Computer Sciences Commons^™

Privacy And Security In Mobile Health – A Research Agenda, David Kotz, Carl A. Gunter, Santosh Kumar, Jonathan P. Weiner

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile health technology has great potential to increase healthcare quality, expand access to services, reduce costs, and improve personal wellness and public health. However, mHealth also raises significant privacy and security challenges.

Mobipot: Understanding Mobile Telephony Threats With Honeycards, Marco Balduzzi, Payas Gupta, Lion Gu, Debin Gao, Mustaque Ahamad

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, the number of mobile phones has increased dramatically, overtaking the world population in October 2014. In developing countries like India and China, mobile subscribers outnumber traditional landline users and account for over 90% of the active population. At the same time, convergence of telephony with the Internet with technologies like VoIP makes it possible to reach a large number of telephone users at a low or no cost via voice calls or SMS (short message service) messages. As a consequence, cybercriminals are abusing the telephony channel to launch attacks, e.g., scams that offer fraudulent services and …

Enterprise Network Design And Implementation For Airports, Ashraf H. Ali

Information Technology Master Theses

The aim of this project was airports network design and implementation and the introduction of a suitable network for most airports around the world. The following project focused on three main parts: security, quality, and safety. The project has been provided with different utilities to introduce a network with a high security level for the airport. These utilities are hardware firewalls, an IP access control list, Mac address port security, a domain server and s proxy server. All of these utilities have been configured to provide a secure environment for the entire network and to prevent hackers from entering sensitive …

Identifying Terrorist Affiliations Through Social Network Analysis Using Data Mining Techniques, Govand A. Ali

Information Technology Master Theses

In a technologically enabled world, local ideologically inspired warfare becomes global all too quickly, specifically terrorist groups like Al Quaeda and ISIS (Daesh) have successfully used modern computing technology and social networking environments to broadcast their message, recruit new members, and plot attacks. This is especially true for such platforms as Twitter and encrypted mobile apps like Telegram or the clandestine Alrawi. As early detection of such activity is crucial to attack prevention data mining techniques have become increasingly important in the fight against the spread of global terrorist activity. This study employs data mining tools to mine Twitter for …

Bridging Statistical Learning And Formal Reasoning For Cyber Attack Detection, Kexin Pei

Open Access Theses

Current cyber-infrastructures are facing increasingly stealthy attacks that implant malicious payloads under the cover of benign programs. Current attack detection approaches based on statistical learning methods may generate misleading decision boundaries when processing noisy data with such a mixture of benign and malicious behaviors. On the other hand, attack detection based on formal program analysis may lack completeness or adaptivity when modeling attack behaviors. In light of these limitations, we have developed LEAPS, an attack detection system based on supervised statistical learning to classify benign and malicious system events. Furthermore, we leverage control flow graphs inferred from the system event …

End-To-End Security In Service-Oriented Architecture, Mehdi Azarmi

Open Access Dissertations

A service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based application is composed of a number of distributed and loosely-coupled web services, which are orchestrated to accomplish a more complex functionality. Any of these web services is able to invoke other web services to offload part of its functionality. The main security challenge in SOA is that we cannot trust the participating web services in a service composition to behave as expected all the time. In addition, the chain of services involved in an end-to-end service invocation may not be visible to the clients. As a result, any violation of client’s policies could remain undetected. To …

Ultrasonic Data Steganography, Alexander Orosz Edwards

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

What started off as a question on the possibly of data transmission via sound above the level of human hearing evolved into a project exploring the possibility of ultrasonic data infiltration and exfiltration in an information security context. It is well known that sound can be used to transmit data as this can be seen in many old technologies, most notably and simply DTMF tones for phone networks. But what if the sound used to transmit signals was in in the ultrasonic range? It would go generally unnoticed to anyone not looking for it with tools such as a spectrum …

Value-Inspired Service Design In Elderly Home-Monitoring Systems, Na Liu, Sandeep Purao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The provision of elderly home-monitoring systems to enhance aging-in-place requires the service to meet the needs of both the elderly and their caregivers. The design of such IT services requires interdisciplinary efforts to look beyond the technical requirements. Taking a value-inspired design perspective, the study argues that service design for promoting aging-in-place needs to reconcile the values of both the elderly and caregivers. Drawn from the framework of basic human values and the unique experience of the SHINESeniors project, the study extracts the core values for elderly and caregivers using a multi-method case analysis. We suggest that both system and …

