Engineering Commons^™

Developing A Sql Injection Exploitation Tool With Natural Language Generation, Kate Isabelle Boekweg

Theses and Dissertations

Websites are a popular tool in our modern world, used daily by many companies and individuals. However, they are also rife with vulnerabilities, including SQL injection (SQLI) vulnerabilities. SQLI attacks can lead to significant damage to the data stored within web applications and their databases. Due to the dangers posed by these attacks, many countermeasures have been researched and implemented to protect websites against this threat. Various tools have been developed to enhance the process of detecting SQLI vulnerabilities and active SQLI attacks. Many of these tools have integrated machine learning technologies, aiming to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Penetration …

Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Development, Challenges, And Strategic Insights In Cyber Security Report Websites Using Artificial Inteligence, Pooja Sharma

Harrisburg University Dissertations and Theses

In an era marked by relentless cyber threats, the imperative of robust cyber security measures cannot be overstated. This thesis embarks on an in-depth exploration of the historical trajectory and contemporary relevance of penetration testing methodologies, elucidating their evolution from nascent origins to indispensable tools in the cyber security arsenal. Moreover, it undertakes the ambitious task of conceptualizing and implementing a cyber security report website, meticulously designed to fortify cyber resilience in the face of ever-evolving threats in the digital realm.

The research journey commences with an insightful examination of the historical antecedents of penetration testing, tracing its genesis in …

Cyber Attacks Against Industrial Control Systems, Adam Kardorff

LSU Master's Theses

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are the foundation of our critical infrastructure, and allow for the manufacturing of the products we need. These systems monitor and control power plants, water treatment plants, manufacturing plants, and much more. The security of these systems is crucial to our everyday lives and to the safety of those working with ICS. In this thesis we examined how an attacker can take control of these systems using a power plant simulator in the Applied Cybersecurity Lab at LSU. Running experiments on a live environment can be costly and dangerous, so using a simulated environment is the …

Cybersecurity In Critical Infrastructure Systems: Emulated Protection Relay, Mitchell Bylak

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cyber-attacks on Critical Systems Infrastructure have been steadily increasing across the world as the capabilities of and reliance on technology have grown throughout the 21st century, and despite the influx of new cybersecurity practices and technologies, the industry faces challenges in its cooperation between the government that regulates law practices and the private sector that owns and operates critical infrastructure and security, which has directly led to an absence of eas- ily accessible information and learning resources on cybersecurity for use in public environments and educational settings. This honors research thesis addresses these challenges by submitting the development of an …

Malicious Game Client Detection Using Feature Extraction And Machine Learning, Spencer J. Austad

Theses and Dissertations

Minecraft, the world's best-selling video game, boasts a vast and vibrant community of users who actively develop third-party software for the game. However, it has also garnered notoriety as one of the most malware-infested gaming environments. This poses a unique challenge because Minecraft software has many community-specific nuances that make traditional malware analysis less effective. These differences include unique file types, differing code formats, and lack of standardization in user-generated content analysis. This research looks at Minecraft clients in the two most common formats: Portable Executable and Java Archive file formats. Feature correlation matrices showed that malware features are too …

Sel4 On Risc-V - Developing High Assurance Platforms With Modular Open-Source Architectures, Michael A. Doran Jr

Masters Theses

Virtualization is now becoming an industry standard for modern embedded systems. Modern embedded systems can now support multiple applications on a single hardware platform while meeting power and cost requirements. Virtualization on an embedded system is achieved through the design of the hardware-software interface. Instruction set architecture, ISA, defines the hardware-software interface for an embedded system. At the hardware level the ISA, provides extensions to support virtualization.

In addition to an ISA that supports hypervisor extensions it is equally important to provide a hypervisor completely capable of exploiting the benefits of virtualization for securing modern embedded systems. Currently there does …

Generative Neural Network-Based Defense Methods Against Cyberattacks For Connected And Autonomous Vehicles, M Sabbir Salek

All Dissertations

The rapid advancement of communication and artificial intelligence technologies is propelling the development of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), revolutionizing the transportation landscape. However, increased connectivity and automation also present heightened potential for cyber threats. Recently, the emergence of generative neural networks (NNs) has unveiled a myriad of opportunities for complementing CAV applications, including generative NN-based cybersecurity measures to protect the CAVs in a transportation cyber-physical system (TCPS) from known and unknown cyberattacks. The goal of this dissertation is to explore the utility of the generative NNs for devising cyberattack detection and mitigation strategies for CAVs. To this end, the …

