Computer Sciences Commons^™

From The Editor, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this issue we have three papers that have made the cut. The first paper titled “The Cost of Privacy: Riley v. California’s Impact on Cell Phone Searches” is timely. In 2014 there was a unanimous decision that requires a warrant for all cell phone searches. This has some strong implications on the forensic analysis of mobile phones, and to that end, this article discusses and summarizes this legal precedent with its practical implications.

Leveraging Decentralization To Extend The Digital Evidence Acquisition Window: Case Study On Bittorrent Sync, Mark Scanlon, Jason Farina, Nhien A. Khac, Tahar Kechadi

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

File synchronization services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, etc., are becoming increasingly popular in today’s always-connected world. A popular alternative to the aforementioned services is BitTorrent Sync. This is a decentralized/cloudless file synchronization service and is gaining significant popularity among Internet users with privacy concerns over where their data is stored and who has the ability to access it. The focus of this paper is the remote recovery of digital evidence pertaining to files identified as being accessed or stored on a suspect’s computer or mobile device. A methodology for the identification, investigation, recovery and verification …

Book Review: The X-Ways Forensics Practitioner's Guide, Linda Lau

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Brett Shavers is a former law enforcement officer, a digital forensics examiner, an adjunct instructor, and a frequent speaker at many conferences. After writing his first book, titled Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard: Using Digital Forensics and Investigative Techniques to Identify Cybercrime Suspects, he co-wrote his 2nd book with Eric Zimmerman and Jimmy Weg, who is a knowledgeable technical editor. Both Brett and Eric are experts in cyber forensics, with many years of law enforcement experience at both the state and federal levels.

The Cost Of Privacy: Riley V. California’S Impact On Cell Phone Searches, Jennifer L. Moore, Jonathan Langton, Joseph Pochron

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Riley v. California is the United States Supreme Court’s first attempt to regulate the searches of cell phones by law enforcement. The 2014 unanimous decision requires a warrant for all cell phone searches incident to arrest absent an emergency. This work summarizes the legal precedent and analyzes the limitations and practical implications of the ruling. General guidelines for members of the criminal justice system at all levels consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision are provided.

Quantifying Relevance Of Mobile Digital Evidence As They Relate To Case Types: A Survey And A Guide For Best Practice, Shahzad Saleem, Ibrahim Baggili, Oliver Popov

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this work, a survey was conducted to help quantify the relevance of nineteen types of evidence (such as SMS) to seven types of digital investigations associated with mobile devices (MD) (such as child pornography). 97 % of the respondents agreed that every type of digital evidence has a different level of relevance to further or solve a particular investigation. From 55 serious participants, a dataset of 5,772 responses regarding the relevance of nineteen types of digital evidence for all the seven types of digital investigations was obtained. The results showed that (i) SMS belongs to the most relevant type …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] Identity And Leadership In Virtual Communities: Establishing Credibility And Influence, Dona J. Hickey, Joe Essid

Bookshelf

The presence and ubiquity of the internet continues to transform the way in which we identify ourselves and others both online and offline. The development of virtual communities permits users to create an online identity to interact with and influence one another in ways that vary greatly from face-to-face interaction.

Identity and Leadership in Virtual Communities: Establishing Credibility and Influence explores the notion of establishing an identity online, managing it like a brand, and using it with particular members of a community. Bringing together a range of voices exemplifying how participants in online communities influence one another, this book serves …

Developing A Conceptual Framework For Modeling Deviant Cyber Flash Mob: A Socio-Computational Approach Leveraging Hypergraph Constructs, Samer Al-Khateeb, Nitin Agarwal

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In a Flash Mob (FM) a group of people get together in the physical world perform an unpredicted act and disperse quickly. Cyber Flash Mob (CFM) is the cyber manifestation of flash mob coordinated primarily using social media. Deviant Cyber Flash Mob (or, DCFM) is a special case of CFM, which is categorized as the new face of transnational crime organizations (TCOs). The DCFM phenomenon can be considered as a form of a cyber-collective action that is defined as an action aiming to improve group’s conditions (such as, status or power). In this paper, we conduct a conceptual analysis of …

