Information Security Commons^™

Cova Cci Undergrad Cyber Research, Nana Jeffrey

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Is your digital assistant your worst enemy? Modern technology has impacted our lives in a positive way making tasks that were once time consuming become more convenient. For example a few years ago writing down your grocery list with a paper and pen was a norm, now with technology we have access to IoT devices such as smart fridges that can inform us on what items are low in stock, send a message to our digital assistants such as iOS Siri and Amazon's Alexa to remind us to buy those groceries. Although these digital assistants have helped make our daily …

Verifiable Searchable Encryption Framework Against Insider Keyword-Guessing Attack In Cloud Storage, Yinbin Miao, Robert H. Deng, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Hongwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) allows cloud tenants to retrieve encrypted data while preserving data confidentiality securely. Many SE solutions have been designed to improve efficiency and security, but most of them are still susceptible to insider Keyword-Guessing Attacks (KGA), which implies that the internal attackers can guess the candidate keywords successfully in an off-line manner. Also in existing SE solutions, a semi-honest-but-curious cloud server may deliver incorrect search results by performing only a fraction of retrieval operations honestly (e.g., to save storage space). To address these two challenging issues, we first construct the basic Verifiable SE Framework (VSEF), which can withstand …

A Combined Approach For Private Indexing Mechanism, Pranita Maruti Desai Ms., Vijay Maruti Shelake Mr.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Private indexing is a set of approaches for analyzing research data that are similar or resemble similar ones. This is used in the database to keep track of the keys and their values. The main subject of this research is private indexing in record linkage to secure the data. Because unique personal identification numbers or social security numbers are not accessible in most countries or databases, data linkage is limited to attributes such as date of birth and names to distinguish between the number of records and the real-life entities they represent. For security reasons, the encryption of these identifiers …

Technical Analysis Of Thanos Ransomware, Ikuromor Ogiriki, Christopher Beck, Vahid Heydari

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

Ransomware is a developing menace that encrypts users’ files and holds the decryption key hostage until the victim pays a ransom. This particular class of malware has been in charge of extortion hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Adding to the problem, generating new variations is cheap. Therefore, new malware can detect antivirus and intrusion detection systems and evade them or manifest in ways to make themselves undetectable. We must first understand the characteristics and behavior of various varieties of ransomware to create and construct effective security mechanisms to combat them. This research presents a novel dynamic and behavioral …

Analyzing Offline Social Engagements: An Empirical Study Of Meetup Events Related To Software Development, Abhishek Sharma, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Anamika Sawhney, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers use a variety of social mediachannels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date,collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contributeto. Meetup is one of such social media used by softwaredevelopers to organize community gatherings. We in this work,investigate the dynamics of Meetup groups and events relatedto software development. Our work is different from previouswork as we focus on the actual event and group data that wascollected using Meetup API.In this work, we performed an empirical study of eventsand groups present on Meetup which are related to softwaredevelopment. First, we identified 6,327 Meetup groups related …

Securing Infiniband Networks With End-Point Encryption, Noah B. Diamond

Theses and Dissertations

The NVIDIA-Mellanox Bluefield-2 is a 100 Gbps high-performance network interface which offers hardware offload and acceleration features that can operate directly on network traffic without routine involvement from the ARM CPU. This allows the ARM multi-core CPU to orchestrate the hardware to perform operations on both Ethernet and RDMA traffic at high rates rather than processing all the traffic directly. A testbed called TNAP was created for performance testing and a MiTM verification process called MiTMVMP is used to ensure proper network configuration. The hardware accelerators of the Bluefield-2 support a throughput of nearly 86 Gbps when using IPsec to …

Removing The Veil: Shining Light On The Lack Of Inclusivity In Cybersecurity Education For Students With Disabilities, Felicia Hellems, Sajal Bhatia

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

There are currently over one billion people living with some form of disability worldwide. The continuous increase in new technologies in today's society comes with an increased risk in security. A fundamental knowledge of cybersecurity should be a basic right available to all users of technology. A review of literature in the fields of cybersecurity, STEM, and computer science (CS) has revealed existent gaps regarding educational methods for teaching cybersecurity to students with disabilities (SWD's). To date, SWD's are largely left without equitable access to cybersecurity education. Our goal is to identify current educational methods being used to teach SWD's …

Malware Detection Using Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis, Matthew A. Bergstedt