Resiliency Of Power Systems In The Cyber Layer: Application To Load Forecasting And Security Assessment, Mojtaba Dezvarei

Doctoral Dissertations

Integrating sensors, actuators, and communication infrastructure in the electrical grid creates a smart grid, known as a cyber-physical system (CPS), which combines the physical framework with a cyber layer. The cyber layer is crucial as it houses the decision-making responsible for reliable operation. However, the complexity of the physical layers, due partly to the deployment of integrated battery resources (IBRs), and the cyber layer itself, introduces challenges such as reliance on measurement quality and vulnerability to data corruption from cyber threats. These challenges result in uncertainties in the CPS framework, emphasizing the need for accurate and robust responses from the …

Cybersecurity In Industrial Automation Lab Design For Ee 435, Jules Khalil Emile Hajjar, Emily Zhou

Electrical Engineering

This project involves the creation of an instructional laboratory aimed at teaching cybersecurity for industrial automation applications. Specifically tailored for Electrical Engineering students at Cal Poly, the experiment focuses on configuring the Modicon M580, a PLC from Schneider Electric, and serves to introduce students to relevant cybersecurity protocols and techniques. This project will be implemented into the EE435 (Industrial Power Control and Automation) course curriculum upon Cal Poly’s transition to the semester system.

Detection Of Crypto-Ransomware Attack Using Deep Learning, Muna Jemal

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

The number one threat to the digital world is the exponential increase in ransomware attacks. Ransomware is malware that prevents victims from accessing their resources by locking or encrypting the data until a ransom is paid. With individuals and businesses growing dependencies on technology and the Internet, researchers in the cyber security field are looking for different measures to prevent malicious attackers from having a successful campaign. A new ransomware variant is being introduced daily, thus behavior-based analysis of detecting ransomware attacks is more effective than the traditional static analysis. This paper proposes a multi-variant classification to detect ransomware I/O …

Protecting The Infrastructure Of Michigan: Analyzing And Understanding Internet Infrastructure, Samuel Blaser, Travis Munyer, Damian Ramirez, Lester Juarez, Jackson Servant

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The Michigan Army National Guard DCOE is hoping to increase their understanding of the physical, electrical, protocol, and logical topography of internet service. In order to understand the infrastructure of the internet, information must be collected on its pieces. By studying, describing, and illustrating the infrastructure of the global internet we can develop hardening tactics, improve user training, and develop contingency plans in the case of an attack. The research is focused on where data lives, locating data centers in the region, identifying global infrastructure and who owns it, and potential for hardening. An interactive map has been created in …

Bridging The Gap Between Public Organizaions And Cybersecurity, Christopher Boutros

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Cyberattacks are a major problem for public organizations across the nation, and unfortunately for them, the frequency of these attacks is constantly growing. This project used a case study approach to explore the types of cybersecurity public organization agencies face and how those crimes can be mitigated. The goal of this paper is to understand how public organization agencies have prepared for cyberattacks and discuss additional suggestions to improve their current systems with the current research available This research provides an analysis of current cyber security systems, new technologies that can be implemented, roadblocks public agencies face before and during …

Enhancing Cyberspace Monitoring In The United States Aviation Industry: A Multi-Layered Approach For Addressing Emerging Threats, Matthew Janson

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This research project examined the cyberspace domain in the United States (U.S.) aviation industry from many different angles. The research involved learning about the U.S. aviation cyberspace environment, the landscape of cyber threats, new technologies like 5G and smart airports, cybersecurity frameworks and best practices, and the use of aviation cyberspace monitoring capabilities. The research looked at how vulnerable the aviation industry is from cyber-attacks, analyzed the possible effects of cyber-attacks on the industry, and suggests ways to improve the industry's cybersecurity posture. The project's main goal was to protect against possible cyber-attacks and make sure that the aviation industry …

Defense Of A Small Network, Isabella Adkins

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A sample network will be virtually created consisting of three routers, one switch, and three hosts. The network will be secured using various methods such as enabling passwords and encryption. After the network has been properly secured, various attacks will be attempted with the goal of breaking into the network. These attacks include reconnaissance (gathering information), penetrating the network using the tool Metasploit, and attempting to get a credential phishing email to end users. If successful in the attacks, the network will be revisited and analyzed for any weaknesses or oversights.

