Information Security Commons^™

Investigating Security Attacks On Wireless Sensor Networks (Wsns) Via An Iot Environmental Monitoring System, Mauricio Tellez Nava, Samy El-Tawab, M. Hossain Heydari

Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship and Creative Activities

To demonstrate our work, we have implemented a secure temperature monitoring system that makes use of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, AES-128 hardware encryption and TelosB sensor nodes. In our design, we consider one of the nodes to be a coordinator node, which plays the role of a central node that establishes network association requests, listens for incoming packets, decrypts the incoming packets and forwards any received packets to the monitoring device. Three other nodes act as end-devices, which play the role of collecting temperature measurements, encrypting the collected data and sending the encrypted packets to the coordinator node. A last …

Ultrasonic Data Transmission And Steganography, Hunter Young

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

This project discusses the feasibility of using ultrasound to transmit data between computer systems, particularly computer systems that have been intentionally cut off from traditional networks for increased security. The goal of this project is to provide a synthesis of the current research that has been done into the use of ultrasonic data transmission, and to conduct a series of tests determining the validity of certain claims made in regards to ultrasonic data transmission within the information security community. All research, experiments, results, and inferences have been discussed in the context of how they relate to the realm of information …

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 …

The Role Of Cryptography In Security For Electronic Commerce, Ann Murphy, David Murphy

The ITB Journal

Many businesses and consumers are wary of conducting business over the Internet due to a perceived lack of security. Electronic business is subject to a variety of threats such as unauthorised access, misappropriation, alteration and destruction of both data and systems. This paper explores the major security concerns of businesses and users and describes the cryptographic techniques used to reduce such risks.

Real-Time Detection System For Suspicious Urls, Krishna Prasad Chouty, Anup Chandra Thogiti, Kranthi Sudha Vudatha

All Capstone Projects

Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spam detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. In this paper, we propose WARNINGBIRD, a suspicious Real-Time URL detection system for …

Enhancing Wifi-Based Localization With Visual Clues, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Yunhao Liu, Ke Yi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Indoor localization is of great importance to a wide range of applications in the era of mobile computing. Current mainstream solutions rely on Received Signal Strength (RSS) of wireless signals as fingerprints to distinguish and infer locations. However, those methods suffer from fingerprint ambiguity that roots in multipath fading and temporal dynamics of wireless signals. Though pioneer efforts have resorted to motion-assisted or peer-assisted localization, they neither work in real time nor work without the help of peer users, which introduces extra costs and constraints, and thus degrades their practicality. To get over these limitations, we propose Argus, an image-assisted …

Panorama: Multi-Path Ssl Authentication Using Peer Network Perspectives, William P. Harris

Computer Engineering

SSL currently uses certificates signed by Certificate Authorities (CAs) to authenticate connections. e.g. Google will pay a CA to sign a certificate for them, so that they can prove that they're not someone pretending to be Google. Unfortunately, this system has had multiple problems, and many believe that an alternative needs to be found.

One of the ideas for alternatives is using multiple "network perspectives" to authenticate a server. The idea behind this is that, though playing man-in-the-middle (MITM) with one connection is easy, it should be difficult for an adversary to do so with many connections, especially if they …

Secure And Reliable Routing Protocol For Transmission Data In Wireless Sensor Mesh Networks, Nooh Adel Bany Muhammad

Dissertations

Abstract

Sensor nodes collect data from the physical world then exchange it until it reaches the intended destination. This information can be sensitive, such as battlefield surveillance. Therefore, providing secure and continuous data transmissions among sensor nodes in wireless network environments is crucial. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have limited resources, limited computation capabilities, and the exchange of data through the air and deployment in accessible areas makes the energy, security, and routing major concerns in WSN. In this research we are looking at security issues for the above reasons. WSN is susceptible to malicious activities such as hacking and physical …

Teaching Cybersecurity Using The Cloud, Khaled Salah, Mohammad Hammoud, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our …