Theses and Dissertations

Many physical systems control or monitor important applications without the capacity to monitor for malware using on-device resources. Thus, it becomes valuable to explore malware detection methods for these systems utilizing external or off-device resources. This research investigates the viability of employing EM SCA to determine whether a performed operation is normal or malicious. A Raspberry Pi 3 was set up as a simulated motor controller with code paths for a normal or malicious operation. While the normal path only calculated the motor speed before updating the motor, the malicious path added a line of code to modify the calculated …

Efficient Certificateless Multi-Copy Integrity Auditing Scheme Supporting Data Dynamics, Lei Zhou, Anmin Fu, Guomin Yang, Huaqun Wang, Yuqing Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To improve data availability and durability, cloud users would like to store multiple copies of their original files at servers. The multi-copy auditing technique is proposed to provide users with the assurance that multiple copies are actually stored in the cloud. However, most multi-replica solutions rely on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which entails massive overhead of certificate computation and management. In this article, we propose an efficient multi-copy dynamic integrity auditing scheme by employing certificateless signatures (named MDSS), which gets rid of expensive certificate management overhead and avoids the key escrow problem in identity-based signatures. Specifically, we improve the classic …

A Probabilistic Perspective Of Human-Machine Interaction, Mustafa Canan, Mustafa Demir, Samuel Kovacic

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Human-machine interaction (HMI) has become an essential part of the daily routine in organizations. Although the machines are designed with state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence applications, they are limited in their ability to mimic human behavior. The human-human interaction occurs between two or more humans; when a machine replaces a human, the interaction dynamics are not the same. The results indicate that a machine that interacts with a human can increase the mental uncertainty that a human experiences. Developments in decision sciences indicate that using quantum probability theory (QPT) improves the understanding of human decision-making than merely using classical probability theory (CPT). …

Ransombuster Iot: A Intrusion Detection And Dataset Creation Tool For Ransomware Attacks Within Iot Networks, Jackson M. Walker

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The proposed research follows the design-science guidelines(Hevner, 2004). This paper uses these design-science methods for developing the guidelines for the implementation of the proposed architecture, understanding previous research contributions, and evaluating of research. This paper proposes a network artifact for studying ransomware IoT intrusion detection techniques and offers a proposed network architecture to serve as a framework for creating a publicly available dataset for IoT research on ransomware.

Deepfakes: Ai Technology Of The Future, Hosanna Root

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Deepfakes technology’s danger stems from its ability to create realistic but fake synthesized media that people often identify as something that is real. With this powerful technology in the wrong hands, deepfakes can cause devastating havoc through information warfare, election campaign disruptions, and more, creating distrust in society. Disinformation is already rampant today, even without wide deployments of deepfakes, which is concerning given the fact that deepfakes’ nefarious full potentials are yet to be reached.

Security Issues With Network Connected Scada Systems, Chad Holm

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The use of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems has become common place and are being used in several different industries. These have evolved as the technology has progressed. The use of Internet of Things (IOT) devices makes for less human intervention to run daily operations in these industries. This can also allow hackers to gain access to these devices due to security holes that are overlooked. There have several different ways that have been exploited on SCADA networks and the goal is to recognize and secure them so hackers cannot gain access to them.

Corporate Cybersecurity In The Context Of M&A Transactions, Cameron Beck

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The rapid rise of digital devices has unlocked a new dimension of innovation and prosperity in the 21st century. Computers are now an integrated and ubiquitous part of our global culture. You would be hard-pressed to walk into any given room without several computer chips humming inaudibly inside the machines that facilitate our modern world. Even lightbulbs and doorbells are connected to the Internet, capturing information from the world around them and sending that information to the Cloud. The Internet expands access to communication, international marketplaces, entertainment, professional resources, and nearly every book in the world.

Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Smart grid technologies are integral to society’s transition to sustainable energy sources, but they do not come without a cost. As the energy sector shifts away from a century’s reliance on fossil fuels and centralized generation, technology that actively monitors and controls every aspect of the power infrastructure has been widely adopted, resulting in a plethora of new vulnerabilities that have already wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure. Integrity attacks that feedback false data through industrial control systems, which result in possible catastrophic overcorrections and ensuing failures, have plagued grid infrastructure over the past several years. This threat is now at …

Timestamp Estimation From Outdoor Scenes, Tawfiq Salem, Jisoo Hwang, Rafael Padilha

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The increasing availability of smartphones allowed people to easily capture and share images on the internet. These images are often associated with metadata, including the image capture time (timestamp) and the location where the image was captured (geolocation). The metadata associated with images provides valuable information to better understand scenes and events presented in these images. The timestamp can be manipulated intentionally to provide false information to convey a twisted version of reality. Images with manipulated timestamps are often used as a cover-up for wrongdoing or broadcasting false claims and competing views on the internet. Estimating the time of capture …

Anatomy Of An Internet Hijack And Interception Attack: A Global And Educational Perspective, Ben A. Scott, Michael N. Johnstone, Patryk Szewczyk

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Internet’s underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure is a rich target for cyber crime, cyber espionage and cyber warfare operations. The stability and security of the Internet infrastructure are important to the function of global matters of state, critical infrastructure, global e-commerce and election systems. There are global approaches to tackle Internet security challenges that include governance, law, educational and technical perspectives. This paper reviews a number of approaches to these challenges, the increasingly surgical attacks that target the underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure of the Internet, and the extant cyber security education curricula; we find the majority of predominant cyber security …

The Effects Of Antecedents And Mediating Factors On Cybersecurity Protection Behavior, Ling Li, Li Xu, Wu He

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper identifies opportunities for potential theoretical and practical improvements in employees' awareness of cybersecurity and their motivational behavior to protect themselves and their organizations from cyberattacks using the protection motivation theory. In addition, it contributes to the literature by examining additional variables and mediators besides the core constructs of the Protection Motivation Model (PMT). This article uses empirical data and structural equation modeling to test the antecedents and mediators of employees' cybersecurity motivational behavior. The study offers theoretical and pragmatic guidance for cybersecurity programs. First, the model developed in this study can partially explain how people may change their …

Modeling Iot Solutions: A Lack Of Iot Device Security, And User Education, Benjamin Newlin

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The Internet of Things, more commonly known as IoT devices, is an ever growing topic, both in the marketplace and in cyber security. While new devices are released into the public every year, a lack of standardized security concepts is also growing ever so clear. By having a model or standard for IoT devices and manufacturers to follow, the customer-base of these devices will have an easier time identifying trustworthy devices as well as how to secure their own devices.

Detecting The Presence Of Electronic Devices In Smart Homes Using Harmonic Radar, Beatrice Perez, Gregory Mazzaro, Timothy J. Pierson, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Data about users is collected constantly by phones, cameras, Internet websites, and others. The advent of so-called ‘Smart Things' now enable ever-more sensitive data to be collected inside that most private of spaces: the home. The first step in helping users regain control of their information (inside their home) is to alert them to the presence of potentially unwanted electronics. In this paper, we present a system that could help homeowners (or home dwellers) find electronic devices in their living space. Specifically, we demonstrate the use of harmonic radars (sometimes called nonlinear junction detectors), which have also been used in …

C2 Microservices Api: Ch4rl3sch4l3m4gn3, Thai H. Nguyễn

School of Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Publications

In the 21^st century, cyber-based attackers such as advance persistent threats are leveraging bots in the form of botnets to conduct a plethora of cyber-attacks. While there are several social engineering techniques used to get targets to unknowingly download these bots, it is the command-and-control techniques advance persistent threats use to control their bots that is of critical interest to the author. In this research paper, the author aims to develop a command-and-control microservice application programming interface infrastructure to facilitate botnet command-and-control attack simulations. To achieve this the author will develop a simple bot skeletal framework, utilize the latest …

A Lightweight Reliably Quantified Deepfake Detection Approach, Tianyi Wang, Kam Pui Chow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Deepfake has brought huge threats to society such that everyone can become a potential victim. Current Deepfake detection approaches have unsatisfactory performance in either accuracy or efficiency. Meanwhile, most models are only evaluated on different benchmark test datasets with different accuracies, which could not imitate the real-life Deepfake unknown population. As Deepfake cases have already been raised and brought challenges at the court, it is disappointed that no existing work has studied the model reliability and attempted to make the detection model act as the evidence at the court. We propose a lightweight Deepfake detection deep learning approach using the …

Precursors Of Email Response To Cybersecurity Scenarios: Factor Exploration And Scale Development, Miguel A. Toro-Jarrin, Pilar Pazos-Lago, Miguel Padilla

