Computer Sciences Commons^™

Security In Distributed Systems - A Framework For Different Application Types, Ingo Stengel

Theses

Security is a factor which decides upon the applicability of distributed applications. Therefore this thesis deals with security in distributed systems. The complexity of the existing distributed technologies makes it necessary to reduce the number of distributed technologies considered in this thesis, i.e. concentrating on: Java, Mobile Agents and CORBA, where only Java-based mobile agents will be considered.

After a short review of basic security principles including firewalls, existing security problems in the above mentioned distributed technologies are analysed. Additional generic problems in distributed systems are outlined.

Solutions are referring to two different areas: those regarding security problems with firewalls …

Some Remarks On Fair Exchange Protocol, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fair exchange turns out to be an increasingly important topic due to the rapid growth of electronic commerce. An exchange is deemed to be fair if at the end of exchange, either each party receives the expected item or neither party receives any useful information about the other’s item. Several protocols for fair exchange have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we first examine a newly published fair exchange protocol and point out its flaws and weaknesses. We then put forward a more efficient and secure protocol and give an informal analysis.

Network Security Versus Network Connectivity: A Framework For Addressing The Issues Facing The Air Force Medical Community, Franklin E. Cunningham Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force has instituted Barrier Reef to protect its networks. The Air Force medical community operates network connections that are incompatible with Barrier Reef. To overcome this problem, OASD(HA) directed the Tri-Service Management Program Office (TIMPO) to develop an architecture that protects all military health systems and allows them to link with all three services and outside partners. This research studied the underlying networking issues and formed a framework based on data from network experts from the Air Force's medical centers and their base network organizations. The findings were compared TIMPO and a composite framework was developed that more …

Information System Incidents: The Development Of A Damage Assessment Model, Mark D. Horony

Theses and Dissertations

Information system (IS) incidents are on the rise. With low manning and undertrained information security specialists it is difficult for organizations to stop IS incidents from occurring. Once an incident has occurred it is the IS manager's responsibility to ensure that a full and accurate damage assessment has been accomplished. However, most IS managers lack the necessary tools to assess the damage from an incident. This exploratory thesis developed an IS incident damage assessment model (DAM) that can be part of the IS manager's tool kit. During the development of the model, it became apparent that the model was supported …

An Interview With David Brin, Switch Staffs

SWITCH

This is an interview with David Brin, a science fiction author, and the Switch staff. They discuss some topics of Brin’s book, "The Transparent Society". The main hypothesis of this book is reciprocal surveillance for accountability and decentralization of power. Brin discusses his thoughts on privacy, such as real privacy, illusory privacy, and a third kind of privacy. He goes on to connect surveillance with power and the government. He continues with how people react to the advances of technology and how they learn from past generations.

Trends. An Encryption Paradox: Cracking The Groupe Speciale Mobile Standard (Gsm), Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the vulnerability of encryption methods used with today's modern technology.

Trends. Injustice Through Justice Within The Ins And The Fbi: Fertile Territory For Information, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the quest for justice, in which policymakers, legislators, and those who seek to influence them sometimes seek to effect mandatory sequences of adjudicative procedure upon allegations of misbehavior.

A Signcryption Scheme With Signature Directly Verifiable By Public Key, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Signcryption, first proposed by Zheng, is a cryptographic primitive which combines both the functions of digital signature and public key encryption in a logical single step, and with a computational cost significantly lower than that needed by the traditional signature-then-encryption approach. In Zheng's scheme, the signature verification can be done either by the recipient directly (using his private key) or by engaging a zero-knowledge interative protocol with a third party, without disclosing recipient's private key. In this note, we modify Zheng's scheme so that the recipient's private key is no longer needed in signature verification. The computational cost of the …

Network Security: An Evaluation Of Security Policies And Firewall Implementations, Melanie L. Abbas

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This paper begins focusing on network security issues. The areas of physical security, access security, and connection security are explored. Connection security provides the biggest need for improvement in the entire security field. This type of security is managed best with firewall implementations. Various firewall models are discussed.

Software evaluations were performed on three different commercial Internet security tools. The software was compared on the basis of ease of installation, functionality, level of security provided, and output available. In summary, the value of the firewall is dependent on the need to implement a firewall in an organization.

