Information Security Commons^™

Keep It Simple, Keep It Safe - Research On The Impacts Of Increasing Complexity Of Modern Enterprise Applications, Shawn Ware, David Phillips

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

As the Cybersecurity program within UNO continues to adapt to the ever-changing world of information systems and information security, the Cybersecurity Capstone has recently become an active, community-involvement project, where real-world organizations can receive valuable, useful research and information from students on their way towards a degree. This presentation encompasses two such projects from the Cybersecurity Capstone, looking at how modern, more complex systems can often increase system vulnerability.

Mining Sandboxes: Are We There Yet?, Lingfeng Bao, Tien Duy B. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The popularity of Android platform on mobile devices has attracted much attention from many developers and researchers, as well as malware writers. Recently, Jamrozik et al. proposed a technique to secure Android applications referred to as mining sandboxes. They used an automated test case generation technique to explore the behavior of the app under test and then extracted a set of sensitive APIs that were called. Based on the extracted sensitive APIs, they built a sandbox that can block access to APIs not used during testing. However, they only evaluated the proposed technique with benign apps but not investigated whether …

Urlnet: Learning A Url Representation With Deep Learning For Malicious Url Detection, Hung Le, Hong Quang Pham, Doyen Sahoo, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malicious URLs host unsolicited content and are used to perpetrate cybercrimes. It is imperative to detect them in a timely manner. Traditionally, this is done through the usage of blacklists, which cannot be exhaustive, and cannot detect newly generated malicious URLs. To address this, recent years have witnessed several efforts to perform Malicious URL Detection using Machine Learning. The most popular and scalable approaches use lexical properties of the URL string by extracting Bag-of-words like features, followed by applying machine learning models such as SVMs. There are also other features designed by experts to improve the prediction performance of the …

Attribute-Based Cloud Storage With Secure Provenance Over Encrypted Data, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To securely and conveniently enjoy the benefits of cloud storage, it is desirable to design a cloud data storage system which protects data privacy from storage servers through encryption, allows fine-grained access control such that data providers can expressively specify who are eligible to access the encrypted data, enables dynamic user management such that the total number of data users is unbounded and user revocation can be carried out conveniently, supports data provider anonymity and traceability such that a data provider’s identity is not disclosed to data users in normal circumstances but can be traced by a trusted authority if …

Can Ego Defense Mechanism Help Explain Is Security Dysfunctional Behavior, Abhijit Chaudhury, Debasish Mallick

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Conference Proceedings

IS security behavior studies are becoming popular. To date, much of the research has been based on theories such as the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Adoption Model, Rational Choice theory and Theory of Reasoned Action. They view users as rational individuals making conscious utilitarian decisions when there is increasing evidence that security breaches are the result of human behavior such as carelessness, malicious intent, bad habits, and hostility. We propose the ego defense mechanism model, taken from the psychoanalytical world. This model makes no assumption of rationality and has been developed to help understand the roots of dysfunctional behavior …

Developing A Cyberterrorism Policy: Incorporating Individual Values, Osama Bassam J. Rabie

Theses and Dissertations

Preventing cyberterrorism is becoming a necessity for individuals, organizations, and governments. However, current policies focus on technical and managerial aspects without asking for experts and non-experts values and preferences for preventing cyberterrorism. This study employs value focused thinking and public value forum to bare strategic measures and alternatives for complex policy decisions for preventing cyberterrorism. The strategic measures and alternatives are per socio-technical process.

Determining Vulnerability Using Attach Graphs: An Expansion Of The Current Fair Model, Beth M. Anderson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) provides a framework for measuring and understanding factors that contribute to information risk. One such factor is FAIR Vulnerability; the probability that an event involving a threat will result in a loss. An asset is vulnerable if a threat actor’s Threat Capability is higher than the Resistance Strength of the asset. In FAIR scenarios, Resistance Strength is currently estimated for entire assets, oversimplifying assets containing individual systems and the surrounding environment. This research explores enhancing estimations of FAIR Vulnerability by modeling interactions between threat actors and assets through attack graphs. By breaking down the …

