Information Security Commons^™

Unreasonable: A Strict Liability Solution To The Ftc’S Data Security Problem, James C. Cooper, Bruce H. Kobayashi

Michigan Technology Law Review

For over two decades, the FTC creatively employed its capacious statute to police against shoddy data practices. Although the FTC’s actions were arguably needed at the time to fill a gap in enforcement, there are reasons to believe that its current approach has outlived its usefulness and is in serious need of updating. In particular, our analysis shows that the FTC’s current approach to data security is unlikely to instill anything close to optimal incentives for data holders. These shortcomings cannot be fixed through changes to the FTC enforcement approach, as they are largely generated by a mismatch between the …

Proposed L-Shape Pattern On Ufs Acm For Risk Analysis, Abhishek Asthana, Padma Lochan Pradhan Dr

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

At this cloud age, there is tremendous growth in business, services, resources, and cloud technology. This growth comes with a risk of unsafe, unordered, and uncertainty due to unauthorized access and theft of confidential propriety data. Our objective is to model around Read, Write and Execute to resolve these unordered, unsafe, and uncertain issues. We will develop a L-Shape pattern model matching UFS ACM to minimize the accessibilities based on RIGHT & ROLE of the resources and maximize the quality of services for safety and high availability. The preventive, detective, corrective (PDC) services are the major roles for all levels …

A Critical Comparison Of Brave Browser And Google Chrome Forensic Artefacts, Stuart Berham, Sarah Morris

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensic practitioners are tasked with the identification, recovery and analysis of Internet browser artefacts which may have been used in the pursuit of committing a civil or criminal offence. This research paper critically compares the most downloaded browser, Google Chrome, against an increasingly popular Chromium browser known as Brave, said to offer privacy-by-default. With increasing forensic caseloads, data complexity, and requirements for method validation to satisfy ISO 17025 accreditation, recognising the similarities and differences between the browsers, developed on the same underlying technology is essential. The paper describes a series of conducted experiments and subsequent analysis to identify artefacts …

Digital Evidence In Appeals Of Criminal Cases Before The U.S. Courts Of Appeal: A Review Of Decisions And Examination Of The Legal Landscape From 2016 – 2020, Martin Novak

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This study is a follow-up to Digital Evidence in Criminal Cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeal: Trends and Issues for Consideration – 2010 to 2015. The current study examines appeals of criminal cases before the United States Courts of Appeal from January 2016 through August 2020, where one or more appeal claims were related to digital evidence. The purpose of this research was to determine if the legal landscape has changed since 2015; examine the most relevant legal issues related to digital evidence; and analyze how precedential cases may have affected digital forensics as evidence.

Security Strategy In Combating Online Extremist Ideologies In Uae, Khalid Al-Qasimi

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

This study aims at identifying the role of security strategies; the foundations of correct belief and good upbringing in the face of extremist ideology in order to protect the intellectual security of society. The researcher adopted the descriptive analytical approach in order to describe and analyze the role of the security strategy, the foundations of the correct faith and good upbringing in spreading moderation and combating extremist ideology through electronic websites.

The study has arrived at a number of findings, the most important of which are: extremist ideology cannot be confronted by traditional methods, but must be combated through modern …

Technical Behaviours Of Child Sexual Exploitation Material Offenders, Chad Steel, Emily Newman, Suzanne O'Rourke, Ethel Quayle

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

An exploration of the technological behaviours of previously convicted child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) offenders provides a foundation for future applied research into deterrence, investigation, and treatment efforts. This study evaluates the technology choices and transitions of individuals previously convicted of CSEM offenses. Based on their inclusion in two sex offender registries, anonymous survey results (n=78) were collected from English-speaking adults within the United States. CSEM offenders chose technologies based on both utility and perceived risk; peer-to-peer and web-browsers were the most common gateway technologies and showed substantial sustained usage; a substantial minority of users never stored CSEM and only …

Forensic Discoverability Of Ios Vault Applications, Alissa Gilbert, Kathryn C. Seigfried-Spellar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Vault Applications are used to store potentially sensitive information on a smartphone; and are available on Android and iOS. The purpose of using these applications could be used to hide potential evidence or illicit photos. After comparing five different iOS photo vaults, each vault left evidence and photos behind. However, of the three forensic toolkits used, each produced different results in their scans of the phone. The media left behind was due to the photo vaults not protecting their information as claimed, and using basic obfuscation techniques in place of security controls. Future research will look at how newer security …

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 …

Cybersecurity & Correctional Institutions, Kelly Himelwright

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly important aspect of correctional operations. To properly maintain security, more jails and prisons are using comprehensive cyber protection techniques. Correctional facilities face risks that were perhaps unimaginable only a few decades ago. Many organizations have used information technology to help them run their businesses, but few have the resources or vision to foresee and adequately manage the cyber dangers that come with it. Institutions need to be more aware of these hazards, as well as have more information security experts on staff.

