Computer Sciences Commons^™

Weaponizing Twitter Litter: Abuse-Forming Networks And Social Media, Hal Berghel

Computer Science Faculty Research

Instead of liberating us from the biases of the educated among us, the Internet has saddled us with the biases of the unreasoned among us.

Security And Privacy In Ubiquitous Sensor Networks, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally, Nafaa Jabeur

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The availability of powerful and sensor-enabled mobile and Internet-connected devices have enabled the advent of the ubiquitous sensor network (USN) paradigm. USN provides various types of solutions to the general public in multiple sectors, including environmental monitoring, entertainment, transportation, security, and healthcare. Here, we explore and compare the features of wireless sensor networks and USN. Based on our extensive study, we classify the security- and privacy-related challenges of USNs. We identify and discuss solutions available to address these challenges. Finally, we briefly discuss open challenges for designing more secure and privacy-preserving approaches in next-generation USNs.

Nocloud: Experimenting With Network Disconnection By Design, Reza Rawassizadeh, Timothy Pierson, Ronald Peterson, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Application developers often advocate uploading data to the cloud for analysis or storage, primarily due to concerns about the limited computational capability of ubiquitous devices. Today, however, many such devices can still effectively operate and execute complex algorithms without reliance on the cloud. The authors recommend prioritizing on-device analysis over uploading the data to another host, and if on-device analysis is not possible, favoring local network services over a cloud service.

Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Analytics For Iot And Cloud Based Healthcare Systems, Sagar Sharma, Keke Chen, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Modern healthcare systems now rely on advanced computing methods and technologies, such as IoT devices and clouds, to collect and analyze personal health data at unprecedented scale and depth. Patients, doctors, healthcare providers, and researchers depend on analytical models derived from such data sources to remotely monitor patients, early-diagnose diseases, and find personalized treatments and medications. However, without appropriate privacy protection, conducting data analytics becomes a source of privacy nightmare. In this paper, we present the research challenges in developing practical privacy-preserving analytics in healthcare information systems. The study is based on kHealth - a personalized digital healthcare information system …

Obfuscation At-Source: Privacy In Context-Aware Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Randy Tandriansyah, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

By effectively reaching out to and engaging larger population of mobile users, mobile crowd-sourcing has become a strategy to perform large amount of urban tasks. The recent empirical studies have shown that compared to the pull-based approach, which expects the users to browse through the list of tasks to perform, the push-based approach that actively recommends tasks can greatly improve the overall system performance. As the efficiency of the push-based approach is achieved by incorporating worker's mobility traces, privacy is naturally a concern. In this paper, we propose a novel, 2-stage and user-controlled obfuscation technique that provides a trade off-amenable …

Regrets, I'Ve Had A Few: When Regretful Experiences Do (And Don't) Compel Users To Leave Facebook, Shion Guha, Eric P.S. Baumer, Geri K. Gay

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Previous work has explored regretful experiences on social media. In parallel, scholars have examined how people do not use social media. This paper aims to synthesize these two research areas and asks: Do regretful experiences on social media influence people to (consider) not using social media? How might this influence differ for different sorts of regretful experiences? We adopted a mixed methods approach, combining topic modeling, logistic regressions, and contingency analysis to analyze data from a web survey with a demographically representative sample of US internet users (n=515) focusing on their Facebook use. We found that experiences that arise because …

Tactful Inattention: Erving Goffman, Privacy In The Digital Age, And The Virtue Of Averting One's Eyes, Elizabeth De Armond

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Broncovote: Secure Voting System Using Ethereum’S Blockchain, Gaby G. Dagher, Praneeth Babu Marella, Matea Milojkovic, Jordan Mohler

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Voting is a fundamental part of democratic systems; it gives individuals in a community the faculty to voice their opinion. In recent years, voter turnout has diminished while concerns regarding integrity, security, and accessibility of current voting systems have escalated. E-voting was introduced to address those concerns; however, it is not cost-effective and still requires full supervision by a central authority. The blockchain is an emerging, decentralized, and distributed technology that promises to enhance different aspects of many industries. Expanding e-voting into blockchain technology could be the solution to alleviate the present concerns in e-voting. In this paper, we propose …

Smartphone User Privacy Preserving Through Crowdsourcing, Bahman Rashidi

Theses and Dissertations

In current Android architecture, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not. Expert users can make savvy decisions to avoid unnecessary private data breach. However, the majority of regular users are not technically capable or do not care to consider privacy implications to make safe decisions. To assist the technically incapable crowd, we propose a permission control framework based on crowdsourcing. At its core, our framework runs new apps under probation mode without granting their permission requests up-front. It provides recommendations on whether to accept or not the permission requests based on decisions from peer …

