Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Sec-Lib: Protecting Scholarly Digital Libraries From Infected Papers Using Active Machine Learning Framework, Nir Nissim, Aviad Cohen, Jian Wu, Andrea Lanzi, Lior Rokach, Yuval Elovici, Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Researchers from academia and the corporate-sector rely on scholarly digital libraries to access articles. Attackers take advantage of innocent users who consider the articles' files safe and thus open PDF-files with little concern. In addition, researchers consider scholarly libraries a reliable, trusted, and untainted corpus of papers. For these reasons, scholarly digital libraries are an attractive-target and inadvertently support the proliferation of cyber-attacks launched via malicious PDF-files. In this study, we present related vulnerabilities and malware distribution approaches that exploit the vulnerabilities of scholarly digital libraries. We evaluated over two-million scholarly papers in the CiteSeerX library and found the library …

Facepet: Enhancing Bystanders' Facial Privacy With Smart Wearables/Internet Of Things, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally, Luis Y. Matos Garcia, Jaouad A. Mouloud, Scott Griffith

Information Science Faculty Publications

Given the availability of cameras in mobile phones, drones and Internet-connected devices, facial privacy has become an area of major interest in the last few years, especially when photos are captured and can be used to identify bystanders’ faces who may have not given consent for these photos to be taken and be identified. Some solutions to protect facial privacy in photos currently exist. However, many of these solutions do not give a choice to bystanders because they rely on algorithms that de-identify photos or protocols to deactivate devices and systems not controlled by bystanders, thereby being dependent on the …

Bipartite Quantum Interactions: Entangling And Information Processing Abilities, Siddhartha Das

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to advance the theory behind quantum information processing tasks, by deriving fundamental limits on bipartite quantum interactions and dynamics. A bipartite quantum interaction corresponds to an underlying Hamiltonian that governs the physical transformation of a two-body open quantum system. Under such an interaction, the physical transformation of a bipartite quantum system is considered in the presence of a bath, which may be inaccessible to an observer. The goal is to determine entangling abilities of such arbitrary bipartite quantum interactions. Doing so provides fundamental limitations on information processing tasks, including entanglement distillation and secret key …

A New Framework For Securing, Extracting And Analyzing Big Forensic Data, Hitesh Sachdev, Hayden Wimmer, Lei Chen, Carl Rebman

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Finding new methods to investigate criminal activities, behaviors, and responsibilities has always been a challenge for forensic research. Advances in big data, technology, and increased capabilities of smartphones has contributed to the demand for modern techniques of examination. Smartphones are ubiquitous, transformative, and have become a goldmine for forensics research. Given the right tools and research methods investigating agencies can help crack almost any illegal activity using smartphones. This paper focuses on conducting forensic analysis in exposing a terrorist or criminal network and introduces a new Big Forensic Data Framework model where different technologies of Hadoop and EnCase software are …

Implementation Of Secure Dnp3 Architecture Of Scada System For Smart Grids, Uday Bhaskar Boyanapalli

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

With the recent advances in the power grid system connecting to the internet, data sharing, and networking enables space for hackers to maliciously attack them based on their vulnerabilities. Vital stations in the smart grid are the generation, transmission, distribution, and customer substations are connected and controlled remotely by the network. Every substation is controlled by a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system which communicates on DNP3 protocol on Internet/IP which has many security vulnerabilities. This research will focus on Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3) communication which is used in the smart grid to communicate between the controller devices. We …

Phasorsec: Protocol Security Filters For Wide Area Measurement Systems, Prashant Anantharaman, Kartik Palani, Rafael Brantley, Sergey Bratus, Sean W. Smith

Dartmouth Scholarship

The addition of synchrophasors to the power grid to improve observability comes at the cost of an increased attack surface: the wide area measurement system. A common source of zero-days, that can be used to exploit the system, is improper input validation. The strict availability and timing requirements of the grid make it critical that input validation be done right and in a timely fashion. PhasorSec is a hardened security filter for the synchrophasor communication protocol, C37.118. PhasorSec is built using language theoretic principles which treat all input as a language with a specific grammar that defines what input must …

Blockchain Based Efficient And Robust Fair Payment For Outsourcing Services In Cloud Computing, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Ximeng Liu, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an attractive business model of cloud computing, outsourcing services usually involve online payment and security issues. The mutual distrust between users and outsourcing service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing payment solutions only consider a specific type of outsourcing service and rely on a trusted third-party to realize fairness. In this paper, in order to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third-party, trusted or not, we introduce BCPay, a blockchain based fair payment framework for outsourcing services in cloud computing. We first present the …

