Information Security Commons^™

Keeping Data Safe From Prying Eyes, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

An expert in information security research, Professor Robert Deng is constantly trying to beat hackers at their own game.

See the papers:

• Launching generic attacks on iOS with approved third-party applications
• Universally composable RFID mutual authentication
• Attribute-based cloud storage with secure provenance over encrypted data

Strengthening Cybersecurity Through Research, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

Tackling cybersecurity risks in mobile computing by Professors Robert Deng and Li Yingjiu.

See their papers:

• Seeing your face is not enough: An inertial sensor-based liveness detection for face authentication
• An efficient privacy-preserving outsourced computation over public data
• Secure encrypted data deduplication with ownership proof and user revocation

A Framework For Forensic Reconstruction Of Spontaneous Ad Hoc Networks, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Spontaneous ad hoc networks are distinguished by rapid deployment for a specific purpose, with no forward planning or pre-design in their topology. Often these networks will spring up through necessity whenever a network is required urgently but briefly. This may be in a disaster recovery setting, military uses where often the network is unplanned but the devices are pre-installed with security settings, educational networks or networks created as a one-off for a meeting such as in a business organisation. Generally, wireless networks pose problems for forensic investigators because of the open nature of the medium, but if logging procedures and …

Analysis Of Attempted Intrusions: Intelligence Gathered From Ssh Honeypots, Priya Rabadia, Craig Valli, Ahmed Ibrahim, Zubair A. Baig

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Honeypots are a defensive cyber security countermeasure used to gather data on intruder activities. By analysing the data collected by honeypots, mitigation strategies for cyberattacks launched against cyber-enabled infrastructures can be developed. In this paper, intelligence gathered from six Secure Shell (SSH) honeypots is presented. The paper is part of an ongoing investigation into analysing malicious activities captured by the honeypots. This paper focuses on the time of day attempted intrusions have occurred. The honeypot data has been gathered from 18th July 2012 until 13th January 2016; a period of 1,247 days. All six honeypots have the same hardware and …

Proceedings Of The 15th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, 5-6 December 2017, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Conference Foreword This is the sixth year that the Australian Digital Forensics Conference has been held under the banner of the Security Research Institute, which is in part due to the success of the security conference program at ECU. As with previous years, the conference continues to see a quality papers with a number from local and international authors. 8 papers were submitted and following a double blind peer review process, 5 were accepted for final presentation and publication. Conferences such as these are simply not possible without willing volunteers who follow through with the commitment they have initially made, …

Drop (Drone Open Source Parser) Your Drone: Forensic Analysis Of The Dji Phantom Iii, Devon R. Clark, Christopher S. Meffert, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The DJI Phantom III drone has already been used for malicious activities (to drop bombs, remote surveillance and plane watching) in 2016 and 2017. At the time of writing, DJI was the drone manufacturer with the largest market share. Our work presents the primary thorough forensic analysis of the DJI Phantom III drone, and the primary account for proprietary file structures stored by the examined drone. It also presents the forensically sound open source tool DRone Open source Parser (DROP) that parses proprietary DAT files extracted from the drone's nonvolatile internal storage. These DAT files are encrypted and encoded. The …

Iseek, A Tool For High Speed, Concurrent, Distributed Forensic Data Acquisition, Richard Adams, Graham Mann, Valerie Hobbs

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Electronic discovery (also written as e-discovery or eDiscovery) and digital forensics are processes in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and processed with the expectation that it may be used as evidence in legal proceedings. Electronic evidence plays a fundamental role in many aspects of litigation (Stanfield, 2009). However, both eDiscovery and digital forensic approaches that rely on the creation of an index as part of their processing are struggling to cope with the huge increases in hard disk storage capacity. This paper introduces a novel technology that meets the existing and future data volume challenges faced by practitioners …

Security Readiness Evaluation Framework For Tonga E-Government Initiatives, Raymond Lutui, Semisi Hopoi, Siaosi Maeakafa

