Computer Sciences Commons^™

Digital Records Forensics: A New Science And Academic Program For Forensic Readiness, Luciana Duranti, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper introduces the Digital Records Forensics project, a research endeavour located at the University of British Columbia in Canada and aimed at the development of a new science resulting from the integration of digital forensics with diplomatics, archival science, information science and the law of evidence, and of an interdisciplinary graduate degree program, called Digital Records Forensics Studies, directed to professionals working for law enforcement agencies, legal firms, courts, and all kind of institutions and business that require their services. The program anticipates the need for organizations to become “forensically ready,” defined by John Tan as “maximizing the ability …

A Layered Framework Approach To Mitigate Crimeware, Mathew Nyamagwa

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Crimeware attacks are growing at such an alarming rate and are becoming so prevalent that the FBI now rank cybercrime among its top priorities after terrorism and espionage. New studies estimate cyber crimes cost firms an astounding $1 trillion annually. But the good news? Over 80% of them are preventable. Crimeware is not a purely technical threat but more or a socio-technical affair. This clearly brings out the fact that computers do not commit a crime, but we (humans) do! In this paper I propose a layered approach that involves all stakeholders from end-users to service-providers and law enforcement to …

Canvass - A Steganalysis Forensic Tool For Jpeg Images, Jennifer L. Davidson, Jaikishan Jalan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Steganography is a way to communicate a message such that no one except the sender and recipient suspects the existence of the message. This type of covert communication lends itself to a variety of different purposes such as spy-to-spy communication, exchange of pornographic material hidden in innocuous image files, and other illicit acts. Computer forensic personnel have an interest in testing for possible steganographic files, but often do not have access to the technical and financial resources required to perform steganalysis in an effective manner. This paper describes the results of a funded effort by a grant from the National …

Measuring Whitespace Patterns As An Indication Of Plagiarism, Ilana Shay, Nikolaus Baer, Robert Zeidman

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

There are several different methods of comparing source code from different programs to find copying1 . Perhaps the most common method is comparing source code statements, comments, strings, identifiers, and instruction sequences. However, there are anecdotes about the use of whitespace patterns in code. These virtually invisible patterns of spaces and tabs have been used in litigation to imply copying, but no formal study has been performed that shows that these patterns can actually identify copied code. This paper presents a detailed study of whitespace patterns and the uniqueness of these patterns in different programs.

Keywords: Copyright Infringement, Intellectual Property, …

Electronic Discovery: A Fool’S Errand Where Angels Fear To Tread?, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Electronic discovery has transformed the discovery phase of civil litigation in recent years. The expectations of lawyers and parties were initially established in the Rowe and Zubulake cases that led to a complete revision of the electronic discovery rules contained in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Subsequent cases have underscored the importance of document search methodologies and implications for attorneys, IT professionals, and digital forensics professionals. The authors review how electronic discovery has evolved thus far and offer recommendations regarding the electronic discovery process.

Keywords: Electronic discovery, e-discovery, keyword search, concept search,

Social Networking: A Boon To Criminals, Tejashree D. Datar, Richard Mislan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the world getting more and more digitized, social networking has also found a place in the cyber world. These social networking sites (SNSs) which enable people to socialize, and build and maintain relationships are attracting attention of all kinds of people such as teens, adults, sports persons, and even businesses. But these SNSs are also getting unwanted attention from people like sexual predators, spammers, and people involved in criminal and illegal activities. This paper talks about SNSs and how these sites are exploited for criminal or illegal activity. The SNSs are discussed in detail with respect to user profiles, …

Hard Disk Storage: Firmware Manipulation And Forensic Impact And Current Best Practice, Gareth Davies, Iain Sutherland

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The most common form of storage media utilized in both commercial and domestic systems is the hard disk drive, consequently these devices feature heavily in digital investigations. Hard disk drives are a collection of complex components. These components include hardware and firmware elements that are essential for the effective operation of the drive. There are now a number of devices available, intended for data recovery, which can be used to manipulate the firmware components contained within the drive. It has been previously shown that it is possible to alter firmware for malicious purposes, either to conceal information or to prevent …

Organizational Handling Of Digital Evidence, Sheona A. Hoolachan, William B. Glisson