Cyber Blackbox For Collecting Network Evidence, Jooyoung Lee, Sunoh Choi, Yangseo Choi, Jonghyun Kim, Ikkyun Kim, Youngseok Lee

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

In recent years, the hottest topics in the security field are related to the advanced and persistent attacks. As an approach to solve this problem, we propose a cyber blackbox which collects and preserves network traffic on a virtual volume based WORM device, called EvidenceLock to ensure data integrity for security and forensic analysis. As a strategy to retain traffic for long enough periods, we introduce a deduplication method. Also this paper includes a study on the network evidence which is collected and preserved for analyzing the cause of cyber incident. Then, a method is proposed to suggest a starting …

Intelligent Network Intrusion Detection Using An Evolutionary Computation Approach, Samaneh Rastegari

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

With the enormous growth of users' reliance on the Internet, the need for secure and reliable computer networks also increases. Availability of effective automatic tools for carrying out different types of network attacks raises the need for effective intrusion detection systems.

Generally, a comprehensive defence mechanism consists of three phases, namely, preparation, detection and reaction. In the preparation phase, network administrators aim to find and fix security vulnerabilities (e.g., insecure protocol and vulnerable computer systems or firewalls), that can be exploited to launch attacks. Although the preparation phase increases the level of security in a network, this will never completely …

Mobile Device Vulnerabilities & Securities, Luke Rondeau

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

An investigation on current mobile vulnerabilities and research into security. Also, a proof of concept to show the ease of injecting an Android phone with a virus.

Cross-Domain Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange Revisited, Liqun Chen, Hoon Wei Lim, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We revisit the problem of secure cross-domain communication between two users belonging to different security domains within an open and distributed environment. Existing approaches presuppose that either the users are in possession of public key certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA), or the associated domain authentication servers share a long-term secret key. In this article, we propose a generic framework for designing four-party password-based authenticated key exchange (4PAKE) protocols. Our framework takes a different approach from previous work. The users are not required to have public key certificates, but they simply reuse their login passwords, which they share …

A Novel Defense Mechanism Against Web Crawler Intrusion, Alireza Aghamohammadi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Web robots also known as crawlers or spiders are used by search engines, hackers and spammers to gather information about web pages. Timely detection and prevention of unwanted crawlers increases privacy and security of websites. In this research, a novel method to identify web crawlers is proposed to prevent unwanted crawler to access websites. The proposed method suggests a five-factor identification process to detect unwanted crawlers. This study provides the pretest and posttest results along with a systematic evaluation of web pages with the proposed identification technique versus web pages without the proposed identification process. An experiment was performed with …

A Forward-Secure Certificate-Based Signature Scheme, Jiguo Li, Huiyun Teng, Xinyu Huang, Yichen Zhang, Jianying Zhou

Faculty Publications

Cryptographic computations are often carried out on insecure devices for which the threat of key exposure raises a serious concern. In an effort to address the key exposure problem, the notion of forward security was first presented by Günther in 1990. In a forward-secure scheme, secret keys are updated at regular periods of time; exposure of the secret key corresponding to a given time period does not enable an adversary to ‘break’ the scheme for any prior time period. In this paper, we first introduce forward security into certificate-based cryptography and define the security model of forward-secure certificate-based signatures (CBSs). …

Applied Hypergame Theory For Network Defense, Alan S. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Cyber operations are the most important aspect of military conflicts in the 21st century, but unfortunately they are also among the least understood. The continual battle for network dominance between attackers and defenders is considered to be a complex game. Hypergame theory is an extension of game theory that addresses the kind of games where misperception exists, as is often the case in military engagements. Hypergame theory, like game theory, uses a game model to determine strategy selection, but goes beyond game theory by examining subgames that exist within the full game. The inclusion of misperception and misinformation in the …

