Information Security Commons^™

Robust Lifetime Measurement In Large-Scale P2p Systems With Non-Stationary Arrivals, Xiaoming Wang, Zhongmei Yao, Yueping Zhang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Characterizing user churn has become an important topic in studying P2P networks, both in theoretical analysis and system design. Recent work has shown that direct sampling of user lifetimes may lead to certain bias (arising from missed peers and round-off inconsistencies) and proposed a technique that estimates lifetimes based on sampled residuals. In this paper, however, we show that under non-stationary arrivals, which are often present in real systems, residual-based sampling does not correctly reconstruct user lifetimes and suffers a varying degree of bias, which in some cases makes estimation completely impossible. We overcome this problem using two contributions: a …

Wireless Networks: Spert: A Stateless Protocol For Energy-Sensitive Real-Time Routing For Wireless Sensor Network, Sohail Jabbar, Abid Ali Minhas, Raja Adeel Akhtar

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Putting constraints on performance of a system in the temporal domain, some times turns right into wrong and update into outdate. These are the scenarios where apposite value of time inveterate in the reality. But such timing precision not only requires tightly scheduled performance constraints but also requires optimal design and operation of all system components. Any malfunctioning at any relevant aspect may causes a serious disaster and even loss of human lives. Managing and interacting with such real-time system becomes much intricate when the resources are limited as in wireless sensor nodes. A wireless sensor node is typically comprises …

Networks - Ii: Overhead Analysis Of Security Implementation Using Ipsec, Muhammad Awais Azam, Zaka -Ul- Mustafa, Usman Tahir, S. M. Ahsan, Muhammad Adnan Naseem, Imran Rashid, Muhammad Adeel

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Authentication, access control, encryption and auditing make up the essential elements of network security. Researchers have dedicated a large amount of efforts to implement security features that fully incorporate the use of all these elements. Currently, data networks mainly provide authentication and confidentiality services. Confidentiality alone is not able to protect the system, thus, suitable security measures must be taken. However, this security is itself an overhead which must be accounted for. A trade-off must exist between performance and security. This trade-off must be carefully managed so as not to deteriorate the systems being secured. This calls for the true …

Cyber Attacks: Cross-Country Interdependence And Enforcement, Qiu-Hong Wang, Seung Hyun Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically characterizes the interdependence in cyber attacks and examines theimpact from the first international treaty against cybercrimes (Convention on Cybercrimes:Europe Treaty Series No. 185). With the data covering 62 countries over the period from year2003 to 2007, we find that, international cooperation in enforcement as measured by theindicator of joining the Convention on Cybercrimes, deterred cyber attacks originating from anyparticular country by 15.81% ~ 24.77% (in 95% confidence interval). Second, joining theConvention also affected the interdependence in cyber attacks from two angels. First, for anypair of country, closer status in joining or not joining the Convention was associated …

Mitigating Insider Sabotage And Espionage: A Review Of The United States Air Force's Current Posture, Erika C. Leach

Theses and Dissertations

The security threat from malicious insiders affects all organizations. Mitigating this problem is quite difficult due to the fact that (1) there is no definitive profile for malicious insiders, (2) organizations have placed trust in these individuals, and (3) insiders have a vast knowledge of their organization’s personnel, security policies, and information systems. The purpose of this research is to analyze to what extent the United States Air Force (USAF) security policies address the insider threat problem. The policies are reviewed in terms of how well they align with best practices published by the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Emergency Readiness …

Heuristics For Improved Enterprise Intrusion Detection, James J. Treinen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the greatest challenges facing network operators today is the identification of malicious activity on their networks. The current approach is to deploy a set of intrusion detection sensors (IDSs) in various locations throughout the network and on strategic hosts. Unfortunately, the available intrusion detection technologies generate an overwhelming volume of false alarms, making the task of identifying genuine attacks nearly impossible. This problem is very difficult to solve even in networks of nominal size. The task of uncovering attacks in enterprise class networks quickly becomes unmanageable.

