Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A 2013 Study Of Wireless Network Security In New Zealand: Are We There Yet?, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This research examines the current level of security in wireless networks in New Zealand. A comprehensive wardrive covering the length of the country was made in January 2013 to ensure accurate comparisons from two previous wardrives as well as comparisons between the four main cities and the suburbs can be made. With 16 years since the introduction of the original IEEE 802.11 wireless standard having passed, an examination is made of the current state of wireless security of networks throughout New Zealand and the Auckland suburbs, and where possible compares these results with similar studies undertaken in 2004 and 2011. …

Privacy And Legal Issues In Cloud Computing - The Smme Position In South Africa, Mathias Mujinga

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Cloud computing (CC) brings substantial benefits to organizations and their clients. Information technology (IT) users in developing countries, especially those in underdeveloped communities, are gaining easy and cost‐effective access to a variety of services, from entertainment to banking. South Africa has outlined a national e‐strategy that aims to improve those communities, by providing frameworks for access to information and communications technology (ICT). The products and services of small‐, medium and micro‐sized enterprises (SMME) are now reaching a wider audience through the use of technology. CC can go a long way to help government realize the national e‐strategy. There are numerous …

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 …

Exposing And Mitigating Privacy Loss In Crowdsourced Survey Platforms, Thivya Kandappu, Vijay Sivaraman, Arik Friedman, Roksana Borell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Google Consumer Surveys can profile users based on their inputs to online surveys. In this work we first demonstrate how easily user privacy can be compromised by collating information from multiple surveys. We then propose, develop, and evaluate a crowdsourcing survey platform called Loki that allows users to control their privacy loss via atsource obfuscation.

A Novel Defense Mechanism Against Web Crawler Intrusion, Alireza Aghamohammadi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Web robots also known as crawlers or spiders are used by search engines, hackers and spammers to gather information about web pages. Timely detection and prevention of unwanted crawlers increases privacy and security of websites. In this research, a novel method to identify web crawlers is proposed to prevent unwanted crawler to access websites. The proposed method suggests a five-factor identification process to detect unwanted crawlers. This study provides the pretest and posttest results along with a systematic evaluation of web pages with the proposed identification technique versus web pages without the proposed identification process. An experiment was performed with …

What You Want Is Not What You Get: Predicting Sharing Policies For Text-Based Content On Facebook, Arunesh Sinha, Li Yan, Lujo Bauer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As the amount of content users publish on social networking sites rises, so do the danger and costs of inadvertently sharing content with an unintended audience. Studies repeatedly show that users frequently misconfigure their policies or misunderstand the privacy features offered by social networks. A way to mitigate these problems is to develop automated tools to assist users in correctly setting their policy. This paper explores the viability of one such approach: we examine the extent to which machine learning can be used to deduce users' sharing preferences for content posted on Facebook. To generate data on which to evaluate …

Trajectory Privacy Preservation In Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks, Xinyu Jin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, there has been an enormous growth of location-aware devices, such as GPS embedded cell phones, mobile sensors and radio-frequency identification tags. The age of combining sensing, processing and communication in one device, gives rise to a vast number of applications leading to endless possibilities and a realization of mobile Wireless Sensor Network (mWSN) applications. As computing, sensing and communication become more ubiquitous, trajectory privacy becomes a critical piece of information and an important factor for commercial success. While on the move, sensor nodes continuously transmit data streams of sensed values and spatiotemporal information, known as ``trajectory information". …

The Security And Privacy Implications Of Energy-Proportional Computing, Shane S. Clark

Open Access Dissertations

The parallel trends of greater energy-efficiency and more aggressive power management are yielding computers that inch closer to energy-proportional computing with every generation. Energy-proportional computing, in which power consumption scales closely with workload, has unintended side effects for security and privacy. Saving energy is an unqualified boon for computer operators, but it is becoming easier to identify computing activities by observing power consumption because an energy-proportional computer reveals more about its workload.

