Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Privacy Framework For Mobile Health And Home-Care Systems, David Kotz, Sasikanth Avancha, Amit Baxi

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, we consider the challenge of preserving patient privacy in the context of mobile healthcare and home-care systems, that is, the use of mobile computing and communications technologies in the delivery of healthcare or the provision of at-home medical care and assisted living. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we compare existing privacy frameworks, identifying key differences and shortcomings. Second, we identify a privacy framework for mobile healthcare and home-care systems. Third, we extract a set of privacy properties intended for use by those who design systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems, linking them …

Why It Managers Don't Go For Cyber-Insurance Products, Tridib Bandyopadhyay, Vijay S. Mookerjee, Ram C. Rao

Faculty Articles

Despite positive expectations, cyber-insurance products have failed to take center stage in the management of IT security risk. Market inexperience, leading to conservatism in pricing cyber-insurance instruments, is often cited as the primary reason for the limited growth of the cyber-insurance market. In contrast, here we provide a demand-side explanation for why cyber-insurance products have not lived up to their initial expectations. We highlight the presence of information asymmetry between customers and providers, showing how it leads to overpricing cyber-insurance contracts and helps explain why cyber insurance might have failed to deliver its promise as a cornerstone of IT security-management …

A Study Of Content Authentication In Proxy-Enabled Multimedia Delivery Systems: Model, Techniques, And Applications, Robert H. Deng, Yanjiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compared with the direct server-user approach, the server-proxy-user architecture for multimedia delivery promises significantly improved system scalability. The introduction of the intermediary transcoding proxies between content servers and end users in this architecture, however, brings unprecedented challenges to content security. In this article, we present a systematic study on the end-to-end content authentication problem in the server-proxy-user context, where intermediary proxies transcode multimedia content dynamically. We present a formal model for the authentication problem, propose a concrete construction for authenticating generic data modality and formally prove its security. We then apply the generic construction to authenticating specific multimedia formats, for …

Complexities Of Information Security In Cyber-Physical Power Systems, Bruce Mcmillin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Cyber-Physical Power Systems consist of significant cyber components that mange the physical electric power infrastructure under distributed control of power electronics devices. This represents a departure from more centralized SCADA-type control. NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection standards emphasize the need to protect the power infrastructure from both cyber and physical attacks. Complex interactions between the cyber and physical worlds introduce new vulnerabilities that go beyond those found in the purely computer world. in this paper, some of these new vulnerabilities are described and a direction is suggested to determine and mitigate these vulnerabilities. © 2009 IEEE.

Node Security In Hierarchical Sensor Networks: Distribution Of Functions Versus Keys, Biswajit Panja, Sanjay Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Secure communication involving cluster heads in a sensor network is vital as they are responsible for data aggregation and for taking important decisions in their groups. in this article, we propose a scheme for secure communication via such nodes in a sensor network. in our approach, the base station provides a function to the cluster head of each group, which is used to compute the key for the secure communication with the base station. the protocol is first elucidated for a fixed cluster head in each group and later it is extended for dynamic cluster heads. Each function is computed …

Kiwivault: Encryption Software For Portable Storage Devices, Trevor Bradshaw Florence

Theses and Dissertations

While many people use USB flash drives, most do not protect their stored documents. Solutions for protecting flash drives exist but inherently limit functionality found in unprotected drives such as portability, usability, and the ability to share documents between multiple people. In addition, other drawbacks are introduced such as the possibility of losing access to protected documents if a password is lost. Assuming protecting portable documents is important, in order for people to be willing to protect their documents they should be required to make as few sacrifices in functionality as possible. We introduce KiwiVault, a USB flash drive encryption …

Wireless Networks: Improved Secure Network Authentication Protocol (Isnap) For Ieee 802.16, Raheel M. Hashmi, Arooj M. Siddiqui, M. Jabeen, K. Shehzad, A. Zubair, K. S. Alimgeer

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Security is amongst one of the major issues in broadband wireless access (BWA) networks. After the launch of the IEEE 802.16 standard (WiMAX), a number of security issues were reported in several articles. Ever since the beginning, work has been in progress for the neutralization of these identified threats. In this paper, the analysis of the authentication protocols implemented in WiMAX has been presented along with the description of the threats posed to them. The paper also describes security sub-layer and limitations of the existing architecture. An approach has also been presented for the prevention of these threats like the …

Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed (Dist): Building A Campus-Wide Wireless Testbed, Sergey Bratus, David Kotz, Keren Tan, William Taylor, Anna Shubina, Bennet Vance, Michael E. Locasto

Dartmouth Scholarship

We describe our experiences in deploying a campus-wide wireless security testbed. The testbed gives us the capability to monitor security-related aspects of the 802.11 MAC layer in over 200 diverse campus locations. We describe both the technical and the social challenges of designing, building, and deploying such a system, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest such testbed in academia (with the UCSD's Jigsaw infrastructure a close competitor). In this paper we focus on the \em testbed setup, rather than on the experimental data and results.

