Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Security, Privacy And Trust For Smart Mobile- Internet Of Things (M-Iot): A Survey, Vishal Sharma, Ilsun You, Karl Andersson, Francesco Palmieri, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Jaedeock Lim

Publications

With an enormous range of applications, the Internet of Things (IoT) has magnetized industries and academicians from everywhere. IoT facilitates operations through ubiquitous connectivity by providing Internet access to all the devices with computing capabilities. With the evolution of wireless infrastructure, the focus from simple IoT has been shifted to smart, connected and mobile IoT (M-IoT) devices and platforms, which can enable low-complexity, low-cost and efficient computing through sensors, machines, and even crowdsourcing. All these devices can be grouped under a common term of M-IoT. Even though the positive impact on applications has been tremendous, security, privacy and trust are …

Is The Transit Industry Prepared For The Cyber Revolution? Policy Recommendations To Enhance Surface Transit Cyber Preparedness, Scott Belcher, Terri Belcher, Eric Greenwald, Brandon Thomas

Mineta Transportation Institute

The intent of this study is to assess the readiness, resourcing, and structure of public transit agencies to identify, protect from, detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats. Given the multitude of connected devices already in use by the transit industry and the vast amount of data generated (with more coming online soon), the transit industry is vulnerable to malicious cyber-attack and other cybersecurity-related threats. This study reviews the state of best cybersecurity practices in public surface transit; outlines U.S. public surface transit operators’ cybersecurity operations; assesses U.S. policy on cybersecurity in public surface transportation; and provides …

A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System Using Deep Learning On Mobile Devices, Ruitao Feng, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Guozhu Meng, Shang-Wei Lin, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, Android malware detection is mostly performed on server side against the increasing number of malware. Powerful computing resource provides more exhaustive protection for app markets than maintaining detection by a single user. However, apart from the applications (apps) provided by the official market (i.e., Google Play Store), apps from unofficial markets and third-party resources are always causing serious security threats to end-users. Meanwhile, it is a time-consuming task if the app is downloaded first and then uploaded to the server side for detection, because the network transmission has a lot of overhead. In addition, the uploading process also suffers …

The Future Of Work Now: The Multi-Faceted Mall Security Guard At A Multi-Faceted Jewel, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the most frequently-used phrases at business events these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring substantial changes in work tasks and business processes. But while these changes are predicted for the future, they’re already present in many organizations for many different jobs. The job and incumbents described below are an example of this phenomenon. Steve Miller of Singapore Management University and I co-authored the story.

Crowdsourcing Atop Blockchains, Yuan Lu

Dissertations

Traditional crowdsourcing systems, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), though once acquiring great economic successes, have to fully rely on third-party platforms to serve between the requesters and the workers for basic utilities. These third-parties have to be fully trusted to assist payments, resolve disputes, protect data privacy, manage user authentications, maintain service online, etc. Nevertheless, tremendous real-world incidents indicate how elusive it is to completely trust these platforms in reality, and the reduction of such over-reliance becomes desirable.

In contrast to the arguably vulnerable centralized approaches, a public blockchain is a distributed and transparent global "consensus computer" that is …

"How Good Are They?" - A State Of The Effectiveness Of Anti-Phishing Tools On Twitter, Sayak Saha Roy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Phishing websites are one of the most pervasive online attack vectors, with nearly 1.5 million such attacks created every month. Social media is the primary ground for phishing attacks, with 86% of these attacks originating from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Prevalent approaches against these attacks includes URL scanners, anti-phishing blacklists and social media's own detection systems. In this work, we focus on Twitter, and through a combination of data-driven methods and emulations, we evaluate the verdicts provided by URL scanners, and Twitter’s detection system. We show that these sources provide a good amount of misinformation, which not only can lead …

Secure Mobile Computing By Using Convolutional And Capsule Deep Neural Networks, Rui Ning

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Mobile devices are becoming smarter to satisfy modern user's increasing needs better, which is achieved by equipping divers of sensors and integrating the most cutting-edge Deep Learning (DL) techniques. As a sophisticated system, it is often vulnerable to multiple attacks (side-channel attacks, neural backdoor, etc.). This dissertation proposes solutions to maintain the cyber-hygiene of the DL-Based smartphone system by exploring possible vulnerabilities and developing countermeasures.