However, a security …

Stackguard: Automatic Adaptive Detection And Prevention Of Buffer-Overflow Attacks, Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, David Maier, Heather Hinton, Jonathan Walpole, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie, Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a systematic solution to the persistent problem of buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks gained notoriety in 1988 as part of the Morris Worm incident on the Internet. While it is fairly simple to fix individual buffer overflow vulnerabilities, buffer overflow attacks continue to this day. Hundreds of attacks have been discovered, and while most of the obvious vulnerabilities have now been patched, more sophisticated buffer overflow attacks continue to emerge.

We describe StackGuard: a simple compiler technique that virtually eliminates buffer overflow vulnerabilities with only modest performance penalties. Privileged programs that are recompiled with the StackGuard …

A Model For Determining Information To Be Captured Regarding Unauthorized Computer Entry Of An Air Force Computer System, Leslie F. Himebrook

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a model of information to capture regarding unauthorized computer systems access attempts. This model takes a management focus, and incorporates the technical focus, intelligence focus, and legal focus as inputs. The author used an exploratory, qualitative methodology consisting of an extensive literature review and interviews with experts in the field. These efforts produced the proposed model, which was reviewed by experts in the field using a delphi technique. The model consists of information that is divided into the following areas: 1. What information was compromised. 2. What type of intrusion occurred. 3. How the intrusion was attempted. …

A New On-Line Cash Check Scheme, Robert H. Deng, Yongfei Han, Albert B. Jeng, Teow-Hin Ngair

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a new on-line cash check scheme which guarantees payor anonymity and improves upon existing similar schemes in efficiency and security.

Analyzing And Improving Stochastic Network Security: A Multicriteria Prescriptive Risk Analysis Model, David L. Lyle

Theses and Dissertations

This research optimized two measures of network security by hardening components and improving their reliability. A common measure of effectiveness (MOE) for networks is statistical reliability, which ignores the effects of hostile actions. A new MOE which includes hostile actions was developed. Both measures require component reliability functions, derived using fault trees. Fuzzy Logic and Monte Carlo simulation were used to quantify uncertainty. Results from the model are compared to traditional Risk Assessment results.

The "Hoover" Project: Home Occupants Vehicular Electronic Reconnaissance, Kelvin Chan

SWITCH

The article explains telepresence, as well as its potential in safety and security, along with its traditional usage of traversing dangerous situations. This article describes a dystopian plan to place drones equipped with cameras and microphones in all homes in the Silicon Valley as a vehicle for telepresence. The data achieved through this method would also be stored into a public domain browser on the internet, free for anyone in the public to view, including larger corporations and the government. The idea behind this is the assimilation of data behind all cultures for understanding and to assist law enforcement in …

Privacy Issues Dealing With Technology : A Review Of The Literature, Kimberly S. Mccoy

Graduate Research Papers

The sophisticated applications of technology are expanding everyday. Unfortunately, so are the many concerns individuals in society are having about their right to privacy. The actual regulations dealing with one's right to privacy has not expand as rapidly as the applications of technology. Individuals using various types of technology are under the assumption their activities are private; however, this is not the case. It does not seem to matter if you are using a computer for communications work, school, or in the "privacy" of your own home, there is absolutely no privacy when dealing with this type of technology.

This …

Review Of Personal Identification Systems, J. M. Cross

Research outputs pre 2011

The growth of the use of biometric personal identification systems has been relatively steady over the last 20 years. The expected biometric revolution which was forecast since the mid 1970's has not yet occurred. The main factor for lower than expected growth has been the cost and user acceptance of the systems. During the last few years, however, a new generation of more reliable, less expensive and better designed biometric devices have come onto the market. This combined with the anticipated expansion of new reliable, user friendly inexpensive systems provides a signal that the revolution is about to begin. This …

The Development And Use Of The Secure Electronic Transaction (Set) Protocol On The Internet, Damon James Whyte

