Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Information Security Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discipline
Keyword
Publication Year

Articles 781 - 810 of 1051

Full-Text Articles in Information Security

I Can Be You: Questioning The Use Of Keystroke Dynamics As Biometrics, Chee Meng Tey, Payas Gupta, Debin Gao Feb 2013

I Can Be You: Questioning The Use Of Keystroke Dynamics As Biometrics, Chee Meng Tey, Payas Gupta, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Keystroke dynamics refer to information about the typing patterns of individuals, such as the relative timing when the individual presses and releases each key. Prior studies suggest that such patterns are unique and cannot be easily imitated. This lays the foundation for the use of keystroke biometrics in authentication systems. The research effort in this area has thus far focused on novel detection techniques to differentiate between legitimate users and imposters. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel feedback and training interface named Mimesis. Mimesis provides both positive and negative feedback on the differences between a submitted pattern vs. a …


Guardian: Hypervisor As Security Foothold For Personal Computers, Yueqiang Cheng, Xuhua Ding Jan 2013

Guardian: Hypervisor As Security Foothold For Personal Computers, Yueqiang Cheng, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Personal computers lack of a security foothold to allow the end-users to protect their systems or to mitigate the damage. Existing candidates either rely on a large Trusted Computing Base (TCB) or are too costly to widely deploy for commodity use. To fill this gap, we propose a hypervisor-based security foothold, named as Guardian, for commodity personal computers. We innovate a bootup and shutdown mechanism to achieve both integrity and availability of Guardian. We also propose two security utilities based on Guardian. One is a device monitor which detects malicious manipulation on camera and network adaptors. The other is hyper-firewall …


Accountable Trapdoor Sanitizable Signatures, Junzuo Lai, Xuhua Ding, Yongdong Wu Jan 2013

Accountable Trapdoor Sanitizable Signatures, Junzuo Lai, Xuhua Ding, Yongdong Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sanitizable signature (SS) allows a signer to partly delegate signing rights to a predetermined party, called sanitizer, who can later modify certain designated parts of a message originally signed by the signer and generate a new signature on the sanitized message without interacting with the signer. One of the important security requirements of sanitizable signatures is accountability, which allows the signer to prove, in case of dispute, to a third party that a message was modified by the sanitizer. Trapdoor sanitizable signature (TSS) enables a signer of a message to delegate the power of sanitization to any parties at anytime …


Verifiable And Private Top-K Monitoring, Xuhua Ding, Hwee Hwa Pang Jan 2013

Verifiable And Private Top-K Monitoring, Xuhua Ding, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a data streaming model, records or documents are pushed from a data owner, via untrusted third-party servers, to a large number of users with matching interests. The match in interest is calculated from the correlation between each pair of document and user query. For scalability and availability reasons, this calculation is delegated to the servers, which gives rise to the need to protect the privacy of the documents and user queries. In addition, the users need to guard against the eventuality of a server distorting the correlation score of the documents to manipulate which documents are highlighted to certain …


Improving Internet Security Through Information Disclosure: A Field Quasi-Experiment, Qian Tang, Leigh L. Linden, John S. Quarterman, Andrew B. Whinston Jan 2013

Improving Internet Security Through Information Disclosure: A Field Quasi-Experiment, Qian Tang, Leigh L. Linden, John S. Quarterman, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of negative externalities and the resulting lack of economic incentives, companies often underinvest in security controls, despite government and industry recommendations. Although many existing studies on security have explored technical solutions, only a few have looked at the economic motivations. To fill the gap, we propose an approach to increase the incentives of organizations to address security problems. Specifically, we utilize and process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. We regularly release information on the …


A Secure Platform For Information Sharing In Epcglobal Network, Jie Shi, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Wei He, Eng Wah Lee Jan 2013

A Secure Platform For Information Sharing In Epcglobal Network, Jie Shi, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Wei He, Eng Wah Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of RFID technology, the EPCglobal network has drawn considerable attention from both research and industry communities, which enables supply chain partners to automatically share information and improve the visibility of supply chains. As the information shared in the EPCglobal network is usually sensitive and valuable, security mechanisms should be provided. In this paper, we aim at designing and implementing a secure information sharing platform in the EPCglobal network with a focus on authorization mechanism. We also design and implement a track and trace application based on the proposed secure platform so as to demonstrate its feasibility …


Semi-Automated Verification Of Defense Against Sql Injection In Web Applications, Kaiping Liu, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar Dec 2012