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 …

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 …

The Amorphous Nature Of Hackers: An Exploratory Study, Kento Yasuhara, Daniel Walnycky, Ibrahim Baggili, Ahmed Alhishwan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this work, we aim to better understand outsider perspectives of the hacker community through a series of situation based survey questions. By doing this, we hope to gain insight into the overall reputation of hackers from participants in a wide range of technical and non-technical backgrounds. This is important to digital forensics since convicted hackers will be tried by people, each with their own perception of who hackers are. Do cyber crimes and national security issues negatively affect people’s perceptions of hackers? Does hacktivism and information warfare positively affect people’s perception of hackers? Do individual personality factors affect one’s …

Digital Forensics For Mobility As A Service Platform: Analysis Of Uber Application On Iphone And Cloud, Nina Matulis, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Uber is a ride-hailing smartphone application (app) that allows users to order a ride in a highly efficient manner. The Uber app provides Mobility as a Service and allows users to easily order a ride in a private car with just a few clicks. Uber stores large amounts of data on both the mobile device the app is being used on, and in the cloud. Examples of this data include geolocation data, date/time, origin/destination addresses, departure/arrival times, and distance. Uber geolocation data has been previously researched to investigate the privacy of the Uber app; however, there is minimal research relating …

Smart Home Forensics: Identifying Ddos Attack Patterns On Iot Devices, Samuel Ho, Hope Greeson, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smart homes are becoming more common as more people integrate IoT devices into their home environment. As such, these devices have access to personal data on their homeowners’ networks. One of the advantages of IoT devices is that they are compact. However, this limits the incorporation of security measures in their hardware. Misconfigured IoT devices are commonly the target of malicious attacks. Additionally, distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming more common due to applications and software that provides users with easy-to-use user interfaces. Since one vulnerable device is all an attacker needs to launch an attack on a network, in regards …

Microsoft Defender Will Be Defended: Memoryranger Prevents Blinding Windows Av, Denis Pogonin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Windows OS is facing a huge rise in kernel attacks. An overview of popular techniques that result in loading kernel drivers will be presented. One of the key targets of modern threats is disabling and blinding Microsoft Defender, a default Windows AV. The analysis of recent driver-based attacks will be given, the challenge is to block them. The survey of user- and kernel-level attacks on Microsoft Defender will be given. One of the recently published attackers’ techniques abuses Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) and Security Reference Monitor (SRM) by modifying Integrity Level and Debug Privileges for the Microsoft Defender via syscalls. …

Detection Of Overlapping Passive Manipulation Techniques In Image Forensics, Gianna S. Lint, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With a growing number of images uploaded daily to social media sites, it is essential to understand if an image can be used to trace its origin. Forensic investigations are focusing on analyzing images that are uploaded to social media sites resulting in an emphasis on building and validating tools. There has been a strong focus on understanding active manipulation or tampering techniques and building tools for analysis. However, research on manipulation is often studied in a vacuum, involving only one technique at a time. Additionally, less focus has been placed on passive manipulation, which can occur by simply uploading …

Defining Smart Contract Defects On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important …

Performance Assessment Of Some Phishing Predictive Models Based On Minimal Feature Corpus, Orunsolu Abdul Abiodun, Sodiya A.S, Kareem S.O, Oladimeji G. B Mr.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing is currently one of the severest cybersecurity challenges facing the emerging online community. With damages running into millions of dollars in financial and brand losses, the sad tale of phishing activities continues unabated. This led to an arms race between the con artists and online security community which demand a constant investigation to win the cyberwar. In this paper, a new approach to phishing is investigated based on the concept of minimal feature set on some selected remarkable machine learning algorithms. The goal of this is to select and determine the most efficient machine learning methodology without undue high …

Don't Bite The Bait: Phishing Attack For Internet Banking (E-Banking), Ilker Kara

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing attacks are based on obtaining desired information from users quickly and easily with the help of misdirecting, panicking, curiosity, or excitement. Most of the phishing web sites are designed on internet banking(e-banking) and the attackers can acquire financial information of misled users with the tactics and discourses they develop. Despite the increase of prevention techniques against phishing attacks day by day, an effective solution could not be found for this issue due to the human factor. Because of this reason, real phishing attack studies are essential to study and analyze the attackers’ attack techniques and strategies. This study focused …

Gdpr, Pipl & Lgpd: Privacy Regulations & Policies Across The Globe, Raymond H. Geistel

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Several privacy laws around the world are adopting similar regulations to the GPDR; this has effects on privacy policies of companies providing services in across multiple countries & continents. While these regulations share many attributes, their differing requirements can make things difficult for companies regarding said policies. Automation could be a potential solution to both analyze and compare regulations from different nations & international organizations, analyze and monitor privacy policy adherence to said regulations.

