Computer Sciences Commons^™

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Preserving Transparency And Accountability In Optimistic Fair Exchange Of Digital Signatures, Xinyi Huang, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Optimistic fair exchange (OFE) protocols are useful tools for two participants to fairly exchange items with the aid of a third party who is only involved if needed. A widely accepted requirement is that the third party's involvement in the exchange must be transparent, to protect privacy and avoid bad publicity. At the same time, a dishonest third party would compromise the fairness of the exchange and the third party thus must be responsible for its behaviors. This is achieved in OFE protocols with another property called accountability. It is unfortunate that the accountability has never been formally studied in …

A Solution With Security Concern For Rfid-Based Track And Trace Services In Epcglobal-Enabled Supply Chains, Wei He, Yingjiu Li, Kevin Chiew, Tieyan Li, Eng Wah Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A supply chain represents the flow of materials, information, and finance as they move through supply chain partners such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. The track & trace services in supply chains can help improve supply chain visibility and efficiency, and prevent counterfeiting and stealing of products thus enhance security. Track & trace services in supply chains require identification of items, capture of events as items move through supply chains, and query of events of items. RFID (radio frequency identification) is a technology that allows to identify objects simultaneously in a fully automated manner via radio waves. This …

Fully Secure Cipertext-Policy Hiding Cp-Abe, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In ciphertext-policy attributed-based encryption (CP-ABE), each ciphertext is labeled by the encryptor with an access structure (also called ciphertext policy) and each private key is associated with a set of attributes. A user should be able to decrypt a ciphertext if and only if his private key attributes satisfy the access structure.The traditional security property of CP-ABE is plaintext privacy, which ciphertexts reveal no information about the underlying plaintext. At ACNS’08, Nishide, Yoneyama and Ohta introduced the notion of ciphertext-policy hiding CP-ABE. In addition to protecting the privacy of plaintexts, ciphertext-policy hiding CP-ABE also protects the description of the access …

Hierarchical Identity-Based Chameleon Hash And Its Applications, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng, Xuhua Ding, Junzuo Lai, Yunlei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At ACNS 2008, Canard et al. introduced the notion of trapdoor sanitizable signature (TSS) based on identity-based chameleon hash (IBCH). Trapdoor sanitizable signatures allow the signer of a message to delegate, at any time, the power of sanitization to possibly several entities who can modify predetermined parts of the message and generate a new signature on the sanitized message without interacting with the original signer. In this paper, we introduce the notion of hierarchical identity-based chameleon hash (HIBCH), which is a hierarchical extension of IBCH. We show that HIBCH can be used to construct other cryptographic primitives, including hierarchical trapdoor …

Ios Mobile Device Forensics: Initial Analysis, Rita M. Barrios, Michael R. Lehrfeld

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The ability to recover forensic artifacts from mobile devices is proving to be an ever-increasing challenge for investigators. Coupling this with the ubiquity of mobile devices and the increasing complexity and processing power they contain results in a reliance on them by suspects. In investigating Apple’s iOS devices -- namely the iPhone and iPad -- an investigator’s challenges are increased due to the closed nature of the platforms. What is left is an extremely powerful and complex mobile tool that is inexpensive, small, and can be used in suspect activities. Little is known about the internal data structures of the …

Forensic Analysis Of Smartphones: The Android Data Extractor Lite (Adel), Felix Freiling, Michael Spreitzenbarth, Sven Schmitt

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to the ubiquitous use of smartphones, these devices become an increasingly important source of digital evidence in forensic investigations. Thus, the recovery of digital traces from smartphones often plays an essential role for the examination and clarification of the facts in a case. Although some tools already exist regarding the examination of smartphone data, there is still a strong demand to develop further methods and tools for forensic extraction and analysis of data that is stored on smartphones. In this paper we describe specifications of smartphones running Android. We further introduce a newly developed tool – called ADEL – …

Survey On Cloud Forensics And Critical Criteria For Cloud Forensic Capability: A Preliminary Analysis, Keyun Ruan, Ibrahim Baggili, Joe Carthy, Tahar Kechadi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper we present the current results and analysis of the survey “Cloud forensics and critical criteria for cloud forensic capability” carried out towards digital forensic experts and practitioners. This survey was created in order to gain a better understanding on some of the key questions of the new field - cloud forensics - before further research and development. We aim to understand concepts such as its definition, the most challenging issues, most valuable research directions, and the critical criteria for cloud forensic capability.