Privacy In Iot Cloud, Aftab Ahmad, Ravi Mukkamala, Karthik Navuluri

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a framework for privacy preservation in an information cloud of IoT devices. We contend that privacy provisioning should be located in the user device and must protect the user, the information, and the device from breaches in privacy. We elaborate on how the layered privacy model can ensure such privacy provisioning, and justify the device being the provisioning point instead of the cloud alone. We present the point of view that, due to resource limitations of the IoT devices in general, the privacy preserving measures need to be hard-coded in the device technology. We fall short of suggesting …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Secure Server-Aided Top-K Monitoring, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Yanjiang Yang, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a data streaming model, a data owner releases records or documents to a set of users with matching interests, in such a way that the match in interest can be calculated from the correlation between each pair of document and user query. For scalability and availability reasons, this calculation is delegated to third-party servers, which gives rise to the need to protect the integrity and privacy of the documents and user queries. In this paper, we propose a server-aided data stream monitoring scheme (DSM) to address the aforementioned integrity and privacy challenges, so that the users are able to …

Spice: Secure Proximity-Based Infrastructure For Close Encounters, Aarathi Prasad, Xiaohui Liang, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

We present a crowdsourcing system that extends the capabilities of location-based applications and allows users to connect and exchange information with users in spatial and temporal proximity. We define this incident of spatio-temporal proximity as a \em close encounter. Typically, location-based application users store their information on a server, and trust the server to provide access only to authorized users, not misuse the data or disclose their location history. Our system, called SPICE, addresses these privacy issues by leveraging Wi-Fi access points to connect users and encrypt their information before it is exchanged, so only users in close encounters have …

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

UBT International Conference

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

UBT International Conference

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 …

Usable Secure Email Through Short-Lived Keys, Tyler Jay Monson

Theses and Dissertations

Participants from recent secure email user studies have expressed a need to use secure email tools only a few times a year. At the same time, Internet users are expressing concerns over the permanence of personal information on the Internet. Support for short-lived keys has the potential to address both of these problems. However, the short-lived keys usability and security space is underdeveloped and unexplored. In this thesis, we present an exploration of the short-lived keys usability and security design space. We implement both a short-lived keys and a long-term keys secure email prototype. With these two prototypes, we conduct …

Analysis Of Security In Big Data Related To Healthcare, Isabel De La Torre, Begoña García-Zapirain, Miguel López-Coronado

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Big data facilitates the processing and management of huge amounts of data. In health, the main information source is the electronic health record with others being the Internet and social media. Health-related data refers to storage in big data based on and shared via electronic means. Why are criminal organisations interested in this data? These organisations can blackmail people with information related to their health condition or sell the information to marketing companies, etc. This article analyses healthcare-related big data security and proposes different solutions. There are different techniques available to help preserve privacy such as data modification techniques, cryptographic …

Security And The Transnational Information Polity, Michael M. Losavio, Adel Said Elmaghraby

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Global information and communications technologies create criminal opportunities in which criminal violation and physical proximity are decoupled. As in all our endeavors, the good become the prey of the bad. Murderous and venal exploitation of ICT has followed from the inception of the Internet, threatening all the good it brings and the trust we need so badly as a people. As the work continues to expand the implementation of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things, there will be more opportunities for exploitation of these technologies. We examine the social and liberty risks our data and technology-driven responses may entail.

A Longitudinal Study Of Privacy Awareness In The Digital Age And The Influence Of Knowledge, Therese L. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Privacy, in the modern connected world, has become a much discussed topic in society ranging from privacy concerns to impacts, attitudes, practices and technologies. In today’s environment of vast social media and revelations of government spying, personal privacy is being highlighted as either non-existent or something that can be achieved to different degrees with knowledge or awareness of how our private information is collected and used. This research strives to answer the question "Using Alan Westin's privacy categories, what is the general awareness of privacy issues in social media and smartphone usage and how does it change when knowledge is …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

Stateful Detection Of Stealthy Behaviors In Android Apps, Mohsin Junaid

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The number of smartphones has increased greatly during the last few years. Among the popular mobile operating systems (such as iOS and Android) installed on these devices, Android captures most of the mobile market share. This also puts Android OS in a spotlight to attract malware attacks. A recent study shows that for the last two years, more than ~99% of the mobile malware targeted Android OS. Examples of such attacks are leakage of privacy-sensitive data available on the devices (such as phone number, contacts, photos, and SMS and call logs), recording audio and video files, silently making phone calls …

