Computer Sciences Commons^™

Continuous Fraud Detection In Enterprise Systems Through Audit Trail Analysis, Peter J. Best, Pall Rikhardsson, Mark Toleman

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Enterprise systems, real time recording and real time reporting pose new and significant challenges to the accounting and auditing professions. This includes developing methods and tools for continuous assurance and fraud detection. In this paper we propose a methodology for continuous fraud detection that exploits security audit logs, changes in master records and accounting audit trails in enterprise systems. The steps in this process are: (1) threat monitoringsurveillance of security audit logs for ‘red flags’, (2) automated extraction and analysis of data from audit trails, and (3) using forensic investigation techniques to determine whether a fraud has actually occurred. We …

A Synopsis Of Proposed Data Protection Legislation In Sa, Francis S. Cronjé

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Privacy International1 made the following statement regarding South Africa’s financial sector in its 2005 world survey: “South Africa has a well-developed financial system and banking infrastructure. Despite the sophistication of the financial sector, the privacy of financial information is weakly regulated by a code of conduct for banks issued by the Banking Council.” This extract highlights some of the problems South Africa are experiencing with its current status on privacy as viewed from an International perspective. In recent years the International society has stepped up its efforts in creating a global village wherein the individual could be assured of having …

Bluetooth Hacking: A Case Study, Dennis Browning, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper describes a student project examining mechanisms with which to attack Bluetooth-enabled devices. The paper briefly describes the protocol architecture of Bluetooth and the Java interface that programmers can use to connect to Bluetooth communication services. Several types of attacks are described, along with a detailed example of two attack tools, Bloover II and BT Info.

Detection Of Steganography-Producing Software Artifacts On Crime-Related Seized Computers, Asawaree Kulkarni, James Goldman, Brad Nabholz, William Eyre

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Steganography is the art and science of hiding information within information so that an observer does not know that communication is taking place. Bad actors passing information using steganography are of concern to the national security establishment and law enforcement. An attempt was made to determine if steganography was being used by criminals to communicate information. Web crawling technology was used and images were downloaded from Web sites that were considered as likely candidates for containing information hidden using steganographic techniques. A detection tool was used to analyze these images. The research failed to demonstrate that steganography was prevalent on …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Prevention Is Better Than Prosecution: Deepening The Defence Against Cyber Crime, Jacqueline Fick

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In the paper the author proposes that effectively and efficiently addressing cyber crime requires a shift in paradigm. For businesses and government departments alike the focus should be on prevention, rather than the prosecution of cyber criminals. The Defence in Depth strategy poses a practical solution for achieving Information Assurance in today’s highly networked environments. In a world where “absolute security” is an unachievable goal, the concept of Information Assurance poses significant benefits to securing one of an organization’s most valuable assets: Information. It will be argued that the approach of achieving Information Assurance within an organisation, coupled with the …

To License Or Not To License Revisited: An Examination Of State Statutes Regarding Private Investigators And Digital Examiners, Thomas Lonardo, Doug White, Alan Rea

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this update to the previous year's study, the authors examine statutes that regulate, license, and enforce investigative functions in each US state. After identification and review of Private Investigator licensing requirements, the authors find that very few state statutes explicitly differentiate between Private Investigators and Digital Examiners. After contacting all state agencies the authors present a distinct grouping organizing state approaches to professional Digital Examiner licensing. The authors conclude that states must differentiate between Private Investigator and Digital Examiner licensing requirements and oversight.

