Information Security Commons^™

The Golden Ticket: How Blockchain Technology Can Be Implemented Into Event Ticketing, Jack Singer

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

When the group/individual named Satoshi Nakamoto first conceptualized blockchain in 2008, it served as the underlying foundation to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. In the years following, cryptocurrencies alike experiences massive gains in profitability; however, after the bubble had burst organizations began to look at the technology from a more academic standpoint. It was quickly found out that there is a massive application for blockchain in almost all sectors of industry from bulk stores (Walmart) to banking (IBM). This paper will explore how blockchain technology can be implemented into event ticketing, more specifically concerts. The current landscape of the industry is under …

Federal, State And Local Law Enforcement Agency Interoperability Capabilities And Cyber Vulnerabilities, Tyrone Trapnell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The National Data Exchange (N-DEx) System is the central informational hub located at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Its purpose is to provide network subscriptions to all Federal, state and local level law enforcement agencies while increasing information collaboration across all domains. The National Data Exchange users must satisfy the Advanced Permission Requirements, confirming the terms of N-DEx information use, and the Verification Requirement (verifying the completeness, timeliness, accuracy, and relevancy of N-DEx information) through coordination with the record-owning agency (Management, 2018). A network infection model is proposed to simulate the spread impact of various cyber-attacks within Federal, state …

Applying Machine Learning To Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection Systems, Fekadu Yihunie, Eman Abdelfattah, Amish Regmi

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

The enormous growth of Internet-based traffic exposes corporate networks with a wide variety of vulnerabilities. Intrusive traffics are affecting the normal functionality of network's operation by consuming corporate resources and time. Efficient ways of identifying, protecting, and mitigating from intrusive incidents enhance productivity. As Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is hosted in the network and at the user machine level to oversee the malicious traffic in the network and at the individual computer, it is one of the critical components of a network and host security. Unsupervised anomaly traffic detection techniques are improving over time. This research aims to find an …

Increasing User Confidence In Privacy-Sensitive Robots, Raniah Abdullah Bamagain

Theses and Dissertations

As the deployment and availability of robots grow rapidly, and spreads everywhere to reach places where they can communicate with humans, and they can constantly sense, watch, hear, process, and record all the environment around them, numerous new benefits and services can be provided, but at the same time, various types of privacy issues appear. Indeed, the use of robots that process data remotely causes privacy concerns. There are some main factors that could increase the capability of violating the users’ privacy, such as the robots’ appearance, perception, or navigation capability, as well as the lack of authentication, the lack …

Hardware Ip Classification Through Weighted Characteristics, Brendan Mcgeehan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s business model for hardware designs frequently incorporates third-party Intellectual Property (IP) due to the many benefits it can bring to a company. For instance, outsourcing certain components of an overall design can reduce time-to-market by allowing each party to specialize and perfect a specific part of the overall design. However, allowing third-party involvement also increases the possibility of malicious attacks, such as hardware Trojan insertion. Trojan insertion is a particularly dangerous security threat because testing the functionality of an IP can often leave the Trojan undetected. Therefore, this thesis work provides an improvement on a Trojan detection method known …

Analysis Of A Group Of Automorphisms Of A Free Group As A Platform For Conjugacy-Based Group Cryptography, Pavel Shostak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Let F be a finitely generated free group and Aut(F) its group of automorphisms.

In this monograph we discuss potential uses of Aut(F) in group-based cryptography.

Our main focus is on using Aut(F) as a platform group for the Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld protocol, Ko-Lee protocol, and other protocols based on different versions of the conjugacy search problem or decomposition problem, such as Shpilrain-Ushakov protocol.

