Information Security Commons^™

Multi-Dimensional Security Integrity Analysis Of Broad Market Internet-Connected Cameras, Mark A. Stanislav

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This study used a quantitative approach with a cross-sectional, descriptive analysis survey design to examine the adherence of 40 internet-connected cameras against three IoT security frameworks to determine their overall security posture. Relevant literature was reviewed showing that prior studies in a similar regard had limitations, such as a small sample population, singular market segment focus, and/or a lack of validation against formalized frameworks. This study resulted in a uniform and multi-dimensional set of findings with supporting evidence, leading to a mapping against selected IoT security frameworks that was then quantitatively analyzed for their relative adherence as individual cameras, across …

Analyzing Offline Social Engagements: An Empirical Study Of Meetup Events Related To Software Development, Abhishek Sharma, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Anamika Sawhney, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers use a variety of social mediachannels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date,collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contributeto. Meetup is one of such social media used by softwaredevelopers to organize community gatherings. We in this work,investigate the dynamics of Meetup groups and events relatedto software development. Our work is different from previouswork as we focus on the actual event and group data that wascollected using Meetup API.In this work, we performed an empirical study of eventsand groups present on Meetup which are related to softwaredevelopment. First, we identified 6,327 Meetup groups related …

Securing Infiniband Networks With End-Point Encryption, Noah B. Diamond

Theses and Dissertations

The NVIDIA-Mellanox Bluefield-2 is a 100 Gbps high-performance network interface which offers hardware offload and acceleration features that can operate directly on network traffic without routine involvement from the ARM CPU. This allows the ARM multi-core CPU to orchestrate the hardware to perform operations on both Ethernet and RDMA traffic at high rates rather than processing all the traffic directly. A testbed called TNAP was created for performance testing and a MiTM verification process called MiTMVMP is used to ensure proper network configuration. The hardware accelerators of the Bluefield-2 support a throughput of nearly 86 Gbps when using IPsec to …

Dds-Cerberus: Improving Security In Dds Middleware Using Kerberos Tickets, Andrew T. Park

Theses and Dissertations

The military deploys many IoT in battlefield operations to provide information on terrain and enemy combatants. It also deploys automated robots or UAVs where securing and trusting collected data is essential. Choosing the middleware that handles this message transfer is crucial for real-time operations. Networks with multiple entities, including IoT devices, UAVs, and small computers, require robust middleware facilitating message sending in real-time. Ideally, the middleware would provide QoS to handle lost packets and retransmissions in lossy environments, especially between low-power machines. DDS is a middleware that implements real-time and QoS capabilities by sending messages, not based on endpoints but …

Removing The Veil: Shining Light On The Lack Of Inclusivity In Cybersecurity Education For Students With Disabilities, Felicia Hellems, Sajal Bhatia

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

There are currently over one billion people living with some form of disability worldwide. The continuous increase in new technologies in today's society comes with an increased risk in security. A fundamental knowledge of cybersecurity should be a basic right available to all users of technology. A review of literature in the fields of cybersecurity, STEM, and computer science (CS) has revealed existent gaps regarding educational methods for teaching cybersecurity to students with disabilities (SWD's). To date, SWD's are largely left without equitable access to cybersecurity education. Our goal is to identify current educational methods being used to teach SWD's …

Evaluating Secure Enclave Firmware Development For Contemporary Risc-V Workstations, Samuel D. Chadwick

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of the open-source RISC-V ISA empowers developers and engineers, device manufactures, industry leaders, nation-states, adversaries and allies alike with the unique opportunity to re-evaluate existing Trusted Computing paradigms. Emerging open-source security mechanisms facilitate the proliferation of Confidential Computing principles. These technology standards aim to provide secure enclave computing as a fundamental computing attribute, inherent within the RISC-V ISA specification. Security enforcement within these enclaves are handled by performing computation in memory-isolated, hardware-based, software-defined TEEs. This research evaluates the firmware development procedures required to implement Keystone Enclave on new unsupported hardware. Expressly, this effort extends Keystone SM firmware components …

Malware Detection Using Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis, Matthew A. Bergstedt