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The rapid expansion of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the Pacific have reached the Kingdom of Tonga. The submarine fibre-optic cable which connects Tonga to Fiji and onward to a hub in Sydney went live 2013. Now the people of Tonga experience the high-speed impact of digital communication, fast international access, and social changes such as the government is implementing a digital society through e-government services. This study focuses on identifying the factors that will later become a vulnerability and a risk to the security of Tonga government e-government initiatives. Data was collected through interviews with three government …

Intelligent Feature Selection For Detecting Http/2 Denial Of Service Attacks, Erwin Adi, Zubair Baig

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Intrusion-detection systems employ machine learning techniques to classify traffic into attack and legitimate. Network flooding attacks can leverage the new web communications protocol (HTTP/2) to bypass intrusion-detection systems. This creates an urgent demand to understand HTTP/2 characteristics and to devise customised cyber-attack detection schemes. This paper proposes Step Sister; a technique to generate an optimum network traffic feature set for network intrusion detection. The proposed technique demonstrates that a consistent set of features are selected for a given HTTP/2 dataset. This allows intrusion-detection systems to classify previously unseen network traffic samples with fewer false alarm than when techniques used in …

The 2017 Homograph Browser Attack Mitigation Survey, Tyson Mcelroy, Peter Hannay, Greg Baatard

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Since their inception, International Domain Names (IDN) have allowed for non-Latin characters to be entered into domain names. This feature has led to attackers forging malicious domains which appear identical to the Latin counterpart. This is achieved through using non-Latin characters which appear identical to their Latin counterpart. This attack is referred to as a Homograph attack. This research continues the work of Hannay and Bolan (2009), and Hannay and Baatard (2012), which assessed the mitigation methods incorporated by web browsers in mitigating IDN homograph attacks. Since these works, time IDN mitigation algorithms have been altered, such as the one …

A Comparison Of 2d And 3d Delaunay Triangulations For Fingerprint Authentication, Marcelo Jose Macedo, Wencheng Yang, Guanglou Zheng, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The two-dimensional (2D) Delaunay triangulation-based structure, i.e., Delaunay triangle, has been widely used in fingerprint authentication. However, we also notice the existence of three-dimensional (3D) Delaunay triangulation, which has not been extensively explored. Inspired by this, in this paper, the features of both 2D and 3D Delaunay triangulation-based structures are investigated and the findings show that a 3D Delaunay structure, e.g., Delaunay tetrahedron, can provide more feature types and a larger number of elements than a 2D Delaunay structure, which was expected to provide a higher discriminative capability. However, higher discrimination does not necessarily lead to better performance, especially in …

An Investigation Into Some Security Issues In The Dds Messaging Protocol, Thomas White, Michael N. Johnstone, Matthew Peacock

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The convergence of Operational Technology and Information Technology is driving integration of the Internet of Things and Industrial Control Systems to form the Industrial Internet of Things. Due to the influence of Information Technology, security has become a high priority particularly when implementations expand into critical infrastructure. At present there appears to be minimal research addressing security considerations for industrial systems which implement application layer IoT messaging protocols such as Data Distribution Services (DDS). Simulated IoT devices in a virtual environment using the DDSI-RTPS protocol were used to demonstrate that enumeration of devices is possible by a non-authenticated client in …

Deceptive Security Based On Authentication Profiling, Andrew Nicholson, Helge Janicke, Andrew Jones, Adeeb Alnajaar

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Passwords are broken. Multi-factor Authentication overcomes password insecurities, but its potentials are often not realised. This article presents InSight, a system to actively identify perpetrators by deceitful adaptation of the accessible system resources using Multi-factor Authentication profiles. This approach improves authentication reliability and attributes users by computing trust scores against profiles. Based on this score, certain functionality is locked, unlocked, buffered, or redirected to a deceptive honeypot, which is used for attribution. The novelty of this approach is twofold; a profile-based multi-factor authentication approach that is combined with a gradient, deceptive honeypot.

