Computer Sciences Commons^™

Efficient, Effective, And Realistic Website Fingerprinting Mitigation, Weiqi Cui, Jiangmin Yu, Yanmin Gong, David Chan-Tin

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Website fingerprinting attacks have been shown to be able to predict the website visited even if the network connection is encrypted and anonymized. These attacks have achieved accuracies as high as 92%. Mitigations to these attacks are using cover/decoy network traffic to add noise, padding to ensure all the network packets are the same size, and introducing network delays to confuse an adversary. Although these mitigations have been shown to be effective, reducing the accuracy to 10%, the overhead is high. The latency overhead is above 100% and the bandwidth overhead is at least 30%. We introduce a new realistic …

The Ethics Of Cookies: Exploring The Collection Of Big Data And Its Ramifications, Sarah Biely 19

Honor Scholar Theses

Technology is taking over the world. In every aspect of human life, technology has been able to provide some sort of help or solution. At the forefront of this revolution is the Internet and with it, the activity of day-to-day life that now takes place online. This rapid takeover pushes technological innovations to develop quickly, pushing boundaries and creating a new way of life.

Today in the United States, websites are allowed to track user data. When a user clicks on a website that intends on documenting the user's actions, the website installs a tracker, otherwise known as "cookie." Websites …

After Https: Indicating Risk Instead Of Security, Matthew Wayne Holt

Theses and Dissertations

Browser security indicators show warnings when sites load without HTTPS, but more malicious sites are using HTTPS to appear legitimate in browsers and deceive users. We explore a new approach to browser indicators that overcomes several limitations of existing indicators. First, we develop a high-level risk assessment framework to identify risky interactions and evaluate the utility of this approach through a survey. Next, we evaluate potential designs for a new risk indicator to communicate risk rather than security. Finally, we conduct a within-subjects user study to compare the risk indicator to existing security indicators by observing participant behavior and collecting …

Preserving Privacy In Automotive Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems, Kenneth L. Hacker

Theses and Dissertations

The automotive industry is moving towards a more connected ecosystem, with connectivity achieved through multiple wireless systems. However, in the pursuit of these technological advances and to quickly satisfy requirements imposed on manufacturers, the security of these systems is often an afterthought. It has been shown that systems in a standard new automobile that one would not expect to be vulnerable can be exploited for a variety of harmful effects. This thesis considers a seemingly benign, but government mandated, safety feature of modern vehicles; the Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS). Typical implementations have no security-oriented features, leaking data that can …

Towards Secure Data Flow Oriented Multi-Vendor Ict Governance Model, Lars Magnusson, Patrik Elm, Anita Mirijamdotter

International Journal of Business and Technology

Today, still, ICT Governance is being regarded as a departmental concern, not an overall organizational concern. History has shown us that implementation strategies, which are based on departments, results in fractional implementations leading to ad hoc solutions with no central control and stagnation for the in-house ICT strategy. Further, this recently has created an opinion trend; many are talking about the ICT department as being redundant, a dying out breed, which should be replaced by on-demand specialized external services. Clearly, the evermore changing surroundings do force organizations to accelerate the pace of new adaptations within their ICT plans, more vivacious …

Permission-Based Privacy Analysis For Android Applications, Erza Gashi, Zhilbert Tafa

International Journal of Business and Technology

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) trends are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications are becoming more and more popular. Mostly due to their pervasiveness and the level of interaction with the users, along with the great number of advantages, the mobile applications bring up a great number of privacy related issues as well. These platforms can gather our very sensitive private data by only granting them a list of permissions during the installation process. Additionally, most of the users can find it difficult, or even useless, to analyze system permissions. Thus, their guess of app’s safety …

Cyber Security Awareness Among College Students, Abbas Moallem

Faculty Publications

This study reports the early results of a study aimed to investigate student awareness and attitudes toward cyber security and the resulting risks in the most advanced technology environment: the Silicon Valley in California, USA. The composition of students in Silicon Valley is very ethnically diverse. The objective was to see how much the students in such a tech-savvy environment are aware of cyber-attacks and how they protect themselves against them. The early statistical analysis suggested that college students, despite their belief that they are observed when using the Internet and that their data is not secure even on university …

A New Network Model For Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing Using Blockchain Technology, Daire Homan, Ian Shiel, Christina Thorpe

Conference Papers

The aim of this research is to propose a new blockchain network model that facilitates the secure dissemination of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) data. The primary motivations for this study are based around the recent changes to information security legislation in the European Union and the challenges that Computer Security and Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) face when trying to share actionable and highly sensitive data within systems where participants do not always share the same interests or motivations. We discuss the common problems within the domain of CTI sharing and we propose a new model, that leverages the security properties …