Establishing Effective And Economical Traffic Surveillance In Tonga, Brian Cusack, George Maeakafa

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The Pacific Islands are seriously challenged by the growth in wealth and the expansion of international material possessions. On the roads traffic has grown dramatically and the types of vehicles now using Island roads has greatly changed. With the importation of cheap second hand vehicles designed for freeway speeds serious safety issues have grown proportionally with the increasing numbers. In this research we consider the prohibitive costs of traditional traffic controls to economy and propose a light weight highly mobile aerial surveillance system that integrates with ground policing capability. Our research question was: How can road safety and security be …

A Privacy Gap Around The Internet Of Things For Open-Source Projects, Brian Cusack, Reza Khaleghparast

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The Internet of Things (IoT) is having a more important role in the everyday lives of people. The distribution of connectivity across social and personal interaction discloses personalised information and gives access to a sphere of sensitivities that were previously masked. Privacy measures and security to protect personal sensitivities are weak and in their infancy. In this paper we review the issue of privacy in the context of IoT open-source projects, and the IoT security concerns. A proposal is made to create a privacy bubble around the interoperability of devices and systems and a filter layer to mitigate the exploitation …

New Secure Solutions For Privacy And Access Control In Health Information Exchange, Ahmed Fouad Shedeed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In the current digital age, almost every healthcare organization (HCO) has moved from storing patient health records on paper to storing them electronically. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the ability to share (or transfer) patients’ health information between different HCOs while maintaining national security standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Over the past few years, research has been conducted to develop privacy and access control frameworks for HIE systems. The goal of this dissertation is to address the privacy and access control concerns by building practical and efficient HIE frameworks to secure the sharing …

A Forensic Examination Of Several Mobile Device Faraday Bags & Materials To Test Their Effectiveness, Ashleigh Lennox-Steele, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

A Faraday bag is designed to shield a mobile phone or small digital device from radio waves entering the bag and reaching the device, or to stop radio waves escaping through the bag from the device. The effectiveness of these shields is vital for security professionals and forensic investigators who seize devices and wish to ensure that their contents are not read, modified or deleted prior to a forensic examination. This research tests the effectiveness of several readily available Faraday bags. The Faraday bags tested are all available through online means and promise complete blocking of all signals through the …

An Empirical Assessment Of Employee Cyberslacking In The Public Sector, Wilnelia Hernández

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing use of the Internet, new challenges are presented to employees in the workplace. Employees spend time during work hours on non-work related activities including visiting e-commerce Websites, managing personal email accounts, and engaging in e-banking. These types of actions in the workplace are known as cyberslacking. Cyberslacking affects the employees’ productivity, presents legal concerns, and undermines the security of the organization’s network. This research study addressed the problem of cyberslacking in the public sector, by assessing the ethical severity of cyberslacking activities, as well as how employees perceived that the frequency of such activities occurred by their …

Using Graphic Methods To Challenge Cryptographic Performance, Brian Cusack, Erin Chapman

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Block and stream ciphers have formed the traditional basis for the standardisation of commercial ciphers in the DES, AES, RC4, and so on. More recently alternative graphic methods such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have been adopted for performance gains. In this research we reviewed a range of graphic and non-graphic methods and then designed our own cipher system based on several graphic methods, including Visual Cryptography (VC). We then tested our cipher against RC4 and the AES algorithms for performance and security. The results showed that a graphics based construct may deliver comparable or improved security and performance in …

A Survey Of Social Media Users Privacy Settings & Information Disclosure, Mashael Aljohani, Alastair Nisbet, Kelly Blincoe

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This research utilises a comprehensive survey to ascertain the level of social networking site personal information disclosure by members at the time of joining the membership and their subsequent postings to the sites. Areas examined are the type of information they reveal, their level of knowledge and awareness regarding how their information is protected by SNSs and the awareness of risks that over-sharing may pose. Additionally, this research studies the effect of gender, age, education, and level of privacy concern on the amount and kind of personal information disclosure and privacy settings applied. A social experiment was then run for …