We attack the Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld and Ko-Lee protocols by adapting the existing types of the length-based attack to the specifics of Aut(F). We also present our own version of the length-based attack that significantly increases the attack' success …

On-The-Fly Android Static Analysis With Applications In Vulnerability Discovery, Daoyuan Wu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Static analysis is a common program analysis technique extensively used in the software security field. Widely-used static analysis tools for Android, e.g., Amandroid and FlowDroid, perform the whole-app analysis which is comprehensive yet at the cost of huge overheads. In this dissertation, we make a first attempt to explore a novel on-demand analysis that creatively leverages bytecode search to guide inter-procedural analysis on the fly or just in time, and develop such on-the-fly analysis into a tool, called BackDroid, for Android apps. We further explore how the core technique of on-the-fly static analysis in BackDroid can enable different vulnerability studies …

Querying Over Encrypted Databases In A Cloud Environment, Jake Douglas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The adoption of cloud computing has created a huge shift in where data is processed and stored. Increasingly, organizations opt to store their data outside of their own network to gain the benefits offered by shared cloud resources. With these benefits also come risks; namely, another organization has access to all of the data. A malicious insider at the cloud services provider could steal any personal information contained on the cloud or could use the data for the cloud service provider's business advantage. By encrypting the data, some of these risks can be mitigated. Unfortunately, encrypting the data also means …

Designated-Server Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption With Keyword Search For Encrypted Emails, Hongbo Li, Qiong Huang, Jian Shen, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In encrypted email system, how to search over encrypted cloud emails without decryption is an important and practical problem. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is an efficient solution to it. However, PEKS suffers from the complex key management problem in the public key infrastructure. Its variant in the identity-based setting addresses the drawback, however, almost all the schemes does not resist against offline keyword guessing attacks (KGA) by inside adversaries. In this work we introduce the notion of designated-server identity-based authenticated encryption with keyword search (dIBAEKS), in which the email sender authenticates the message while encrypting so that …

Pptds: A Privacy-Preserving Truth Discovery Scheme In Crowd Sensing Systems, Chuan Zhang, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu, Kashif Sharif, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Benefiting from the fast development of human-carried mobile devices, crowd sensing has become an emerging paradigm to sense and collect data. However, reliability of sensory data provided by participating users is still a major concern. To address this reliability challenge, truth discovery is an effective technology to improve data accuracy, and has garnered significant attention. Nevertheless, many of state of art works in truth discovery, either failed to address the protection of participants' privacy or incurred tremendous overhead on the user side. In this paper, we first propose a privacy-preserving truth discovery scheme, named PPTDS-I, which is implemented on two …

A Blockchain-Based Location Privacy-Preserving Crowdsensing System, Mengmeng Yang, Tianqing Zhu, Kaitai Liang, Wanlei Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the support of portable electronic devices and crowdsensing, a new class of mobile applications based on the Internet of Things (IoT) application is emerging. Crowdsensing enables workers with mobile devices to travel to specified locations and collect data, then send it back to the requester for rewards. However, the majority of the existing crowdsensing systems are based on centralized servers, which are prone to a high chance of attack, intrusion, and manipulation. Further, during the process of transmitting information to and from the service server, the worker's location is usually exposed. This raises the potential risk of a privacy …

Bilateral Liability-Based Contracts In Information Security Outsourcing, Kai-Lung Hui, Ping Fan Ke, Yuxi Yao, Wei Thoo Yue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the efficiency of bilateral liability-based contracts in managed security services (MSSs). We model MSS as a collaborative service with the protection quality shaped by the contribution of both the service provider and the client. We adopt the negligence concept from the legal profession to design two novel contracts: threshold-based liability contract and variable liability contract. We find that they can achieve the first best outcome when postbreach effort verification is feasible. More importantly, they are more efficient than a multilateral contract when the MSS provider assumes limited liability. Our results show that bilateral liability-based contracts can work in …

Adversarial Sample Detection For Deep Neural Network Through Model Mutation Testing, Jingyi Wang, Guoliang Dong, Jun Sun, Xinyu Wang, Zhang Peixin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Analyzing And Estimating Cyberattack Trends By Performing Data Mining On A Cybersecurity Data Set, Chan Young Koh

Honors Program Theses and Projects

More than five billion personal information has been compromised over the past eight years through data breaches from notable companies, and the damage related to cybercrime is expected to reach six trillion USD annually by the year of 2021. Interestingly, recent cyberattacks were aimed specifically at credit agencies and companies that hold credit information of their customers and employees. The question is: “Why is it difficult to protect against or evade cyberattacks even for these prestigious companies?”. The purpose of this research is to bring the notion of notorious, rapidly-multiplying cyberthreats. Hence, the research focuses on analyzing cyberattack techniques and …

Securing Our Future Homes: Smart Home Security Issues And Solutions, Nicholas Romano

