Computer Sciences Commons^™

Peeling Back The (Onion) Layers Of The Dark Web, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Manoeuvring the minefield of risk and exposure

Matching Possible Mitigations To Cyber Threats: A Document-Driven Decision Support Systems Approach, Martha Wagner Mcneil

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Cyber systems are ubiquitous in all aspects of society. At the same time, breaches to cyber systems continue to be front-page news (Calfas, 2018; Equifax, 2017) and, despite more than a decade of heightened focus on cybersecurity, the threat continues to evolve and grow, costing globally up to $575 billion annually (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014; Gosler & Von Thaer, 2013; Microsoft, 2016; Verizon, 2017). To address possible impacts due to cyber threats, information system (IS) stakeholders must assess the risks they face. Following a risk assessment, the next step is to determine mitigations to counter the threats …

Self-Efficacy In Information Security: A Mixed Methods Study Of Deaf End-Users, Kyle Murbach

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This explanatory sequential mixed methods study focuses on gaining an overall understanding of the potential variances in self-efficacy in information security and security practice behavior in the deaf population. Very little is understood about the deaf experience when engaging in security practices and their confidence levels in doing so. Due to the fastpaced nature of cyber security and its many facets, the human factor plays a crucial role in the success of cyber security. It is important to understand the potential implications of variances that may affect a deaf end-user’s security practice behavior to be able to provide more effective …

Malgazer: An Automated Malware Classifier With Running Window Entropy And Machine Learning, Keith Jones

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores functional malware classification using running window entropy and machine learning classifiers. This topic was under researched in the prior literature, but the implications are important for malware defense. This dissertation will present six new design science artifacts. The first artifact was a generalized machine learning based malware classifier model. This model was used to categorize and explain the gaps in the prior literature. This artifact was also used to compare the prior literature to the classifiers created in this dissertation, herein referred to as “Malgazer” classifiers.

Running window entropy data was required, but the algorithm was too …

Flashlight In A Dark Room: A Grounded Theory Study On Information Security Management At Small Healthcare Provider Organizations, Gerald Auger

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Healthcare providers have a responsibility to protect patient’s privacy and a business motivation to properly secure their assets. These providers encounter barriers to achieving these objectives and limited academic research has been conducted to examine the causes and strategies to overcome them. A subset of this demographic, businesses with less than 10 providers, compose a majority 57% of provider organizations in the United States. This grounded theory study provides exploratory findings, discovering these small healthcare provider organizations (SHPO) have limited knowledge on information technology (IT) and information security that results in assumptions and misappropriations of information security implementation, who is …

Advanced Code-Reuse Attacks: A Novel Framework For Jop, Bramwell J. Brizendine

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Return-oriented programming is the predominant code-reuse attack, where short gadgets or borrowed chunks of code ending in a RET instruction can be discovered in binaries. A chain of ROP gadgets placed on the stack can permit control flow to be subverted, allowing for arbitrary computation. Jump-oriented programming is a class of code-reuse attack where instead of using RET instructions, indirect jumps and indirect calls are utilized to subvert the control flow. JOP is important because can allow for important mitigations and protections against ROP to be bypassed, and some protections against JOP are imperfect. This dissertation presents a design science …

A Malware Analysis And Artifact Capture Tool, Dallas Wright

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Malware authors attempt to obfuscate and hide their execution objectives in their program’s static and dynamic states. This paper provides a novel approach to aid analysis by introducing a malware analysis tool which is quick to set up and use with respect to other existing tools. The tool allows for the intercepting and capturing of malware artifacts while providing dynamic control of process flow. Capturing malware artifacts allows an analyst to more quickly and comprehensively understand malware behavior and obfuscation techniques and doing so interactively allows multiple code paths to be explored. The faster that malware can be analyzed the …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Detecting X.509 Covert Channels, Cody Welu

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study examined the performance impacts of detecting X.509 covert channels in the Suricata intrusion detection system. Relevant literature and previous studies surrounding covert channels and covert channel detection, X.509 certificates, and intrusion detection system performance were evaluated. This study used Jason Reaves’ X.509 covert channel proof of concept code to generate malicious network traffic for detection (2018). Various detection rules for intrusion detection systems were created to aid in the detection of the X.509 covert channel. The central processing unit (CPU) and memory utilization impacts that each rule had on the intrusion detection system was studied and …