Os2: Oblivious Similarity Based Searching For Encrypted Data Outsourced To An Untrusted Domain, Zeeshan Pervez, Mahmood Ahmad, Asad Masood Khattak, Naeem Ramzan, Wajahat Ali Khan

All Works

© 2017 Pervez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Public cloud storage services are becoming prevalent and myriad data sharing, archiving and collaborative services have emerged which harness the pay-as-you-go business model of public cloud. To ensure privacy and confidentiality often encrypted data is outsourced to such services, which further complicates the process of accessing relevant data by using search queries. Search over encrypted data schemes solve this problem by …

A Privacy Preserving Framework For Rfid Based Healthcare Systems, Farzana Rahman, Anwarul A. Bhuiyan, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is anticipated to be a core technology that will be used in many practical applications of our life in near future. It has received considerable attention within the healthcare for almost a decade now. The technology’s promise to efficiently track hospital supplies, medical equipment, medications and patients is an attractive proposition to the healthcare industry. However, the prospect of wide spread use of RFID tags in the healthcare area has also triggered discussions regarding privacy, particularly because RFID data in transit may easily be intercepted and can be send to track its user (owner). In a …

Cyber Security For Everyone: An Introductory Course For Non-Technical Majors, Marc J. Dupuis

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In this paper, we describe the need for and development of an introductory cyber security course. The course was designed for non-technical majors with the goal of increasing cyber security hygiene for an important segment of the population—college undergraduates. While the need for degree programs that focus on educating and training individuals for occupations in the ever-growing cyber security field is critically important, the need for improved cyber security hygiene from the average everyday person is of equal importance. This paper discusses the approach used, curriculum developed, results from two runs of the course, and frames the overall structure of …

Bystanders' Privacy, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally, Scott Griffith

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The growing adoption of Internet-connected devices has given rise to significant privacy issues not only for users but also for bystanders. The authors explore privacy concerns related to bystanders' privacy and present a taxonomy of the solutions found in the literature to handle this issue. They also explore open issues that must be addressed in the future.

Malware Analysis And Privacy Policy Enforcement Techniques For Android Applications, Aisha Ibrahim Ali-Gombe

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The rapid increase in mobile malware and deployment of over-privileged applications over the years has been of great concern to the security community. Encroaching on user’s privacy, mobile applications (apps) increasingly exploit various sensitive data on mobile devices. The information gathered by these applications is sufficient to uniquely and accurately profile users and can cause tremendous personal and financial damage.

On Android specifically, the security and privacy holes in the operating system and framework code has created a whole new dynamic for malware and privacy exploitation. This research work seeks to develop novel analysis techniques that monitor Android applications for …

Ispy: Threats To Individual And Institutional Privacy In The Digital World, Lori Andrews

All Faculty Scholarship

What type of information is collected, who is viewing it, and what law librarians can do to protect their patrons and institutions.

Lighttouch: Securely Connecting Wearables To Ambient Displays With User Intent, Xiaohui Liang, Tianlong Yun, Ronald Peterson, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Wearables are small and have limited user interfaces, so they often wirelessly interface with a personal smartphone/computer to relay information from the wearable for display or other interactions. In this paper, we envision a new method, LightTouch, by which a wearable can establish a secure connection to an ambient display, such as a television or a computer monitor, while ensuring the user's intention to connect to the display. LightTouch uses standard RF methods (like Bluetooth) for communicating the data to display, securely bootstrapped via the visible-light communication (the brightness channel) from the display to the low-cost, low-power, ambient light sensor …

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication And Key Agreement Protocol For Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks, Qi Jiang, Sherali Zeadally, Jianfeng Ma, Debiao He

Information Science Faculty Publications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their …

Are The Trade-Offs For Reducing Cross-Border Cybercrime Manageable?, Steven Mark Miller, Qiu-Hong Wang, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Without increased government intervention andgovernment-industry collaboration, the advantages inherent in the next wave ofInternet-enabled digital transformation will increasingly tilt towardcyber criminals, and their influence will disproportionately increase. The dilemma that immediately presents itself in such ascenario, however, is that an increased level of government involvement canalso lead to undesirable consequences. Increasing security always comes withtrade-offs that must be managed. The obvious concerns relate to the erosion ofprivacy, illegal or extralegal persecution, the abuse of Internet censorshipand the impediment to or stifling of innovation.