Proactive Search: Using Outcome-Based Dynamic Nearest-Neighbor Recommendation Algorithms To Improve Search Engine Efficacy, Christopher Shaun Wagner

Doctoral Dissertations

"The explosion of readily available electronic information has changed the focus of data processing from data generation to data discovery. The prevalent use of search engines has generated extensive research into improving the speed and accuracy of searches. The goal of this research is to accurately predict user behavior as a means to proactively improve speed, accuracy, and predictability of search engines. The proactive approach eliminates query entry time and hence reduces the overall processing time, improving speed. Assuming success, the user locates an electronic resource of interest, improving accuracy.

Algorithms that have been shown to predict many vastly different …

Proceedings Of The 1st Annual Cuny Games Festival, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Francesco Crocco, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Offenholley, Leah Potter, Maura A. Smale, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 17-18, 2014, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Topics in Game Design - Teaching with Virtual and Augmented Realities - Writing with Games - Breaking the Magic Circle: Games & Real Life - Interactive Game Design (What's Your Game Plan? - Designing Ethical Games - Games and Gender - Gaming English Language and Literature - Game, Narrative, Literacy - Teaching with Games - Games, Storytelling, and Narrative - Games and STEM - Learning by Design - Students as Game Designers - Experiencing Reality in Popular Games …

Do Groups Matter? An Agent-Based Modeling Approach To Pedestrian Egress, Andrew Collins, Terra Elzie, Erika Frydenlund, R. Michael Robinson

VMASC Publications

Festivals in city parks attended by individuals and families are a universal feature of urban life. These venues often have the common attributes of vendors and other obstacles that restrict pedestrian movement through certain areas, as well as fixed number of exits. In this study, the authors build an agent-based model (ABM) that incorporates group cohesion forces into this type of pedestrian egress scenario. The scenario considered was an evacuation of 500 people through a single exit. This allowed an investigation into the use of two different simulated pedestrian's heading updating rules.

A Study Of Personal Cloud Computing: Compatibility, Social Influence, And Moderating Role Of Perceived Familiarity, Murad Moqbel, Valerie L. Bartelt, Mohammed Al-Suqri

Information Systems Faculty Publications

Building on a research framework based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Innovation Diffusion Technology (IDT), and the Technology Adoption Model (TAM), we propose a model integrating compatibility, social influence, and perceived familiarity given the implicit uncertainty of personal cloud. Our model emphasizes the moderating effect of perceived familiarity on the relationships between both perceived compatibility and social influence on behavioral intention. PLS-based structural equation modeling is employed to test the related propositions empirically. Results from a survey, involving 265 university students, reveal that perceived compatibility explains a larger proportion of the variance in behavioral intention; perceived familiarity plays …

How Well Does Multiple Ocr Error Correction Generalize?, William B. Lund, Eric K. Ringger, Daniel D. Walker

Faculty Publications

As the digitization of historical documents, such as newspapers, becomes more common, the need of the archive patron for accurate digital text from those documents increases. Building on our earlier work, the contributions of this paper are: 1. in demonstrating the applicability of novel methods for correcting optical character recognition (OCR) on disparate data sets, including a new synthetic training set, 2. enhancing the correction algorithm with novel features, and 3. assessing the data requirements of the correction learning method. First, we correct errors using conditional random fields (CRF) trained on synthetic training data sets in order to demonstrate the …

Essays On The Digital Divide, Belal Abdelfattah

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The digital divide is a phenomenon that is globally persistent, despite rapidly decreasing costs in technology. While much of the variance in the adoption and use of information communication technology (ICT) that defines the digital divide can be explained by socioeconomic and demographic variables, there is still significant unaccounted variance that needs to be explained if the world's population is expected to be brought more fully into the digital age. The present research addresses this need with three cross-country studies. Study 1 primarily investigates the time individuals spend with traditional media sources as a likely explanation for their frequency of …