Rootkit Detection Using A Cross-View Clean Boot Method, Bridget N. Flatley

Theses and Dissertations

In cyberspace, attackers commonly infect computer systems with malware to gain capabilities such as remote access, keylogging, and stealth. Many malware samples include rootkit functionality to hide attacker activities on the target system. After detection, users can remove the rootkit and associated malware from the system with commercial tools. This research describes, implements, and evaluates a clean boot method using two partitions to detect rootkits on a system. One partition is potentially infected with a rootkit while the other is clean. The method obtains directory listings of the potentially infected operating system from each partition and compares the lists to …

Mobile Network Defense Interface For Cyber Defense And Situational Awareness, James C. Hannan

Theses and Dissertations

Today's computer networks are under constant attack. In order to deal with this constant threat, network administrators rely on intrusion detection and prevention services (IDS) (IPS). Most IDS and IPS implement static rule sets to automatically alert administrators and resolve intrusions. Network administrators face a difficult challenge, identifying attacks against a vast number of benign network transactions. Also after a threat is identified making even the smallest policy change to the security software potentially has far-reaching and unanticipated consequences. Finally, because the administrator is primarily responding to alerts they may lose situational awareness of the network. During this research a …

A Multi Agent System For Flow-Based Intrusion Detection Using Reputation And Evolutionary Computation, David Hancock

Theses and Dissertations

The rising sophistication of cyber threats as well as the improvement of physical computer network properties present increasing challenges to contemporary Intrusion Detection (ID) techniques. To respond to these challenges, a multi agent system (MAS) coupled with flow-based ID techniques may effectively complement traditional ID systems. This paper develops: 1) a scalable software architecture for a new, self-organized, multi agent, flow-based ID system; and 2) a network simulation environment suitable for evaluating implementations of this MAS architecture and for other research purposes. Self-organization is achieved via 1) a reputation system that influences agent mobility in the search for effective vantage …

Malicious And Malfunctioning Node Detection Via Observed Physical Layer Data, Tyler J. Hardy

Theses and Dissertations

There are many mechanisms that can cause inadequate or unreliable information in sensor networks. A user of the network might be interested in detecting and classifying specific sensors nodes causing these problems. Several network layer based trust methods have been developed in previous research to assess these issues; in contrast this work develops a trust protocol based on observations of physical layer data collected by the sensors. Observations of physical layer data are used for decisions and calculations, and are based on just the measurements collected by the sensors. Although this information is packaged and distributed on the network layer, …

Holistic Network Defense: Fusing Host And Network Features For Attack Classification, Jenny W. Ji

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents a hybrid network-host monitoring strategy, which fuses data from both the network and the host to recognize malware infections. This work focuses on three categories: Normal, Scanning, and Infected. The network-host sensor fusion is accomplished by extracting 248 features from network traffic using the Fullstats Network Feature generator and from the host using text mining, looking at the frequency of the 500 most common strings and analyzing them as word vectors. Improvements to detection performance are made by synergistically fusing network features obtained from IP packet flows and host features, obtained from text mining port, processor, logon …

Evaluating Information Assurance Control Effectiveness On An Air Force Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (Scada) System, Jason R. Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are increasingly being connected to corporate networks which has dramatically expanded their attack surface to remote cyber attack. Adversaries are targeting these systems with increasing frequency and sophistication. This thesis seeks to answer the research question addressing which Information Assurance (IA) controls are most significant for network defenders and SCADA system managers/operators to focus on in order to increase the security of critical infrastructure systems against a Stuxnet-like cyber attack. This research applies the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) IA controls to an attack tree modeled on a remote Stuxnet-like cyber …

Hijacking User Uploads To Online Persistent Data Repositories For Covert Data Exfiltration, Curtis P. Barnard