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 …


Investigating Intelligent Agents In A 3d Virtual World, Yilin Kang, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Ah-Hwee Tan Dec 2012

Investigating Intelligent Agents In A 3d Virtual World, Yilin Kang, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web 3.0 involves " intelligent " web applications that utilize natural language processing, machine-based learning and reasoning, and intelligent techniques to analyze and understand user behavior. In this research, we empirically assess a specific form of Web 3.0 application in the form of intelligent agents that offer assistance to users in the virtual world. Using media naturalness theory, we hypothesize that the use of intelligent agents in the virtual world can enhance user experience by offering a more natural way of communication and assistance to users. We are interested to test if media naturalness theory holds in the context of …


Ibinhunt: Binary Hunting With Inter-Procedural Control Flow, Jiang Ming, Meng Pan, Debin Gao Dec 2012

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 Nov 2012

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. …


Audit Mechanisms For Provable Risk Management And Accountable Data Governance, Jeremiah Blocki, Nicolas Christin, Anupam Datta, Arunesh Sinha Nov 2012

Audit Mechanisms For Provable Risk Management And Accountable Data Governance, Jeremiah Blocki, Nicolas Christin, Anupam Datta, Arunesh Sinha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizations that collect and use large volumes of personal information are expected under the principle of accountable data governance to take measures to protect data subjects from risks that arise from inapproriate uses of this information. In this paper, we focus on a specific class of mechanisms—audits to identify policy violators coupled with punishments—that organizations such as hospitals, financial institutions, and Web services companies may adopt to protect data subjects from privacy and security risks stemming from inappropriate information use by insiders. We model the interaction between the organization (defender) and an insider (adversary) during the audit process as a …


(Strong) Multidesignated Verifiers Signatures Secure Against Rogue Key Attack, Yunmei Zhang, Man Ho Au, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo Nov 2012

(Strong) Multidesignated Verifiers Signatures Secure Against Rogue Key Attack, Yunmei Zhang, Man Ho Au, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designated verifier signatures (DVS) allow a signer to create a signature whose validity can only be verified by a specific entity chosen by the signer. In addition, the chosen entity, known as the designated verifier, cannot convince any body that the signature is created by the signer. Multi-designated verifiers signatures (MDVS) are a natural extension of DVS in which the signer can choose multiple designated verifiers. DVS and MDVS are useful primitives in electronic voting and contract signing. In this paper, we investigate various aspects of MDVS and make two contributions. Firstly, we revisit the notion of unforgeability under rogue …


An Improved Authentication Scheme For H.264/Svc And Its Performance Evaluation Over Non-Stationary Wireless Mobile Networks, Yifan Zhao, Swee-Won Lo, Robert H. Deng, Xuhua Ding Nov 2012

An Improved Authentication Scheme For H.264/Svc And Its Performance Evaluation Over Non-Stationary Wireless Mobile Networks, Yifan Zhao, Swee-Won Lo, Robert H. Deng, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a bit stream-based authentication scheme for H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is proposed. The proposed scheme seamlessly integrates cryptographic algorithms and erasure correction codes (ECCs) to SVC video streams such that the authenticated streams are format compliant with the SVC specifications and preserve the three dimensional scalability (i. e., spatial, quality and temporal) of the original streams. We implement our scheme on a smart phone and study its performance over a realistic bursty packet-lossy wireless mobile network. Our analysis and experimental results show that the scheme achieves very high verification rates with lower communication overhead and much smaller …


Oto: Online Trust Oracle For User-Centric Trust Establishment, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Payas Gupta, Jun Han, Emmanuel Owusu, Jason Hong, Adrian Perrig, Debin Gao Oct 2012

Oto: Online Trust Oracle For User-Centric Trust Establishment, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Payas Gupta, Jun Han, Emmanuel Owusu, Jason Hong, Adrian Perrig, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malware continues to thrive on the Internet. Besides automated mechanisms for detecting malware, we provide users with trust evidence information to enable them to make informed trust decisions. To scope the problem, we study the challenge of assisting users with judging the trustworthiness of software downloaded from the Internet. Through expert elicitation, we deduce indicators for trust evidence, then analyze these indicators with respect to scalability and robustness. We design OTO, a system for communicating these trust evidence indicators to users, and we demonstrate through a user study the effectiveness of OTO, even with respect to IE’s SmartScreen Filter (SSF). …