The Convergence Of It And Ot In Critical Infrastructure, Glenn Murray, Michael N. Johnstone, Craig Valli

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Automation and control systems, such as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), DCS (Distributed Control Systems) and are often referred to as Operational Technology (OT). These systems are used to monitor and control critical infrastructures such as power, pipelines, water distribution, sewage systems and production control,). Traditionally, these OT systems have had a degree of physical separation from Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. With changing technologies and a drive towards data-driven and remote operations the two technology environments are starting to converge. With this convergence, what was a relatively standalone secure and isolated environment is now connected and accessible via the …

The Rise Of Cybersecurity And Its Impact On Data Protection, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey, Christopher Millard

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Gdpr As A Chance To Break Down Borders, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey, Nora Ni Loideain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

From The National Cyber Maturity To The Cyber Resilience: The Lessons Learnt From The Efforts Of Turkey, Bilge Karabacak, Unal Tatar

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In this paper, the details of critical infrastructure protection program of United States of America are shared by taking the cyber resilience into account. The academic and institutional studies on the concepts of cyber maturity, critical infrastructure protection program and cyber resilience are explained in detail. By the help of these studies and national efforts, the relations among these concepts are proposed. The key components of a cyber security strategy and action plan for a cyber resilient society is proposed by taking these three concepts into account. As the final step, the recent cyber security efforts of Turkey is shared …

Earning A Seat At The Table: How It Departments Can Partner In Organizational Change And Innovation, Robert L. Moore, Nathan Johnson

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Few would argue that the information technology department (ITD) is not an essential part of an organization. It is hard to envision a project that does not need the support of the ITD. Despite this importance, the ITD is not always involved in the management of projects. Often, the ITD is brought into the project late in the planning and development process. In many cases, the inclusion of the ITD in an advanced project stage can result in project failure where early involvement could have prevented it. Why is it that ITDs, while clearly a vital part of project implementation, …

Machine Learning With Personal Data: Is Data Protection Law Smart Enough To Meet The Challenge?, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey, Christopher Millard

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Trustworthiness Requirements For Manufacturing Cyber-Physical Systems, Radu F. Babiceanu, Remzi Seker

Publications

Distributed manufacturing operations include cyber-physical systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Long time not considered a priority, cybersecurity jumped to the forefront of manufacturing concerns due to the need to network together legacy, newer equipment, and entire operation centers. This paper proposes trustworthiness solutions for integrated manufacturing physical-cyber worlds, where trustworthiness is defined to complement system dependability requirements with cybersecurity requirements, such that the resulting manufacturing cyber-physical system delivers services that can justifiably be trusted. Acknowledging the inevitability of cyber-attacks, the paper models the cybersecurity component using the resilient systems framework, where system resilience is viewed as preservation of a required state …

A Centralised Platform For Digital Forensic Investigations In Cloud-Based Environments, Shaunak Mody, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Forensic investigations of digital media traditionally involve seizing a device and performing a forensic investigation. Often legal and physical obstructions must be overcome so that the investigator has access to the device and the right to secure it for investigation purposes. Taking a forensic image of a hard disk may need to be done in the field but analysis can usually be performed at a later time. With the rapid increase in hard disk size, the acquiring of a forensic image can take hours or days. This poses significant issues for forensic investigators when potential evidence resides in the cloud. …

Tonga’S Organisational Vulnerability To Social Engineering, Raymond Lutui, Viliami Fe’Aomoeata

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Tonga is a small developing island in the south pacific and ICT is still in its early stages. In this paper we ask the questions, what is social engineering and who is this social engineer, what are the threats to Tonga, how can these threats be identified and which countermeasures can be taken to mitigate the risk of social engineering? The answers to these questions will lead to a social engineering risk management framework to make the risks of social engineering more transparent and help organisations implement mitigating controls against social engineering. The study was performed in four chosen organisations …

A Review Of Data Breaches And Losses That Occurred From Laptops That Were Stolen Or Otherwise Misplaced In 2015 And 2016, Samuel Griffith Wakeling, Peter Hannay, Zubair Baig