The Impact Of Hard Disk Firmware Steganography On Computer Forensics, Iain Sutherland, Gareth Davies, Nick Pringle, Andrew Blyth

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The hard disk drive is probably the predominant form of storage media and is a primary data source in a forensic investigation. The majority of available software tools and literature relating to the investigation of the structure and content contained within a hard disk drive concerns the extraction and analysis of evidence from the various file systems which can reside in the user accessible area of the disk. It is known that there are other areas of the hard disk drive which could be used to conceal information, such as the Host Protected Area and the Device Configuration Overlay. There …

Electronic Forms-Based Computing For Evidentiary Analysis, Andy Luse, Brian Mennecke, Anthony M. Townsend

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The paperwork associated with evidentiary collection and analysis is a highly repetitive and time-consuming process which often involves duplication of work and can frequently result in documentary errors. Electronic entry of evidencerelated information can facilitate greater accuracy and less time spent on data entry. This manuscript describes a general framework for the implementation of an electronic tablet-based system for evidentiary processing. This framework is then utilized in the design and implementation of an electronic tablet-based evidentiary input prototype system developed for use by forensic laboratories which serves as a verification of the proposed framework. The manuscript concludes with a discussion …

Graduate Accounting Students' Perception Of It Forensics: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Grover S. Kearns

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Forensics and information technology (IT) have become increasingly important to accountants and auditors. Undergraduate accounting students are introduced to general IT topics but discussion of forensic knowledge is limited. A few schools have introduced an undergraduate major in forensic accounting. Some graduate schools offer accounting students an emphasis in forensic or fraud accounting that includes instruction in forensics and information technology. When students do not view the IT topics as being equally important to their careers as traditional accounting topics, these attitudes may reduce the quality of the course. In an effort to assess student attitudes, a survey of 46 …

Book Review: Cyber Security And Global Information Assurance: Threat Analysis And Response Solutions, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

I freely admit that this book was sent to me by the publisher for the expressed purpose of my writing a review and that I know several of the chapter authors. With that disclosure out of the way, let me say that the book is well worth the review (and I get to keep my review copy).
The preface to the book cites the 2003 publication of The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace by the White House, and the acknowledgement by the U.S. government that our economy and national security were fully dependent upon computers, networks, and the telecommunications infrastructure. …

Seasonal Adaptation Of Vegetation Color In Satellite Images For Flight Simulations, Yuzhong Shen, Jiang Li, Vamsi Mantena, Srinivas Jakkula

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Automatic vegetation identification plays an important role in many applications including remote sensing and high performance flight simulations. This paper proposes a novel method that identifies vegetative areas in satellite images and then alters vegetation color to simulate seasonal changes based on training image pairs. The proposed method first generates a vegetation map for pixels corresponding to vegetative areas, using ISODATA clustering and vegetation classification. The ISODATA algorithm determines the number of clusters automatically. We then apply morphological operations to the clustered images to smooth the boundaries between clusters and to fill holes inside clusters. Six features are then computed …

Dynamic Adaptation Of Joint Transmission Power And Contention Window In Vanet, Danda B. Rawat, Gongjun Yan, Dimitrie C. Popescu, Michele C. Weigle, Stephan Olariu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for joint adaptation of transmission power and contention window to improve the performance of vehicular network in a cross layer approach. The high mobility of vehicles in vehicular communication results in the change in topology of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) dynamically, and the communication link between two vehicles might remain active only for short duration of time. In order for VANET to make a connection for long time and to mitigate adverse effects due to high and fixed transmission power, the proposed algorithm adapts transmission power dynamically based on estimated local traffic …

Psoda: Open Source Phylogenetic Search And Dna Analysis, Mark J. Clement, Quinn O. Snell, Kenneth Sundberg

Faculty Publications

PSODA is an open source (GPL v2) sequence analysis package that implements sequence alignment using biochemical properties, phylogeny search with parsimony or maximum likelihood criteria and selection detection using biochemical properties (TreeSAAP ). PSODA is compatible with PAUP and the search algorithms are competitive with those in PAUP. PSODA also adds a basic scripting language to the PAUP block, making it possible to easily create advanced meta-searches. Because PSODA is open-source, we have also been able to easily add in advanced search techniques and characterize the benefits of various optimizations. PSODA is available for Macintosh OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Efficient Clustering Techniques For Managing Large Datasets, Vasanth Nemala

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The result set produced by a search engine in response to the user query is very large. It is typically the responsibility of the user to browse the result set to identify relevant documents. Many tools have been developed to assist the user to identify the most relevant documents. One such a tool is clustering technique. In this method, the closely related documents are grouped based on their contents. Hence if a document turns out to be relevant, so are the rest of the documents in the cluster. So it would be easy for a user to sift through the …

Hierarchical Routing In Manets Using Simple Clustering, Adam Carnine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis presents both a review of current MANET routing protocols and a new MANET routing algorithm. The routing protocols reviewed include representative samples from the three primary forms of routing found in MANETS: proactive routing, reactive routing and hybrid routing. Secure algorithms are given special treatment in the review. In addition several protocol enhancements are discussed.

