Information Security Commons^™

On Robust Image Spam Filtering Via Comprehensive Visual Modeling, Jialie Shen, Deng, Robert H., Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet has brought about fundamental changes in the way peoples generate and exchange media information. Over the last decade, unsolicited message images (image spams) have become one of the most serious problems for Internet service providers (ISPs), business firms and general end users. In this paper, we report a novel system called RoBoTs (Robust BoosTrap based spam detector) to support accurate and robust image spam filtering. The system is developed based on multiple visual properties extracted from different levels of granularity, aiming to capture more discriminative contents for effective spam image identification. In addition, a resampling based learning framework …

Seeing Your Face Is Not Enough: An Inertial Sensor-Based Liveness Detection For Face Authentication, Yan Li, Yingjiu Li, Qiang Yan, Hancong Kong, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Leveraging built-in cameras on smartphones and tablets, face authentication provides an attractive alternative of legacy passwords due to its memory-less authentication process. However, it has an intrinsic vulnerability against the media-based facial forgery (MFF) where adversaries use photos/videos containing victims' faces to circumvent face authentication systems. In this paper, we propose FaceLive, a practical and robust liveness detection mechanism to strengthen the face authentication on mobile devices in fighting the MFF-based attacks. FaceLive detects the MFF-based attacks by measuring the consistency between device movement data from the inertial sensors and the head pose changes from the facial video captured by …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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

Attribute Based Broadcast Encryption With Short Ciphertext And Decryption Key, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo, Xiaofeng Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute Based Broadcast Encryption (ABBE) is a combination of Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and Broadcast Encryption (BE). It allows a broadcaster (or encrypter) to broadcast an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by the receivers who are within a predefined user set and satisfy the access policy specified by the broadcaster. Compared with normal ABE, ABBE allows direct revocation, which is important in many real-time broadcasting applications such as Pay TV. In this paper, we propose two novel ABBE schemes that have distinguishing features: the first scheme is key-policy based and has short ciphertext and constant size decryption key; …

On Indistinguishability In Remote Data Integrity Checking, Xinyu Fan, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Yong Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With a rapid growth of data storage in the cloud, data integrity checking in a remote data storage system has become an important issue. A number of protocols, which allow remote integrity checking by a third party, have been proposed. Although those protocols are provably secure, the data privacy issues in those protocols have not been considered. We believe that these issues are equally important since the communication flows of integrity proofs from the cloud server should not reveal any useful information of the stored data. In this paper, we introduce a new definition of data privacy called ‘INDPrivacy’ by …

From Physical Security To Cybersecurity, Arunesh Sinha, Thanh H. Nguyen, Debarun Kar, Matthew Brown, Milind Tambe, Albert Xin Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security is a critical concern around the world. In many domains from cybersecurity to sustainability, limited security resources prevent complete security coverage at all times. Instead, these limited resources must be scheduled (or allocated or deployed), while simultaneously taking into account the importance of different targets, the responses of the adversaries to the security posture, and the potential uncertainties in adversary payoffs and observations, etc. Computational game theory can help generate such security schedules. Indeed, casting the problem as a Stackelberg game, we have developed new algorithms that are now deployed over multiple years in multiple applications for scheduling of …

On Security Of Content-Based Video Stream Authentication, Swee Won Lo, Zhou Wei, Deng, Robert H., Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Content-based authentication (CBA) schemes are used to authenticate multimedia streams while allowing content-preserving manipulations such as bit-rate transcoding. In this paper, we survey and classify existing transform-domain CBA schemes for videos into two categories, and point out that in contrary to CBA for images, there exists a common design flaw in these schemes. We present the principles (based on video coding concept) on how the flaw can be exploited to mount semantic-changing attacks in the transform domain that cannot be detected by existing CBA schemes. We show attack examples including content removal, modification and insertion attacks. Noting that these CBA …