This thesis demonstrates the potential for system-level power analysis---the inference of a computers internal states based on power observation at the "plug." It also examines which hardware components …

Exploring Privacy And Personalization In Information Retrieval Applications, Henry A. Feild

Open Access Dissertations

A growing number of information retrieval applications rely on search behavior aggregated over many users. If aggregated data such as search query reformulations is not handled properly, it can allow users to be identified and their privacy compromised. Besides leveraging aggregate data, it is also common for applications to make use of user-specific behavior in order to provide a personalized experience for users. Unlike aggregate data, privacy is not an issue in individual personalization since users are the only consumers of their own data.

The goal of this work is to explore the effects of personalization and privacy preservation methods …

A Highly Efficient Rfid Distance Bounding Protocol Without Real-Time Prf Evaluation, Yunhui Zhuang, Anjia Yang, Duncan S. Wong, Guomin Yang, Qi Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a common situation among current distance bounding protocols in the literature: they set the fast bit exchange phase after a slow phase in which the nonces for both the reader and a tag are exchanged. The output computed in the slow phase is acting as the responses in the subsequent fast phase. Due to the calculation constrained RFID environment of being lightweight and efficient, it is the important objective of building the protocol which can have fewer number of message flows and less number of cryptographic operations in real time performed by the tag. In this paper, we …

Human Tracking Technology In Mutual Legal Assistance And Police Inter-State Cooperation In International Crimes, Katina Michael, G. L. Rose

Professor Gregory Rose

The objective of this paper is to explore the role of human tracking technology, primarily the use of global positioning systems (GPS) in locating individuals for the purposes of mutual legal assistance (MLA), and providing location intelligence for use in inter-state police cooperation within the context of transnational crime. GPS allows for the 24/7 continuous real-time tracking of an individual, and is considered manifold more powerful than the traditional visual surveillance often exercised by the police. As the use of GPS for human tracking grows in the law enforcement sector, federal and state laws in many countries are to a …

Big Data: New Opportunities And New Challenges, Katina Michael, Keith Miller

Associate Professor Katina Michael

We can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes—whether good or bad—to society.

It's no secret that both private enterprise and government seek greater insights into people's behaviors and sentiments. Organizations use various analytical techniques—from crowdsourcing to genetic algorithms to neural networks to sentiment analysis—to study both structured and unstructured forms of data that can aid product and process discovery, productivity, and policy-making. This data is collected from numerous sources including sensor networks, government data …

Enforcing Secure And Privacy-Preserving Information Brokering In Distributed Information Sharing, Fengjun Li, Bo Luo, Peng Liu, Dongwon Lee, Chao-Hsien Chu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today’s organizations raise an increasing need for information sharing via on-demand access. Information brokering systems (IBSs) have been proposed to connect large-scale loosely federated data sources via a brokering overlay, in which the brokers make routing decisions to direct client queries to the requested data servers. Many existing IBSs assume that brokers are trusted and thus only adopt server-side access control for data confidentiality. However, privacy of data location and data consumer can still be inferred from metadata (such as query and access control rules) exchanged within the IBS, but little attention has been put on its protection. In this …

Big Data: New Opportunities And New Challenges, Katina Michael, Keith W. Miller

Keith Miller

We can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes—whether good or bad—to society.

It's no secret that both private enterprise and government seek greater insights into people's behaviors and sentiments. Organizations use various analytical techniques—from crowdsourcing to genetic algorithms to neural networks to sentiment analysis—to study both structured and unstructured forms of data that can aid product and process discovery, productivity, and policy-making. This data is collected from numerous sources including sensor networks, government data …

Balance Or Trade-Off? Online Security Technologies And Fundamental Rights, Mireille Hildebrandt

Mireille Hildebrandt

In this contribution I argue that the image of the balance is often used to defend the idea of a trade-off. To understand the drawbacks of this line of thought I will explore the relationship between online security technologies and fundamental rights, notably privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of speech and due process. After discriminating between three types of online security technologies I will trace the reconfiguration of the notion of privacy in the era of smart environments. This will lead to an inquiry into the metaphor of the scale, building on the triple test regarding the justification of the limitation of …

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …

Introduction To The Value Of Personal Data, Mireille Hildebrandt, Kieron O'Hara, Michael Waidner

Mireille Hildebrandt

This Chapter provides an introduction to and overview of the 2013 Yearbook of the Digital Enlightenment Forum, on the subject of the value of personal data. It discusses why we should care about the current monetization of our personal data and raises the issue of whether and, if so, how user-centric personal data ecosystems help to rebalance power asymmetries between individual citizens and large Personal Data Processing Systems.