Research on improving intrusion detection sensors is ongoing, but given the nature …

User Interface Design, Moritz Stefaner, Sebastien Ferre, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren, Yi Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

As detailed in Chap. 1, system implementations for dynamic taxonomies and faceted search allow a wide range of query possibilities on the data. Only when these are made accessible by appropriate user interfaces, the resulting applications can support a variety of search, browsing and analysis tasks. User interface design in this area is confronted with specific challenges. This chapter presents an overview of both established and novel principles and solutions.

Cyber Power In The 21st Century, Joseph M. Elbaum

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the United States Congress has acknowledged that a separate branch of military service is required to exert supremacy over each of the recognized Domains of Operation. Throughout the evolution of modern warfare, leading minds in military theory have come to the conclusion that due to fundamental differences inherent in the theory and tactics that must be employed in order to successfully wage war within a domain’s associated environment, a specialized force was needed - until now. With the recent inclusion of Cyberspace as an operational domain by the Department of Defense, the case should be made that it, too, …

Control Of The Electronic Management Of Information, A. Boone, R. Szatmary Jr.

Publications (YM)

This procedure establishes the responsibilities and provides direction for developing and evaluating the adequacy of process controls on specific uses of electronically stored information. These uses include, but are not limited to, information used in design input, developed as design output, or developed as input to or output from scientific investigation or performance assessment modeling and analysis. This pertains to information that resides in an electronic information management system or on electronic media.

Modeling Heterogeneous User Churn And Local Resilience Of Unstructured P2p Networks, Zhongmei Yao, Derek Leonard, Dmitri Loguinov, Xiaoming Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Previous analytical results on the resilience of unstructured P2P systems have not explicitly modeled heterogeneity of user churn (i.e., difference in online behavior) or the impact of in-degree on system resilience. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a generic model of heterogeneous user churn, derive the distribution of the various metrics observed in prior experimental studies (e.g., lifetime distribution of joining users, joint distribution of session time of alive peers, and residual lifetime of a randomly selected user), derive several closed-form results on the transient behavior of in-degree, and eventually obtain the joint in/out degree isolation probability as a simple …

Three Architectures For Trusted Data Dissemination In Edge Computing, Shen-Tat Goh, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Edge computing pushes application logic and the underlying data to the edge of the network, with the aim of improving availability and scalability. As the edge servers are not necessarily secure, there must be provisions for users to validate the results—that values in the result tuples are not tampered with, that no qualifying data are left out, that no spurious tuples are introduced, and that a query result is not actually the output from a different query. This paper aims to address the challenges of ensuring data integrity in edge computing. We study three schemes that enable users to check …

Authenticating Multi-Dimensional Query Results In Data Publishing, Weiwei Cheng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In data publishing, the owner delegates the role of satisfying user queries to a third-party publisher. As the publisher may be untrusted or susceptible to attacks, it could produce incorrect query results. This paper introduces a mechanism for users to verify that their query answers on a multi-dimensional dataset are correct, in the sense of being complete (i.e., no qualifying data points are omitted) and authentic (i.e., all the result values originated from the owner). Our approach is to add authentication information into a spatial data structure, by constructing certified chains on the points within each partition, as well as …

Online Survey System: A Web-Based Tool For Creating And Administering Student Evaluations Online, Fatima Marie Idowu

Theses and Dissertations

With the advancement in technology over the years, the administering of online surveys has expanded. In particular, universities are using the online medium to administer surveys to students, in order to evaluate faculty performances. The move of surveys to the online realm has meant a reduction in cost, time and efforts, of survey administrators, and the increase in use of technology within universities. With the use of online surveys the challenges of confidentiality, anonymity and response rates are as prominent as they are with paper-based surveys.

