed as well. In this paper we test a specific UAV, the Parrot AR Drone version 2, and present a forensic analysis of tests used to …

3d Visual Method Of Variant Logic Construction For Random Sequence, Huan Wang, Jeffrey Zheng

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

As Internet security threats continue to evolve, in order to ensure information transmission security, various encrypt and decrypt has been used in channel coding and decoding of data communication. While cryptography requires a very high degree of apparent randomness, Random sequences play an important role in cryptography. Both CA (Cellular Automata) and RC4 contain pseudo‐random number generators and may have intrinsic properties respectively. In this paper, a 3D visualization model (3DVM) is proposed to display spatial characteristics of the random sequences from CA or RC4 keystream. Key components of this model and core mechanism are described. Every module and their …

A Comparison Of Information Security Curricula In China And The Usa, Huaying Chen, Sean B. Maynard, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Information Security (InfoSec) education varies in its content, focus and level of technicality across the world. In this paper we investigate the differences between graduate InfoSec programs in top universities in China and in the United States of America (USA). In China, curriculum emphasises Telecommunication, Computer Science and InfoSec Technology, whilst in the USA in addition to Computer Science and InfoSec Technology the curriculum also emphasises Enterprise‐level Security Strategy and Policy, InfoSec Management, and Cyber Law. The differences are significant and will have a profound impact on both the perceptions and capabilities of future generations of information security professionals on …

Twitter Influence And Cumulative Perceptions Of Extremist Support: A Case Study Of Geert Wilders, Gabrielle Blanquart, David M. Cook

Australian Counter Terrorism Conference

The advent of Social media has changed the manner in which perceptions about power and information can be influenced. Twitter is used as a fast‐paced vehicle to deliver short, succinct pieces of information, creating the perception of acceptance, popularity and authority. In the case of extremist groups, Twitter is one of several avenues to create the perception of endorsement of values that would otherwise gain less prominence through mainstream media. This study examines the use of Twitter in augmenting the status and reputation of anti‐Islam and anti‐immigration policy through the controlled release of social media information bursts. The paper demonstrates …

Identifying Bugs In Digital Forensic Tools, Brian Cusack, Alain Homewood

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Bugs can be found in all code and the consequences are usually managed through upgrade releases, patches, and restarting operating systems and applications. However, in mission critical systems complete fall over systems are built to assure service continuity. In our research we asked the question, what are the professional risks of bugs in digital forensic tools? Our investigation reviewed three high use professional proprietary digital forensic tools, one in which we identified six bugs and evaluated these bug in terms of potential impacts on an investigator’s work. The findings show that yes major brand name digital forensic tools have software …

Information Security Management: Factors That Influence Security Investments In Smes, Zhi Xian Ng, Atif Ahmad, Sean B. Maynard

Australian Information Security Management Conference

In the modern information economy, the security of information is critically important to organizations. Information‐security risk assessments (ISRAs) allow organizations to identify key information assets and security risks so security expenditure can be directed cost‐effectively. Unfortunately conducting ISRAs requires special expertise and tends to be complex and costly for small to medium sized organizations (SMEs). Therefore, it remains unclear in practice, and unknown in literature, how SMEs address information security imperatives without the benefit of an ISRA process. This research makes a contribution to theory in security management by identifying the factors that influence key decision-makers in SMEs to address …

Complementary Feature Level Data Fusion For Biometric Authentication Using Neural Networks, Mark Abernethy, Shri Rai

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Data fusion as a formal research area is referred to as multi‐sensor data fusion. The premise is that combined data from multiple sources can provide more meaningful, accurate and reliable information than that provided by data from a single source. There are many application areas in military and security as well as civilian domains. Multi‐sensor data fusion as applied to biometric authentication is termed multi‐modal biometrics. Though based on similar premises, and having many similarities to formal data fusion, multi‐modal biometrics has some differences in relation to data fusion levels. The objective of the current study was to apply feature …

The Influence And Deception Of Twitter: The Authenticity Of The Narrative And Slacktivism In The Australian Electoral Process, Benjamin Waugh, Maldini Abdipanah, Omid Hashemi, Shaquille A. Rahman, David M. Cook

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

It is uncertain how many discreet users occupy the social media community. Fake tweets, sock puppets, force‐multipliers and botnets have become embedded within the fabric of new media in sufficient numbers that social media support by means of quantity is no longer a reliable metric for determining authority and influence within openly expressed issues and causes. Election campaigns, and their associated political agendas, can now be influenced by non‐specific virtual presences that cajole and redirect opinions without declaring identity or allegiance. In the lead up to the 2013 Australian Federal Election, the open source Twitter activity for the two major …