Theses : Honours

While still in its infancy, Electronic Commerce is growing at an exponential rate each year (Walson, 1997. p.53). Although few doubt that such growth will only continue in years to come, many people still have serious reservations about the levels of security offered by currently available applications for conducting such trade. This thesis identifies some of the key areas of concern regarding Electronic Commerce on the lnternet, and looks at the ways in which the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) model, proposed by Mastercard and Visa, succeeds or fails in addressing these concerns. It identifies and describes the key dements and …

A Specialization Toolkit To Increase The Diversity Of Operating Systems, Calton Pu, Andrew P. Black, Crispin Cowan, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Consel

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Virus and worm attacks that exploit system implementation details can be countered with a diversified set of implementations. Furthermore, immune systems show that attacks from previously unknown organisms require effective dynamic response. In the Synthetix project, we have been developing a specialization toolkit to improve the performance of operating system kernels. The toolkit helps programmers generate and manage diverse specialized implementations of software modules. The Tempo-C specializer tool generates different versions for both compile-time and run-time specialization. We are now adapting the toolkit to improve operating system survivability against implementations attacks.

An On-The-Fly Decoding Technique For Reed-Solomon Codes, Yuan Xing Lee, Robert H. Deng, Eng Hean Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An on-the-fly error correction technique for double-byte-error-correction (DBEC) and triple-byte-error-detection (TBED) Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is presented in this paper. This new algorithm finds number of byte-errors (single byte-error, double-byte errors, and triple-byte errors) by simply testing the values of a few syndrome functions, and locates and corrects the byte-errors directly without using the standard iterative algorithms for finding the error location polynomial. More importantly, it neither suffers from malfunctions incurred in Deng-Costello algorithm (1987), nor requires syndrome re-calculation as in Koksal-Yucel's modification (1992). It is also much more simpler and faster than the original Deng-Costello algorithm. It has found applications …

Gnarly Rantings About The Hacker And The Ants, Rudy Rucker

SWITCH

The article is an excerpt from Rucker’s book “The Happy Mutant”. It begins with his reflection of his career with GoMotion. He discusses the relation that he saw between design and cyberspace. Later he discusses his experience with a game a colleague found on the net: a virtual world where player is an ant. He talks about the struggles he goes through in this virtual world because of game difficulty and poor visuals. He ties it all in with how the Silicon Valley works in a similar way, and is filled with hackers and programers all needing each other to …

A Type I Hybrid Arq System With Adaptive Code Rates, Robert H. Deng, Michael L. Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Type I hybrid ARQ systems use an error-control code of fixed rate for error-correction in each transmitted packet. In such systems, the code rate must be carefully chosen to match the channel bit error rate (BER) in order to maximize system throughput. Whenever there is a mismatch between code rate and channel BER, the throughput suffers. In this paper, we proposed a type I hybrid ARQ system which automatically adjusts its code rates to match channel BERs. The proposed system is very simple to implement and yet performs significantly better than type I hybrid ARQ systems of fixed code rate

Improving Intrusion Detection In Unix-Based Networks, David R. Landry

Theses and Dissertations

Computer security has not kept pace with the rapid growth of networked systems. Through its connection to the Internet, the Department of Defense is vulnerable to computer-based attacks. Current intrusion detection systems are still unproven, too complicated, or too costly for most system security officers to implement. The attack methods used by system intruders are known and can be represented as groups of commands called attack signatures. This thesis investigates methods for detecting intruders by monitoring command usage. Testing was conducted in both controlled and uncontrolled circumstances. With controlled testing, it was shown that 7 of the 11 signatures could …

Performance Of Combined Diversity Reception And Convolutional Coding For Qdpsk Land Mobile Radio, Huafei Zhou, Robert H. Deng, T. T. Tjhung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Diversity reception and error correction coding are powerful techniques to combat multipath fading encountered in mobile radio communications. In order to improve the transmission performance of the ?/4-shift QDPSK signal in mobile radio channels, the authors propose a new scheme of combined coding and diversity reception, i.e., combination of diversity reception employing code combining (CC) and convolutional coding employing error-and erasure correction Viterbi decoding. They also consider another combination scheme, i.e., combination of diversity reception employing postdetection maximal ratio combining (MRC) and convolutional coding employing hard decision Viterbi decoding. They theoretically analyze the performance of the schemes taking into account …