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

There are a number of factors that impact a digital forensics investigation. These factors include: the digital media in question, implemented processes and methodologies, the legal aspects, and the individuals involved in the investigation. This paper presents the initial idea that Digital Forensic Practice (DFP) recommendations can potentially improve how organizations handle digital evidence. The recommendations are derived from an in-depth survey conducted with practitioners in both commercial organizations and law enforcement along with supporting literature. The recommendations presented in this paper can be used to assess an organization’s existing digital forensics practices and a guide to Digital Forensics Improvement …

A Framework To Integrate The Data Of Interview Investigation And Digital Evidence, Fahad Alshathry

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The physical interview process in crime investigation produces an extremely large amount of data, particularly in big cases. In comparison, examiners of digital evidence have enormous amounts of data to search through whilst looking for data relating to the investigation. However, the links between their results are limited. Whilst investigators need to refute or support their hypothesis throughout, digital evidence examiners often use search based keywords. These keywords are usually created from evidence taken from the physical investigation reports and this basic method has been found to have many shortcomings and limitations. This paper proposes a highly automatic framework to …

Developing Voip Honeypots: A Preliminary Investigation Into Malfeasant Activity, Craig Valli

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

30 years ago PABX systems were compromised by hackers wanting to make long distance calls at some other entities expense. This activity faded as telephony became cheaper and PABX systems had countermeasures installed to overcome attacks. Now the world has moved onto the provision of telephony via broadband enabled Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) with this service now being provided as a replacement for conventional fixed wire telephony by major telecommunication providers worldwide. Due to increasing bandwidth it is possible for systems to support multiple voice connections simultaneously. The networked nature of the Internet allows for attackers of these VoIP …

Higate (High Grade Anti‐Tamper Equipment) Prototype And Application To E‐Discovery, Yui Sakurai, Yuki Ashino, Tetsutaro Uehara, Hiroshi Yoshiura, Ryoichi Sasaki

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

These days, most data is digitized and processed in various ways by computers. In the past, computer owners were free to process data as desired and to observe the inputted data as well as the interim results. However, the unrestricted processing of data and accessing of interim results even by computer users is associated with an increasing number of adverse events. These adverse events often occur when sensitive data such as personal or confidential business information must be handled by two or more parties, such as in the case of e-Discovery, used in legal proceedings, or epidemiologic studies. To solve …

Assessing The Flexibility Of A Service Oriented Architecture To That Of The Classic Data Warehouse, Michael Pastore

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The flexibility of a service oriented architecture (SOA) is compared to that of the classic data warehouse across three categories: (1) source system access, (2) integration and transformation, and (3) end user access. The findings suggest that an SOA allows better upgrade and migration flexibility if back-end systems expose their source data via adapters. However, the providers of such adapters must deal with the complexity of maintaining consistent interfaces. An SOA also appears to provide more flexibility at the integration tier due to its ability to merge batch with real-time source system data. This has the potential to retain source …

A Framework Towards An Internalization Structure Using Document Repositories In The Context Of A Knowledge Management Strategy: A Case Study Of The First Colorado Title, Sharyl Swope

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Knowledge management is a key to creating efficiency and consistency within an organization. Title examiners review documents that may affect the issuance of title insurance. Some documents may affect many properties and thus are reviewed many times. This paper seeks to develop a framework that will enable the knowledge gained by the first review of the document to be captured and shared. Exploring the ontology of the title insurance industry with respect to title searching and examinations through the development of a concept map was the first step. Surveying the members of the title department provided the specifics for the …

Energy Savings Through Multi-Level Security Clients, Keith S. Mcabee

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

In a multi-desktop environment, where users are required to access separate desktops to use different systems due to security requirements, the redundant desktop computers present a gross inefficiency in relation to power consumption even if each individual system is thoroughly examined and overhauled for energy efficiency. Several organizations require the use of separate networks and computer systems to perform different functions or access different data. The separation of networks is often the consequence of the need for security between the information and data on each individual system. The military is an excellent example of this situation. The need to separate …