Small Business Office Network, Michael Gerome

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will emulate a small office network environment. The project will demonstrate the process of building and configuring the network to meet the requirements laid out in the project plan. This network includes four subnets with Windows 10 end devices and a Kali Linux device, it also includes five Cisco layer 2 switches and three Cisco routers. There are also three subnets connecting the routers to each other to enable routing between the subnets. After the network environment is set up, various penetration tests are performed from the Kali Linux device to gather information. The Nmap reconnaissance tool is …

Multifaceted Cybersecurity Analysis: Reconnaissance, Exploitation And Mitigation In A Controlled Network Environment, Austin Coontz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report details a network penetration test in a simulated environment using GNS3, focusing on the configuration of routers, switches, and hosts. The project successfully identified and exploited network vulnerabilities, including FTP access, misconfigured sudo permissions, and SMB protocol weaknesses. The penetration testing process utilized tools like fping and nmap for reconnaissance and vulnerability scanning, revealing the importance of device configurations in network security. The project concluded with mitigation strategies, emphasizing the need for secure access, robust password policies, and security controls. The experience underscored the significance of continuous learning and adaptation in the ever-evolving field of cybersecurity. The project …

Behavioral Biometrics-Based Continuous User Authentication, Sanket Vilas Salunke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The field of cybersecurity is exploring new ways to defend against cyber-attacks, including a technique called continuous user authentication. This method uses keystroke (typing) data to continuously match the user's typing pattern with patterns previously recorded using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the user. While this approach has the potential to improve security, it also has some challenges, including the time it takes to register a user, the performance of machine learning algorithms on real-world data, and latency within the system. In this study, the researchers proposed solutions to these issues by using transfer learning to reduce user registration time, …

Cloud Container Security’ Next Move, Vishakha Sadhwani

Dissertations and Theses

In the last few years, it is apparent to cybersecurity experts everywhere that the proverbial container tech genie is out of the bottle, and has been widely embraced across multiple organizations. To achieve the flexibility of building and deploying applications anywhere and everywhere, cloud native environments have gained great momentum and made the development lifecycle simpler than ever. However, container environments brings with them a range of cybersecurity issues that includes images, containers, hosts, runtimes, registries, and orchestration platforms, which needs the necessity to focus on investing in securing your container stack.

According to this report[1], released by cloud-native …

The Observation Of Smart Camera Security, Shun-Hsin Wang

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

At present, as the Internet of Thing (IoT) is increasingly widely used in human life, how to protect IoT devices from Malware attack has become an inevitable problem. This project is an analysis of two malwares and how they impact the Internet of Thing (IoT), especially the smart cameras common in people’s life and used in the enterprise. The analysis looks at the vulnerabilities of smart cameras and how Mirai malware and Persirai malware take advantage to these vulnerabilities to attack smart cameras within the network through the simulation process. Through the simulation, although both malwares were implemented using different …

Cyber Resilience Analytics For Cyber-Physical Systems, Md Ariful Haque

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are complex systems that evolve from the integrations of components dealing with physical processes and real-time computations, along with networking. CPSs often incorporate approaches merging from different scientific fields such as embedded systems, control systems, operational technology, information technology systems (ITS), and cybernetics. Today critical infrastructures (CIs) (e.g., energy systems, electric grids, etc.) and other CPSs (e.g., manufacturing industries, autonomous transportation systems, etc.) are experiencing challenges in dealing with cyberattacks. Major cybersecurity concerns are rising around CPSs because of their ever-growing use of information technology based automation. Often the security concerns are limited to probability-based possible attack …

Software Protection And Secure Authentication For Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing, Muhammad Hataba

Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC.

In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our …

Supporting The Discovery, Reuse, And Validation Of Cybersecurity Requirements At The Early Stages Of The Software Development Lifecycle, Jessica Antonia Steinmann

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The focus of this research is to develop an approach that enhances the elicitation and specification of reusable cybersecurity requirements. Cybersecurity has become a global concern as cyber-attacks are projected to cost damages totaling more than $10.5 trillion dollars by 2025. Cybersecurity requirements are more challenging to elicit than other requirements because they are nonfunctional requirements that requires cybersecurity expertise and knowledge of the proposed system. The goal of this research is to generate cybersecurity requirements based on knowledge acquired from requirements elicitation and analysis activities, to provide cybersecurity specifications without requiring the specialized knowledge of a cybersecurity expert, and …

Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence Methods For Cybersecurity Data Within The Aviation Ecosystem, Anna Baron Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Aviation cybersecurity research has proven to be a complex topic due to the intricate nature of the aviation ecosystem. Over the last two decades, research has been centered on isolated modules of the entire aviation systems, and it has lacked the state-of-the-art tools (e.g. ML/AI methods) that other cybersecurity disciplines have leveraged in their fields. Security research in aviation in the last two decades has mainly focused on: (i) reverse engineering avionics and software certification; (ii) communications due to the rising new technologies of Software Defined Radios (SDRs); (iii) networking cybersecurity concerns such as the inter and intra connections of …

Development Of A Security-Focused Multi-Channel Communication Protocol And Associated Quality Of Secure Service (Qoss) Metrics, Paul M. Simon

Theses and Dissertations

The threat of eavesdropping, and the challenge of recognizing and correcting for corrupted or suppressed information in communication systems is a consistent challenge. Effectively managing protection mechanisms requires an ability to accurately gauge the likelihood or severity of a threat, and adapt the security features available in a system to mitigate the threat. This research focuses on the design and development of a security-focused communication protocol at the session-layer based on a re-prioritized communication architecture model and associated metrics. From a probabilistic model that considers data leakage and data corruption as surrogates for breaches of confidentiality and integrity, a set …

Anonymization & Generation Of Network Packet Datasets Using Deep Learning, Spencer K. Vecile

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Corporate networks are constantly bombarded by malicious actors trying to gain access. The current state of the art in protecting networks is deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, for an IDS to be effective it needs to be trained on a good dataset. The best datasets for training an IDS are real data captured from large corporate networks. Unfortunately, companies cannot release their network data due to privacy concerns creating a lack of public cybersecurity data. In this thesis I take a novel approach to network dataset anonymization using character-level LSTM models to learn the characteristics of a dataset; …

Power Market Cybersecurity And Profit-Targeting Cyberattacks, Qiwei Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies and business to operate through remote platforms, which has made everyday life and everyone more digitally connected than ever before. The cybersecurity has become a bigger priority in all aspects of life. A few real-world cases have demonstrated the current capability of cyberattacks as in [1], [2], and [3]. These cases invalidate the traditional belief that cyberattacks are unable to penetrate real-world industrial systems. Beyond the physical damage, some attackers target financial arbitrage advantages brought by false data injection attacks (FDIAs) [4]. Malicious breaches into power market operations could induce catastrophic consequences on …

Predictors Of Email Response: Determinants Of The Intention Of Not Following Security Recommendations, Miguel Angel Toro-Jarrin

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Organizations and government leaders are concerned about cyber incidents. For some time, researchers have studied what motivates people to act in ways that put the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information in organizations at risk. Still, several areas remained unexplored, including the role of employees’ evaluation of the organizational systems and the role of value orientation at work as precursors of secure and insecure actions in relation to information technologies (information security [IS] action). The objective of this research project was to examine how the evaluations of formal and informal security norms are associated with the intention to follow them …

Cyber Deception For Critical Infrastructure Resiliency, Md Ali Reza Al Amin

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The high connectivity of modern cyber networks and devices has brought many improvements to the functionality and efficiency of networked systems. Unfortunately, these benefits have come with many new entry points for attackers, making systems much more vulnerable to intrusions. Thus, it is critically important to protect cyber infrastructure against cyber attacks. The static nature of cyber infrastructure leads to adversaries performing reconnaissance activities and identifying potential threats. Threats related to software vulnerabilities can be mitigated upon discovering a vulnerability and-, developing and releasing a patch to remove the vulnerability. Unfortunately, the period between discovering a vulnerability and applying a …

Investigation Of Python Variable Privacy, Joshua Bartholomew

Honors Theses

This study looks at the relative security of Python regarding private variables and functions used in most other programming languages. Python has only grown in popularity due to its simple syntax and developing capabilities. However, little research has been published about how secure Python code and programs compiled from Python code actually are. This research seeks to expose vulnerabilities in Python code and determine what must be done for these vulnerabilities to be exploited by hackers to abuse potentially sensitive information contained within the program.

The proposed methodology includes examining the private variable concept in other programming languages and conducting …

The Applications Of The Internet Of Things In The Medical Field, Cody Repass

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm promises to make “things” include a more generic set of entities such as smart devices, sensors, human beings, and any other IoT objects to be accessible at anytime and anywhere. IoT varies widely in its applications, and one of its most beneficial uses is in the medical field. However, the large attack surface and vulnerabilities of IoT systems needs to be secured and protected. Security is a requirement for IoT systems in the medical field where the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies.

This work investigates various applications of IoT in healthcare …