First, I actively explore possible vulnerabilities on the DL-Based smartphone system to develop proactive defense mechanisms. I discover a new side-channel attack on smartphones using the unrestricted magnetic sensor data. I demonstrate that attackers can …

Privacy Preserving Search Services Against Online Attack, Yi Zhao, Jianting Nian, Kaitai Liang, Yanqi Zhao, Liqun Chen, Bo Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable functionality is provided in many online services such as mail services or outsourced data storage. To protect users privacy, data in these services is usually stored after being encrypted using searchable encryption. This enables the data user to securely search encrypted data from a remote server without leaking data and query information. Public key encryption with keyword search is one of the research branches of searchable encryption; this provides privacy-preserving searchable functionality for applications such as encrypted email systems. However, it has an inherent vulnerability in that the information of a query may be leaked using a keyword guessing …

Denial Of Service Attack Detection Through Machine Learning For The Iot, Naeem Firdous Syed, Zubair Baig, Ahmed Ibrahim, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Sustained Internet of Things (IoT) deployment and functioning are heavily reliant on the use of effective data communication protocols. In the IoT landscape, the publish/subscribe-based Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is popular. Cyber security threats against the MQTT protocol are anticipated to increase at par with its increasing use by IoT manufacturers. In particular, IoT is vulnerable to protocol-based Application layer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which have been known to cause widespread service disruption in legacy systems. In this paper, we propose an Application layer DoS attack detection framework for the MQTT protocol and test the scheme on …

Two Image Watermarkingmethodsbased On Compressive Sensing, Yidi Miao, Lü Ju, Xiumei Li

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: As an emerging sample theory, compressive sensing attracts wide attention because it breaks through the Nyquist sampling theorem. , Two different methods of watermark embedding and extraction are presented by measuring the carrier image and watermark image respectively based on compressive sensing. Moreover, the attack tests, such as the Gaussian noise, pepper and salt noise, filtering, compression, and cropping, are implemented to watermarked images. Experiment results show that although the two different methods for image watermarking have different processing procedure, both can guarantee the robustness and security of embedded digital watermark.

Towards Security And Privacy In Networked Medical Devices And Electronic Healthcare Systems, Isabel Jellen

Master's Theses

E-health is a growing eld which utilizes wireless sensor networks to enable access to effective and efficient healthcare services and provide patient monitoring to enable early detection and treatment of health conditions. Due to the proliferation of e-health systems, security and privacy have become critical issues in preventing data falsification, unauthorized access to the system, or eavesdropping on sensitive health data. Furthermore, due to the intrinsic limitations of many wireless medical devices, including low power and limited computational resources, security and device performance can be difficult to balance. Therefore, many current networked medical devices operate without basic security services such …

From Degree To Chief Information Security Officer (Ciso): A Framework For Consideration, Wendi M. Kappers, Martha Nanette Harrell,

Publications

Educational entities are establishing program degree content designed to ensure cybersecurity and information security assurance skills are adequate and efficient for preparing students to be successful in this very important field. Many Master’s level programs include courses that address these skills in an attempt to provide a well-rounded program of study. However, undergraduates who are in the practitioner’s world have other alternatives to gain these skills. These individuals can gain various certifications, such as the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) or the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM). Due to a perceived gap between academics and field knowledge, it appears …

A Unified Decentralized Trust Framework For Detection Of Iot Device Attacks In Smart Homes, Hussein Salim Qasim Alsheakh

Dissertations

Trust in Smart Home technology security is a primary concern for consumers, which can prevent them from adopting smart home services. Such concerns are due to following reasons; (i) nature of IoT devices– which due to their limited computational and resource capabilities, cannot support traditional on-device security controls (ii) any breach to cyber-attacks have an immediate impact on the smart homeowner, compared to traditional cyber-attacks (iii) a large variety of different applications and services under the umbrella of make an overarching security framework for smart homes fundamentally challenging for both providers to offer and owners to manage.

This dissertation offers …

Tapin: A Two-Factor User Authentication Scheme For Smartwatches Through Secret Finger Tapping, Akash Lohani

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Nowadays, smartwatches have become one of the most common wearable gadgets as they are small and portable. As more and more personal information is managed and processed inside smartwatches, it is important to have a secure user authentication scheme in place. There have been many successful authentication schemes for a smartphones such as Password/PIN, bio-metric approach(e.g. fingerprint, face recognition), etc directly used on smartwatches. However, these approaches are not quite suitable for smartwatches due to its constraints in size and limited computation power. To address this issue, we propose TaPIN that allows users to authenticate themselves by playing out the …

Mitigating Real-Time Relay Phishing Attacks Against Mobile Push Notification Based Two-Factor Authentication Systems, Casey Silver