Keywords: Cloud Forensics, Cloud Computing, Digital Forensics, Survey, Cloud Forensic Capability

Kindle Forensics: Acquisition & Analysis, Peter Hannay

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Amazon Kindle eBook reader supports a wide range of capabilities beyond reading books. This functionality includes an inbuilt cellular data connection known as Whispernet. The Kindle provides web browsing, an application framework, eBook delivery and other services over this connection. The historic data left by user interaction with this device may be of forensic interest. Analysis of the Amazon Kindle device has resulted in a method to reliably extract and interpret data from these devices in a forensically complete manner.

Keywords: forensics, digital forensics, kindle, mobile, embedded, ebook, ereader

Aacsb‐Accredited Schools’ Adoption Of Information Security Curriculum, Linda Lau, Cheryl Davis

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The need to professionally and successfully conduct computer forensic investigations of incidents has never been greater. This has launched an increasing demand for a skilled computer security workforce (Locasto, et al., 2011). This paper examines the extent to which AACSB-accredited universities located in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. are working towards providing courses that will meet this demand. The authors conduct an online research of the information security courses and programs offered by the 27 AACSB-accredited business schools in the selected area.

The preliminary investigation revealed that eight of the 27 participating universities did not offer any courses in cybersecurity, …

Digital Forensics Investigation In A Collegiate Environment, Robert E. Johnston

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Creating, building, managing a cost effective digital forensics lab including a team of qualified examiners can be a challenge for colleges [1] with multiple campuses in multiple towns, counties and states. Leaving such examination responsibilities to each of the campuses results in not only disparity in the results but more than likely excessive duplication of efforts as well as the potential for compromise of evidence. Centralizing the forensic efforts results in a team that is not subject to the political pressures of a campus and virtually eliminates the possibility of examiner favoritism. Learn what it takes to create a cost …

Backtrack In The Outback - A Preliminary Report On Cyber Security Evaluation Of Organisations In Western Australia, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward, Peter Hannay

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The authors were involved in extensive vulnerability assessment and penetration testing of over 15 large organisations across various industry sectors in the Perth CBD. The actual live testing involved a team of five people for approximately a four week period, and was black box testing. The scanning consisted of running network and web vulnerability tools, and in a few cases, exploiting vulnerability to establish validity of the tools. The tools were run in aggressive mode with no attempt made to deceive or avoid detection by IDS/IPS or firewalls. The aim of the testing was to determine firstly whether these organisations …

Creating Realistic Corpora For Security And Forensic Education, Kam Woods, Christopher A. Lee, Simson Garfinkel, David Dittrich, Adam Russell, Kris Kearton

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

We present work on the design, implementation, distribution, and use of realistic forensic datasets to support digital forensics and security education. We describe in particular the “M57-Patents” scenario, a multi-modal corpus consisting of hard drive images, RAM images, network captures, and images from other devices typically found in forensics investigations such as USB drives and cellphones. Corpus creation has been performed as part of a scripted scenario; subsequently it is less “noisy” than real-world data but retains the complexity necessary to support a wide variety of forensic education activities. Realistic forensic corpora allow direct comparison of approaches and tools across …

Developing A Forensic Continuous Audit Model, Grover S. Kearns, Katherine J. Barker

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Despite increased attention to internal controls and risk assessment, traditional audit approaches do not seem to be highly effective in uncovering the majority of frauds. Less than 20 percent of all occupational frauds are uncovered by auditors. Forensic accounting has recognized the need for automated approaches to fraud analysis yet research has not examined the benefits of forensic continuous auditing as a method to detect and deter corporate fraud. The purpose of this paper is to show how such an approach is possible. A model is presented that supports the acceptance of forensic continuous auditing by auditors and management as …