Data For Cybersecurity Research: Process And ‘Wish List’, Jean Camp, Lorrie Cranor, Nick Feamster, Joan Feigenbaum, Stephanie Forrest, David Kotz, Wenke Lee, Patrick Lincoln, Vern Paxson, Mike Reiter, Ron Rivest, William Sanders, Stefan Savage, Sean Smith, Eugene Spafford, Sal Stolfo

Other Faculty Materials

This document identifies data needs of the security research community. This document is in response to a request for a “data wish list”. Because specific data needs will evolve in conjunction with evolving threats and research problems, we augment the wish list with commentary about some of the broader issues for data usage.

Routing In The Dark: Pitch Black, Nathan S. Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In many networks, such as mobile ad-hoc networks and friend-to-friend overlay networks, direct communication between nodes is limited to specific neighbors. Friendto-friend “darknet” networks have been shown to commonly have a small-world topology; while short paths exist between any pair of nodes in small-world networks, it is non-trivial to determine such paths with a distributed algorithm. Recently, Clarke and Sandberg proposed the first decentralized routing algorithm that achieves efficient routing in such small-world networks.

Herein this thesis we discuss the first independent security analysis of Clarke and Sandberg’s routing algorithm. We show that a relatively weak participating adversary can render …

State Of Secure Application Development For 802.15.4, Janell Armstrong

Theses and Dissertations

A wireless sensor network consists of small, limited-resource embedded systems exchanging environment data and activating controls. These networks can be deployed in hostile environments to monitor wildlife habitats, implemented in factories to locate mobile equipment, and installed in home environments to optimize the use of utilities. Each of these scenarios requires network security to protect the network data. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for WSN communication, yet the standard states that it is not responsible for defining the initialization, distribution, updating, or management of network public keys. Individuals seeking to research security topics will find that there are many …

Beyond Output Voting: Detecting Compromised Replicas Using Hmm-Based Behavioral Distance, Debin Gao, Michael K. Reiter, Dawn Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many host-based anomaly detection techniques have been proposed to detect code-injection attacks on servers. The vast majority, however, are susceptible to "mimicry" attacks in which the injected code masquerades as the original server software, including returning the correct service responses, while conducting its attack. "Behavioral distance," by which two diverse replicas processing the same inputs are continually monitored to detect divergence in their low-level (system-call) behaviors and hence potentially the compromise of one of them, has been proposed for detecting mimicry attacks. In this paper, we present a novel approach to behavioral distance measurement using a new type of hidden …

The Not So Smart, Smart Grid: Potential Security Risks Associated With Thedeployment Of Smart Grid Technologies, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The electricity grid has been up until now a relatively stable artifice of modern industrialized nations. The power grids are the most widespread wired networks in the world. They are heavily regulated and standardized to protect the integrity, stability and reliability of supply. The grids have been essentially closed systems, this is now rapidly changing with the introduction of the network enabled smart meter. These meters are “web” accessible, connect and interact directly with electrical appliances in domiciles and businesses. This move now brings a range of extreme risks and complexities into these stable networks. This paper explores the security …

Generalized Neuron Based Secure Media Access Control Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks, Raghavendra V. Kulkarni, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Abhishek V. Thakur, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Security plays a pivotal role in most applications of wireless sensor networks. It is common to find inadequately secure networks confined only to controlled environments. The issue of security in wireless sensor networks is a hot research topic for over a decade. This paper presents a compact generalized neuron (GN) based medium access protocol that renders a CSMA/CD network secure against denial-of-service attacks launched by adversaries. The GN enhances the security by constantly monitoring multiple parameters that reflect the possibility that an attack is launched by an adversary. Particle swarm optimization, a popular bio-inspired evolutionary-like optimization algorithm is used for …

Security Decay: An Entropic Approach To Definition And Understanding, Michael Coole, David J. Brooks