Band Reduction For Hyperspectral Imagery Processing, Stefan Robila

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Feature reduction denotes the group of techniques that reduce high dimensional data to a smaller set of components. In remote sensing feature reduction is a preprocessing step to many algorithms intended as a way to reduce the computational complexity and get a better data representation. Reduction can be done by either identifying bands from the original subset (selection), or by employing various transforms that produce new features (extraction). Research has noted challenges in both directions. In feature selection, identifying an "ideal" spectral band subset is a hard problem as the number of bands is increasingly large, rendering any exhaustive search …

On Building An Index Advisor For Semantic Web Queries, Lubomir Stanchev, Grant Weddell

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Current optimization techniques for answering queries over Semantic Web data use realization to precalculate the individuals associated with every concept in the given ontology. However, this technique does not take into account the type of queries, written for example in nRQL or SPARQL-DL, that will arrive at the system. In this paper we propose how this additional knowledge can be used to create query-specific indices. We include experimental results that show how our approach can be used to improve the performance of the Pellet query engine for the popular LUBM benchmark.

Analysis Of Medical Images By Colonies Of Prehending Entities, Rebecca Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of emergent behavior is difficult to define, but can be considered as higher-level activity created by the individual actions of a population of simple agents. A potential means to model such behavior has been previously developed using Alfred North Whitehead's concept of Actual Entities. In computational form, actual entities are agents which evolve over time in response to interactions with their environment via the process of prehension. This occurs within the context of a Colony of Prehending Entities, a framework for implementation of AE concepts. This thesis explores the practical application of this framework in analysis of medical …

Development Of A 3d Game Engine, Nicholas Alexander Woodfield

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper presents the development history and specification of a 3D game engine titled "Spark Engine". The term "engine" is used to describe a complex graphics software suite that streamlines application development and provides efficient rendering functionality. A game engine specifically provides tools to simplify game development. Spark Engine is fully shader driven and is built on top of Microsoft's XNA Framework. It is a reusable and flexible platform that can be used to build any type of graphics application ranging from gaming to simulation. The engine was released as open source software under the New BSD License with an …

Generating Compact Wasp Nest Structures Via Minimal Complexity Algorithms., Fadel Ewusi Kofi Adoe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many models have been developed to explain the process of self organization-the emergence of seemingly purposeful behaviors from groups of entities with limited individual intelligence. However, the underlying behavior that facilitates the emergence of this global pattern is not generally well understood. Our study focuses on different low complexity building algorithms and characterizes how nests are built using these algorithms. Three rules postulated to be functions of wasps' building behavior were developed. First is the random rule, in which there is no constraint per the choice of site to be initiated. The second is the 2-cell rule where only sites …

Security Analysis Of A Fingerprint-Secured Usb Drive, Benjamin David Rodes

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In response to user demands for mobile data security and maximum ease of use, fingerprint-secured mobile storage devices have been increasingly available for purchase. A fingerprint-secured Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive looks like a regular USB drive, except that it has an integrated optical scanner. When a fingerprint-secured USB drive is plugged into a computer running Windows, a program on this drive will run automatically to ask for fingerprint authentication. (When the program runs the very first time, it will ask for fingerprint enrollment). After a successful fingerprint authentication, a new private drive (for example, drive G:) will appear and …

Improving The Measurement Of System Time On Remote Hosts, Michael Christopher Smith

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The tools and techniques of digital forensics are useful in investigating system failures, gathering evidence of illegal activities, and analyzing computer systems after cyber attacks. Constructing an accurate timeline of digital events is essential to forensic analysis, and developing a correlation between a computer’s system time and a standard time such as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is key to building such a timeline. In addition to local temporal data, such as file MAC (Modified, Accessed, and Changed/Created) times and event logs, a computer may hold timestamps from other machines, such as email headers, HTTP cookies, and downloaded files. To fully …

A Design Of A Generic Profile-Based Queue System, Ali Husain

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Website and server hosting accounts impose resource limits which restrict the processing power available to applications. One technique to bypass these restrictions is to split up large jobs into smaller tasks that can then be queued and processed task by task. This is a fairly common need. However, different application jobs can differ widely in nature and in their requirements. Thus, a queue system built for one job type may not be entirely suitable for another. This situation could result in the having to implement separate, additional queue systems for different needs. This research proposes a generic queue core design …