Development Of A Distributed Print‐Out Monitoring System For Efficient Forensic Investigation, Satoshi Kai, Tetsutaro Uehara

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

If information leakage occurs, an investigator is instructed to specify what documents were leaked and who leaked them. In the present work, a distributed print-out monitoring system—which consists of a virtual printer driver and print-out policy/log management servers—was developed. For easily matching the discovered (i.e., leaked) paper document with the print-out log, the virtual printer driver acquires full-text of printed-out documents by DDI hooking technique to check the content, transforms a spool file to a picture file and creates both a thumbnail and text log for forensic investigation afterwards. The log size is as only about 0.04 times bigger than …

Mac Os X Forensics: Password Discovery, David Primeaux, Robert Dahlberg, Kamnab Keo, Stephen Larson, B. Pennell, K. Sherman

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

OS X provides a password-rich environment in which passwords protect OS X resources and perhaps many other resources accessed through OS X. Every password an investigator discovers in an OS X environment has the potential for use in discovering other such passwords, and any discovered passwords may also be useful in other aspects of an investigation, not directly related to the OS X environment. This research advises the use of multiple attack vectors in approaching the password problem in an OS X system, including the more generally applicable non-OS X-specific techniques such as social engineering or well-known password cracking techniques …

Software Piracy Forensics: Impact And Implications Of Post‐Piracy Modifications, Vinod Bhattathiripad, S. Santhosh Baboo

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Piracy is potentially possible at any stage of the lifetime of the software. In a post-piracy situation, however, the growth of the respective versions of the software (both the original and pirated) is expected to be in different directions as a result of expectedly different implementation strategies. This paper shows how such post-piracy modifications are of special interest to a cyber crime expert investigating software piracy and suggests that the present software piracy forensic (or software copyright infringement investigation) approaches require amendments to take in such modifications. For this purpose, the paper also presents a format that is jargon-free, so …

Understanding Issues In Cloud Forensics: Two Hypothetical Case Studies, Josiah Dykstra, Alan T. Sherman

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The inevitable vulnerabilities and criminal targeting of cloud environments demand an understanding of how digital forensic investigations of the cloud can be accomplished. We present two hypothetical case studies of cloud crimes; child pornography being hosted in the cloud, and a compromised cloudbased website. Our cases highlight shortcomings of current forensic practices and laws. We describe significant challenges with cloud forensics, including forensic acquisition, evidence preservation and chain of custody, and open problems for continued research.

Keywords: Cloud computing, cloud forensics, digital forensics, case studies

A Practitioners Guide To The Forensic Investigation Of Xbox 360 Gaming Consoles, Ashley L. Podhradsky, Rob D’Ovidio, Cindy Casey

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Given the ubiquitous nature of computing, individuals now have nearly 24-7 access to the internet. People are not just going online through traditional means with a PC anymore, they are now frequently using nontraditional devices such as cell phones, smart phones, and gaming consoles. Given the increased use of gaming consoles for online access, there is also an increased use of gaming consoles to commit criminal activity. The digital forensic community has been tasked with creating new approaches for forensically analyzing gaming consoles. In this research paper the authors demonstrate different tools, both commercial and open source, available to forensically …

Sampling: Making Electronic Discovery More Cost Effective, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the huge volumes of electronic data subject to discovery in virtually every instance of litigation, time and costs of conducting discovery have become exceedingly important when litigants plan their discovery strategies. Rather than incurring the costs of having lawyers review every document produced in response to a discovery request in search of relevant evidence, a cost effective strategy for document review planning is to use statistical sampling of the database of documents to determine the likelihood of finding relevant evidence by reviewing additional documents. This paper reviews and discusses how sampling can be used to make document review more …

Digital Forensics And The Law, Karon N. Murff, Hugh E. Gardenier, Martha L. Gardenier