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This paper explores how existing push notification based two-factor authentication systems are susceptible to real-time man-in-the-middle relay attacks and proposes a system for mitigating such attacks. A fully functional reference system of the proposed mitigation was built and compared to an existing push notification two-factor authentication system while undergoing a real-time man-in-the-middle relay attack. The reference systems used cloud infrastructure for hosting, an Apple iPhone as the notification receiver, and Apple’s push notification service to send notifications. A publicly available tool for conducting real-time man-in-the-middle relay attacks was used to conduct the attacks. The results of the tests were recorded …

An Efficient Ddos Attack Detection Framework For Vehicular Communication, Kolandaisamy Raenu

Student Works (2020-2029)

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are rapidly gaining attention due to the diversity of services that they can potentially offer. VANET is a wireless network that allows vehicles to interconnect and communicate with other nearby vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs). In VANET, each vehicle is considered as a node which is equipped with an On-Board Unit (OBU) and an Application Unit (AU). The nodes may connect and communicate with each other directly (i.e., Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V)) or through RSUs (i.e., Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I)). This is primarily for alleviating an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) that aims to provide …

Cybersecurity Methods For Grid-Connected Power Electronics, Stephen Joe Moquin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present work shows a secure-by-design process, defense-in-depth method, and security techniques for a secure distributed energy resource. The distributed energy resource is a cybersecure, solar inverter and battery energy storage system prototype, collectively called the Cybersecure Power Router. Consideration is given to the use of the Smart Green Power Node for a foundation of the present work. Metrics for controller security are investigated to evaluate firmware security techniques. The prototype's ability to mitigate, respond to, and recover from firmware integrity degradation is examined. The prototype shows many working security techniques within the context of a grid-connected, distributed energy resource. …

Service Provisioning And Security Design In Software Defined Networks, Mohamed Rahouti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructures and systems are being widely deployed to support a broad range of users and application scenarios. A key trend here is the emergence of many different "smart" technology paradigms along with an increasingly diverse array of networked sensors, e.g., for smart homes and buildings, intelligent transportation and autonomous systems, emergency response, remote health monitoring and telehealth, etc. As billions of these devices come online, ICT networks are being tasked with transferring increasing volumes of data to support intelligent real-time decision making and management. Indeed, many applications and services will have very stringent Quality of …

Managing Two-Factor Authentication Setup Through Password Managers, Jonathan William Dutson

Theses and Dissertations

Two-factor authentication (2FA) provides online accounts with protection against remote account compromise. Despite the security benefits, adoption of 2FA has remained low, in part due to poor usability. We explore the possibility of improving the usability of the 2FA setup process by providing setup automation through password managers. We create a proof-of-concept KeePass (a popular password manager) extension that adds browser-based automation to the 2FA setup process and conduct a 30-participant within-subjects user study to measure user perceptions about the system. Our system is found to be significantly more usable than the current manual method of 2FA setup for multiple …

Keyless Anti-Jamming Communication Via Randomized Dsss, Ahmad Alagil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, wireless networking is ubiquitous. In wireless communication systems, multiple nodes exchange data during the transmission time. Due to the natural use of the communication channel, it is crucial to protect the physical layer to make wireless channels between nodes more reliable. Jamming attacks consider one of the most significant threats on wireless communication. Spread spectrum techniques have been widely used to mitigate the effects of the jammer. Traditional anti-jamming approaches like Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) require a sender and a receiver to share a secret key prior to their communication. If this …

Iot-Hass: A Framework For Protecting Smart Home Environment, Tarig Mudawi

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

While many solutions have been proposed for smart home security, the problem that no single solution fully protects the smart home environment still exists. In this research we propose a security framework to protect the smart home environment. The proposed framework includes three engines that complement each other to protect the smart home IoT devices. The first engine is an IDS/IPS module that monitors all traffic in the home network and then detects, alerts users, and/or blocks packets using anomaly-based detection. The second engine works as a device management module that scans and verifies IoT devices in the home network, …

Performance Evaluation Of Modbus Tcp In Normal Operation And Under A Distributed Denial Of Service Attack, Eric Gamess, Brody Smith, Guillermo Francia Iii

Research, Publications & Creative Work

Modbus is the de facto standard communication protocol for the industrial world. It was initially designed to be used in serial communications (Modbus RTU/ASCII). However, not long ago, it was adapted to TCP due to the increasing popularity of the TCP/IP stack. Since it was originally designed for controlled serial lines, Modbus does not have any security features. In this paper, we wrote several benchmarks to evaluate the performance of networking devices that run Modbus TCP. Parameters reported by our benchmarks include: (1) response time for Modbus requests, (2) maximum number of requests successfully handled by Modbus devices in a …