A Generic Interpreter, Jason Avery Wilkins

Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers a novel tool, called a generic interpreter, for the implementation of compilers. Compilers are traditionally implemented as a series of phases where each phase takes input from the previous phase and feeds it to the next phase. Each phase is ad-hoc which means that it is written specifically to read a single form of input and write a single form of output. A generic interpreter uses principles of object-oriented and generic programming to implement a single generic engine that can read and write more general forms of input and output and therefore can be used by all …

Change Management In A Dynamic Information Technology Environment: Inquiries Into The Adkar Model For Change Management Results, Michael S. Lowery

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Change in our lives is an ongoing, complex, and difficult process that cannot be avoided, and in order for any organization comprised of people to be successful, change must be managed. There are many documented instances of organizations failing in their change efforts, and it is not always the technology that causes change failures, but it is the people aspect towards change that is neglected. This paper focuses on the ADKAR model which is a sequential and cumulative goal-oriented change management model with targeted results and consists of the elements Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, and how the model …

A Strategy For Improving Performance On A Sharepoint Social Computing Portal, Matt Adkins

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

An important usability rule for any web site is the concept of speed. Failing to provide prompt pages and data will result in a negative view of the site and ultimately a lack of usership. In spite of this, many organizations implement web sites without a clear strategy regarding performance. This project explores three database strategies to consider when deploying a Microsoft SharePoint website with a social computing usage style. Although all of the strategies do not provide significant performance gains, the study illuminates several important factors that will increase performance in sites that use other usage styles. To properly …

Information Technology Control Model For Wastewater Treatment Plant, Ray Sandoval

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The Information Technology (IT) governance of a large wastewater treatment plant was examined with respect to the COBIT framework. The COBIT Quickstart prescription was used as the basis for a phase I current state assessment throughout this examination. Assessment tests were administered to the CIO revealing a strong need for IT governance within this domain. Following, interviews were conducted with individuals in an effort to illustrate the current state of IT governance and identify gaps. A sample of management practices from the four COBIT domains was explored. The department director, CIO and two IT department managers were interviewed and asked …

Developing A Baccalaureate Digital Forensics Major, John H. Riley

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As colleges and universities consider instituting a bachelor’s degree in digital forensics or computer forensics, there are numerous questions to be addressed. While some of these normally occur in the development of any new major, there are aspects of digital forensics which do not often (if ever) occur in other majors. We discuss the issues that should be resolved in the development of a baccalaureate degree program in digital forensics.

Keywords: Digital forensics major. Computer forensics major.

Distance-Based Measures Of Inconsistency And Incoherency For Description Logics, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Inconsistency and incoherency are two sorts of erroneous information in a DL ontology which have been widely discussed in ontology-based applications. For example, they have been used to detect modeling errors during ontology construction. To provide more informative metrics which can tell the differences between inconsistent ontologies and between incoherent terminologies, there has been some work on measuring inconsistency of an ontology and on measuring incoherency of a terminology. However, most of them merely focus either on measuring inconsistency or on measuring incoherency and no clear ideas of how to extend them to allow for the other. In this paper, …

Neurophone: Brain-Mobile Phone Interface Using A Wireless Eeg Headset, Matthew K. Mukerjee

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Neural signals are everywhere just like mobile phones. We propose to use neural signals to control mobile phones for hands-free, silent and effortless human-mobile interaction. Until recently, devices for detecting neural signals have been costly, bulky and fragile. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of the NeuroPhone system, which allows neural signals to drive mobile phone applications on the iPhone using cheap off-the-shelf wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headsets. We demonstrate a mind-controlled address book dialing app, which works on similar principles to P300-speller brain-computer interfaces: the phone flashes a sequence of photos of contacts from the address book and a …

Some Trust Issues In Social Networks And Sensor Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust and reputation are becoming increasingly important in diverse areas such as search, e-commerce, social media, semantic sensor networks, etc. We review past work and explore future research issues relevant to trust in social/sensor networks and interactions. We advocate a balanced, iterative approach to trust that marries both theory and practice. On the theoretical side, we investigate models of trust to analyze and specify the nature of trust and trust computation. On the practical side, we propose to uncover aspects that provide a basis for trust formation and techniques to extract trust information from concrete social/sensor networks and interactions. We …