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This paper provides an analysis of what information can be found on laptops that may or may not have connections to an organisation of some form, the statistics of the number of laptops stolen or otherwise misplaced in 2015 and 2016, and the number of potentially affected people from each of the cases. As seen in many news articles, laptops are often stolen or otherwise misplaced by employees or contractors in an organisational environment. As discovered in this research, many laptops are stolen from vehicles or homes of employees rather than organisation’s buildings, but not all. The majority of stolen …

Data Protection And Humanitarian Emergencies, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey, Christopher Millard

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Overview Of Metrics, Models, And Simulation For Cyber-Physical Systems, Barry C. Ezell, Luanne Burns Chamberland

VMASC Publications

The metric, models, and simulation for Cyber-Physical Systems focuses on the different frameworks that have been operationalized so that cyber-physical systems can be baselined in security. In addition, the minitrack is interest in innovations in decision support such as cost effective means to decide what metrics should be addressed to get the best value in cybersecurity. There are many challenges to overcome in cyber-physical systems. We ask: How should frameworks be operationalized? What methodologies are available to quantify cybersecurity frameworks while accounting for cyber-physical interactions into account.

A Critical Analysis Of Security Vulnerabilities And Countermeasures In A Smart Ship System, Dennis Bothur, Guanglou Zheng, Craig Valli

Australian Information Security Management Conference

It is timely to raise cyber security awareness while attacks on maritime infrastructure have not yet gained critical momentum. This paper analyses vulnerabilities in existing shipborne systems and a range of measures to protect them. It discusses Information Technology network flaws, describes issues with Industrial Control Systems, and lays out major weaknesses in the Automated Identification System, Electronic Chart Display Information System and Very Small Aperture Terminals. The countermeasures relate to the concept of “Defence-in-depth”, and describe procedural and technical solutions. The maritime sector is interconnected and exposed to cyber threats. Internet satellite connections are feasible and omnipresent on vessels, …

Source Credibility And Cybersecurity Behaviors Of Computer Users, Bracken Sallin

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

Security Vulnerabilities And Cyber Threat Analysis Of The Amqp Protocol For The Internet Of Things, Ian Noel Mcateer, Muhammad Imran Malik, Zubair Baig, Peter Hannay

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The Internet of Things (IoT) expands the global Internet-connected network to encompass device-to-device, device-to-server, and server-to-server connectivity for an ever-increasing variety of end-user devices. IoT remains a somewhat amorphous entity, with little in the way of coordinated development, and is undermined largely by a manufacturer-driven scramble to be first-to-market with the latest innovation. Communication between IoT devices/servers relies on underlying protocols, which must be efficient and effective to establish and maintain reliability and integrity of data transfer. However, the lack of coordination during IoT’s expansion has resulted in a variety of communications protocols being developed. AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) …

Safestack+: Enhanced Dual Stack To Combat Data-Flow Hijacking, Yan Lin, Xiaoxiao Tang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SafeStack, initially proposed as a key component of Code Pointer Integrity (CPI), separates the program stack into two distinct regions to provide a safe region for sensitive code pointers. SafeStack can prevent buffer overflow attacks that overwrite sensitive code pointers, e.g., return addresses, to hijack control flow of the program, and has been incorporated into the Clang project of LLVM as a C-based language front-end. In this paper, we propose and implement SafeStack+, an enhanced dual stack LLVM plug-in that further protects programs from data-flow hijacking. SafeStack+ locates data flow sensitive variables on the unsafe stack that could potentially affect …

Data Analytics In Performance Of Kick-Out Distribution And Effectiveness In Senior Championship Football In Ireland, Roisin Donnelly, Darragh Daly

Journal Articles

n recent years, data analytics has been a growing phenomenon in many fields, including sport, and there has been an increased focus on how technology will impact the work of coaching andperformance professionals. This paper provides a reflection of the use of data analytics within the Gaelic Athletic Association’s (GAA) football coaching practice in Ireland, and evaluates for coaches how to enhance kick- out distribution and effectiveness. Specifically, the study aimed to dissect and analyse kick- out strategies to assess from a coaching perspective, the impact on distribution andeffectiveness. The research is a …