Software Intrusion Detection Evaluation System: A Cost-Based Evaluation Of Intrusion Detection Capability, Agbotiname L. Imoize, Taiwo Oyedare, Michael E. Otuokere, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

In this paper, we consider a cost-based extension of intrusion detection capability (CID). An objective metric motivated by information theory is presented and based on this formulation; a package for computing the intrusion detection capability of intrusion detection system (IDS), given certain input parameters is developed using Java. In order to determine the expected cost at each IDS operating point, the decision tree method of analysis is employed, and plots of expected cost and intrusion detection capability against false positive rate were generated. The point of intersection between the maximum intrusion detection capability and the expected cost is selected as …

User-Friendly Deniable Storage For Mobile Devices, Bing Chang, Yao Cheng, Bo Chen, Fengwei Zhang, Wen-Tao Zhu, Yingjiu Li, Zhan. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile devices are prevalently used to process sensitive data, but traditional encryption may not work when an adversary is able to coerce the device owners to disclose the encryption keys. Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) is thus designed to protect sensitive data against this powerful adversary. In this paper, we present MobiPluto, a user-friendly PDE scheme for denying the existence of sensitive data stored on mobile devices. A salient difference between MobiPluto and the existing PDE systems is that any block-based file systems can be deployed on top of it. To further improve usability and deniability of MobiPluto, we introduce a …

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 …

Policy Analytics For Environmental Sustainability: Household Hazardous Waste And Water Impacts Of Carbon Pollution Standards, Kustini

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Policy analytics are essential in supporting more informed policy-making in environmental management. This dissertation employs a fusion of machine methods and explanatory empiricism that involves data analytics, math programming, optimization, econometrics, geospatial and spatiotemporal analysis, and other approaches for assessing and evaluating current and future environmental policies.
Essay 1 discusses household informedness and its impact on the collection and recycling of household hazardous waste (HHW). Household informedness is the degree to which households have the necessary information to make utility-maximizing decisions about the handling of their waste. Such informedness seems to be influenced by HHW public education and environmental quality …

Uncovering User-Triggered Privacy Leaks In Mobile Applications And Their Utility In Privacy Protection, Joo Keng Joseph Chan

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Mobile applications are increasingly popular, and help mobile users in many aspects of their lifestyle. Applications have access to a wealth of information about the user through powerful developer APIs. It is known that most applications, even popular and highly regarded ones, utilize and leak privacy data to the network. It is also common for applications to over-access privacy data that does not fit the functionality profile of the application. Although there are available privacy detection tools, they might not provide sufficient context to help users better understand the privacy behaviours of their applications. In this dissertation, I present the …

Self Service Business Intelligence: An Analysis Of Tourists Preferences In Kosovo, Ardian Hyseni

UBT International Conference

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the preferences of tourists in Kosovo through the data from TripAdvisor.com. Top things to do in Kosovo, will be analyzed through the comments of tourists in TripAdvisor.com. By analyzing the data with PowerBI, will be analyzed what are the most preferred things to do and what the tourists like the most in Kosovo. This paper will contribute on defining the preferences of tourists in Kosovo, it also can help tourism to invest and attract more tourists in specific areas or improve and invest in places less preferred by tourists.

Security Assessment Of Web Applications, Renelada Kushe

UBT International Conference

A web application is an application that is accessed by users over a network such as the internet or intranet. The term also refers an application that is coded in a browser-supported programming language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable. Web applications are vulnerable to varies exploits from those which manipulate the application via its graphical web interface (HTTP exploits), to tampering the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) or tampering HTTPS elements not contained in the URI. Getting started from the accessibility and the variety of exploits, the security assessment is a necessity for providing …

Web Scrapping And Self Service Business Intelligence: Analysis Of Preferences Of Tourists In Albania, Ardian Hyseni

UBT International Conference

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the preferences of tourists in Albania through the data web scrapped from TripAdvisor.com. Top things to do in Albania, will be analyzed through the comments of tourists in TripAdvisor.com. By using tools for web scrapping and analyzing of data with nVivo and PowerBI, will be analyzed what are the most preferred things to do and what the tourists like doing the most in Albania. This paper will contribute on defining the preferences of tourists in Albania, also can help tourism to invest and attract more tourists in specific areas or improve and …