A Social Dimensional Cyber Threat Model With Formal Concept Analysis And Fact-Proposition Inference, Anup Sharma, Robin Gandhi, Qiuming Zhu, William Mahoney, William Sousan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyberspace has increasingly become a medium to express outrage, conduct protests, take revenge, spread opinions, and stir up issues. Many cyber attacks can be linked to current and historic events in the social, political, economic, and cultural (SPEC) dimensions of human conflicts in the physical world. These SPEC factors are often the root cause of many cyber attacks. Understanding the relationships between past and current SPEC events and cyber attacks can help understand and better prepare people for impending cyber attacks. The focus of this paper is to analyze these attacks in social dimensions and build a threat model based …

Estimation And Improvements Of The Fundamental Qos In Networks With Random Topologies, Zhilbert Tafa

UBT International Conference

The computer communication paradigm is moving towards the ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things (IoT). Small autonomous wirelessly networked devices are becoming more and more present in monitoring and automation of every human interaction with the environment, as well as in collecting various other information from the physical world. Applications, such as remote health monitoring, intelligent homes, early fire, volcano, and earthquake detection, traffic congestion prevention etc., are already present and all share the similar networking philosophy. An additional challenging for the scientific and engineering world is the appropriateness of the alike networks which are to be deployed in the …

Metamorphic Detection Using Function Call Graph Analysis, Prasad Deshpande

Master's Projects

Well-designed metamorphic malware can evade many commonly used malware detection techniques including signature scanning. In this research, we consider a score based on function call graph analysis. We test this score on several challenging classes of metamorphic malware and we show that the resulting detection rates yield an improvement over previous research.

A Probabilistic Encryption Based Min/Max Computation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Bharath K. Samanthula, Wei Jiang, Sanjay Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have wide range of applications in military, health-monitoring, smart-home applications, and in other commercial environments. The computation of data aggregation functions like MIN/MAX is one of the commonly used tasks in many such WSN applications. However, due to privacy issues in some of these applications, the individual sensor readings should be kept secret from others. That is, the base station should be the only entity who should receive the output of MIN/MAX function and the individual sensor readings should not be revealed either to other sensor nodes or to the root node for confidentiality reasons. Existing …

Utilizing A Modular Approach To Gamification To Improve Nutrition And Fitness In Children, Chad Richards

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic that affects adults and children, impacts over 30% of the population in several states of the U.S., damages national economies, and is a factor in four out of the six of the leading causes of death, including diabetes and heart disease. Obesity is preventable: solution approaches include better education, more exercise, better nutrition, and changing eating habits. Still, it is difficult for many people to remain interested enough to educate themselves and to learn new behaviors to change their eating and exercise habits.

Gamification is a relatively new research area that involves using video game …

Innovation-Ict-Cybersecurity: The Triad Relationship And Its Impact On Growth Competitiveness, Manal M. Yunis

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study examines the global growth competitiveness of countries using the dynamics of growth, ICT, and innovation. It also introduces a new dynamic, cybersecurity, and argues that within a growth competitiveness framework, ICT, innovation, and cybersecurity mechanisms allow some countries to achieve higher ranks on the competitiveness ladder than others. Based on a theoretical framework that encompasses the economic growth model, the complementarity theory, and the international law theory, a model that integrates ICT, innovation, and cybersecurity, depicts the relationships amongst them and with growth competitiveness, and incorporates complementary factors with possible moderating effect is presented. The model proposed relationships …

Predicting Threat Potential Using Cyber Sensors, Mark Anthony Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of the Internet has created a culture of a connected society dependent upon technology for communication and information sharing needs. In this dissertation, we hypothesize that attackers are increasingly using electronic resources that are capable of leaving a digital footprint, such as social media services, e-mail, text messages, blogs, and websites for the communication, planning, and coordination of attacks. In its current form, however, traffic analysis is primarily concerned with using communications volume to extract intelligence information, but largely ignores the content of communications transmissions that is needed to meet the security challenges and demands of continually emerging …

Applied Hypergame Theory For Network Defense, Alan S. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Cyber operations are the most important aspect of military conflicts in the 21st century, but unfortunately they are also among the least understood. The continual battle for network dominance between attackers and defenders is considered to be a complex game. Hypergame theory is an extension of game theory that addresses the kind of games where misperception exists, as is often the case in military engagements. Hypergame theory, like game theory, uses a game model to determine strategy selection, but goes beyond game theory by examining subgames that exist within the full game. The inclusion of misperception and misinformation in the …

Characterization Of Optical Communication In A Leader-Follower Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Formation, Firat Eren, Shachak Pe'eri, May-Win Thein

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

As part of the research to development an optical communication design of a leader-follower formation between unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), this paper presents light field characterization and design configuration of the hardware required to allow the use of distance detection between UUVs. The study specifically is targeting communication between remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). As an initial step in this study, the light field produced from a light source mounted on the leader UUV was empirically characterized and modeled. Based on the light field measurements, a photo-detector array for the follower UUV was designed. Evaluation of the communication algorithms to monitor …