See No Evil, Hear No Evil? Dissecting The Impact Of Online Hacker Forums, Wei T. Yue, Qiu-Hong Wang, Kai‐Lung Hui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion decreases DDOS attacks by 0.032% to 0.122%. This means that two DDOS-attack posts per day could reduce the number of victims by 700 to 2,600 per day. We find that discussion topics with similar keywords can variously increase or decrease DDOS attacks, meaning we cannot ascertain the impact of the discussion just by the post nature. …

Suaa: A Secure User Authentication Scheme With Anonymity For The Single & Multi-Server Environments, Nassoro M. R. Lwamo, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu, Kashif Sharif, Ximeng Liu, Chuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid increase in user base and technological penetration has enabled the use of a wide range of devices and applications. The services are rendered to these devices from single-server or highly distributed server environments, irrespective of their location. As the information exchanged between servers and clients is private, numerous forms of attacks can be launched to compromise it. To ensure the security, privacy, and availability of the services, different authentication schemes have been proposed for both single-server and multi-server environments. The primary performance objective of such schemes is to prevent most (if not all) attacks, with minimal computational costs …

International Nuclear Cyber Security Threat Landscape, Shannon Eggers, Charles Nickerson

Purdue Workshop on Nonproliferation: Technology and Approaches

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Nuclear Cyber Team (NCT) is a recognized leader in international nuclear cyber program assessments as well as nuclear cyber training development and delivery. This paper discusses how the NCT is implementing their vision to protect global nuclear infrastructure from cyber threats. Also outlined is the team’s perspectives on the global nuclear cyber threat landscape and the top ten approachable cyber security measures that can be applied to immediately improve a country’s nuclear cyber security posture.

Mirai Bot Scanner Summation Prototype, Charles V. Frank Jr.

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Mirai botnet deploys a distributed mechanism with each Bot continually scanning for a potential new Bot Victim. A Bot continually generates a random IP address to scan the network for discovering a potential new Bot Victim. The Bot establishes a connection with the potential new Bot Victim with a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) handshake. The Mirai botnet has recruited hundreds of thousands of Bots. With 100,000 Bots, Mirai Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on service provider Dyn in October 2016 triggered the inaccessibility to hundreds of websites in Europe and North America (Sinanović & Mrdovic, 2017). A month …

Chip-Off Success Rate Analysis Comparing Temperature And Chip Type, Choli Ence, Joan Runs Through, Gary D. Cantrell

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Throughout the digital forensic community, chip-off analysis provides examiners with a technique to obtain a physical acquisition from locked or damaged digital device. Thermal based chip-analysis relies upon the application of heat to remove the flash memory chip from the circuit board. Occasionally, a flash memory chip fails to successfully read despite following similar protocols as other flash memory chips. Previous research found the application of high temperatures increased the number of bit errors present in the flash memory chip. The purpose of this study is to analyze data collected from chip-off analyses to determine if a statistical difference exists …

Towards Secure Data Flow Oriented Multi-Vendor Ict Governance Model, Lars Magnusson, Patrik Elm, Anita Mirijamdotter

International Journal of Business and Technology

Today, still, ICT Governance is being regarded as a departmental concern, not an overall organizational concern. History has shown us that implementation strategies, which are based on departments, results in fractional implementations leading to ad hoc solutions with no central control and stagnation for the in-house ICT strategy. Further, this recently has created an opinion trend; many are talking about the ICT department as being redundant, a dying out breed, which should be replaced by on-demand specialized external services. Clearly, the evermore changing surroundings do force organizations to accelerate the pace of new adaptations within their ICT plans, more vivacious …

Implications Of Eu-Gdpr In Low-Grade Social, Activist And Ngo Settings, Lars Magnusson, Sarfraz Iqbal

International Journal of Business and Technology

Social support services are becoming popular among the citizens of every country and every age. Though, social support services easily accessible on mobile phones are used in different contexts, ranging from extending your presence and connectivity to friends, family and colleagues to using social media services for being a social activist seeking to help individuals confined in miserable situations such as homeless community, drug addicts or even revolutionists fighting against dictatorships etc. However, a very recent development in the European Parliament’s law (2016/679) on the processing and free movement of personal data in terms of EU-GDPR (General data protection rules) …