The proposed routing protocol is designed to support networks of a medium size, containing over 200 nodes but less than 3,000 nodes. The design is intentionally simple to allow ease of implementation in comparison with other MANET protocols that provide similar functionality.

Back Matter Of Volume 4 Number 1, Tufail A. Qureshi

Business Review

Call for Papers: the Third International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICICT'09) August 15-16, 2009, A word about the IBA, About our Authors, Back Matter

Exploring Impact Of Educational And Economic Factors On National Intellectual Productivity Using Machine Learning Methods, Canon Fazenbaker

Theses and Dissertations

The patent process is representative of a nationwide means for innovations and new ideas to be recognized. The U.S. Patents Office, since its inception in 1790, has issued nearly five million patents. These patents span from the U.S. Patent #1, which was for an improvement "in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process" to today's patents which deal with technologies and mediums that were unimaginable at the Patent Offices' inception. The purpose of this study is to determine what social and economic factors at the federal level have the highest impact on national …

Partial Program Admission, Michael Wilson, Ron Cytron, Jon Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Real-time systems on non-preemptive platforms require a means of bounding the execution time of programs for admission purposes. Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) is most commonly used to bound program execution time. While bounding a program’s WCET statically is possible, computing its true WCET is difficult.We present a new technique we call partial program admission, a means of statically enforcing an otherwise untrusted assertion of WCET without adding runtime overhead, by means of code duplication. We apply this technique to real programs from the virtual networking arena and present the results.

Design Of An Extensible Network Testbed With Heterogeneous Components, Charlie Wisemen, Jyoti Parwatikar, Ken Wong, John Dehart, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Virtualized network infrastructures are currently deployed in both research and commercial contexts. The complexity of the virtualization layer varies greatly in different deployments, ranging from cloud computing environments, to carrier Ethernet applications using stacked VLANs, to networking testbeds. In all of these cases, there are many users sharing the resources of one provider, where each user expects their resources to be isolated from all other users. Our work in this area is focused on network testbeds. In particular, we present the design of the latest version of the Open Network Laboratory (ONL) testbed. This redesign generalizes the underlying infrastructure to …

Self-Stabilizing Computation Of 3-Edge-Connected Components, Abusayeed Saifullah, Yung Tsin

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

Non-Programmers Identifying Functionality In Unfamiliar Code: Strategies And Barriers, Paul Gross, Caitlin Kelleher

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Source code on the web is a widely available and potentially rich learning resource for non-programmers. However, unfamiliar code can be daunting to end-users without programming experience. This paper describes the results of an exploratory study in which we asked non-programmers to find and modify the code responsible for specific functionality within unfamiliar programs. We present two interacting models of how non-programmers approach this problem: the Task Process Model and the Landmark-Mapping model. Using these models, we describe code search strategies non-programmers employed and the difficulties they encountered. Finally, we propose guidelines for future programming environments that support non-programmers in …

Adaptive Service Provisioning For Wireless Sensor Networks, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Service provisioning has gained significant attention as a promising programming model for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Its key idea is to exploit the decoupling of service providers and consumers to enable platform-independent applications that are dynamically bound to platform-specific services. We explore novel adaptive service binding strategies that are able to cope with network dynamics and to promote energy conservation. To achieve this goal, we developed policies and algorithms that automatically switch providers in response to network topology changes and adapt application behavior when opportunities for energy savings surface. The latter is accomplished by providing limited information about the energy …