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

This article discusses the affect decay has within a systems approach used when implementing security strategies, in particular, the theory of defence in depth. Defence in depth is implemented within a risk management framework to reduce an organisation’s identified risks, which could lead to undesirable and unacceptable consequences. Defence in depth aims to link layered security elements into a system to ensure a holistic and functional security system, underpinned by the functions of; deter, detect, delay, response and recovery. For such a system to be commissioned and maintain its commissioning effectiveness, these functions must be performed in their sequential order …

Beyond K-Anonymity: A Decision Theoretic Framework For Assessing Privacy Risk, Guy Lebanon, Monica Scannapieco, Mohamed Fouad, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

An important issue any organization or individual has to face when managing data containing sensitive information, is the risk that can be incurred when releasing such data. Even though data may be sanitized before being released, it is still possible for an adversary to reconstruct the original data using additional information thus resulting in privacy violations. To date, however, a systematic approach to quantify such risks is not available. In this paper we develop a framework, based on statistical decision theory, that assesses the relationship between the disclosed data and the resulting privacy risk. We model the problem of deciding …

Opportunistic Sensing: Security Challenges For The New Paradigm, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Nikos Triandopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

We study the security challenges that arise in Opportunistic people-centric sensing, a new sensing paradigm leveraging humans as part of the sensing infrastructure. Most prior sensor-network research has focused on collecting and processing environmental data using a static topology and an application-aware infrastructure, whereas opportunistic sensing involves collecting, storing, processing and fusing large volumes of data related to everyday human activities. This highly dynamic and mobile setting, where humans are the central focus, presents new challenges for information security, because data originates from sensors carried by people— not tiny sensors thrown in the forest or attached to animals. In this …

Strides Towards Better Application Security, Sathyaraj Balasubramanian

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Static analysis tools analyze source code for vulnerabilities. However, these types of tools suffer from various problems that limit their effectiveness. This thesis examines these static analysis tools and suggests techniques for making them more efficient at detecting different types of vulnerabilities.

The thesis further analyzes possible causes for these vulnerabilities by examining the source code written by programmers of various categories. Finally, this thesis discusses solutions and techniques to improve general security awareness as well as the importance of secure coding among the students and software developers.

Localizing Sensor Networks In Un-Friendly Environments, Sriram Chellappan, Vamsi Paruchuri, Dylan Mcdonald, Arjan Durresi

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we study the issue of defending against a wireless sensor network (WSN) that has been deployed by a malicious enemy agent in an area of interest to us. While there can be many approaches to defend against maliciously deployed WSNs, we propose the design of a localization centric approach. Specifically, the problem we address is: given an enemy deployed WSN in an area of interest to us, how can we determine locations of the sensors without co-operating with the sensors themselves during localization. In our approach, we employ a physically mobile agent called the localizer (e.g., a …

Streaming Estimation Of Information-Theoretic Metrics For Anomaly Detection (Extended Abstract), Sergey Bratus, Joshua Brody, David Kotz, Anna Shubina

Dartmouth Scholarship

Information-theoretic metrics hold great promise for modeling traffic and detecting anomalies if only they could be computed in an efficient, scalable ways. Recent advances in streaming estimation algorithms give hope that such computations can be made practical. We describe our work in progress that aims to use streaming algorithms on 802.11a/b/g link layer (and above) features and feature pairs to detect anomalies.

A Secure Group Communication Architecture For Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Adrian N. Phillips, Barry E. Mullins, Richard Raines, Rusty O. Baldwin

Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the application of a secure group communication architecture to a swarm of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A multicast secure group communication architecture for the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite environment is evaluated to determine if it can be effectively adapted to a swarm of UAVs and provide secure, scalable, and efficient communications. The performance of the proposed security architecture is evaluated with two other commonly used architectures using a discrete event computer simulation developed using MATLAB. Performance is evaluated in terms of the scalability and efficiency of the group key distribution and management scheme when the …

Simple, Secure, Selective Delegation In Online Identify Systems, Bryant Gordon Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

The ability to delegate privileges to others is so important to users of online identity systems that users create ad hoc delegation systems by sharing authentication credentials if no other easy delegation mechanism is available. With the rise of internet-scale relationship-based single sign-on protocols like OpenID, the security risks of password sharing are unacceptable. We therefore propose SimpleAuth, a simple modification to relationship-based authentication protocols that gives users a secure way to selectively delegate subsets of their privileges, making identity systems more flexible and increasing user security. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of the SimpleAuth pattern using the sSRP …

Slides: Threats To Biological Diversity: Global, Continental, Local, J. Michael Scott

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: J. Michael Scott, U.S. Geological Survey, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, University of Idaho