An Approach To Information Security For Smes Based On The Resource-Based View Theory, Blerton Abazi

International Journal of Business and Technology

The main focus of this proposal is to analyze implementation challenges, benefits and requirements in implementation of Information Systems and managing information security in small and medium size companies in Western Balkans countries. In relation to the study, the proposal will focus in the following questions to investigate: What are the benefits that companies mostly find after the implementation of Information Systems has been implemented, efficiency, how to they manage security of the information’s, competitive advantage, return of investments etc. The study should give a clear approach to Information Systems implementation, information security, maintenance, measurable benefits, challenges companies have gone …

Some Issues In The Testing Of Computer Simulation Models, David J. Murray-Smith

International Journal of Business and Technology

The testing of simulation models has much in common with testing processes in other types of application involving software development. However, there are also important differences associated with the fact that simulation model testing involves two distinct aspects, which are known as verification and validation. Model validation is concerned with investigation of modelling errors and model limitations while verification involves checking that the simulation program is an accurate representation of the mathematical and logical structure of the underlying model. Success in model validation depends upon the availability of detailed information about all aspects of the system being modelled. It also …

Cs04all: Cryptography Module, Hunter R. Johnson

Open Educational Resources

Cryptography module

This archive contains a series of lessons on cryptography suitable for use in a CS0 course. The only requirement is familiarity with Python, particularly dictionaries, lists, and file IO. It is also assumed that students know how to create stand-alone Python programs and interact with them through the terminal. Most of the work is done in Jupyter notebooks.

The material found in the notebooks is a combination of reading material, exercises, activities and assignments. Below are descriptions of each lesson or assignment and links to notebooks on Cocalc. The same files are available for batch download in this …

Security Analysis Of A Large-Scale Concurrent Data Anonymous Batch Verification Scheme For Mobile Healthcare Crowd Sensing, Yinghui Zhang, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Jin Li, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an important application of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, mobile healthcare crowd sensing (MHCS) still has challenging issues, such as privacy protection and efficiency. Quite recently in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2018.2828463), Liu et al. proposed a large-scale concurrent data anonymous batch verification scheme for mobile healthcare crowd sensing, claiming to provide batch authentication, non-repudiation, and anonymity. However, after a close look at the scheme, we point out that the scheme suffers two types of signature forgery attacks and hence fails to achieve the claimed security properties. In addition, a reasonable and rigorous probability analysis indicates …

Understanding Open Ports In Android Applications: Discovery, Diagnosis, And Security Assessment, Daoyuan Wu, Debin Gao, Rocky K. C. Chang, En He, Eric K. T. Cheng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open TCP/UDP ports are traditionally used by servers to provide application services, but they are also found in many Android apps. In this paper, we present the first open-port analysis pipeline, covering the discovery, diagnosis, and security assessment, to systematically understand open ports in Android apps and their threats. We design and deploy a novel on-device crowdsourcing app and its server-side analytic engine to continuously monitor open ports in the wild. Over a period of ten months, we have collected over 40 million port monitoring records from 3,293 users in 136 countries worldwide, which allow us to observe the actual …

Verifiable Computation Using Re-Randomizable Garbled Circuits, Qingsong Zhao, Qingkai Zeng, Ximeng Liu, Huanliang Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Yao's garbled circuit allows a client to outsource a function computation to a server with verifiablity. Unfortunately, the garbled circuit suffers from a one-time usage. The combination of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and garbled circuits enables the client and the server to reuse the garbled circuit with multiple inputs (Gennaro et al.). However, there still seems to be a long way to go for improving the efficiency of all known FHE schemes and it need much stronger security assumption. On the other hand, the construction is only proven to be secure in a weaker model where an adversary can not …

An Attribute-Based Framework For Secure Communications In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Guilin Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce an attribute-based framework to achieve secure communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which enjoys several advantageous features. The proposed framework employs attribute-based signature (ABS) to achieve message authentication and integrity and protect vehicle privacy, which greatly mitigates the overhead caused by pseudonym/private key change or update in the existing solutions for VANETs based on symmetric key, asymmetric key, and identity-based cryptography and group signature. In addition, we extend a standard ABS scheme with traceability and revocation mechanisms and seamlessly integrate them into the proposed framework to support vehicle traceability and revocation by a trusted …