An Investigation Of Electronic Protected Health Information (E-Phi) Privacy Policy Legislation In California For Seniors Using In-Home Health Monitoring Systems, Robert Lee Saganich

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This study examined privacy legislation in California to identify those electronic Protected Health Information (e-PHI) privacy policies that are suited to seniors using in-home health monitoring systems. Personal freedom and independence are essential to a person's physical and mental health, and mobile technology applications provide a convenient and economical method for monitoring personal health. Many of these apps are written by third parties, however, which poses serious risks to patient privacy. Current federal regulations only cover applications and systems developed for use by covered entities and their business partners. As a result, the responsibility for protecting the privacy of the …

Comprehending The Safety Paradox And Privacy Concerns With Medical Device Remote Patient Monitoring, Marc Doyle

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Medical literature identifies a number of technology-driven improvements in disease management such as implantable medical devices (IMDs) that are a standard treatment for candidates with specific diseases. Among patients using implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICD), for example, problems and issues are being discovered faster compared to patients without monitoring, improving safety. What is not known is why patients report not feeling safer, creating a safety paradox, and why patients identify privacy concerns in ICD monitoring.

There is a major gap in the literature regarding the factors that contribute to perceived safety and privacy in remote patient monitoring (RPM). To address this …

Integration Of Biometrics And Steganography: A Comprehensive Review, Ian Mcateer, Ahmed Ibrahim, Guanglou Zhang, Wencheng Yang, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The use of an individual’s biometric characteristics to advance authentication and verification technology beyond the current dependence on passwords has been the subject of extensive research for some time. Since such physical characteristics cannot be hidden from the public eye, the security of digitised biometric data becomes paramount to avoid the risk of substitution or replay attacks. Biometric systems have readily embraced cryptography to encrypt the data extracted from the scanning of anatomical features. Significant amounts of research have also gone into the integration of biometrics with steganography to add a layer to the defence-in-depth security model, and this has …

"Anon What What?": Children's Understanding Of The Language Of Privacy, Stacy Black, Rezvan Joshaghani, Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda, Hoda Mehrpouyan, Jerry Alan Fails

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Internet usage continues to increase among children ages 12 and younger. Because their digital interactions can be persistently stored, there is a need for building an understanding and foundational knowledge of privacy. We describe initial investigations into children’s understanding of privacy from a Contextual Integrity (CI) perspective by conducting semi-structured interviews. We share results – that echo what others have shown – that indicate children have limited knowledge and understanding of CI principles. We also share an initial exploration of utilizing participatory design theater as a possible educational mechanism to help children develop a stronger understanding of important privacy principles.

Design And Evaluation Of A Wearable System For Facial Privacy, Scott Griffith

Theses and Dissertations

Through the increasingly common use of devices that provide ubiquitous sensor data such as wearables, mobile phones, and Internet-connected devices of the sort, privacy challenges are becoming even more significant. One major challenge that requires more focus is bystanders' privacy, as there are too few solutions that solve the issue. Of the solutions available, many of them do not give bystanders a choice in how their private data is used, Bystanders' privacy has become an afterthought when it comes to data capture in the forms of photographs, videos, voice recordings, etc. and continues to remain that way. This thesis provides …

Privacy Preservation In Social Media Environments Using Big Data, Katrina Ward

Doctoral Dissertations

"With the pervasive use of mobile devices, social media, home assistants, and smart devices, the idea of individual privacy is fading. More than ever, the public is giving up personal information in order to take advantage of what is now considered every day conveniences and ignoring the consequences. Even seemingly harmless information is making headlines for its unauthorized use (18). Among this data is user trajectory data which can be described as a user's location information over a time period (6). This data is generated whenever users access their devices to record their location, query the location of a point …

Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Keyword Search In Shared Multi-Owner Setting, Yibin Miao, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Robert H. Deng, Jjguo Li, Hongwei Li, Jianfeng Ma

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Keyword Search (CP-ABKS) facilitates search queries and supports fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. However, prior CP-ABKS schemes were designed to support unshared multi-owner setting, and cannot be directly applied in the shared multi-owner setting (where each record is accredited by a fixed number of data owners), without incurring high computational and storage costs. In addition, due to privacy concerns on access policies, most existing schemes are vulnerable to off-line keyword-guessing attacks if the keyword space is of polynomial size. Furthermore, it is difficult to identify malicious users who leak the secret keys when more …

Privacy Issues In Post Dissemination On Facebook, Burcu Sayi̇n Günel, Serap Şahi̇n, Dimitris G. Kogias, Charalampos Z. Patrikakis