Predicting Common Web Application Vulnerabilities From Input Validation And Sanitization Code Patterns, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan Sep 2012

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 …


Guest Editors’ Introduction: Methods Innovations For The Empirical Study Of Technology Adoption And Diffusion, Robert John Kauffman, Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn Sep 2012

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Methods Innovations For The Empirical Study Of Technology Adoption And Diffusion, Robert John Kauffman, Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The literature on technology adoption and diffusion is ahighly mature area of Information Systems (IS) research,which requires a deft hand in research to support the creationof new contributions of knowledge. In this specialissue, we focus on the application of various methods,including new ones, to shed light on research questions thathave not been understood fully in prior research. In particular,we will showcase research that involves theapplication of event history analysis and spatial econometrics,as well as count data models to study frequencyrelatedphenomena for changes and development in technologyadoption and diffusion. We also include an articlethat employs game theory, as well as another …


No Tradeoff Between Confidentiality And Performance: An Analysis On H.264/Svc Partial Encryption, Zhuo Wei, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng, Yongdong Wu Sep 2012

No Tradeoff Between Confidentiality And Performance: An Analysis On H.264/Svc Partial Encryption, Zhuo Wei, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng, Yongdong Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Partial encryption is often used as a tradeoff between security and performance to protect scalable video data. In this paper, we argue that although partial encryption is strong enough for access control, it is not adequate for content confidentiality protection. We conduct experiments to show that partially encrypted H.264/SVC (scalable video coding) streams leak significant content information from the enhancement layers in all three scalability dimensions. Our analysis concludes that such leakage is caused by the underlying coding techniques used in H.264/SVC, and all layers should be encrypted to protect confidential video streams.


Learning Fine-Grained Structured Input For Memory Corruption Detection, Lei Zhao, Debin Gao, Lina Wang Sep 2012

Learning Fine-Grained Structured Input For Memory Corruption Detection, Lei Zhao, Debin Gao, Lina Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inputs to many application and server programs contain rich and consistent structural information. The propagation of such input in program execution could serve as accurate and reliable signatures for detecting memory corruptions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect memory corruptions at the binary level. The basic insight is that different parts of an input are usually processed in different ways, e.g., by different instructions. Identifying individual parts in an input and learning the pattern in which they are processed is an attractive approach to detect memory corruptions. We propose a fine-grained dynamic taint analysis system to …


Reputation As Public Policy For Internet Security, Leigh L. Linden, John S. Quarterman, Qian Tang, Andrew B. Whinston Sep 2012

Reputation As Public Policy For Internet Security, Leigh L. Linden, John S. Quarterman, Qian Tang, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Insufficient resource allocation causes an Internet information security (infosec) problem that public policy could improve. Lack of transparency lets organizations avoid addressing internal risks, leaving vulnerabilities that are exploited by botnets, threatening information security of other Internet participants. Their protection provides no economic benefit to the firm, so this negative externality causes underinvestment in infosec. Public policy could provide a partial solution by adding incentives for organizations to have well-configured infosec. Specifically, mandatory reporting of security issues plus presenting this information to the public, can impose shame and fame on organizations through publicity and peer influence by comparison with major …


Defeating Sql Injection, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan Aug 2012

Defeating Sql Injection, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The best strategy for combating SQL injection, which has emerged as the most widespread website security risk, calls for integrating defensive coding practices with both vulnerability detection and runtime attack prevention methods.


A Secure And Efficient Discovery Service System In Epcglobal Network, Jie Shi, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng Aug 2012

A Secure And Efficient Discovery Service System In Epcglobal Network, Jie Shi, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IOT) has drawn considerable attention from the industrial and research communities. Due to the vast amount of data generated through IOT devices and users, there is an urgent need for an effective search engine to help us make sense of this massive amount of data. With this motivation, we begin our initial works on developing a secure and efficient search engine (SecDS) based on EPC Discovery Services (EPCDS) for EPCglobal network, an integral part of IOT. SecDS is designed to provide a bridge between different partners of supply chains to share information while …


A Pollution Attack To Public-Key Watermarking Schemes, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng Jul 2012

A Pollution Attack To Public-Key Watermarking Schemes, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Public-key watermarking schemes are required to possess two desirable properties: allowing everyone to determine whether a watermark exists in an image or not and ensuring high detection probability in case of malicious modification. In this paper we propose an attack which pollutes the watermark embedded in an image with an optimal colored noise so as to fool the detector of the underlying public-key watermarking scheme. We further show how to apply the proposed pollution attack to public-key subspace watermarking schemes to generate pirated images of high quality but of low detection probability. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed pollution …