Implications Of Eu-Gdpr In Low-Grade Social, Activist And Ngo Settings, Lars Magnusson, Sarfraz Iqbal

UBT International Conference

Social support services are becoming popular among the citizens of every country and every age. Though, social support services easily accessible on mobile phones are used in different contexts, ranging from extending your presence and connectivity to friends, family and colleagues to using social media services for being a social activist seeking to help individuals confined in miserable situations such as homeless community, drug addicts or even revolutionists fighting against dictatorships etc. However, a very recent development in the European Parliament’s law (2016/679) on the processing and free movement of personal data in terms of EU-GDPR (General data protection rules) …

E-Commerce Implementation In Kosovo, Besnik Skenderi, Diamanta Skenderi

UBT International Conference

In this paper, author had analyzed journal articles that were published by Alemayehu & Heeks, (2007) and Hwang, Jung, & Selvendy (2006). Both articles are about e-commerce and in first article (Alemayehu & Heeks, 2007) authors had analyzed impact of cultural differences, telecomunication infrastructure and local market. In addition, authors of this research paper were focused on consumers that are purchasing through e-commerce companies.

Second analyzed article (Hwang, Jung, & Selvendy, 2006) is about exploring e-commerce benefits in developing countries and developing countries are home to more than 80% of the world’s population, and are the site for growing use …

Learning Management Systems In Higher Education, Romina Agaçi

UBT International Conference

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are improving learning processes and are widely used in higher education institutions. There are available various types of LMSs used by pedagogues to manage eLearning and to deliver course materials to students. Nowadays, LMSs have become essential tools that affect the quality of learning and teaching in higher education. In this article, we introduce LMSs and we choose Moodle as a tool to presentaninformation system that is used in our university. Moodle is an online learning environment that supports classroom teaching. We will focus on the advantages of LMSs and why we choose Moodle as the …

An Approach To Information Security For Smes Based On The Resource-Based View Theory, Blerton Abazi

UBT International Conference

The main focus of this proposal is to analyze implementation challenges, benefits and requirements in implementation of Information Systems and managing information security in small and medium size companies in Western Balkans countries. In relation to the study, the proposal will focus in the following questions to investigate: What are the benefits that companies mostly find after the implementation of Information Systems has been implemented, efficiency, how to they manage security of the information’s, competitive advantage, return of investments etc. The study should give a clear approach to Information Systems implementation, information security, maintenance, measurable benefits, challenges companies have gone …

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 …

Every Step You Take, I’Ll Be Watching You: Practical Stepauth-Entication Of Rfid Paths, Kai Bu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Path authentication thwarts counterfeits in RFID-based supply chains. Its motivation is that tagged products taking invalid paths are likely faked and injected by adversaries at certain supply chain partners/steps. Existing solutions are path-grained in that they simply regard a product as genuine if it takes any valid path. Furthermore, they enforce distributed authentication by offloading the sets of valid paths to some or all steps from a centralized issuer. This not only imposes network and storage overhead but also leaks transaction privacy. We present StepAuth, the first step-grained path authentication protocol that is practically efficient for authenticating products with strict …

Every Step You Take, I’Ll Be Watching You: Practical Stepauth-Entication Of Rfid Paths, Kai Bu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Path authentication thwarts counterfeits in RFID-based supply chains. Its motivation is that tagged products taking invalid paths are likely faked and injected by adversaries at certain supply chain partners/steps. Existing solutions are path-grained in that they simply regard a product as genuine if it takes any valid path. Furthermore, they enforce distributed authentication by offloading the sets of valid paths to some or all steps from a centralized issuer. This not only imposes network and storage overhead but also leaks transaction privacy. We present StepAuth, the first step-grained path authentication protocol that is practically efficient for authenticating products with strict …

Vurle: Automatic Vulnerability Detection And Repair By Learning From Examples, Ma Siqi, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Cong Sun, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vulnerability becomes a major threat to the security of many systems. Attackers can steal private information and perform harmful actions by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities often remain undetected for a long time as they may not affect typical systems’ functionalities. Furthermore, it is often difficult for a developer to fix a vulnerability correctly if he/she is not a security expert. To assist developers to deal with multiple types of vulnerabilities, we propose a new tool, called VuRLE, for automatic detection and repair of vulnerabilities. VuRLE (1) learns transformative edits and their contexts (i.e., code characterizing edit locations) from examples of …

