Information Security Commons^™

Active Semi-Supervised Approach For Checking App Behavior Against Its Description, Ma Siqi, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Deng, Robert H., Cong Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile applications are popular in recent years. They are often allowed to access and modify users' sensitive data. However, many mobile applications are malwares that inappropriately use these sensitive data. To detect these malwares, Gorla et al. Propose CHABADA which compares app behaviors against its descriptions. Data about known malwares are not used in their work, which limits its effectiveness. In this work, we extend the work by Gorla et al. By proposing an active and semi-supervised approach for detecting malwares. Different from CHABADA, our approach will make use of both known benign and malicious apps to predict other malicious …

Homesafe: A Mobile Application Utilizing Encryption And Access Control, Kenneth Trumpoldt

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Our society is becoming more virtual and mobile everyday. The purpose of this application is to transform a physical card system into a virtual card system that meets the demands of a technologically-oriented society. Parents will be able to create their own child identification cards more quickly and cost efficiently. Cards can be easily edited instead of having to order an updated replacement. Immediate and frequent alteration of cards allows for information to be more accurate. Cards can be shared globally and instantly via the Internet or shared connections such as Bluetooth. The fast access to and virtual duplication of …

Compression Of Video Tracking And Bandwidth Balancing Routing In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, Yin Wang, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen, Bryson Payne, Juan Guo, Kun Hua

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There has been a tremendous growth in multimedia applications over wireless networks. Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) have become the premier choice in many research communities and industry. Many state-of-art applications, such as surveillance, traffic monitoring, and remote heath care are essentially video tracking and transmission in WMSNs. The transmission speed is constrained by the big file size of video data and fixed bandwidth allocation in constant routing paths. In this paper, we present a CamShift based algorithm to compress the tracking of videos. Then we propose a bandwidth balancing strategy in which each sensor node is able to dynamically select …

Leading Undergraduate Students To Big Data Generation, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

People are facing a flood of data today. Data are being collected at unprecedented scale in many areas, such as networking, image processing, virtualization, scientific computation, and algorithms. The huge data nowadays are called Big Data. Big data is an all encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. In this article, the authors present a unique way which uses network simulator and tools of image processing to train students abilities to learn, analyze, manipulate, and apply Big Data. Thus they develop students hands-on …

A Web-Based Temperature Monitoring System For The College Of Arts And Letters, Rigoberto Solorio

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In general, server rooms have restricted access requiring that staff possess access codes, keys, etc. Normally, only administrators are provided access to protect the physical hardware and the data stored in the servers. Servers also have firewalls to restrict outsiders from accessing them via the Internet. Servers also cost a lot of money. For this reason, server rooms also need to be protected against overheating. This will prolong the lifecycle of the units and can prevent data loss from hardware failure.

The California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB), Specifically the College of Arts and Letters server room has faced power …

Hole Detection And Shape-Free Representation And Double Landmarks Based Geographic Routing In Wireless Sensor Networks, Jianjun Yang, Zongming Fei, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In wireless sensor networks, an important issue of geographic routing is “local minimum” problem, which is caused by a “hole” that blocks the greedy forwarding process. Existing geographic routing algorithms use perimeter routing strategies to find a long detour path when such a situation occurs. To avoid the long detour path, recent research focuses on detecting the hole in advance, then the nodes located on the boundary of the hole advertise the hole information to the nodes near the hole. Hence the long detour path can be avoided in future routing. We propose a heuristic hole detecting algorithm which identifies …

Framing The Question, "Who Governs The Internet?", Robert J. Domanski

Publications and Research

There remains a widespread perception among both the public and elements of academia that the Internet is “ungovernable”. However, this idea, as well as the notion that the Internet has become some type of cyber-libertarian utopia, is wholly inaccurate. Governments may certainly encounter tremendous difficulty in attempting to regulate the Internet, but numerous types of authority have nevertheless become pervasive. So who, then, governs the Internet? This book will contend that the Internet is, in fact, being governed, that it is being governed by specific and identifiable networks of policy actors, and that an argument can be made as to …

Integrating Security Into The Undergraduate Software Engineering Curriculum, Robert Evans

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research included a thorough examination of the existing software assurance or what is commonly called software security knowledge, methodologies and what information security technologies is currently being recommended by the information technology community. Finally it is demonstrated how this security knowledge could be incorporated into the curriculum for undergraduate software engineering.