Server-Aided Revocable Identity-Based Encryption, Baodong Qin, Deng, Robert H., Yingjiu Li, Shengli Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Efficient user revocation in Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) has been a challenging problem and has been the subject of several research efforts in the literature. Among them, the tree-based revocation approach, due to Boldyreva, Goyal and Kumar, is probably the most efficient one. In this approach, a trusted Key Generation Center (KGC) periodically broadcasts a set of key updates to all (non-revoked) users through public channels, where the size of key updates is only O(r log N/r), with N being the number of users and r the number of revoked users, respectively; however, every user needs to keep at least O(logN) …

Api-Based Acquisition Of Evidence From Cloud Storage Providers, Andres E. Barreto

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing and cloud storage services, in particular, pose a new challenge to digital forensic investigations. Currently, evidence acquisition for such services still follows the traditional approach of collecting artifacts on a client device. In this work, we show that such an approach not only requires upfront substantial investment in reverse engineering each service, but is also inherently incomplete as it misses prior versions of the artifacts, as well as cloud-only artifacts that do not have standard serialized representations on the client.

In this work, we introduce the concept of API-based evidence acquisition for cloud services, which addresses these concerns …

Identity-Based Lossy Encryption From Learning With Errors, Jingnan He, Bao Li, Xianhui Lu, Dingding Jia, Haiyang Xue, Xiaochao Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We extend the notion of lossy encryption to the scenario of identity-based encryption (IBE), and propose a new primitive called identity-based lossy encryption (IBLE). Similar as the case of lossy encryption, we show that IBLE can also achieve selective opening security. Finally, we present a construction of IBLE from the assumption of learning with errors.

Novel Cryptographic Primitives And Protocols For Censorship Resistance, Kevin Patrick Dyer

Dissertations and Theses

Internet users rely on the availability of websites and digital services to engage in political discussions, report on newsworthy events in real-time, watch videos, etc. However, sometimes those who control networks, such as governments, censor certain websites, block specific applications or throttle encrypted traffic. Understandably, when users are faced with egregious censorship, where certain websites or applications are banned, they seek reliable and efficient means to circumvent such blocks. This tension is evident in countries such as a Iran and China, where the Internet censorship infrastructure is pervasive and continues to increase in scope and effectiveness.

An arms race is …

Automatic Video Self Modeling For Voice Disorder, Ju Shen, Changpeng Ti, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Rita Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him- or herself. In the field of speech language pathology, the approach of VSM has been successfully used for treatment of language in children with Autism and in individuals with fluency disorder of stuttering. Technical challenges remain in creating VSM contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that synthesizes new video sequences for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorders. Starting with a video recording of a voice-disorder patient, the proposed …

Privacy-Preserving Offloading Of Mobile App To The Public Cloud, Yue Duan, Mu Zhang, Heng Yin, Yuzhe Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To support intensive computations on resource-restricting mobile devices, studies have been made to enable the offloading of a part of a mobile program to the cloud. However, none of the existing approaches considers user privacy when transmitting code and data off the device, resulting in potential privacy breach. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a system that automatically performs fine-grained privacy-preserving Android app offloading. It utilizes static analysis and bytecode instrumentation techniques to ensure transparent and efficient Android app offloading while preserving user privacy. We evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our system using two Android …

A New Public Remote Integrity Checking Scheme With User Privacy, Yiteng Feng, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Joseph Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With a cloud storage, users can store their data files on a remote cloud server with a high quality on-demand cloud service and are able to share their data with other users. Since cloud servers are not usually regarded as fully trusted and the cloud data can be shared amongst users, the integrity checking of the remote files has become an important issue. A number of remote data integrity checking protocols have been proposed in the literature to allow public auditing of cloud data by a third party auditor (TPA). However, user privacy is not taken into account in most …

A New General Framework For Secure Public Key Encryption With Keyword Search, Rongmao Chen, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo, Xiaofen Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS), introduced by Boneh et al. in Eurocrypt’04, allows users to search encrypted documents on an untrusted server without revealing any information. This notion is very useful in many applications and has attracted a lot of attention by the cryptographic research community. However, one limitation of all the existing PEKS schemes is that they cannot resist the Keyword Guessing Attack (KGA) launched by a malicious server. In this paper, we propose a new PEKS framework named Dual-Server Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search (DS-PEKS). This new framework can withstand all the attacks, including the …