Conceptualizing Financial Loses As A Result Of Advanced Persistent Threats, Christopher Levine

Honors College Theses

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks are the biggest threat in the computing world. Currently, there is ample information available on how these attacks occur and who supports these attacks. However, there is dearth of information available that adequately describes the potentiality for financial losses. These losses are a direct result of the attacks themselves, however these attacks could only operate with the support of well-funded groups, such as nation states. Therefore, it is important to understand this relationship to conceptualize how these losses occur. In exploring the results of both Operation Aurora and Stuxnet, two famous APT attacks, it is …

Actual Entities: A Control Method For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Erica Absetz

Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this thesis is on Actual Entities, a concept created by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and how the concept can be applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a behavioral control method. Actual Entities are vector based, atomic units that use a method called prehension to observe their environment and react with various actions. When combining multiple Actual Entities a Colony of Prehending Entities is created; when observing their prehensions an intelligent behavior emerges. By applying the characteristics of Actual Entities to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, specifically in a situation where they are searching for targets, this emergent, intelligent …

Enhancing The Interdisciplinary Curriculum In Cybersecurity By Engaging High-Impact Educational Practices, Li-Chiou Chen, Andreea Cotoranu

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Modeling Cyber Situational Awareness Through Data Fusion, Evan L. Raulerson

Theses and Dissertations

Cyber attacks are compromising networks faster than administrators can respond. Network defenders are unable to become oriented with these attacks, determine the potential impacts, and assess the damages in a timely manner. Since the observations of network sensors are normally disjointed, analysis of the data is overwhelming and time is not spent efficiently. Automation in defending cyber networks requires a level of reasoning for adequate response. Current automated systems are mostly limited to scripted responses. Better defense tools are required. This research develops a framework that aggregates data from heterogeneous network sensors. The collected data is correlated into a single …

Mobile Network Defense Interface For Cyber Defense And Situational Awareness, James C. Hannan

Theses and Dissertations

Today's computer networks are under constant attack. In order to deal with this constant threat, network administrators rely on intrusion detection and prevention services (IDS) (IPS). Most IDS and IPS implement static rule sets to automatically alert administrators and resolve intrusions. Network administrators face a difficult challenge, identifying attacks against a vast number of benign network transactions. Also after a threat is identified making even the smallest policy change to the security software potentially has far-reaching and unanticipated consequences. Finally, because the administrator is primarily responding to alerts they may lose situational awareness of the network. During this research a …

Security-Policy Analysis With Extended Unix Tools, Gabriel A. Weaver

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

During our fieldwork with real-world organizations---including those in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), network configuration management, and the electrical power grid---we repeatedly noticed that security policies and related security artifacts are hard to manage. We observed three core limitations of security policy analysis that contribute to this difficulty. First, there is a gap between policy languages and the tools available to practitioners. Traditional Unix text-processing tools are useful, but practitioners cannot use these tools to operate on the high-level languages in which security policies are expressed and implemented. Second, practitioners cannot process policy at multiple levels of abstraction but they need …

Dependence On Cyberscribes - Issues In E-Security, Thomas R. Mclean, Alexander B. Mclean

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Online Deception Detection Using Bdi Agents, Richard Alan Merritts

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This research has two facets within separate research areas. The research area of Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) agent capability development was extended. Deception detection research has been advanced with the development of automation using BDI agents. BDI agents performed tasks automatically and autonomously. This study used these characteristics to automate deception detection with limited intervention of human users. This was a useful research area resulting in a capability general enough to have practical application by private individuals, investigators, organizations and others. The need for this research is grounded in the fact that humans are not very effective at detecting …

Multireference Tdoa-Based Source Localization, Hamid Torbati Fard, Mahmoud Atashbar, Yaser Norouzi, Farrokh Hojjat Kashani

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based methods usually achieve the most accurate source localization in passive systems. In these methods, one of the sensors is assigned as the reference and the TDOA of the others with respect to the reference is measured. The source location is estimated by processing these TDOAs. In this paper, a multireference maximum likelihood (ML)-Taylor algorithm is proposed in order to decrease the source localization error of the TDOA methods. In the proposed algorithm, TDOAs are measured assuming 2 different reference sensors, and then the ML objective function of this multireference TDOA algorithm is derived and solved …

Utilizing Cyber Espionage To Combat Terrorism, Gary Adkins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The world has effectively exited the Industrial Age and is firmly planted in the Information Age. Global communication at the speed of light has been a great asset to both businesses and private citizens. However, there is a dark side to the age we live in, where terrorist groups are able to communicate, plan, fund, recruit, and spread their message to the world. The relative anonymity the internet provides hinders law enforcement and security agencies in not only locating would-be terrorists but also in disrupting their operations. The internet is a loosely knit group of computers and routers and is …