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

With social networks (SNs) being populated by a still increasing numbers of people who take advantage of the communication and collaboration capabilities that they offer, the probability of the exposure of people's personal moments to a wider than expected audience is also increasing. By studying the functionalities and characteristics that modern SNs offer, along with the people's habits and common behaviors in them, it is easy to understand that several privacy risks may exist, many of which people may be unaware of. In this paper, we focus on users' interactions with posts in a social network (SN), using Facebook as …

Dual-Side Privacy-Preserving Task Matching For Spatial Crowdsourcing, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Yinghui Zhang, Xiaohua Jia, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of mobile phones and the ubiquity of wireless transmission technologies, spatial crowdsourcing (SC) has emerged as a novel approach to outsource location-based tasks to a set of workers who physically move to the designated locations to perform the tasks. To achieve the accurate task matching, both requesters and workers need to expose their locations or queries to the SC-Server, which raises security concerns. Although many protection measures have been proposed, there are some drawbacks in one-side protection, dual-server setting and user scalability when they are applied to the practical crowdsourcing environment. In this paper, we design a …

Secure Smart Health With Privacy-Aware Aggregate Authentication And Access Control In Internet Of Things, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Gang Han, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid technological advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless communication and cloud computing, smart health is expected to enable comprehensive and qualified healthcare services. It is important to ensure security and efficiency in smart health. However, existing smart health systems still have challenging issues, such as aggregate authentication, fine-grained access control and privacy protection. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing SSH, a Secure Smart Health system with privacy-aware aggregate authentication and access control in IoT. In SSH, privacy-aware aggregate authentication is enabled by an anonymous certificateless aggregate signature scheme, in which users' identity information …

Vpsearch: Achieving Verifiability For Privacy-Preserving Multi-Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although cloud computing offers elastic computation and storage resources, it poses challenges on verifiability of computations and data privacy. In this work we investigate verifiability for privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over outsourced documents. As the cloud server may return incorrect results due to system faults or incentive to reduce computation cost, it is critical to offer verifiability of search results and privacy protection for outsourced data at the same time. To fulfill these requirements, we design aVerifiablePrivacy-preserving keywordSearch scheme, called VPSearch, by integrating an adapted homomorphic MAC technique with a privacy-preserving multi-keyword search scheme. The proposed scheme enables the client to …

Healthcare Monitoring System Security Platform Using Software Defined Networking Paradigm, Mohamad Issam Khayat

Information Security Theses

This thesis studies the security and privacy concerns of Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) and proposes a state-of-the-art Security Platform for HMS using the newly emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. In this thesis, we investigate the existing HMS architecture and the relevant solutions proposed for both security and privacy concerns in the literature today. Moreover, we develop a new HMS Security Integration Framework, in the form of a security platform for securing HMS. Finally, we perform a comparison among existing architectures and our proposed framework to highlight the added value of our proposed architecture. Our proposed integration framework eliminates the …

Efficient Traceable Oblivious Transfer And Its Applications, Weiwei Liu, Yinghui Zhang, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Yangguang Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Oblivious transfer (OT) has been applied widely in privacy-sensitive systems such as on-line transactions and electronic commerce to protect users’ private information. Traceability is an interesting feature of such systems that the privacy of the dishonest users could be traced by the service provider or a trusted third party (TTP). However, previous research on OT mainly focused on designing protocols with unconditional receiver’s privacy. Thus, traditional OT schemes cannot fulfill the traceability requirements in the aforementioned applications. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a novel traceable oblivious transfer (TOT) without involvement of any TTP. In the new …

Algorithms For Exploratory Queries Over Web Database, Md Farhadur Rahman

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

In recent years we have seen an increase in the popularity of many web applications. The functionality of these applications range from allowing users to interact using online social network, to assist users in their everyday activity such as selecting a hotel in an area, locating a nearby restaurant etc. Google Maps, WeChat, FourSquare, AirBnB, TripAdvisor, and Hotels.com are a few such examples. The backed database of these applications can be a rich source of information for the corresponding application domain. For example, using Google Maps a user can find the ratings, reviews, and price of a restaurant, using Zillow …

Improving Performance And Security In Anonymity Systems, Mohsen Imani

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Tor is an anonymity network that provides online privacy for the Internet users. Tor hides the user's traffic among the others' traffic. The more users Tor attracts, the stronger anonymity it provides. Unfortunately, users of the Tor anonymity system suffer from less-than-ideal performance, in part because circuit building and selection processes are not tuned for speed. Moreover, there are some attacks like guard fingerprinting and website fingerprinting attacks that try to profile or de-anonymize the Tor users. In this dissertation, we propose methods to address both security and performance issues in Tor. We first examine the process of selecting among …