Product Authentication Using Hash Chains And Printed Qr Codes, Harshith R. Keni

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the usage of simple printed tags for authenticating products. Printed tags are a cheap alternative to RFID and other tag based systems and do not require specialized equipment. Due to the simplistic nature of such printed codes, many security issues like tag impersonation, server impersonation, reader impersonation, replay attacks and denial of service present in RFID based solutions need to be handled differently. An algorithm that utilizes hash chains to secure such simple tags while still keeping cost low is discussed. The security characteristics of this scheme as well as other product authentication schemes that use RFID …

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

Understanding The Impact Of Hacker Innovation Upon Is Security Countermeasures, Sean M. Zadig

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Hackers external to the organization continue to wreak havoc upon the information systems infrastructure of firms through breaches of security defenses, despite constant development of and continual investment in new IS security countermeasures by security professionals and vendors. These breaches are exceedingly costly and damaging to the affected organizations. The continued success of hackers in the face of massive amounts of security investments suggests that the defenders are losing and that the hackers can innovate at a much faster pace.

Underground hacker communities have been shown to be an environment where attackers can learn new techniques and share tools pertaining …

Applying Deep Learning Techniques To The Analysis Of Android Apks, Robin Andrew Nix

LSU Master's Theses

Malware targeting mobile devices is a pervasive problem in modern life and as such tools to detect and classify malware are of great value. This paper seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Deep Learning Techniques, specifically Convolutional Neural Networks, in detecting and classifying malware targeting the Android operating system. Unlike many current detection techniques, which require the use of relatively rigid features to aid in detection, deep neural networks are capable of automatically learning flexible features which may be more resilient to obfuscation. We present a parsing for extracting sequences of API calls which can be used to describe a …

The Corporate Security Stratum Of Work: Identifying Levels Of Work In The Domain, Codee Roy Ludbey

Theses : Honours

Corporate security is a practicing domain and developing academic discipline that provides for the protection of people, information and assets, as well as the self-protection of organisations. Fayol (1949) articulated such an activity within organisations to be a core business function of significant importance; embedding security operations within all aspects of organisational work. This embedded nature of security within organisations has led to difficulty in the literature delineating roles and responsibilities of security practitioners; consequently leading to a nebulous understanding of security as a whole. Therefore, an investigation of the corporate security stratum of work has been undertaken to address …

An Analysis Of Chosen Alarm Code Pin Numbers & Their Weakness Against A Modified Brute Force Attack, Alastair Nisbet, Maria Kim

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Home and commercial alarms are an integral physical security measure that have become so commonplace that little thought is given to the security that they may or may not provide. Whilst the focus has shifted from physical security in the past to cyber security in the present, physical security for protecting assets may be just as important for many business organisations. This research looks at 700 genuine alarm PIN codes chosen by users to arm and disarm alarm systems in a commercial environment. A comparison is made with a study of millions of PIN numbers unrelated to alarms to compare …

Technetium: Productivity Tracking For Version Control Systems, David Leonard

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, the City College of New York has seen its Computer Science program grow immensely, to the point of overcrowding. This has negative implications for both students and professors, particularly in introductory computer science courses in which constant feedback, iteration and collaboration with others is key to success. In this paper we propose various models for collaboration among students in all course levels using distributed version control systems and implement a secure and efficient tool for visualizing collaborative efforts by observing past work [5]. Lastly, we lay the foundation for future work around additional collaborative metrics, features and …

Optical Fiber Sensors In Physical Intrusion Detection Systems: A Review, Gary Andrew Allwood, Graham Wild, Steven Hinkley

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Fiber optic sensors have become a mainstream sensing technology within a large array of applications due to their inherent benefits. They are now used significantly in structural health monitoring, and are an essential solution for monitoring harsh environments. Since their first development over 30 years ago, they have also found promise in security applications. This paper reviews all of the optical fiber-based techniques used in physical intrusion detection systems. It details the different approaches used for sensing, interrogation, and networking, by research groups, attempting to secure both commercial and residential premises from physical security breaches. The advantages and the disadvantages …