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the last decade, information security research has further expanded to include human factors as key elements of the organization's cybersecurity infrastructure. Numerous factors from several theories have been explored to explain and predict the multitude of information security-related behaviors in organizations. Lately, there has been a call for the study of specific cybersecurity behaviors in contextualized scenarios that reflect specific and realistic situations of a potential cyber-attack. This paper focuses on precursors of email response in situations that can be the origin of cybersecurity incidents in organizations (i.e., phishing attacks, ransomware, etc.). This study explores participants' intentions to follow …

Evaluating Similarity Of Cross-Architecture Basic Blocks, Elijah L. Meyer

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Vulnerabilities in source code can be compiled for multiple processor architectures and make their way into several different devices. Security researchers frequently have no way to obtain this source code to analyze for vulnerabilities. Therefore, the ability to effectively analyze binary code is essential. Similarity detection is one facet of binary code analysis. Because source code can be compiled for different architectures, the need can arise for detecting code similarity across architectures. This need is especially apparent when analyzing firmware from embedded computing environments such as Internet of Things devices, where the processor architecture is dependent on the product and …

Sok: Analysis Of Software Supply Chain Security By Establishing Secure Design Properties, Chinenye Okafor, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Santiao Torres-Arias, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper systematizes knowledge about secure software supply chain patterns. It identifies four stages of a software supply chain attack and proposes three security properties crucial for a secured supply chain: transparency, validity, and separation. The paper describes current security approaches and maps them to the proposed security properties, including research ideas and case studies of supply chains in practice. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches relative to known attacks and details the various security frameworks put out to ensure the security of the software supply chain. Finally, the paper highlights potential gaps in actor and operation-centered …

Exploiting Input Sanitization For Regex Denial Of Service, Efe Barlas, Xin Du, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings — and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS.

In this paper, we conduct the first black-box …

Discrepancies Among Pre-Trained Deep Neural Networks: A New Threat To Model Zoo Reliability, Diego Montes, Pongpatapee Peerapatanapokin, Jeff Schultz, Chengjun Guo, Wenxin Jiang, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) takes significant time and resources. A practice for expedited deployment is to use pre-trained deep neural networks (PTNNs), often from model zoos.collections of PTNNs; yet, the reliability of model zoos remains unexamined. In the absence of an industry standard for the implementation and performance of PTNNs, engineers cannot confidently incorporate them into production systems. As a first step, discovering potential discrepancies between PTNNs across model zoos would reveal a threat to model zoo reliability. Prior works indicated existing variances in deep learning systems in terms of accuracy. However, broader measures of reliability for PTNNs from …

Secure Authenticated Key Exchange For Enhancing The Security Of Routing Protocol For Low-Power And Lossy Networks, Sarah Mohammed Alzahrani

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The current Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standard provides three security modes Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). The PSM and ASM are designed to prevent external routing attacks and specific replay attacks through an optional replay protection mechanism. RPL's PSM mode does not support key replacement when a malicious party obtains the key via differential cryptanalysis since it considers the key to be provided to nodes during the configuration of the network. This thesis presents an approach to implementing a secure authenticated key exchange mechanism for RPL, which ensures …

A Low-Cost Machine Learning Based Network Intrusion Detection System With Data Privacy Preservation, Jyoti Fakirah, Lauhim Mahfuz Zishan, Roshni Mooruth, Michael L. Johnstone, Wencheng Yang

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Network intrusion is a well-studied area of cyber security. Current machine learning-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) monitor network data and the patterns within those data but at the cost of presenting significant issues in terms of privacy violations which may threaten end-user privacy. Therefore, to mitigate risk and preserve a balance between security and privacy, it is imperative to protect user privacy with respect to intrusion data. Moreover, cost is a driver of a machine learning-based NIDS because such systems are increasingly being deployed on resource-limited edge devices. To solve these issues, in this paper we propose a NIDS …

Human-Controlled Fuzzing With Afl, Maxim Grishin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Fuzzing techniques are applied to reveal different types of bugs and vulnerabilities. American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) is a free most popular software fuzzer used by many other fuzzing frameworks. AFL supports autonomous mode of operation that uses the previous step output into the next step, as a result fuzzer spends a lot of time analyzing minor code sections. By making fuzzing process more focused and human controlled security expert can save time and find more bugs in less time. We designed a new module that can fuzz only the specified functions. As a result, the chosen ones will be inspected …