Apparatus For Securely Configuring A Target Device And Associated Methods, Timothy J. Pierson, Xiaohui Liang, Ronald Peterson, David Kotz

Other Faculty Materials

Apparatus and method securely transfer first data from a source device to a target device. A wireless signal having (a) a higher speed channel conveying second data and (b) a lower speed channel conveying the first data is transmitted. The lower speed channel is formed by selectively transmitting the wireless signal from one of a first and second antennae of the source device based upon the first data. The first and second antenna are positioned a fixed distance apart and the target device uses a received signal strength indication (RSSI) of the first signal to decode the lower speed channel …

Image Subset Communication For Resource-Constrained Applications In Wirelesssensor Networks, Sajid Nazir, Omar Alzubi, Mohammad Kaleem, Hassan Hamdoun

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

JPEG is the most widely used image compression standard for sensing, medical, and security applications. JPEG provides a high degree of compression but field devices relying on battery power must further economize on data transmissions to prolong deployment duration with particular use cases in wireless sensor networks. Transmitting a subset of image data could potentially enhance the battery life of power-constrained devices and also meet the application requirements to identify the objects within an image. Depending on an application's needs, after the first selected subset is received at the base station, further transmissions of the image data for successive refinements …

A Novel Grouping Proof Authentication Protocol For Lightweight Devices:Gpapxr+, Ömer Aydin, Gökhan Dalkiliç, Cem Kösemen

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that meet EPC Gen2 standards are used in many fields such as supply chain operations. The number of the RFID tags, smart cards, wireless sensor nodes, and Internet of things devices is increasing day by day and the areas where they are used are expanding. These devices are very limited in terms of the resources they have. For this reason, many security mechanisms developed for existing computer systems cannot be used for these devices. In order to ensure secure communication, it is necessary to provide authentication process between these lightweight devices and the devices they …

Analysis Of Biometric Data Using Watermarking Techniques, Foday Jorh, Bariş Özyer, Claude Fachkha

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper evaluates and analyses the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) frequency bands for embedding and extracting of the biometric data using DWT single level and multilevel watermarking approach with and without the use of alpha blending approach. In addition, singular value decomposition (SVD) combined with DWT is used to embed and extract the watermark image. The performance of compression and decompression approaches has been analyzed to examine the robustness and to check whether the compression function does destroy the integrity of the watermarked image. We investigate the proposed approach to understand how robust the watermarked on different sub-band is against …

Abstraction Techniques In Security Games With Underlying Network Structure, Anjon Basak

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In a multi-agent system, multiple intelligent agents interact with each other in an environment to achieve their objectives. They can do this because they know which actions are available to them and which actions they prefer to take in a particular situation. The job of game theory is to analyze the interactions of the intelligent agents by different solution techniques and provide analysis such as predicting outcomes or recommending courses of action to specific players. To do so game theory works with a model of real-world scenarios which helps us to make a better decision in our already complex daily …

Detecting Rogue Manipulation Of Smart Home Device Settings, David Zeichick

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Smart home devices control a home’s environmental and security settings. This includes devices that control home thermostats, sprinkler systems, light bulbs, and home appliances. Malicious manipulation of the settings of these devices by an outside adversary has caused emotional distress and could even cause physical harm. For example, researchers have reported that there is a rise in domestic abuse perpetrated via smart home devices; victims have reported their thermostat settings being unwittingly manipulated and being locked out of their house due to their smart lock code being changed. Rapid adoption of smart home devices by consumers has led to an …

Blockchain Based End-To-End Tracking System For Distributed Iot Intelligence Application Security Enhancement, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Xinxin Fan, Lin Chen, Hanyee Kim, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

IoT devices provide a rich data source that is not available in the past, which is valuable for a wide range of intelligence applications, especially deep neural network (DNN) applications that are data-thirsty. An established DNN model in turn provides useful analysis results that can improve the operation of IoT systems. The progress in distributed/federated DNN training further unleashes the potential of integration of IoT and intelligence applications. When a large number of IoT devices deployed in different physical locations, distributed training allows training modules to be deployed to multiple edge data centers that are close to the IoT devices …

Framework For Examination Of Software Quality Characteristics In Conflict: A Security And Usability Exemplar, Bilal Naqvi, Ahmed Seffah, Alain Abran

All Works

© 2020, © 2020 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license. Standards and best practices for software quality guide on handling each quality characteristic individually, but not when two or more characteristics come into conflict such as security and usability. The objectives of this paper are twofold: (a) to argue on the importance of handling the conflicts between quality characteristics in general; (b) to formulate a framework for conflict examination of the software quality characteristics, we do so while considering the specific case of security and usability. In line with the …