Professional Responsibility, Legal Malpractice, Cybersecurity, And Cyber-Insurance In The Covid-19 Era, Ethan S. Burger

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, law firms conformed their activities to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and state health authority guidelines by immediately reducing the size of gatherings, encouraging social distancing, and mandating the use of protective gear. These changes necessitated the expansion of law firm remote operations, made possible by the increased adoption of technological tools to coordinate workflow and administrative tasks, communicate with clients, and engage with judicial and governmental bodies.

Law firms’ increased use of these technological tools for carrying out legal and administrative activities has implications …

Effects Of Cloud Computing In The Workforce, Kevin Rossi Acosta

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

In recent years, the incorporation of cloud computing and cloud services has increased in many different types of organizations and companies. This paper will focus on the philosophical, economical, and political factors that cloud computing and cloud services have in the workforce and different organizations. Based on various scholarly articles and resources it was observed that organizations used cloud computing and cloud services to increase their overall productivity as well as decrease the overall cost of their operations, as well as the different policies that were created by lawmakers to control the realm of cloud computing. The results of this …

Internet Of Things Software And Hardware Architectures And Their Impacts On Forensic Investigations: Current Approaches And Challenges, Abel Alex Boozer, Arun John, Tathagata Mukherjee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The never-before-seen proliferation of interconnected low-power computing devices, patently dubbed the Internet of Things (IoT), is revolutionizing how people, organizations, and malicious actors interact with one another and the Internet. Many of these devices collect data in different forms, be it audio, location data, or user commands. In civil or criminal nature investigations, the data collected can act as evidence for the prosecution or the defense. This data can also be used as a component of cybersecurity efforts. When data is extracted from these devices, investigators are expected to do so using proven methods. Still, unfortunately, given the heterogeneity in …

The Survey On Cross-Border Collection Of Digital Evidence By Representatives From Polish Prosecutors’ Offices And Judicial Authorities, Paweł Olber Dr

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Dynamic development of IT technology poses new challenges related to the cross-border collection of electronic evidence from the cloud. Many times investigators need to secure data stored on foreign servers directly and then look for solutions on how to turn the data into a legitimate source of evidence. To study the situation and propose solutions, I conducted a survey among Polish representatives of public prosecutors' offices and courts. This paper presents information from digital evidence collection practices across multiple jurisdictions. I stated that representatives from the prosecution and the judiciary in Poland are aware of the issues associated with cross-border …

An Economical Method For Securely Disintegrating Solid-State Drives Using Blenders, Brandon J. Hopkins Phd, Kevin A. Riggle

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Pulverizing solid-state drives (SSDs) down to particles no larger than 2 mm is required by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure the highest level of data security, but commercial disintegrators that achieve this standard are large, heavy, costly, and often difficult to access globally. Here, we present a portable, inexpensive, and accessible method of pulverizing SSDs using a household blender and other readily available materials. We verify this approach by pulverizing SSDs with a variety of household blenders for fixed periods of time and sieve the resulting powder to ensure appropriate particle size. Among the 6 household …

Viability Of Consumer Grade Hardware For Learning Computer Forensics Principles, Lazaro A. Herrera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

We propose utilizing budget consumer hardware and software to teach computer forensics principles and for non-case work, research and developing new techniques. Consumer grade hardware and free / open source software is more easily accessible in most developing markets and can be used as a first purchase for education, technique development and even when developing new techniques. These techniques should allow for small forensics laboratories or classroom settings to have the tooling and framework for trying existing forensics techniques or creating new forensics techniques on consumer grade hardware. We'll be testing how viable each individual piece of hardware is as …

Technological Tethereds: Potential Impact Of Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence In Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Instruments, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of racial inequality and violence are front and center in today’s society, as are issues surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). This Article, written by a law professor who is also a computer scientist, takes a deep dive into understanding how and why hacked and rogue AI creates unlawful and unfair outcomes, particularly for persons of color.

Black Americans are disproportionally featured in criminal justice, and their stories are obfuscated. The seemingly endless back-to-back murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and heartbreakingly countless others have finally shaken the United States from its slumbering journey towards intentional criminal justice …

Identification Of Lsb Image Steganography Using Cover Image Comparisons, Michael Pelosi, Chuck Easttom

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Steganography has long been used to counter forensic investigation. This use of steganography as an anti-forensics technique is becoming more widespread. This requires forensic examiners to have additional tools to more effectively detect steganography. In this paper we introduce a new software concept specifically designed to allow the digital forensics professional to clearly identify and attribute instances of LSB image steganography by using the original cover image in side-by-side comparison with a suspected steganographic payload image. This technique is embodied in a software implementation named CounterSteg. The CounterSteg software allows detailed analysis and comparison of both the original cover …