Mining Input Sanitization Patterns For Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan Jun 2012

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 Jun 2012

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 …


A New Framework For Privacy Of Rfid Path Authentication, Shaoying Cai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Yunlei Zhao Jun 2012

A New Framework For Privacy Of Rfid Path Authentication, Shaoying Cai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Yunlei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

RFID-based path authentication enables supply chain managers to verify the exact path that a tag has taken. In this paper, we introduce a new oracle Move that models a tag's movement along a designed or an arbitrary path in a supply chain. With this oracle, we refine the existing security and privacy notions for RFID-based path authentication. In addition, we propose a new privacy notion, called path privacy, for RFID-based path authentication. Our privacy notion captures the privacy of both tag identity and path information in a single game. Compared to existing two-game based privacy notions, it is more rigorous, …


Active Malware Analysis Using Stochastic Games, Simon Williamson, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Debin Gao, Chen Hui Ong Jun 2012

Active Malware Analysis Using Stochastic Games, Simon Williamson, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Debin Gao, Chen Hui Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber security is increasingly important for defending computer systems from loss of privacy or unauthorised use. One important aspect is threat analysis - how does an attacker infiltrate a system and what do they want once they are inside. This paper considers the problem of Active Malware Analysis, where we learn about the human or software intruder by actively interacting with it with the goal of learning about its behaviours and intentions, whilst at the same time that intruder may be trying to avoid detection or showing those behaviours and intentions. This game-theoretic active learning is then used to obtain …


Trurepec: A Trust-Behavior-Based Reputation And Recommender System For Mobile Applications, Zheng Yan, Peng Zhang, Robert H. Deng Jun 2012

Trurepec: A Trust-Behavior-Based Reputation And Recommender System For Mobile Applications, Zheng Yan, Peng Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile applications are software packages that can be installed and executed in a mobile device. Which mobile application is trustworthy for a user to purchase, download, install, execute or recommend becomes a crucial issue that impacts its final success. This paper proposes TruBeRepec, a trust-behavior-based reputation and recommender system for mobile applications. We explore a model of trust behavior for mobile applications based on the result of a large-scale user survey. We further develop a number of algorithms that are used to evaluate individual user’s trust in a mobile application through trust behavior observation, generate the application’s reputation by aggregating …


Distributed Path Authentication For Dynamic Rfid-Enabled Supply Chains, Shaoying Cai, Yingjiu Li, Yunlei Zhao Jun 2012

Distributed Path Authentication For Dynamic Rfid-Enabled Supply Chains, Shaoying Cai, Yingjiu Li, Yunlei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a distributed path authentication solution for dynamic RFID-enabled supply chains to address the counterfeiting problem. Compared to existing general anti-counterfeiting solutions, our solution requires non sharing of item-level RFID information among supply chain parties, thus eliminating the requirement on high network bandwidth and fine-grained access control. Our solution is secure, privacy-preserving, and practical. It leverages on the standard EPCglobal network to share information about paths and parties in path authentication. Our solution can be implemented on standard EPC class 1 generation 2 tags with only 720 bits storage and no computational capability.


Expressive Cp-Abe With Partially Hidden Access Structures, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li May 2012

Expressive Cp-Abe With Partially Hidden Access Structures, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At Eurocrypt 2005, Sahai and Waters [7] introduced the concept of attribute-based encryption (ABE). ABE enables public key based one-to-many encryption and is envisioned as a promising cryptographic primitive for realizing scalable and fine-grained access control systems. There are two kinds of ABE schemes [1], key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) and ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) schemes. This paper, our concern is on the latter.


Coercion Resistance In Authentication Responsibility Shifting, Payas Gupta, Xuhua Ding, Debin Gao May 2012

Coercion Resistance In Authentication Responsibility Shifting, Payas Gupta, Xuhua Ding, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Responsibility shifting, a popular solution used in the event of failure of primary authentication where a human helper is involved in regaining access, is vulnerable to coercion attacks. In this work, we report our user study which investigates the helper’s emotional status when being coerced to assist in an attack. Results show that the coercion causes involuntary skin conductance fluctuation on the helper, which indicates that he/she is nervous and stressed. This response can be used to strengthen the security of the authentication system by providing coercion resistance.