Performance-Engineered Network Overlays For High Quality Interaction In Virtual Worlds, Mart Haitjema, Ritun Patney, Jon Turner, Charlie Wiseman, John Dehart

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Overlay hosting systems such as PlanetLab, and cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s EC2, provide shared infrastructures within which new applications can be developed and deployed on a global scale. This paper ex-plores how systems of this sort can be used to enable ad-vanced network services and sophisticated applications that use those services to enhance performance and provide a high quality user experience. Specifically, we investigate how advanced overlay hosting environments can be used to provide network services that enable scalable virtual world applications and other large-scale distributed applications requiring consistent, real-time performance. We propose a novel network architecture called …

Reliable Patient Monitoring: A Clinical Study In A Step-Down Hospital Unit, Octav Chipara, Chenyang Lu, Thomas C. Bailey, Gruia-Catalin Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper presents the design, deployment, and empirical study of a wireless clinical monitoring system that collects pulse and oxygen saturation readings from patients. The primary contribution of this paper is an in-depth clinical trial that assesses the feasibility of wireless sensor networks for patient monitoring in general (non-ICU) hospital units. The trial involved 32 patients monitored in a step-down cardiology unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis. During a total of 31 days of monitoring, the network achieved high reliability (median 99.92%, range 95.21% - 100%). The overall reliability of the system was dominated by sensing reliability (median 80.55%, range …

Achieving Coordination Through Dynamic Construction Of Open Workflows, Louis Thomas, Justin Wilson, Grui-Catalin Roman, Christopher Gill

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Workflow middleware executes tasks orchestrated by rules defined in a carefully handcrafted static graph. Workflow management systems have proved effective for service-oriented business automation in stable, wired infrastructures. We introduce a radically new paradigm for workflow construction and execution called open workflow to support goal-directed coordination among physically mobile people and devices that form a transient community over an ad hoc wireless network. The quintessential feature of the open workflow paradigm is dynamic construction of custom, context-specific workflows in response to unpredictable and evolving circumstances by exploiting the knowledge and services available within a given spatiotemporal context. This paper introduces …

Globally Clocked Magnetic Logic Circuits, Michael Hall, Albrecht Jander, Roger D. Chamberlain, Pallavi Dhagat

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Magnetic spin valve devices enable the design of logic and memory elements that are suitable for use when constructing digital systems. A master-slave flip-flop design is proposed that can be clocked using an externally applied global magnetic field. With an external global clock, the digital system no longer needs to deliver the clock on-chip, thereby eliminating the need for a clock distribution network. We assess the power, area, and speed implications associated with the ability to eliminate the clock distribution network on a hybrid CMOS-magnetologic digital system.

Radio Mapping For Indoor Environments, Octav Chipara, Gregory Hackmann, Chenyang Lu, William D. Smart

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The efficient deployment and robust operation of many sensor network applications depend on deploying relays to ensure wireless coverage. Radio mapping aims to predict network coverage based on a small number of link measurements from sampled locations. Radio mapping is particularly challenging in complex indoor environments where walls significantly affect radio signal propagation. This paper makes the following key contributions to indoor radio mapping. First, our empirical study in an office building identifies a wall-classification model as the most effective model for indoor environments due to its balance between model complexity and accuracy. Second, we propose a practical algorithm to …

When Is It Beneficial For A Firm To Pursue A Unified Procurement Strategy For Enterprise Software Solutions?, Robert J. Kauffman, Juliana Y. Tsai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The underlying structure of the enterprise software marketplace during the past ten years suggests that the arrangements that firms make with respect to the acquisition of such software capabilities will become increasingly concentrated. This article explores the multiple theoretical rationales and business cases for the move to a unified procurement strategy for enterprise software, reflecting some differences in terms of what might be expected from the predictions of the well known move-to-the-middle hypothesis. Our central argument is that a "move-to-the-middle" with more than just a single vendor is the likely outcome in unconsolidated industry markets. In industries experiencing consolidation, firms …