Digital Forensics In The Next Five Years, Laoise Luciano, Ibrahim Baggili, Mateusz Topor, Peter Casey, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyber forensics has encountered major obstacles over the last decade and is at a crossroads. This paper presents data that was obtained during the National Workshop on Redefining Cyber Forensics (NWRCF) on May 23-24, 2017 supported by the National Science Foundation and organized by the University of New Haven. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed from twenty-four cyber forensics expert panel members. This work identified important themes that need to be addressed by the community, focusing on (1) where the domain currently is; (2) where it needs to go and; (3) steps needed to improve it. Furthermore, based on the …

I Know What You Did Last Summer: Your Smart Home Internet Of Things And Your Iphone Forensically Ratting You Out, Gokila Dorai, Shiva Houshmand, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The adoption of smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues to grow. What if your devices can snitch on you and let us know where you are at any given point in time? In this work we examined the forensic artifacts produced by Nest devices, and in specific, we examined the logical backup structure of an iPhone used to control a Nest thermostat, Nest Indoor Camera and a Nest Outdoor Camera. We also integrated the Google Home Mini as another method of controlling the studied Smart Home devices. Our work is the primary account for the examination of Nest …

Forensic Analysis Of Immersive Virtual Reality Social Applications: A Primary Account, Ananya Yarramreddy, Peter Gromkowski, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our work presents the primary account for exploring the forensics of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems and their social applications. The Social VR applications studied in this work include Bigscreen, Altspace VR, Rec Room and Facebook Spaces. We explored the two most widely adopted consumer VR systems: the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Our tests examined the efficacy of reconstructing evidence from network traffic as well as the systems themselves. The results showed that a significant amount of forensically relevant data such as user names, user profile pictures, events, and system details may be recovered. We anticipate that this …

Compact Hardware Implementation Of A Sha-3 Core For Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Yi Yang, Debiao He, Neeraj Kumar, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

One of the most important Internet of Things applications is the wireless body sensor network (WBSN), which can provide universal health care, disease prevention, and control. Due to large deployments of small scale smart sensors in WBSNs, security, and privacy guarantees (e.g., security and safety-critical data, sensitive private information) are becoming a challenging issue because these sensor nodes communicate using an open channel, i.e., Internet. We implement data integrity (to resist against malicious tampering) using the secure hash algorithm 3 (SHA-3) when smart sensors in WBSNs communicate with each other using the Internet. Due to the limited resources (i.e., storage, …

Survey Results On Adults And Cybersecurity Education, Frank Breitinger, Joseph Ricci, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyberattacks and identity theft are common problems nowadays where researchers often say that humans are the weakest link in the security chain. Therefore, this survey focused on analyzing the interest for adults for ‘cyber threat education seminars’, e.g., how to project themselves and their loved ones. Specifically, we asked questions to understand a possible audience, willingness for paying / time commitment, or fields of interest as well as background and previous training experience. The survey was conducted in late 2016 and taken by 233 participants. The results show that many are worried about cyber threats and about their children exploring …

Privacy-Preserving Mining Of Association Rule On Outsourced Cloud Data From Multiple Parties, Lin Liu, Jinshu Su, Rongmao Chen, Ximeng Liu, Xiaofeng Wang, Shuhui Chen, Ho-Fung Fung Leung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It has been widely recognized as a challenge to carry out data analysis and meanwhile preserve its privacy in the cloud. In this work, we mainly focus on a well-known data analysis approach namely association rule mining. We found that the data privacy in this mining approach have not been well considered so far. To address this problem, we propose a scheme for privacy-preserving association rule mining on outsourced cloud data which are uploaded from multiple parties in a twin-cloud architecture. In particular, we mainly consider the scenario where the data owners and miners have different encryption keys that are …

Experience Constructing The Artifact Genome Project (Agp): Managing The Domain's Knowledge One Artifact At A Time, Cinthya Grajeda, Laura Sanchez, Ibrahim Baggili, Devon R. Clark, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