Three Essays On Social/Political Structures And Icts Use, Seungeui Ryu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My research identifies how social structures affect the use of the Internet and/or a mobile chat application and how the Internet impacts the political structure of a nation. In my first essay of the 3-essay Dissertation, I am designing three models based on social structure theory that are used to study the Internet and a popular mobile chat application's use by managers in South Korea, with the help of a survey instrument. In my first essay, the contribution is on i) testing a model of manager's personal behavior on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use at the individual level involving …

Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by …

Study Of User Search Activities With Two Discovery Tools At An Academic Library, Xi Niu, Tao Zhang, Hsin-Liang Chen

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The goal of this study was to investigate and compare user search activities of two discovery tools at an academic library. The implementation of a new discovery tool (Primo by Ex Libris) to replace an existing system (VuFind) provided a unique opportunity to collect transaction logs of both systems and examine user search behavior in an empirical test. Results from a transaction log analysis and a user study of this study have contributed to the understanding of users’ search behavior and their preferences and perceptions of the two systems. We find both commonalities and differences between VuFind and Primo for …

A Look Into The Industry Of Video Games Past, Present, And Yet To Come, Chad Hadzinsky

CMC Senior Theses

Since its inception, the video game industry has been both a new medium for art and innovation as well as a major driving force in the advancements of many technologies. The often overlooked video game industry has turned from a hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry in its short, forty year life. People of all ages and genders across the world are playing video games at a higher clip than ever before. With so many new gamers and emerging technologies, it is an exciting time for the industry. The landscape is constantly changing and successful business models of the past …

Book Review: The Basics Of Digital Forensics: The Primer For Getting Started In Digital Forensics, Stephen Larson

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Basics of Digital Forensics: The Primer for Getting Started in Digital Forensics is well-named–it really is very basic. And it should be, as the book’s intended audience includes entry-level digital forensics professionals and complimentary fields such as law enforcement, legal, and general information security. Though the copyright is 2012, some of the data is from 2009, and there is mention of estimates for 2010.

“Time For Some Traffic Problems”: Enhancing E-Discovery And Big Data Processing Tools With Linguistic Methods For Deception Detection, Erin S. Crabb

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Linguistic deception theory provides methods to discover potentially deceptive texts to make them accessible to clerical review. This paper proposes the integration of these linguistic methods with traditional e-discovery techniques to identify deceptive texts within a given author’s larger body of written work, such as their sent email box. First, a set of linguistic features associated with deception are identified and a prototype classifier is constructed to analyze texts and describe the features’ distributions, while avoiding topic-specific features to improve recall of relevant documents. The tool is then applied to a portion of the Enron Email Dataset to illustrate how …

Hot Zone Identification: Analyzing Effects Of Data Sampling On Spam Clustering, Rasib Khan, Mainul Mizan, Ragib Hasan, Alan Sprague

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Email is the most common and comparatively the most efficient means of exchanging information in today's world. However, given the widespread use of emails in all sectors, they have been the target of spammers since the beginning. Filtering spam emails has now led to critical actions such as forensic activities based on mining spam email. The data mine for spam emails at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is considered to be one of the most prominent resources for mining and identifying spam sources. It is a widely researched repository used by researchers from different global organizations. The usual process …

Accurate Modeling Of The Siemens S7 Scada Protocol For Intrusion Detection And Digital Forensics, Amit Kleinmann, Avishai Wool

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Siemens S7 protocol is commonly used in SCADA systems for communications between a Human Machine Interface (HMI) and the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). This paper presents a model-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) designed for S7 networks. The approach is based on the key observation that S7 traffic to and from a specific PLC is highly periodic; as a result, each HMI-PLC channel can be modeled using its own unique Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA). The resulting DFA-based IDS is very sensitive and is able to flag anomalies such as a message appearing out of its position in the normal sequence …