Awareness And Perception Of Cybercrimes And Cybercriminals, Hannarae Lee, Hyeyoung Lim

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Awareness is a starting point to recognize, understand, or know a situation or fact, and the perception makes a difference in how to deal with it. Although the term cybercrime may not be new to the most public and the police, not all of them are well aware of the nature and extent of cybercrimes, cybercriminals, and cyber-victims, which in turn affects their perceptions of matters. The four papers in this issue of the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime empirically examine these important topics and discuss policy implications.

Phishing And Cybercrime Risks In A University Student Community, Roderic Broadhurst, Katie Skinner, Nicholas Sifniotis, Bryan Matamoros-Macias, Yuguang Ipsen

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

In an exploratory quasi-experimental observational study, 138 participants recruited during a university orientation week were exposed to social engineering directives in the form of fake email or phishing attacks over several months in 2017. These email attacks attempted to elicit personal information from participants or entice them into clicking links which may have been compromised in a real-world setting. The study aimed to determine the risks of cybercrime for students by observing their responses to social engineering and exploring attitudes to cybercrime risks before and after the phishing phase. Three types of scam emails were distributed that varied in the …

Examining Perceptions Of Online Harassment Among Constables In England And Wales, Thomas J. Holt, Jin R. Lee, Roberta Liggett, Karen M. Holt, Adam Bossler

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The ubiquity of the Internet and computer technology has enabled individuals to engage in bullying, threats, and harassing communications online. Limited research has found that local line officers may not view these offenses as serious compared to real world crimes despite their negative physical and emotional impact on victims. The perceptions of officers can produce poor interactions with victims during calls for service, particularly victim blaming, which can reduce citizens’ confidence in police agencies generally. However, local law enforcement agencies are increasingly mandated to respond to these cases, calling to question how their views may impact the community. This study …

Cybercrime And Digital Forensics: Bridging The Gap In Legislation, Investigation And Prosecution Of Cybercrime In Nigeria, Kabiru H. Mohammed, Yusuf D. Mohammed, Abiodun A. Solanke

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) opens new avenues and ways for cybercriminals to commit crime. The primary goal of this paper is to raise awareness regarding gaps that exist with regards to Nigeria’s capabilities to adequately legislate, investigate and prosecute cases of cybercrimes. The major source of cybercrime legislation in Nigeria is an act of the National Assembly which is majorly a symbolic legislation rather than a full and active legislation. In perusing these avenues of inquiry, the authors seek to identify systemic impediments which hinder law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and investigators from properly carrying out their …

An Overview Of Cryptography (Updated Version 24 January 2019), Gary C. Kessler

Publications

There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting health care information. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography. But it is important to note that while cryptography is necessary for secure communications, it is not by itself sufficient. The reader is advised, then, that the topics covered here only describe the first of many steps necessary for better security in any number of situations.

Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Robert H. Deng, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond. Choo, Hongjun Wu, Hongwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable Encryption (SE) is an important technique to guarantee data security and usability in the cloud at the same time. Leveraging Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE), the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Keyword Search (CP-ABKS) scheme can achieve keyword-based retrieval and fine-grained access control simultaneously. However, the single attribute authority in existing CP-ABKS schemes is tasked with costly user certificate verification and secret key distribution. In addition, this results in a single-point performance bottleneck in distributed cloud systems. Thus, in this paper, we present a secure Multi-authority CP-ABKS (MABKS) system to address such limitations and minimize the computation and storage burden on resource-limited devices …

Cyber Security Awareness Among College Students, Abbas Moallem

Faculty Publications

This study reports the early results of a study aimed to investigate student awareness and attitudes toward cyber security and the resulting risks in the most advanced technology environment: the Silicon Valley in California, USA. The composition of students in Silicon Valley is very ethnically diverse. The objective was to see how much the students in such a tech-savvy environment are aware of cyber-attacks and how they protect themselves against them. The early statistical analysis suggested that college students, despite their belief that they are observed when using the Internet and that their data is not secure even on university …

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 …