Privacy-Preserving Photo Taking And Accessing For Mobile Phones, Ang Li

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today, we are living in environments that are full of cameras embedded in devices such as smart phones and wearables. These mobile devices and as well as apps installed on them are designed to be extremely convenient for users to take, store and share photos. In spite of the convenience brought by ubiquitous cameras, users' privacy may be breached through photos that are taken and stored with mobile devices. For example, when users take a photo of a scenery, a building or a target person, a stranger may also be unintentionally captured in the photo. Such photos expose the location …

Anonymous Privacy-Preserving Task Matching In Crowdsourcing, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Xiaohua Jia, Kan Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of sharing economy, crowdsourcing as a distributed computing paradigm has become increasingly pervasive. As one of indispensable services for most crowdsourcing applications, task matching has also been extensively explored. However, privacy issues are usually ignored during the task matching and few existing privacy-preserving crowdsourcing mechanisms can simultaneously protect both task privacy and worker privacy. This paper systematically analyzes the privacy leaks and potential threats in the task matching and proposes a single-keyword task matching scheme for the multirequester/multiworker crowdsourcing with efficient worker revocation. The proposed scheme not only protects data confidentiality and identity anonymity against the crowd-server, …

Patient Preferences For Authentication And Security: A Comparison Study Of Younger And Older Patients, Ann Fruhling, Devika Ramachandran, Tamara Bernard, Ryan Schuetzler, John R. Windle

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

We examine authentication and security preferences of younger versus older patients in the healthcare domain. Previous research has investigated users' perception of the acceptability of various forms of authentication in nonhealthcare domains, but not patients’ preferences. First, we developed an interactive prototype to test three authentication methods: passwords, pattern, and voice. Our results indicate that younger patients prefer passwords by a significant margin. Older patients indicated more mixed preferences. In addition, we evaluated the level of security patients desired for protection of health information compared to financial information. We found no difference based on age: both groups felt financial security …

Advanced Malware Detection For Android Platform, Ke Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the first quarter of 2018, 75.66% of smartphones sales were devices running An- droid. Due to its popularity, cyber-criminals have increasingly targeted this ecosys- tem. Malware running on Android severely violates end users security and privacy, allowing many attacks such as defeating two factor authentication of mobile bank- ing applications, capturing real-time voice calls and leaking sensitive information. In this dissertation, I describe the pieces of work that I have done to effectively de- tect malware on Android platform, i.e., ICC-based malware detection system (IC- CDetector), multi-layer malware detection system (DeepRefiner), and self-evolving and scalable malware detection system (DroidEvolver) …

Workshop On Emerging Technology And Data Analytics For Behavioral Health, David Kotz, Sarah E. Lord, A. James O'Malley, Luke Stark, Lisa Marsch

Dartmouth Scholarship

Wearable and portable digital devices can support self-monitoring for patients with chronic medical conditions, individuals seeking to reduce stress, and people seeking to modify health-related behaviors such as substance use or overeating. The resulting data may be used directly by a consumer, or shared with a clinician for treatment, a caregiver for assistance, or a health coach for support. The data can also be used by researchers to develop and evaluate just-in-time interventions that leverage mobile technology to help individuals manage their symptoms and behavior in real time and as needed. Such wearable systems have huge potential for promoting delivery …

Secure Multiparty Protocol For Differentially-Private Data Release, Anthony Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the era where big data is the new norm, a higher emphasis has been placed on models which guarantees the release and exchange of data. The need for privacy-preserving data arose as more sophisticated data-mining techniques led to breaches of sensitive information. In this thesis, we present a secure multiparty protocol for the purpose of integrating multiple datasets simultaneously such that the contents of each dataset is not revealed to any of the data owners, and the contents of the integrated data do not compromise individual’s privacy. We utilize privacy by simulation to prove that the protocol is privacy-preserving, …

Design And Evaluation Of A Privacy Architecture For Crowdsensing Applications, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally

Computer Science Faculty Publications

By using consumer devices such as cellphones, wearables and Internet of Things devices owned by citizens, crowdsensing systems are providing solutions to the community in areas such as transportation, security, entertainment and the environment through the collection of various types of sensor data. Privacy is a major issue in these systems because the data collected can potentially reveal aspects considered private by the contributors of data. We propose the Privacy-Enabled ARchitecture (PEAR), a layered architecture aimed at protecting privacy in privacy-aware crowdsensing systems. We identify and describe the layers of the architecture. We propose and evaluate the design of MetroTrack, …