Dupfinder: Integrated Tool Support For Duplicate Bug Report Detection, Ferdian Thung, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To track bugs that appear in a software, developers often make use of a bug tracking system. Users can report bugs that they encounter in such a system. Bug reporting is inherently an uncoordinated distributed process though and thus when a user submits a new bug report, there might be cases when another bug report describing exactly the same problem is already present in the system. Such bug reports are duplicate of each other and these duplicate bug reports need to be identified. A number of past studies have proposed a number of automated approaches to detect duplicate bug reports. …

Potential Biases In Bug Localization: Do They Matter?, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and fix them. To mitigate this problem, past studies have proposed information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization techniques, which takes as input a textual description of a bug stored in an issue tracking system, and returns a list of potentially buggy source code files. These studies often evaluate their effectiveness on issue reports marked as bugs …

Uncovering Embarrassing Moments In In-Situ Exposure Of Incoming Mobile Messages, Chulhong Min, Saumay Pushp, Seungchul Lee, Inseok Hwang, Youngki Lee, Seungwoo Kang, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile instant messengers serve as major interaction media for everyday chats. Contrary to the belief that a message is seen only by a designated receiver, it can be accidentally exposed to someone nearby and could result in embarrassing moments, for example, when the receiver is viewing pictures together with his friend upon the message arrival. To understand the significance of the problem and core factors that cause such embarrassments, we collected 961 in-situ responses from 14 participants upon the actual message arrival and analyzed them from the perspective of the receiver's situation. The results showed that 29% of message arrivals …

Structure Preserving Large Imagery Reconstruction, Ju Shen, Jianjun Yang, Sami Taha Abu Sneineh, Bryson Payne, Markus Hitz

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the explosive growth of web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as image clustering, 3D scene reconstruction, and other big data applications. However, such tasks are not easy due to the fact the retrieved photos can have large variations in their view perspectives, resolutions, lighting, noises, and distortions. Furthermore, with the occlusion of unexpected objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

Automatic Objects Removal For Scene Completion, Jianjun Yang, Yin Wang, Honggang Wang, Kun Hua, Wei Wang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the explosive growth of Web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the Internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as 3D scene reconstruction and other big data applications. However, this is not an easy task due to the fact the retrieved photos are neither aligned nor calibrated. Furthermore, with the occlusion of unexpected foreground objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image completion algorithm for object removal that produces visually …

Semantic Privacy Policies For Service Description And Discovery In Service-Oriented Architecture, Diego Z. Garcia, Miriam A M Capretz, M. Beatriz F. Toledo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Privacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. This paper focuses on the areas of service description and discovery. The problems in these areas are that currently it is not possible to describe how a service provider deals with information received from a service consumer as well as discover a service that satisfies the privacy preferences of a consumer. There is currently no framework which offers a solution that supports a rich description of privacy policies and their integration in the process of service discovery. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose a privacy preservation …

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

Towards A Hybrid Framework For Detecting Input Manipulation Vulnerabilities, Sun Ding, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar, Bindu Madhavi Padmanabhuni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Input manipulation vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection, Cross-site scripting, Buffer Overflow vulnerabilities are highly prevalent and pose critical security risks. As a result, many methods have been proposed to apply static analysis, dynamic analysis or a combination of them, to detect such security vulnerabilities. Most of the existing methods classify vulnerabilities into safe and unsafe. They have both false-positive and false-negative cases. In general, security vulnerability can be classified into three cases: (1) provable safe, (2) provable unsafe, (3) unsure. In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework-Detecting Input Manipulation Vulnerabilities (DIMV), to verify the adequacy of security vulnerability defenses …

A Robust Rgbd Slam System For 3d Environment With Planar Surfaces, Po-Chang Su, Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in scanning large planar regions such as wall surfaces in a room. The lack of depth …

The Case For Mobile Forensics Of Private Data Leaks: Towards Large-Scale User-Oriented Privacy Protection, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Kiat Wee Tan, Lingxiao Jiang, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy protection against mobile applications on mobile devices is becoming a serious concern as user sensitive data may be leaked without proper justification. Most current leak detection tools only report leaked private data, but provide inadequate information about the causes of the leaks for end users to take preventive measures. Hence, users often cannot reconcile the way they have used an application to a reported leak — i.e., they are unable to comprehend the (il)legitimacy of the leak or make a decision on whether to allow the leak. This paper aims to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of identifying the …

Raising The Game: Applying Theory And Analytics To Real-World Threats, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Safety and security are, on many levels, essential priorities for governments, businesses and individuals. While an increase of defence and security budgets may bring some assurance of peaceful times to come, it seems the world has no lack of insane perpetrators who can still somehow evade, breach, ambush, assail and attack as they please. Enter the “Bayesian Stackelberg Game”, a game theory model that can, and has been applied rather successfully to the allocation of security resources in the United States by Prof Milind Tambe, University of Southern California.