From The Editor-In-Chief, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Welcome to JDFSL’s fourth and final issue for 2014! First, I would like to thank our editorial board, reviewers, and the JDFSL team for bringing this issue to life. It has been a big year for JDFSL as the journal continues to progress. I would like to highlight our critical achievements for 2014 before touching on the papers that were accepted in this issue: 1. JDFSL has gone to a fully open access model without author payment through support from academic institutions. 2. JDFSL has formed and continues to form partnerships with various conferences that relate to cyber security and …

Book Review: Judiciary-Friendly Forensics Of Software Copyright Infringement (Vinod Polpaya Bhattathiripad), Pedro L. P. Sanchez

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Judiciary-Friendly Forensics of Software Copyright Infringement is a book by Dr. Vinod Polpaya Bhattathiripad, published by IGI-Global as part of its Research Essentials series. The book discusses the forensics of software copyright infringement and highlights theoretical, functional, and procedural matters in the investigation of copyright infringement of software products, as well as the development of forensic technologies to detect and avoid software piracy. It is of interest to software forensic experts, lawyers in the field of copyright infringement, judges, software professionals, and students.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Personal Denial Of Service (Pdos) Attacks: A Discussion And Exploration Of A New Category Of Cyber Crime, Michael R. Bartolacci, Larry J. Leblanc, Ashley Podhradsky

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The growth of the Internet has created a corresponding growth in Internet-based crimes and online misbehavior, particularly among younger computer-savvy people. Younger generations have grown up in a world where internet access, social networking, e-commerce and smartphones are commonplace. Given this fact, they have learned how to use, and how to abuse, technology. This leads us to define a new category of cybercrime called a Personal Denial of Service attack (PDOS). A PDOS is a cyber-crime in which an individual deliberately prevents the access of another individual or small group to online services such as email or banking. Due to …

File Detection On Network Traffic Using Approximate Matching, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent years, Internet technologies changed enormously and allow faster Internet connections, higher data rates and mobile usage. Hence, it is possible to send huge amounts of data / files easily which is often used by insiders or attackers to steal intellectual property. As a consequence, data leakage prevention systems (DLPS) have been developed which analyze network traffic and alert in case of a data leak. Although the overall concepts of the detection techniques are known, the systems are mostly closed and commercial. Within this paper we present a new technique for network traffic analysis based on approximate matching (a.k.a …

Fast Rtp Detection And Codecs Classification In Internet Traffic, Petr Matousek, Ondrej Rysavy, Martin Kmet

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper presents a fast multi-stage method for on-line detection of RTP streams and codec identification of transmitted voice or video traffic. The method includes an RTP detector that filters packets based on specific values from UDP and RTP headers. When an RTP stream is successfully detected, codec identification is applied using codec feature sets. The paper shows advantages and limitations of the method and its comparison with other approaches. The method was implemented as a part of network forensics framework NetFox developed in project SEC6NET. Results show that the method can be successfully used for Lawful Interception as well …

Relating Admissibility Standards For Digital Evidence To Attack Scenario Reconstruction, Changwei Liu, Anoop Singhal, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Attackers tend to use complex techniques such as combining multi-step, multi-stage attack with anti-forensic tools to make it difficult to find incriminating evidence and reconstruct attack scenarios that can stand up to the expected level of evidence admissibility in a court of law. As a solution, we propose to integrate the legal aspects of evidence correlation into a Prolog based reasoner to address the admissibility requirements by creating most probable attack scenarios that satisfy admissibility standards for substantiating evidence. Using a prototype implementation, we show how evidence extracted by using forensic tools can be integrated with legal reasoning to reconstruct …

Audit: Automated Disk Investigation Toolkit, Umit Karabiyik, Sudhir Aggarwal

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Software tools designed for disk analysis play a critical role today in forensics investigations. However, these digital forensics tools are often difficult to use, usually task specific, and generally require professionally trained users with IT backgrounds. The relevant tools are also often open source requiring additional technical knowledge and proper configuration. This makes it difficult for investigators without some computer science background to easily conduct the needed disk analysis. In this paper, we present AUDIT, a novel automated disk investigation toolkit that supports investigations conducted by non-expert (in IT and disk technology) and expert investigators. Our proof of concept design …