Theses and Dissertations

As malware has evolved over the years, it has gone from harmless programs that copy themselves into other executables to modern day botnets that perform bank fraud and identity theft. Modern malware often has a need to communicate back to the author, or other machines that are also infected. Several techniques for transmitting this data covertly have been developed over the years which vary significantly in their level of sophistication. This research creates a new covert channel technique for stealing information from a network by piggybacking on user-generated network traffic. Specifically, steganography drop boxes and passive covert channels are merged …

Reputation-Based Internet Protocol Security: A Multilayer Security Framework For Mobil Ad Hoc Networks, Timothy H. Lacey

Theses and Dissertations

This research effort examines the theory, application, and results for a Reputation-based Internet Protocol Security (RIPSec) framework that provides security for an ad-hoc network operating in a hostile environment. In RIPSec, protection from external threats is provided in the form of encrypted communication links and encryption-wrapped nodes while internal threats are mitigated by behavior grading that assigns reputations to nodes based on their demonstrated participation in the routing process. Network availability is provided by behavior grading and round-robin multipath routing. If a node behaves faithfully, it earns a positive reputation over time. If a node misbehaves (for any number of …

Visually Managing Ipsec, Peter J. Dell'accio

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force relies heavily on computer networks to transmit vast amounts of information throughout its organizations and with agencies throughout the Department of Defense. The data take many forms, utilize different protocols, and originate from various platforms and applications. It is not practical to apply security measures specific to individual applications, platforms, and protocols. Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a set of protocols designed to secure data traveling over IP networks, including the Internet. By applying security at the network layer of communications, data packets can be secured regardless of what application generated the data or which …

Developing Cyberspace Data Understanding: Using Crisp-Dm For Host-Based Ids Feature Mining, Joseph R. Erskine

Theses and Dissertations

Current intrusion detection systems generate a large number of specific alerts, but do not provide actionable information. Many times, these alerts must be analyzed by a network defender, a time consuming and tedious task which can occur hours or days after an attack occurs. Improved understanding of the cyberspace domain can lead to great advancements in Cyberspace situational awareness research and development. This thesis applies the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) to develop an understanding about a host system under attack. Data is generated by launching scans and exploits at a machine outfitted with a set of …

Security In Ad Hoc Networks And Pervasive Computing, Isaac Z. Wu, X.-Y. Li, M. Song, C.-M. Liu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Pervasive computing is an exciting and blooming research field, in which innovative techniques and applications are continuously emerging and aim to provide ambient and personalized services to users with high quality. Ad hoc networks are wireless, self-organizing systems formed by cooperating nodes within communication range of each other that form temporary networks. Their topology is dynamic, decentralized, ever changing and the nodes may move around arbitrarily. The last few years have witnessed a wealth of research ideas on ad hoc networking that are moving rapidly into implemented standards. Technology under development for ad hoc networks and pervasive computing is making …

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 …

A Hidden Markov Model Based Approach To Detect Rogue Access Points, Gayathri Shivaraj

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

One of the most challenging security concerns for network administrators is the presence of Rogue access points. The challenge is to detect and disable a Rogue access point before it can cause hazardous damage to the network. This thesis proposes a statistically based approach to detect Rogue access points using a Hidden Markov Model, which is applied to passively measure packet-header data collected at a gateway router or any monitoring point. This approach utilizes variations in packet inter-arrival time to differentiate between authorized access points and Rouge access points. This approach used the inter-arrival time of a packet as a …

A Taxonomy For And Analysis Of Anonymous Communications Networks, Douglas J. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Any entity operating in cyberspace is susceptible to debilitating attacks. With cyber attacks intended to gather intelligence and disrupt communications rapidly replacing the threat of conventional and nuclear attacks, a new age of warfare is at hand. In 2003, the United States acknowledged that the speed and anonymity of cyber attacks makes distinguishing among the actions of terrorists, criminals, and nation states difficult. Even President Obama’s Cybersecurity Chief-elect recognizes the challenge of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Now through April 2009, the White House is reviewing federal cyber initiatives to protect US citizen privacy rights. Indeed, the rising quantity and ubiquity …