Vcksm: Verifiable Conjunctive Keyword Search Over Mobile E-Health Cloud In Shared Multi-Owner Settings, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Qi Jiang, Junwei Zhang, Limin Shen, Zhiquan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) is a promising technique which enables cloud users to conduct search over encrypted cloud data in a privacy-preserving way, especially for the electronic health record (EHR) system that contains plenty of medical history, diagnosis, radiology images, etc. In this paper, we focus on a more practical scenario, also named as the shared multi-owner settings, where each e-health record is co-owned by a fixed number of parties. Although the existing SE schemes under the unshared multi-owner settings can be adapted to this shared scenario, these schemes have to build multiple indexes,which definitely incur higher computational overhead. To save …

Ancr—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme For Wsns With Different-Success-Rate Links †, Xiang Ji, Anwen Wang, Chunyu Li, Chun Ma, Yao Peng, Dajin Wang, Qingyi Hua, Feng Chen, Dingyi Fang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be …

Dynamic Adversarial Mining - Effectively Applying Machine Learning In Adversarial Non-Stationary Environments., Tegjyot Singh Sethi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While understanding of machine learning and data mining is still in its budding stages, the engineering applications of the same has found immense acceptance and success. Cybersecurity applications such as intrusion detection systems, spam filtering, and CAPTCHA authentication, have all begun adopting machine learning as a viable technique to deal with large scale adversarial activity. However, the naive usage of machine learning in an adversarial setting is prone to reverse engineering and evasion attacks, as most of these techniques were designed primarily for a static setting. The security domain is a dynamic landscape, with an ongoing never ending arms race …

Secure Encrypted Data Deduplication With Ownership Proof And User Revocation, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud storage as one of the most important cloud services enables cloud users to save more data without enlarging its own storage. In order to eliminate repeated data and improve the utilization of storage, deduplication is employed to cloud storage. Due to the concern about data security and user privacy, encryption is introduced, but incurs new challenge to cloud data deduplication. Existing work cannot achieve flexible access control and user revocation. Moreover, few of them can support efficient ownership proof, especially public verifiability of ownership. In this paper, we propose a secure encrypted data deduplication scheme with effective ownership proof …

Data Insertion In Bitcoin's Blockchain, Andrew Sward, Vecna Op_0, Forrest Stonedahl

Computer Science: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of methods for inserting arbitrary data into Bitcoin's blockchain. Historical methods of data insertion are described, along with lesser-known techniques that are optimized for efficiency. Insertion methods are compared on the basis of efficiency, cost, convenience of data reconstruction, permanence, and potentially negative impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Tlel: A Two-Layer Ensemble Learning Approach For Just-In-Time Defect Prediction, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Defect prediction is a very meaningful topic, particularly at change-level. Change-level defect prediction, which is also referred as just-in-time defect prediction, could not only ensure software quality in the development process, but also make the developers check and fix the defects in time [1].Objective: Ensemble learning becomes a hot topic in recent years. There have been several studies about applying ensemble learning to defect prediction [2–5]. Traditional ensemble learning approaches only have one layer, i.e., they use ensemble learning once. There are few studies that leverages ensemble learning twice or more. To bridge this research gap, we try to …

Breathprint: Breathing Acoustics-Based User Authentication, Jagmohan Chauhan, Yining Hu, Suranga Sereviratne, Archan Misra, Aruna Sereviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose BreathPrint, a new behavioural biometric signature based on audio features derived from an individual's commonplace breathing gestures. Specifically, BreathPrint uses the audio signatures associated with the three individual gestures: sniff, normal, and deep breathing, which are sufficiently different across individuals. Using these three breathing gestures, we develop the processing pipeline that identifies users via the microphone sensor on smartphones and wearable devices. In BreathPrint, a user performs breathing gestures while holding the device very close to their nose. Using off-the-shelf hardware, we experimentally evaluate the BreathPrint prototype with 10 users, observed over seven days. We show that users …