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As computers and digital devices become more entrenched in our way of life, they become tools for both good and nefarious purposes. When the digital world collides with the legal world, a vast chasm is created. This paper will reflect how the legal community is failing to meet its obligation to provide adequate representation due to a lack of education about digital (computer) forensics. Whether in a civil litigation setting or a criminal setting, attorneys, prosecutors and judges have inadequate knowledge when it comes to the important questions they need to ask regarding digital evidence. Reliance on expert witnesses is …

Portable Network Analyzer, Tyler Warren

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

With networks expanding into all areas of business, both network and security engineers are finding it more difficult to attend directly to issues. In many cases, a physical presence is still necessary on site to troubleshoot and identify issues, but on site, even carrying a bulky laptop is a hindrance. With today's advances in embedded systems, the answer to this problem is presented. A device running an embedded Computer on Module was built with a portable footprint, in both size and power requirements. A device of this type running an operating system like Linux is a powerful tool. In this …

Heterogeneous Signcryption With Key Privacy, Qiong Huang, Duncan S. Wong, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A signcryption scheme allows a sender to produce a ciphertext for a receiver so that both confidentiality and non-repudiation can be ensured. It is built to be more efficient and secure, for example, supporting insider security, when compared with the conventional sign-then-encrypt approach. In this paper, we propose a new notion called heterogeneous signcryption in which the sender has an identity-based secret key while the receiver is holding a certificate-based public key pair. Heterogeneous signcryption is suitable for practical scenarios where an identity-based user, who does not have a personal certificate or a public key, wants to communicate securely with …

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A Multi Agent System For Flow-Based Intrusion Detection Using Reputation And Evolutionary Computation, David Hancock

Theses and Dissertations

The rising sophistication of cyber threats as well as the improvement of physical computer network properties present increasing challenges to contemporary Intrusion Detection (ID) techniques. To respond to these challenges, a multi agent system (MAS) coupled with flow-based ID techniques may effectively complement traditional ID systems. This paper develops: 1) a scalable software architecture for a new, self-organized, multi agent, flow-based ID system; and 2) a network simulation environment suitable for evaluating implementations of this MAS architecture and for other research purposes. Self-organization is achieved via 1) a reputation system that influences agent mobility in the search for effective vantage …

Malicious And Malfunctioning Node Detection Via Observed Physical Layer Data, Tyler J. Hardy

Theses and Dissertations

There are many mechanisms that can cause inadequate or unreliable information in sensor networks. A user of the network might be interested in detecting and classifying specific sensors nodes causing these problems. Several network layer based trust methods have been developed in previous research to assess these issues; in contrast this work develops a trust protocol based on observations of physical layer data collected by the sensors. Observations of physical layer data are used for decisions and calculations, and are based on just the measurements collected by the sensors. Although this information is packaged and distributed on the network layer, …

Holistic Network Defense: Fusing Host And Network Features For Attack Classification, Jenny W. Ji

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents a hybrid network-host monitoring strategy, which fuses data from both the network and the host to recognize malware infections. This work focuses on three categories: Normal, Scanning, and Infected. The network-host sensor fusion is accomplished by extracting 248 features from network traffic using the Fullstats Network Feature generator and from the host using text mining, looking at the frequency of the 500 most common strings and analyzing them as word vectors. Improvements to detection performance are made by synergistically fusing network features obtained from IP packet flows and host features, obtained from text mining port, processor, logon …

An Architecture For Improving Timeliness And Relevance Of Cyber Incident Notifications, James L. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes a communications architecture to deliver timely and relevant cyber incident notifications to dependent mission stakeholders. This architecture, modeled in Unified Modeling Language (UML), eschews the traditional method of pushing notifications via message as dictated in Air Force Instruction 33-138. It instead shifts to a pull or publish and subscribe method of making notifications. Shifting this paradigm improves the notification process by empowering mission owners to identify those resources on which they depend for mission accomplishment, provides a direct conduit between providing and dependent mission owners for notifications when an incident occurs, and provides a shared representation for …