An Extended Study On Addressing Defender Teamwork While Accounting For Uncertainty In Attacker Defender Games Using Iterative Dec-Mdps, Eric Shieh, Albert Xin Jiang, Amulya Yadav, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent teamwork and defender-attacker security games are two areas that are currently receiving significant attention within multi-agent systems research. Unfortunately, despite the need for effective teamwork among multiple defenders, little has been done to harness the teamwork research in security games. The problem that this paper seeks to solve is the coordination of decentralized defender agents in the presence of uncertainty while securing targets against an observing adversary. To address this problem, we offer the following novel contributions in this paper: (i) New model of security games with defender teams that coordinate under uncertainty; (ii) New algorithm based on column …

Behavior-Based Detection Of Application Layer Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks During Flash Events, Renukadevi Saravanan, Saraswathi Shanmuganathan, Yogesh Palanichamy

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are ever threatening to the developers and users of the Internet. DDoS attacks targeted at the application layer are especially difficult to be detected since they mimic the legitimate users' requests. The situation becomes more serious when they occur during flash events. A more sophisticated algorithm is required to detect such attacks during a flash crowd. A few existing works make use of flow similarity for differentiating flash crowds and DDoS, but flow characteristics alone cannot be used for effective detection. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for discriminating DDoS and flash …

A Comparative Study Of Formal Verification Techniques For Authentication Protocols, Hernan Miguel Palombo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Protocol verification is an exciting area of network security that intersects engineering and formal methods. This thesis presents a comparison of formal verification tools for security protocols for their respective strengths and weaknesses supported by the results from several case studies. The formal verification tools considered are based on explicit model checking (SPIN), symbolic analysis (Proverif) and theorem proving (Coq). We formalize and provide models of several well-known authentication and key-establishment protocols in each of the specification languages, and use the tools to find attacks that show protocols insecurity. We contrast the modelling process on each of the tools by …

Developing A Compiler For A Regular Expression Based Policy Specification Language, Cory Michael Juhlin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Security policy specification languages are a response to today's complex and vulnerable software climate. These languages allow an individual or organization to restrict and modify the behavior of third-party applications such that they adhere to the rules specified in the policy. As software grows in complexity, so do the security policies that govern them. Existing policy specification languages have not adapted to the growing complexity of the software they govern and as a result do not scale well, often resulting in code that is overly complex or unreadable. Writing small, isolated policies as separate modules and combining them is known …

Blindcanseeql: Improved Blind Sql Injection For Db Schema Discovery Using A Predictive Dictionary From Web Scraped Word Based Lists, Ryan Wheeler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

SQL Injections are still a prominent threat on the web. Using a custom built tool, BlindCanSeeQL (BCSQL), we will explore how to automate Blind SQL attacks to discover database schema using fewer requests than the standard methods, thus helping avoid detection from overloading a server with hits. This tool uses a web crawler to discover keywords that assist with autocompleting schema object names, along with improvements in ASCII bisection to lower the number of requests sent to the server. Along with this tool, we will discuss ways to prevent and protect against such attacks.

On Robust Image Spam Filtering Via Comprehensive Visual Modeling, Jialie Shen, Deng, Robert H., Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet has brought about fundamental changes in the way peoples generate and exchange media information. Over the last decade, unsolicited message images (image spams) have become one of the most serious problems for Internet service providers (ISPs), business firms and general end users. In this paper, we report a novel system called RoBoTs (Robust BoosTrap based spam detector) to support accurate and robust image spam filtering. The system is developed based on multiple visual properties extracted from different levels of granularity, aiming to capture more discriminative contents for effective spam image identification. In addition, a resampling based learning framework …

Authentication Via Multiple Associated Devices, Jean-Baptiste Subils

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a practical method of authentication utilizing multiple devices. The factors contributing to the practicality of the method are: the utilization of devices already commonly possessed by users and the amenability to being implemented on a wide variety of devices. The term “device” refers to anything able to perform cryptographic operations, store data, and communicate with another such device.

In the method presented herein, multiple devices need to be associated with a single user to provide this user an identity in the system. A public key infrastructure is used to provide this identity. Each of the devices associated …