On The Equivalence Of Mceliece's And Niederreiter's Public-Key Cryptosystems, Y. X. Li, Robert H. Deng, X. M. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is shown that McEliece's and Niederreiter's public-key cryptosystems are equivalent when set up for corresponding choices of parameters. A security analysis for the two systems based on this equivalence observation, is presented

A Probabilistic Approach To Fault Diagnosis In Linear Lightwave Networks, Robert H. Deng, A. A. Lazar, W. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The application of probabilistic reasoning to fault diagnosis in linear lightwave networks (LLNs) is investigated. The LLN inference model is represented by a Bayesian network (or causal network). An inference algorithm is proposed that is capable of conducting fault diagnosis (inference) with incomplete evidence and on an interactive basis. Two belief updating algorithms are presented which are used by the inference algorithm for performing fault diagnosis. The first belief updating algorithm is a simplified version of the one proposed by Pearl (1988) for singly connected inference models. The second belief updating algorithm applies to multiply connected inference models and is …

An Adaptive Coding Scheme With Code Combining For Mobile Radio Systems, Robert H. Deng, Huafei Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The authors propose and study an adaptive error-control coding scheme for binary digital FM (BFM) mobile radio transmission. The scheme employs code combining through packet retransmissions. The number of transmissions of a packet is in proportion to the channel fading/noise levels, which is in contrast to time diversity techniques where a fixed number of repetitions of a data packet is performed even in the absence of channel errors. Furthermore, the receiver uses received signal envelopes as channel state information, which significantly improves the throughput and bit error rate (BER) performance. Performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed for frequency-flat Rayleigh …

Hybrid Arq Schemes For Point-To-Multipoint Communications Over Nonstationary Broadcast Channels, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) error control schemes make use of both error detection and error correction in order to achieve high throughput and low undetected error probabilities on two way channels. Two hybrid ARQ schemes, termed hybrid go-back-N (HGB- N) and hybrid selective-repeat (HSR), are proposed for point-to-multipoint communications over broadcast channels. Both schemes incorporate a concatenated code for error correction and error detection. The performance study of the hybrid schemes is based on a two-state Markov model of a burst noise channel. An analytic solution is derived for the throughput efficiency of the HSR scheme, while approximations and computer simulation …

Performance Analysis Of Two Bridged Csma/Cd Networks, C. C. Ko, W. C. Wang, J. L. Du, Robert H. Deng, K. M. Lye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper analyses the performance of two non-persistent CSMA/CD LANs linked by a bridge. The main function of the bridge is to buffer all internet work packets and forward them across networks to their destinations. From establishing and solving the main equations governing the behaviour of the bridged networks, the effects of design parameters such as the bridge buffer size and re-transmission back off delay on the performance of the system are studied. It is shown that if these parameters are chosen properly, better throughput and delay performance can be obtained, when compared with an equivalent CSMA/CD network without using …

Performance Of A Token-Passing System With Batch Arrivals And Its Application To File Transfers, Robert H. Deng, Xuanyu Zhang, Kuan Tase Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the performance of token-passing systems with limited service and Poisson arrivals. For pure Poisson arrivals, the Laplace-Stieltjes Transform (LST) of an approximate customer/packet waiting time distribution is derived and expressed as a functional equation, from which the approximate mean and variance of waiting time are obtained; for batch Poisson arrivals, an approximate mean of waiting time is derived. Mean waiting time approximations are compared against both simulation results and other results presented in the literature; the variance approximation is evaluated by comparing it to simulation results only, since no other results on variance have been reported so …

Performance Analysis Of Interconnected Lans With Server/Client Configuration, Jiangling Du, Robert H. Deng, Chi Chung Ko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the end-to-end performance of interconnected local area networks (LAN) with server/client configuration. The system uses bridges to connect two token-ring LANs through a high-speed communication link. A server station located on one LAN receives requests from client-stations on the same LAN as well as on the remote LAN, processes the requests, and returns responses to the client-stations. The end-to-end connections of the interconnected network are modelled as single-chain and multiple-chain closed queueing systems, which are solved by an iterative algorithm based on the MVA (mean value analysis) method. The performance examples are shown in terms …