Semi-Automated Verification Of Defense Against Sql Injection In Web Applications, Kaiping Liu, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent reports reveal that majority of the attacks to Web applications are input manipulation attacks. Among these attacks, SQL injection attack malicious input is submitted to manipulate the database in a way that was unintended by the applications' developers is one such attack. This paper proposes an approach for assisting to code verification process on the defense against SQL injection. The approach extracts all such defenses implemented in code. With the use of the proposed approach, developers, testers or auditors can then check the defenses extracted from code to verify their adequacy. We have evaluated the feasibility, effectiveness, and usefulness …

Ibinhunt: Binary Hunting With Inter-Procedural Control Flow, Jiang Ming, Meng Pan, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Techniques have been proposed to find the semantic differences between two binary programs when the source code is not available. Analyzing control flow, and in particular, intra-procedural control flow, has become an attractive technique in the latest binary diffing tools since it is more resistant to syntactic, but non-semantic, differences. However, this makes such techniques vulnerable to simple function obfuscation techniques (e.g., function inlining) attackers any malware writers could use. In this paper, we first show function obfuscation as an attack to such binary diffing techniques, and then propose iBinHunt which uses deep taint and automatic input generation to find …

Scalable Malware Clustering Through Coarse-Grained Behavior Modeling, Mahinthan Chandramohan, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anti-malware vendors receive several thousand new malware (malicious software) variants per day. Due to large volume of malware samples, it has become extremely important to group them based on their malicious characteristics. Grouping of malware variants that exhibit similar behavior helps to generate malware signatures more efficiently. Unfortunately, exponential growth of new malware variants and huge-dimensional feature space, as used in existing approaches, make the clustering task very challenging and difficult to scale. Furthermore, malware behavior modeling techniques proposed in the literature do not scale well, where malware feature space grows in proportion with the number of samples under examination. …

Predicting Common Web Application Vulnerabilities From Input Validation And Sanitization Code Patterns, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software defect prediction studies have shown that defect predictors built from static code attributes are useful and effective. On the other hand, to mitigate the threats posed by common web application vulnerabilities, many vulnerability detection approaches have been proposed. However, finding alternative solutions to address these risks remains an important research problem. As web applications generally adopt input validation and sanitization routines to prevent web security risks, in this paper, we propose a set of static code attributes that represent the characteristics of these routines for predicting the two most common web application vulnerabilities—SQL injection and cross site scripting. In …

Mining Input Sanitization Patterns For Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Static code attributes such as lines of code and cyclomatic complexity have been shown to be useful indicators of defects in software modules. As web applications adopt input sanitization routines to prevent web security risks, static code attributes that represent the characteristics of these routines may be useful for predicting web application vulnerabilities. In this paper, we classify various input sanitization methods into different types and propose a set of static code attributes that represent these types. Then we use data mining methods to predict SQL injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities in web applications. Preliminary experiments show that our …

Where Should The Bugs Be Fixed? More Accurate Information Retrieval-Based Bug Localization Based On Bug Reports, Jian Zhou, Hongyu Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For a large and evolving software system, the project team could receive a large number of bug reports. Locating the source code files that need to be changed in order to fix the bugs is a challenging task. Once a bug report is received, it is desirable to automatically point out to the files that developers should change in order to fix the bug. In this paper, we propose BugLocator, an information retrieval based method for locating the relevant files for fixing a bug. BugLocator ranks all files based on the textual similarity between the initial bug report and the …

Human: Creating Memorable Fingerprints Of Mobile Users, Gupta Payas, Kiat Wee Tan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, David Lo, Debin Gao, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new way of generating behavioral (not biometric) fingerprints from the cellphone usage data. In particular, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users. We built a system, called HuMan, that generates fingerprints from cellphone data. To test HuMan, we conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data (including calls, SMSes, application usage patterns etc.) from 44 Symbian and Android smartphone users. We evaluated the memorable fingerprints generated from this rich multi-context data by asking each user to answer various …

An Iterative Association Rule Mining Framework To K-Anonymize A Dataset, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz, Jefferey Reed, Cheryl Forchuk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Preserving and maintaining client privacy and anonymity is of utmost importance in any domain and specially so in healthcare, as loss of either of these can result in legal and ethical implications. Further, it is sometimes important to extract meaningful and useful information from existing data for research or management purposes. In this case it is necessary for the organization who manages the dataset to be certain that no attributes can identify individuals or group of individuals. This paper proposes an extendable and generalized framework to anonymize a dataset using an iterative association rule mining approach. The proposed framework also …

Automated Removal Of Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities In Web Applications, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability is among the top web application vulnerabilities according to recent surveys. This vulnerability occurs when a web application uses inputs received from users in web pages without properly checking them. This allows an attacker to inject malicious scripts in web pages via such inputs such that the scripts perform malicious actions when a client visits the exploited web pages. Such an attack may cause serious security violations such as account hijacking and cookie theft. Current approaches to mitigate this problem mainly focus on effective detection of XSS vulnerabilities in the programs or prevention of …

Defending Against Cross Site Scripting Attacks, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have proposed multiple solutions to cross-site scripting, but vulnerabilities continue to exist in many Web applications due to developers' lack of understanding of the problem and their unfamiliarity with current defenses' strengths and limitations.