While various tools have been created to assist the digital forensics community with acquiring, processing, and organizing evidence and indicating the existence of artifacts, very few attempts have been made to establish a centralized system for archiving artifacts. The Artifact Genome Project (AGP) has aimed to create the largest vetted and freely available digital forensics repository for Curated Forensic Artifacts (CuFAs). This paper details the experience of building, implementing, and maintaining such a system by sharing design decisions, lessons learned, and future work. We also discuss the impact of AGP in both the professional and academic realms of digital forensics. …

Precognition: Automated Digital Forensic Readiness System For Mobile Computing Devices In Enterprises, Jayaprakash Govindaraj, Robin Verma, Gaurav Gupta

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Enterprises are facing an unprecedented risk of security incidents due to the influx of emerging technologies, like smartphones and wearables. Most of the current Mobile security systems are not maturing in pace with technological advances. They lack the ability to learn and adapt from the past knowledge base. In the case of a security incident, enterprises find themselves underprepared for the lack of evidence and data. The systems are not designed to be forensic ready. There is a need for automated security analysis and forensically ready solution, which can learn and continuously adapt to new challenges, improve efficiency and productivity …

Comparative Study Of Deep Learning Models For Network Intrusion Detection, Brian Lee, Sandhya Amaresh, Clifford Green, Daniel Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of deep learning approaches to network intrusion detection. A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a critical component of every Internet connected system due to likely attacks from both external and internal sources. A NIDS is used to detect network born attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malware replication, and intruders that are operating within the system. Multiple deep learning approaches have been proposed for intrusion detection systems. We evaluate three models, a vanilla deep neural net (DNN), self-taught learning (STL) approach, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Long Short …

Application Of Huffman Data Compression Algorithm In Hashing Computation, Lakshmi Narasimha Devulapalli Venkata,

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Cryptography is the art of protecting information by encrypting the original message into an unreadable format. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an arbitrary length of the text message as input and converts that text into a fixed length of encrypted characters which is infeasible to invert. The values returned by the hash function are called as the message digest or simply hash values. Because of its versatility, hash functions are used in many applications such as message authentication, digital signatures, and password hashing [Thomsen and Knudsen, 2005].

The purpose of this study is to apply …

Criteria-Based Encryption, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a new type of public-key encryption called Criteria-based Encryption (or , for short). Different from Attribute-based Encryption, in , we consider the access policies as criteria carrying different weights. A user must hold some cases (or answers) satisfying the criteria and have sufficient weights in order to successfully decrypt a message. We then propose two Schemes under different settings: the first scheme requires a user to have at least one case for a criterion specified by the encryptor in the access structure, while the second scheme requires a user to have all the cases for each criterion. We …

Automated Man-In-The-Middle Attack Against Wi‑Fi Networks, Martin Vondráček, Jan Pluskal, Ondřej Ryšavý

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Currently used wireless communication technologies suffer security weaknesses that can be exploited allowing to eavesdrop or to spoof network communication. In this paper, we present a practical tool that can automate the attack on wireless security. The developed package called wifimitm provides functionality for the automation of MitM attacks in the wireless environment. The package combines several existing tools and attack strategies to bypass the wireless security mechanisms, such as WEP, WPA, and WPS. The presented tool can be integrated into a solution for automated penetration testing. Also, a popularization of the fact that such attacks can be easily automated …

Estimating Defensive Cyber Operator Decision Confidence, Markus M. Borneman

Theses and Dissertations

As technology continues to advance the domain of cyber defense, signature and heuristic detection mechanisms continue to require human operators to make judgements about the correctness of machine decisions. Human cyber defense operators rely on their experience, expertise, and understanding of network security, when conducting cyber-based investigations, in order to detect and respond to cyber alerts. Ever growing quantities of cyber alerts and network traffic, coupled with systemic manpower issues, mean no one has the time to review or change decisions made by operators. Since these cyber alert decisions ultimately do not get reviewed again, an inaccurate decision could cause …

Assured Android Execution Environments, Brandon P. Froberg

Theses and Dissertations

Current cybersecurity best practices, techniques, tactics and procedures are insufficient to ensure the protection of Android systems. Software tools leveraging formal methods use mathematical means to assure both a design and implementation for a system and these methods can be used to provide security assurances. The goal of this research is to determine methods of assuring isolation when executing Android software in a contained environment. Specifically, this research demonstrates security properties relevant to Android software containers can be formally captured and validated, and that an implementation can be formally verified to satisfy a corresponding specification. A three-stage methodology called "The …

Keep It Simple, Keep It Safe - Research On The Impacts Of Increasing Complexity Of Modern Enterprise Applications, Shawn Ware, David Phillips

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

As the Cybersecurity program within UNO continues to adapt to the ever-changing world of information systems and information security, the Cybersecurity Capstone has recently become an active, community-involvement project, where real-world organizations can receive valuable, useful research and information from students on their way towards a degree. This presentation encompasses two such projects from the Cybersecurity Capstone, looking at how modern, more complex systems can often increase system vulnerability.