Senior Honors Theses

The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, is a new technology transforming businesses, individuals’ daily lives and the operation of entire countries. With more and more devices becoming equipped with IoT technology, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. The components that make up a smart home are at risk for different types of attacks; therefore, security engineers are developing solutions to current problems and are predicting future types of attacks. This paper will analyze IoT smart home components, explain current security risks, and suggest possible solutions. According to “What is a Smart Home” (n.d.), a smart home is a …

Building Consumer Trust In The Cloud: An Experimental Analysis Of The Cloud Trust Label Approach, Lisa Van Der Werff, Grace Fox, Ieva Masevic, Vincent C. Emeakaroha, John P. Morrison, Theo Lynn

Department of Computer Science Publications

The lack of transparency surrounding cloud service provision makes it difficult for consumers to make knowledge based purchasing decisions. As a result, consumer trust has become a major impediment to cloud computing adoption. Cloud Trust Labels represent a means of communicating relevant service and security information to potential customers on the cloud service provided, thereby facilitating informed decision making. This research investigates the potential of a Cloud Trust Label system to overcome the trust barrier. Specifically, it examines the impact of a Cloud Trust Label on consumer perceptions of a service and cloud service provider trustworthiness and trust in the …

Automated Tool Support For Security Bug Repair In Mobile Applications, Larry Singleton

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

Cyber Security- A New Secured Password Generation Algorithm With Graphical Authentication And Alphanumeric Passwords Along With Encryption, Akash Rao

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Graphical passwords are always considered as an alternative of alphanumeric passwords for their better memorability and usability [1]. Alphanumeric passwords provide an adequate amount of satisfaction, but they do not offer better memorability compared to graphical passwords [1].

On the other hand, graphical passwords are considered less secured and provide better memorability [1]. Therefore many researchers have researched on graphical passwords to overcome the vulnerability. One of the most significant weaknesses of the graphical passwords is "Shoulder Surfing Attack," which means, sneaking into a victim's computer to learn the whole password or part of password or some confidential information. Such …

Quantifying Impact Of Cyber Actions On Missions Or Business Processes: A Multilayer Propagative Approach, Unal Tatar

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Ensuring the security of cyberspace is one of the most significant challenges of the modern world because of its complexity. As the cyber environment is getting more integrated with the real world, the direct impact of cybersecurity problems on actual business frequently occur. Therefore, operational and strategic decision makers in particular need to understand the cyber environment and its potential impact on business. Cyber risk has become a top agenda item for businesses all over the world and is listed as one of the most serious global risks with significant financial implications for businesses.

Risk analysis is one of the …

Machine Learning For Real-Time Data-Driven Security Practices, Shane Coleman

Theses

The risk of cyber-attacks exploiting vulnerable organisations has increased significantly over the past several years. Cyber-attacks can be described as any type of aggressive strategy which targets computer information systems, computer networks, personal computer systems or other organisational infrastructures which may originate internally or externally. These attacks may combine to exploit a vulnerability breach within a system’s protection strategy which has the potential for loss, damage or destruction of assets. Consequently, every vulnerability has an accompanying risk which is defined as the “intersection of assets, threats, and vulnerabilities”.

This research project uses various types of recommender system techniques, employed for …

On Efficiency Of Artifact Lookup Strategies In Digital Forensics, Lorenz Liebler, Patrick Schmitt, Harald Baier, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In recent years different strategies have been proposed to handle the problem of ever-growing digital forensic databases. One concept to deal with this data overload is data reduction, which essentially means to separate the wheat from the chaff, e.g., to filter in forensically relevant data. A prominent technique in the context of data reduction are hash-based solutions. Data reduction is achieved because hash values (of possibly large data input) are much smaller than the original input. Today's approaches of storing hash-based data fragments reach from large scale multithreaded databases to simple Bloom filter representations. One main focus was put on …

A Dendritic Cell Algorithm Based Approach For Malicious Tcp Port Scanning Detection, Nuha Yousef Al Masalmeh

Information Security Theses

The proliferation of cyber-attacks is accompanied by an urgent need to develop sophisticated detection tools. Some of these tools are based on algorithms inspired by the Human Immune System (HIS). The Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) is one of such HIS inspired methods, which is based on the Danger theory model. In this thesis, two types of DCA algorithms are identified, namely the deterministic a classical DCA in order to improve the algorithm's applicability and performance to detect TCP port scanning. This algorithm consists of components based on the behavior of Human dendritic cells, which involves four categories of the input …