A Reputation-Based Privacy Management System For Social Networking Sites, Mehmet Erkan Yüksel, Asim Si̇nan Yüksel, Abdül Hali̇m Zai̇m

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Social networking sites form a special type of virtual community where we share our personal information with people and develop new relationships on the Internet. These sites allow the users to share just about everything, including photos, videos, favorite music, and games, and record all user interactions and retain them for potential use in social data mining. This storing and sharing of large amounts of information causes privacy problems for the users of these websites. In order to prevent these problems, we have to provide strict privacy policies, data protection mechanisms, and trusted and built-in applications that help to protect …

A Conceptual Framework For Secure Use Of Mobile Health, Patricia A. Williams, Anthony Maeder

Research outputs 2013

Mobile health is characterised by its diversity of applicability, in a multifaceted and multidisciplinary healthcare delivery continuum. In an environment of rapid change with the increasing development of mobile health, issues related to security and privacy must be well thought out. The different competing tensions in the development of mobile health from the device technologies and associated regulation, to clinical workflow and patient acceptance, require a framework for security that reflects the complex structure of this emerging field. There are three distinct associated elements that require investigation: technology, clinical, and human factors. Each of these elements consists of multiple aspects …

Ensuring Application Specific Security, Privacy And Performance Goals In Rfid Systems, Farzana Rahman

Dissertations (1934 -)

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology that uses radio frequency to identify objects. Securing RFID systems and providing privacy in RFID applications has been the focus of much academic work lately. To ensure universal acceptance of RFID technology, security and privacy issued must be addressed into the design of any RFID application. Due to the constraints on memory, power, storage capacity, and amount of logic on RFID devices, traditional public key based strong security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. Usually, low cost general authentication protocols are used to secure RFID systems. However, the generic authentication protocols provide …

Verifiable And Private Top-K Monitoring, Xuhua Ding, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a data streaming model, records or documents are pushed from a data owner, via untrusted third-party servers, to a large number of users with matching interests. The match in interest is calculated from the correlation between each pair of document and user query. For scalability and availability reasons, this calculation is delegated to the servers, which gives rise to the need to protect the privacy of the documents and user queries. In addition, the users need to guard against the eventuality of a server distorting the correlation score of the documents to manipulate which documents are highlighted to certain …

Location And Tracking Of Mobile Devices: Überveillance Stalks The Streets, Katina Michael, Roger Clarke

Professor Katina Michael

During the last decade, location-tracking and monitoring applications have proliferated, in mobile cellular and wireless data networks, and through self-reporting by applications running in smartphones that are equipped with onboard global positioning system (GPS) chipsets. It is now possible to locate a smartphone-user's location not merely to a cell, but to a small area within it. Innovators have been quick to capitalise on these location-based technologies for commercial purposes, and have gained access to a great deal of sensitive personal data in the process. In addition, law enforcement utilise these technologies, can do so inexpensively and hence can track many …

Towards A Conceptual Model Of User Acceptance Of Location-Based Emergency Services, Anas Aloudat, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

This paper investigates the introduction of location-based services by government as part of an all-hazards approach to modern emergency management solutions. Its main contribution is in exploring the determinants of an individual’s acceptance or rejection of location services. The authors put forward a conceptual model to better predict why an individual would accept or reject such services, especially with respect to emergencies. While it may be posited by government agencies that individuals would unanimously wish to accept life-saving and life-sustaining location services for their well-being, this view remains untested. The theorised determinants include: visibility of the service solution, perceived service …