Constant-Size Ciphertexts In Threshold Attribute-Based Encryption Without Dummy Attributes, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo, Qiong Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an augmentation of public key encryption that allows users to encrypt and decrypt messages based on users' attributes. In a (t, s) threshold ABE, users who can decrypt a ciphertext must hold at least t attributes among the s attributes specified by the encryptor. At PKC 2010, Herranz, Laguillaumie and Raft& proposed the first threshold ABE with constant-size ciphertexts. In order to ensure the encryptor can flexibly select the attribute set and a threshold value, they use dummy attributes to satisfy the decryption requirement. The advantage of their scheme is that any addition or removal of …

An Overview Of The Usage Of Default Passwords, Brandon Knierem, Xiaolu Zhang, Philip Levine, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The recent Mirai botnet attack demonstrated the danger of using default passwords and showed it is still a major problem. In this study we investigated several common applications and their password policies. Specifically, we analyzed if these applications: (1) have default passwords or (2) allow the user to set a weak password (i.e., they do not properly enforce a password policy). Our study shows that default passwords are still a significant problem: 61% of applications inspected initially used a default or blank password. When changing the password, 58% allowed a blank password, 35% allowed a weak password of 1 character.

A Reliable Data Provenance And Privacy Preservation Architecture For Business-Driven Cyber-Physical Systems Using Blockchain, Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Juan Zhao, Danyi Li, Jihong Liu

VMASC Publications

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) including power systems, transportation, industrial control systems, etc. support both advanced control and communications among system components. Frequent data operations could introduce random failures and malicious attacks or even bring down the whole system. The dependency on a central authority increases the risk of single point of failure. To establish an immutable data provenance scheme for CPS, the authors adopt blockchain and propose a decentralized architecture to assure data integrity. In business-driven CPS, end users are required to share their personal information with multiple third parties. To prevent data leakage and preserve user privacy, the authors isolate …

Applying Machine Learning To Advance Cyber Security: Network Based Intrusion Detection Systems, Hassan Hadi Latheeth Al-Maksousy

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Many new devices, such as phones and tablets as well as traditional computer systems, rely on wireless connections to the Internet and are susceptible to attacks. Two important types of attacks are the use of malware and exploiting Internet protocol vulnerabilities in devices and network systems. These attacks form a threat on many levels and therefore any approach to dealing with these nefarious attacks will take several methods to counter. In this research, we utilize machine learning to detect and classify malware, visualize, detect and classify worms, as well as detect deauthentication attacks, a form of Denial of Service (DoS). …

Application Of 3d Delaunay Triangulation In Fingerprint Authentication System, Wencheng Yang, Ahmed Ibrahim, Junaid Chaudhry, Song Wang, Jiankun Hu, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Biometric security has found many applications in Internet of Things (IoT) security. Many mobile devices including smart phones have supplied fingerprint authentication function. However, the authentication performance in such restricted environment has been downgraded significantly. A number of methods based on Delaunay triangulation have been proposed for minutiae-based fingerprint matching, due to some favorable properties of the Delaunay triangulation under image distortion. However, all existing methods are based on 2D pattern, of which each unit, a Delaunay triangle, can only provide limited discrimination ability and could cause low matching performance. In this paper, we propose a 3D Delaunay triangulation based …

A Security Review Of Local Government Using Nist Csf: A Case Study, Ahmed Ibrahim, Craig Valli, Ian Mcateer, Junaid Chaudhry

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Evaluating cyber security risk is a challenging task regardless of an organisation’s nature of business or size, however, an essential activity. This paper uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cyber security framework (CSF) to assess the cyber security posture of a local government organisation in Western Australia. Our approach enabled the quantification of risks for specific NIST CSF core functions and respective categories and allowed making recommendations to address the gaps discovered to attain the desired level of compliance. This has led the organisation to strategically target areas related to their people, processes, and technologies, thus mitigating …

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 …