Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Domain Specific Language For Digital Forensics And Incident Response Analysis, Christopher D. Stelly

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

One of the longstanding conceptual problems in digital forensics is the dichotomy between the need for verifiable and reproducible forensic investigations, and the lack of practical mechanisms to accomplish them. With nearly four decades of professional digital forensic practice, investigator notes are still the primary source of reproducibility information, and much of it is tied to the functions of specific, often proprietary, tools.

The lack of a formal means of specification for digital forensic operations results in three major problems. Specifically, there is a critical lack of:

a) standardized and automated means to scientifically verify accuracy of digital forensic tools; …

Advanced Security Analysis For Emergent Software Platforms, Mohannad Alhanahnah

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emergent software ecosystems, boomed by the advent of smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, are perpetually sophisticated, deployed into highly dynamic environments, and facilitating interactions across heterogeneous domains. Accordingly, assessing the security thereof is a pressing need, yet requires high levels of scalability and reliability to handle the dynamism involved in such volatile ecosystems.

This dissertation seeks to enhance conventional security detection methods to cope with the emergent features of contemporary software ecosystems. In particular, it analyzes the security of Android and IoT ecosystems by developing rigorous vulnerability detection methods. A critical aspect of this work is the …

Rhetsec_ | Rhetorical Security, Jennifer Mead

Culminating Projects in English

Rhetsec_ examines the rhetorical situation, the rhetorical appeals, and how phishing emails simulate "real" emails in five categories of phishing emails. While the first focus of cybersecurity is security, you must also understand the language of computers to know how to secure them. Phishing is one way to compromise security using computers, and so the computer becomes a tool for malicious language (phishing emails and malware) to be transmitted. Therefore to be concerned with securing computers, then you must also be concerned with language. Language is rhetoric's domain, and the various rhetorical elements which create an identity of the phisher …

Ldakm-Eiot: Lightweight Device Authentication And Key Management Mechanism For Edge-Based Iot Deployment, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, Youngho Park

VMASC Publications

In recent years, edge computing has emerged as a new concept in the computing paradigm that empowers several future technologies, such as 5G, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and the Internet of Things (IoT), by providing cloud computing facilities, as well as services to the end users. However, open communication among the entities in an edge based IoT environment makes it vulnerable to various potential attacks that are executed by an adversary. Device authentication is one of the prominent techniques in security that permits an IoT device to authenticate mutually with a cloud server with the help of an edge node. If authentication …

Preventing Browser Fingerprinting By Randomizing Canvas, Rianna Quiogue

Honors Theses

Whether users know it or not, their online behaviors are being tracked and stored by many of the websites they visit regularly through a technique called browser fingerprinting. Just like a person's physical fingerprint can identify them, users' browser fingerprints can identify them on the Internet. This thesis outlines the techniques used in browser fingerprinting and explains how although it can be used for good, it can also be a major threat to people's online privacy and security. Since browser fingerprinting has gained popularity among many websites and advertising companies, researchers have been developing ways to counteract its effectiveness by …

The Performance Cost Of Security, Lucy R. Bowen

Master's Theses

Historically, performance has been the most important feature when optimizing computer hardware. Modern processors are so highly optimized that every cycle of computation time matters. However, this practice of optimizing for performance at all costs has been called into question by new microarchitectural attacks, e.g. Meltdown and Spectre. Microarchitectural attacks exploit the effects of microarchitectural components or optimizations in order to leak data to an attacker. These attacks have caused processor manufacturers to introduce performance impacting mitigations in both software and silicon.

To investigate the performance impact of the various mitigations, a test suite of forty-seven different tests was created. …

Hacking The Extended Mind: The Security Implications Of The New Metaphysics, Robin L. Zebrowski

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Computer security expert Paul Syverson has argued that there is a computer security equivalent of gaslighting: where a clever adversary could convince some system that some component that is not really a part of the system is in fact a part of the system. If non-biological items from our environments (or even pieces of our environments themselves) can be part of our minds (the standard Extended Mind hypothesis, EM), they are therefore part of our selves, and therefore subject to Syverson’s worry about boundary in a way that has not been explored before. If some version of EM holds, then …

Securing Our Future Homes: Smart Home Security Issues And Solutions, Nicholas Romano

Senior Honors Theses

The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, is a new technology transforming businesses, individuals’ daily lives and the operation of entire countries. With more and more devices becoming equipped with IoT technology, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. The components that make up a smart home are at risk for different types of attacks; therefore, security engineers are developing solutions to current problems and are predicting future types of attacks. This paper will analyze IoT smart home components, explain current security risks, and suggest possible solutions. According to “What is a Smart Home” (n.d.), a smart home is a …

Cyber Security- A New Secured Password Generation Algorithm With Graphical Authentication And Alphanumeric Passwords Along With Encryption, Akash Rao

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Graphical passwords are always considered as an alternative of alphanumeric passwords for their better memorability and usability [1]. Alphanumeric passwords provide an adequate amount of satisfaction, but they do not offer better memorability compared to graphical passwords [1].

On the other hand, graphical passwords are considered less secured and provide better memorability [1]. Therefore many researchers have researched on graphical passwords to overcome the vulnerability. One of the most significant weaknesses of the graphical passwords is "Shoulder Surfing Attack," which means, sneaking into a victim's computer to learn the whole password or part of password or some confidential information. Such …

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 …

Social Engineering In Call Centers And Ways To Reduce It, Maureen York

Economic Crime Forensics Capstones

Social engineering is the use of trickery, deception, persuasion, emotional manipulation, impersonation, and abuse of trust to gain information or access through the use of a human interface (Thompson, 2006). Social engineering relies on the human behavior in order to gain information or access. The technique of social engineering can be performed in numerous ways and has been proven to be an effective way for perpetrators to obtain valuable information.

This capstone project, I will focus on social engineering of call centers and the steps organizations can take to reduce it. For most organizations, the call centers or customer support …

A New Network Model For Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing Using Blockchain Technology, Daire Homan, Ian Shiel, Christina Thorpe

Conference Papers

The aim of this research is to propose a new blockchain network model that facilitates the secure dissemination of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) data. The primary motivations for this study are based around the recent changes to information security legislation in the European Union and the challenges that Computer Security and Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) face when trying to share actionable and highly sensitive data within systems where participants do not always share the same interests or motivations. We discuss the common problems within the domain of CTI sharing and we propose a new model, that leverages the security properties …

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 …

Understanding The Ntru Cryptosystem, Benjamin Clark

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this paper, we will examine the NTRU Public Key Cryptosystem. The NTRU cryptosystem was created by Joseph Silverman, Jeffery Hoffstein, and Jill Pipher in 1996. This system uses truncated polynomial rings to encrypt and decrypt data. It was recently released into the public domain in 2013. This paper will describe how this cryptosystem works and give a basic understanding on how to encrypt and decrypt using this system.

Security And Accuracy Of Fingerprint-Based Biometrics: A Review, Wencheng Yang, Song Wang, Jiankun Hu, Guanglou Zhang, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Biometric systems are increasingly replacing traditional password- and token-based authentication systems. Security and recognition accuracy are the two most important aspects to consider in designing a biometric system. In this paper, a comprehensive review is presented to shed light on the latest developments in the study of fingerprint-based biometrics covering these two aspects with a view to improving system security and recognition accuracy. Based on a thorough analysis and discussion, limitations of existing research work are outlined and suggestions for future work are provided. It is shown in the paper that researchers continue to face challenges in tackling the two …