38 slides

Poster Abstract: Reliable People-Centric Sensing With Unreliable Voluntary Carriers, Cory Cornelius, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Dan Peebles, Minho Shin, Patrick Tsang

Dartmouth Scholarship

As sensor technology becomes increasingly easy to integrate into personal devices such as mobile phones, clothing, and athletic equipment, there will be new applications involving opportunistic, people-centric sensing. These applications, which gather information about human activities and personal social context, raise many security and privacy challenges. In particular, data integrity is important for many applications, whether using traffic data for city planning or medical data for diagnosis. Although our AnonySense system (presented at MobiSys) addresses privacy in people-centric sensing, protecting data integrity in people-centric sensing still remains a challenge. Some mechanisms to protect privacy provide anonymity, and thus provide limited …

Anonysense: Opportunistic And Privacy-Preserving Context Collection, Apu Kapadia, Nikos Triandopoulos, Cory Cornelius, Dan Peebles, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Opportunistic sensing allows applications to “task” mobile devices to measure context in a target region. For example, one could leverage sensor-equipped vehicles to measure traffic or pollution levels on a particular street, or users' mobile phones to locate (Bluetooth-enabled) objects in their neighborhood. In most proposed applications, context reports include the time and location of the event, putting the privacy of users at increased risk—even if a report has been anonymized, the accompanying time and location can reveal sufficient information to deanonymize the user whose device sent the report. \par We propose AnonySense, a general-purpose architecture for leveraging users' mobile …

Detecting 802.11 Mac Layer Spoofing Using Received Signal Strength, Yong Sheng, Keren Tan, Guanling Chen, David Kotz, Andrew T. Campbell

Dartmouth Scholarship

MAC addresses can be easily spoofed in 802.11 wireless LANs. An adversary can exploit this vulnerability to launch a large number of attacks. For example, an attacker may masquerade as a legitimate access point to disrupt network services or to advertise false services, tricking nearby wireless stations. On the other hand, the received signal strength (RSS) is a measurement that is hard to forge arbitrarily and it is highly correlated to the transmitter's location. Assuming the attacker and the victim are separated by a reasonable distance, RSS can be used to differentiate them to detect MAC spoofing, as recently proposed …

Refocusing In 802.11 Wireless Measurement, Udayan Deshpande, Chris Mcdonald, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

The edge of the Internet is increasingly wireless. To understand the Internet, one must understand the edge, and yet the measurement of wireless networks poses many new challenges. IEEE 802.11 networks support multiple wireless channels and any monitoring technique involves capturing traffic on each of these channels to gather a representative sample of frames from the network. We call this procedure \emphchannel sampling, in which each sniffer visits each channel periodically, resulting in a sample of the traffic on each of the channels. \par This sampling approach may be sufficient, for example, for a system administrator or anomaly detection module …

Issues Common To Australian Critical Infrastructure Providers Scada Networks Discovered Through Computer And Network Vulnerability Analysis, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

This paper reports on generic issues discovered as a result of conducting computer and network vulnerability assessments (CNVA) on Australian critical infrastructure providers. Generic issues discovered included policy, governance, IT specific such as segregation, patching and updating. Physical security was also lacking in some cases. Another issue was that previous security audits had failed to identify any of these issues. Of major concern is that despite education and awareness programs, and a body of knowledge referring to these issues, they are still occurring. It may be necessary for the federal government to force organisations to undergo computer and network vulnerability …

Virtual Environments Support Insider Security Violations, Iain Swanson, Patricia A.H. Williams

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

This paper describes an investigation into how an employee using a virtual environment can circumvent any or all of the security, policies and procedures within an organization. The paper discusses the fundamental issues that organizations must address to be able to detect such an attack. Attacks of this nature may be malicious with intent to cause disruption by flooding the network or disabling specific equipment, or non-malicious by quietly gathering critical information such as user names and passwords or a colleague’s internet banking details. Identification of potential residual evidence following an attack is presented. Such evidence may be used to …

Active Behavioral Fingerprinting Of Wireless Devices, Sergey Bratus, Cory Cornelius, David Kotz, Dan Peebles

Dartmouth Scholarship

We propose a simple active method for discovering facts about the chipset, the firmware or the driver of an 802.11 wireless device by observing its responses (or lack thereof) to a series of crafted non-standard or malformed 802.11 frames. We demonstrate that such responses can differ significantly enough to distinguish between a number of popular chipsets and drivers. We expect to significantly expand the number of recognized device types through community contributions of signature data for the proposed open fingerprinting framework. Our method complements known fingerprinting approaches, and can be used to interrogate and spot devices that may be spoofing …