This study researched the use of online surveys in education; detailing systems currently used …

Information Assurance Through Binary Vulnerability Auditing, William B. Kimball, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The goal of this research is to develop improved methods of discovering vulnerabilities in software. A large volume of software, from the most frequently used programs on a desktop computer, such as web browsers, e-mail programs, and word processing applications, to mission-critical services for the space shuttle, is unintentionally vulnerable to attacks and thus insecure. By seeking to improve the identification of vulnerabilities in software, the security community can save the time and money necessary to restore compromised computer systems. In addition, this research is imperative to activities of national security such as counterterrorism. The current approach involves a systematic …

E-Healthcare In Abc County Health Department (Abcchd): Trade-Offs Analysis And Evaluation, Keng Siau, Hwee-Joo Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The issue of privacy stirred a tumultuous uproar when the ABC County Health Department (ABCCHD) was planning for an e-Healthcare system that utilized information technology to streamline the administration process of patients. ABCCHD had hired a software vendor, Info-Health, a company that specialized in information system development for the healthcare industry to help in the project. The privacy of patients with Sexually Transmitted Diseases/Human Immunity System was a thorny issue in the implementation of the e-Healthcare system. A trade-off between privacy and cost was discussed and debated. Three alternatives, with varying degrees of privacy and cost, were considered.

Authenticating Query Results In Data Publishing, Di Ma, Robert H. Deng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a communication-efficient authentication scheme to authenticate query results disseminated by untrusted data publishing servers. In our scheme, signatures of multiple tuples in the result set are aggregated into one and thus the communication overhead incurred by the signature keeps constant. Next attr-MHTs (tuple based Merkle Hash Tree) are built to further reduce the communication overhead incurred by auxiliary authentication information (AAI). Besides the property of communication-efficiency, our scheme also supports dynamic SET operations (UNION, INTERSECTION) and dynamic JOIN with immunity to reordering attack.

On Static And Dynamic Partitioning Behavior Of Large-Scale Networks, Derek Leonard, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we analyze the problem of network disconnection in the context of large-scale P2P networks and understand how both static and dynamic patterns of node failure affect the resilience of such graphs. We start by applying classical results from random graph theory to show that a large variety of deterministic and random P2P graphs almost surely (i.e., with probability 1-o(1)) remain connected under random failure if and only if they have no isolated nodes. This simple, yet powerful, result subsequently allows us to derive in closed-form the probability that a P2P network develops isolated nodes, and therefore partitions, …

Cuhk At Imageclef 2005: Cross-Language And Cross-Media Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, J. Zhu, M. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe our studies of cross-language and cross-media image retrieval at the ImageCLEF 2005. This is the first participation of our CUHK (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) group at ImageCLEF. The task in which we participated is the “bilingual ad hoc retrieval” task. There are three major focuses and contributions in our participation. The first is the empirical evaluation of language models and smoothing strategies for cross-language image retrieval. The second is the evaluation of cross-media image retrieval, i.e., combining text and visual contents for image retrieval. The last is the evaluation of bilingual image retrieval …

Secured Network Model For Management Information System Based On Ip Security (Ipsec) Encryption Using Multilayered Approach Of Network Security, Dr. Amir Hassan Pathan, Muniza Irshad

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Secured flow of information through the network and play important role in the management information systems. In this paper I describe Secured Network Model For Corporate & Business Organization In Based On Network Level IP Security (IPSec) Encryption & Its Physical Layout Using Multilayered Approach. I have four important considerations for adoption of secured network model as secured network model for management information system.

A Survey On Intrusion Detection Approaches, A Murali M. Rao

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Intrusion detection plays one of the key roles in computer security techniques and is one of the prime areas of research. Usages of computer network services are tremendously increasing day by day and at the same time intruders are also playing a major role to deny network services, compromising the crucial services for Email, FTP and Web. Realizing the importance of the problem due to intrusions, many researchers have taken up research in this area and have proposed several solutions. It has come to a stage to take a stock of the research results and project a comprehensive view so …

Study Of Data Provenance And Annotation Model For Information Reliability Suggested For Pathological Laboratory Environment In Pakistan, Naila Aamir, Aslam Pervez

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Trust and reliability of information is a very critical issue of today's information age. Keeping provenance of data not only ensures us about its origination but it also keeps track of all the changes that happen to the data through out its life cycle. In this paper we have discussed the importance of data provenance, difference between Where & Why Provenance and different models for keeping such information. The objective of this study is to select a provenance model which can be implemented in scientific environment of our country. For this purpose we have taken the annotation model and have …