Attribute-Based Encryption With Efficient Verifiable Outsourced Decryption, Baodong Qin, Robert H. Deng, Shengli Liu, Siqi Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) with outsourced decryption not only enables fine-grained sharing of encrypted data, but also overcomes the efficiency drawback (in terms of ciphertext size and decryption cost) of the standard ABE schemes. In particular, an ABE scheme with outsourced decryption allows a third party (e.g., a cloud server) to transform an ABE ciphertext into a (short) El Gamal-type ciphertext using a public transformation key provided by a user so that the latter can be decrypted much more efficiently than the former by the user. However, a shortcoming of the original outsourced ABE scheme is that the correctness of the …

Attribute-Based Encryption With Efficient Verifiable Outsourced Decryption, Baodong Qin, Robert H. Deng, Shengli Liu, Siqi Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) with outsourced decryption not only enables fine-grained sharing of encrypted data, but also overcomes the efficiency drawback (in terms of ciphertext size and decryption cost) of the standard ABE schemes. In particular, an ABE scheme with outsourced decryption allows a third party (e.g., a cloud server) to transform an ABE ciphertext into a (short) El Gamal-type ciphertext using a public transformation key provided by a user so that the latter can be decrypted much more efficiently than the former by the user. However, a shortcoming of the original outsourced ABE scheme is that the correctness of the …

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 …

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

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

Computer Engineering

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

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

Continuous Non-Malleable Key Derivation And Its Application To Related-Key Security, Baodong Qin, Shenli Liu, Tsz Hon Yuen, Robert H. Deng, Kefei Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Related-Key Attacks (RKAs) allow an adversary to observe the outcomes of a cryptographic primitive under not only its original secret key e.g., s, but also a sequence of modified keys ϕ(s), where ϕ is specified by the adversary from a class Φ of so-called Related-Key Derivation (RKD) functions. This paper extends the notion of non-malleable Key Derivation Functions (nm-KDFs), introduced by Faust et al. (EUROCRYPT’14), to continuous nm-KDFs. Continuous nm-KDFs have the ability to protect against any a-priori unbounded number of RKA queries, instead of just a single time tampering attack as in the definition of …

Method For Matching Probabilistic Encrypted Data, Hwee Hwa Pang, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Determining if a first encrypted data of a first data value is equal to a second encrypted data of a second data value. Comprising: a first cyclic group; a second cyclic group including a first element. Applying an operation to the first cyclic group to map its elements to an element in the second cyclic group. Randomly selecting a second element from the first cyclic group; producing the first encrypted data by mapping the second element and the first data value into one or more elements of the first cyclic group. Randomly selecting a third element from the first cyclic …

Gpuhelib And Distributedhelib: Distributed Computing Variants Of Helib, A Homomorphic Encryption Library, Ethan Andrew Frame

Master's Theses

Homomorphic Encryption, an encryption scheme only developed in the last five years, allows for arbitrary operations to be performed on encrypted data. Using this scheme, a user can encrypt data, and send it to an online service. The online service can then perform an operation on the data and generate an encrypted result. This encrypted result is then sent back to the user, who decrypts it. This decryption produces the same data as if the operation performed by the online service had been performed on the unencrypted data. This is revolutionary because it allows for users to rely on online …

Support Vector Machines And Metamorphic Malware Detection, Tanuvir Singh

Master's Projects

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure with each infection, which makes it challenging to detect. In this research, we test several scor- ing techniques that have shown promise in metamorphic detection. We then perform a careful robustness analysis by employing morphing strategies that cause each score to fail. Finally, we show that combining scores using a Sup- port Vector Machine (SVM) yields results that are significantly more robust than we obtained using any of the individual scores.

Cryptanalysis Of Classic Ciphers Using Hidden Markov Models, Rohit Vobbilisetty

Master's Projects

Cryptanalysis is the study of identifying weaknesses in the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. This process would improve the complexity of such algo- rithms, making the system secure.

In this research, we apply Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to classic cryptanaly- sis problems. We show that with sufficient ciphertext, an HMM can be used to break a simple substitution cipher. We also show that when limited ciphertext is avail- able, using multiple random restarts for the HMM increases our chance of successful decryption.