Fair And Dynamic Data Sharing Framework In Cloud-Assisted Internet Of Everything, Yinbin Miao, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng, Hongjun Wu, Hongwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly prevalent in our society, for example in home and office environment; hence, it is also known as cloud-assisted Internet of Everything (IoE). While in such a setup, data can be easily shared and disseminated (e.g., between a device, such as Amazon Echo and the cloud, such as Amazon AWS), there are potential security considerations that need to be addressed. Thus, a number of security solutions have been proposed. For example, searchable encryption (SE) has been extensively studied due to its capability to facilitate searching of encrypted data. However, threat models in most existing …

Cinema: Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Online Medical Primary Diagnosis With Skyline Query, Jianfeng Hua, Hui Zhu, Fengwei Wang, Ximeng Liu, Rongxing Lu, Hao Li, Yeping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online medical primary diagnosis system, which can provide convenient medical decision support through applying mobile communication and data analysis technology, has been considered as a promising approach to improve the quality of healthcare service. However, it still faces many severe challenges on the privacy of users' health information and the accuracy of diagnosis result, which deter the wide adoption of online medical primary diagnosis system. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving online medical primary diagnosis (CINEMA) framework. Within CINEMA framework, users can access online medical primary diagnosing service accurately without divulging their medical data. Specifically, based on …

Cybersecurity In The Maritime Domain, Gary C. Kessler

Publications

In 2017 and 2018, the maritime industry saw a record number of attempted—and many successful—frauds via email, phishing, or other means. Demonstrated and actual attacks on vessel networks, communication systems, and navigation systems have become practically routine. Port and shipping line networks are increasingly vulnerable to what appears to be increasingly targeted attacks against maritime systems.

A Framework To Reveal Clandestine Organ Trafficking In The Dark Web And Beyond, Michael P. Heinl, Bo Yu, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to the scarcity of transplantable organs, patients have to wait on long lists for many years to get a matching kidney. This scarcity has created an illicit market place for wealthy recipients to avoid long waiting times. Brokers arrange such organ transplants and collect most of the payment that is sometimes channeled to fund other illicit activities. In order to collect and disburse payments, they often resort to money laundering-like schemes of money transfers. As the low-cost Internet arrives in some of the affected countries, social media and the dark web are used to illegally trade human organs. This …

Digital Forensics, A Need For Credentials And Standards, Nima Zahadat

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The purpose of the conducted study was to explore the credentialing of digital forensic investigators, drawing from applicable literature. A qualitative, descriptive research design was adopted which entailed searching across Google Scholar and ProQuest databases for peer reviewed articles on the subject matter. The resulting scholarship was vetted for timeliness and relevance prior to identification of key ideas on credentialing. The findings of the study indicated that though credentialing was a major issue in digital forensics with an attentive audience of stakeholders, it had been largely overshadowed by the fundamental curricula problems in the discipline. A large portion of research …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Immersive Virtual Reality Attacks And The Human Joystick, Peter Casey, Ibrahim Baggili, Ananya Yarramreddy

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This is one of the first accounts for the security analysis of consumer immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems. This work breaks new ground, coins new terms, and constructs proof of concept implementations of attacks related to immersive VR. Our work used the two most widely adopted immersive VR systems, the HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift. More specifically, we were able to create attacks that can potentially disorient users, turn their Head Mounted Display (HMD) camera on without their knowledge, overlay images in their field of vision, and modify VR environmental factors that force them into hitting physical objects and …

Unguided Cyber Education Techniques Of The Non-Expert, Seth A. Martin

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force and Department of Defense continues to rely on its total workforce to provide the first layer of protection against cyber intrusion. Prior research has shown that the workforce is not adequately educated to perform this task. As a result, DoD cybersecurity strategy now includes attempting to improve education and training on cyber-related concepts and technical skills to all users of DoD networks. This paper describes an experiment designed to understand the broad methods that non-expert users may use to educate themselves on how to perform technical tasks. Preliminary results informed subsequent experiments that directly compared …