Wmxml: A System For Watermarking Xml Data, Xuan Zhou, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kian-Lee Tan, Dhruv Mangla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As increasing amount of data is published in the form of XML, copyright protection of XML data is becoming an important requirement for many applications. While digital watermarking is a widely used measure to protect digital data from copyright offences, the complex and flexible construction of XML data poses a number of challenges to digital watermarking, such as re-organization and alteration attacks. To overcome these challenges, the watermarking scheme has to be based on the usability of data and the underlying semantics like key attributes and functional dependencies. In this paper, we describe WmXML, a system for watermarking XML documents. …

Privacy Issues In The Era Of Ubiquitous Commerce, Holtjona Galanxhi, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The vision of ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce) is realized through the convergence of electronic, mobile, television, voice and silent commerce applications. The ubiquity, universality, uniqueness, and unison of u-commerce will provide two principal benefits for individual users and companies: increased convenience as well as more personalized and customized services. However, u-commerce will also bring new issues such as a greater degree of privacy concerns that will impact individual users, companies, and the society at large. This paper proposes and elaborates on a conceptual framework for privacy in the u-commerce era. It combines Lessig’s macro-level perspective – the four-factor model of privacy …

Automatically Discovering The Number Of Clusters In Web Page Datasets, Zhongmei Yao

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Clustering is well-suited for Web mining by automatically organizing Web pages into categories, each of which contains Web pages having similar contents. However, one problem in clustering is the lack of general methods to automatically determine the number of categories or clusters. For the Web domain in particular, currently there is no such method suitable for Web page clustering. In an attempt to address this problem, we discover a constant factor that characterizes the Web domain, based on which we propose a new method for automatically determining the number of clusters in Web page data sets. We discover that the …

Secure Human Communications Based On Biometrics Signals, Yongdong Wu, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User authentication is the first and probably the most challenging step in achieving secure person-to-person communications. Most of the existing authentication schemes require communicating parties either share a secret/password or know each other's public key. In this paper we suggest a novel user authentication scheme that is easy to use and overcomes the requirements of sharing password or public keys. Our scheme allows two human users to perform mutual authentication and have secure communications over an open channel by exchanging biometrics signals (e. g., voice or video signals). In addition to user authentication, our scheme establishes a secret session key …

Ontology-Assisted Mining Of Rdf Documents, Tao Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Resource description framework (RDF) is becoming a popular encoding language for describing and interchanging metadata of web resources. In this paper, we propose an Apriori-based algorithm for mining association rules (AR) from RDF documents. We treat relations (RDF statements) as items in traditional AR mining to mine associations among relations. The algorithm further makes use of a domain ontology to provide generalization of relations. To obtain compact rule sets, we present a generalized pruning method for removing uninteresting rules. We illustrate a potential usage of AR mining on RDF documents for detecting patterns of terrorist activities. Experiments conducted based on …

Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey, Saverio Perugini, Marcos André Gonçalves, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from …

Ua8 Ssn Protection Committee Recommendations, Wku Information Technology

WKU Administration Documents

Recommendations of the Social Security Number Protection Committee.

Stegfs: A Steganographic File System, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kian-Lee Tan, Xuan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While user access control and encryption can protect valuable data from passive observers, those techniques leave visible ciphertexts that are likely to alert an active adversary to the existence of the data, who can then compel an authorized user to disclose it. This paper introduces StegFS, a steganographic file system that aims to overcome that weakness by offering plausible deniability to owners of protected files. StegFS securely hides user-selected files in a file system so that, without the corresponding access keys, an attacker would not be able to deduce their existence, even if the attacker is thoroughly familiar with the …

E-Mail Filter With Attachment Scanning Prototype, Losini Goval Hema

Student Works (2000-2009)

The E-mail Filter is a mail client that retrieves mails from the Ms Outlook Express, which retrieves mails from POP3 server and categorizes them into different a category that has different level of priorities. Attachments in the incoming mails are scanned and sent to respective folders. These attachments will be stored in the personal computer for easy reference. Meanwhile, the automatic response system automatically replies the mails classified in the Appointments category using automatic response, which runs even when the e-mails are closed. The E-mail Filter with Attachment Scanning Prototype is a stand-alone system. It has a user-friendly concept and …