Theses and Dissertations

Many physical systems control or monitor important applications without the capacity to monitor for malware using on-device resources. Thus, it becomes valuable to explore malware detection methods for these systems utilizing external or off-device resources. This research investigates the viability of employing EM SCA to determine whether a performed operation is normal or malicious. A Raspberry Pi 3 was set up as a simulated motor controller with code paths for a normal or malicious operation. While the normal path only calculated the motor speed before updating the motor, the malicious path added a line of code to modify the calculated …

Match In My Way: Fine-Grained Bilateral Access Control For Secure Cloud-Fog Computing, Shengmin Xu, Jianting Ning, Yingjiu Li, Yinghui Zhang, Guowen Xu, Xinyi Huang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-fog computing is a novel paradigm to extend the functionality of cloud computing to provide a variety of on demand data services via the edge network. Many cryptographic tools have been introduced to preserve data confidentiality against the untrustworthy network and cloud servers. However, how to efficiently identify and retrieve useful data from a large number of ciphertexts without a costly decryption mechanism remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a cloud fog-device data sharing system (CFDS) with data confidentiality and data source identification simultaneously based on a new cryptographic primitive named matchmaking attribute-based encryption (MABE) by extending …

The Relationship Between Parenting Practices And Cyberbullying Perpetration: The Mediating Role Of Moral Beliefs, Jaeyong Choi, Seungmug (Zech) Lee, Layne Dittmann

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Criminologists and psychologists have long recognized that parenting practices can affect childhood outcomes and the development of moral beliefs in children. Another body of literature provides evidence that morality is a key cause of antisocial behavior. Yet, a noticeable gap in this line of work has been testing the mediation effects of parenting practices on cyberbullying via moral beliefs. Using a sample of South Korean adolescents, we tested whether moral beliefs mediate the relationships between parenting practices and cyberbullying perpetration. Results show that parental supervision and excessive parenting can influence cyberbullying perpetration and that the impact of parenting practices is …

Social Construction Of Internet Fraud As Innovation Among Youths In Nigeria, Austin Ayodele Mr., Jonathan Kehinde Oyedeji, Huthman Olamide Badmos

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The proliferation of internet technologies has shaped interactions in contemporary society. Despite the pivotal importance of the internet to the global economy, it has several negative consequences such as internet fraud. This study examined the perception that young adults in Nigeria hold about internet fraud as an innovative means to economic survival rather than as a criminal enterprise. Robert Merton’s Anomie/Strain Theory (AST) was adopted as the theoretical thrust of the study. Adopting a qualitative data collection method, 15 participants were selected using the non-probabilistic purposive and snowballing techniques while opinions were sampled through in-depth interviews in different locations within …

Cybersecurity Risk In U.S. Critical Infrastructure: An Analysis Of Publicly Available U.S. Government Alerts And Advisories, Zachary Lanz

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

As threat actor operations become increasingly sophisticated and emphasize the targeting of critical infrastructure and services, the need for cybersecurity information sharing will continue to grow. Escalating demand for cyber threat intelligence and information sharing across the cybersecurity community has resulted in the need to better understand the information produced by reputable sources such as U.S. CISA Alerts and ICS-CERT advisories. The text analysis program, Profiler Plus, is used to extract information from 1,574 U.S. government alerts and advisories to develop visualizations and generate enhanced insights into different cyber threat actor types, the tactics which can be used for cyber …

Efficient Certificateless Multi-Copy Integrity Auditing Scheme Supporting Data Dynamics, Lei Zhou, Anmin Fu, Guomin Yang, Huaqun Wang, Yuqing Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To improve data availability and durability, cloud users would like to store multiple copies of their original files at servers. The multi-copy auditing technique is proposed to provide users with the assurance that multiple copies are actually stored in the cloud. However, most multi-replica solutions rely on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which entails massive overhead of certificate computation and management. In this article, we propose an efficient multi-copy dynamic integrity auditing scheme by employing certificateless signatures (named MDSS), which gets rid of expensive certificate management overhead and avoids the key escrow problem in identity-based signatures. Specifically, we improve the classic …

Sdac: A Slow-Aging Solution For Android Malware Detection Using Semantic Distance Based Api Clustering, Jiayun Xu, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Xu Ke

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A novel slow-aging solution named SDAC is proposed to address the model aging problem in Android malware detection, which is due to the lack of adapting to the changes in Android specifications during malware detection. Different from periodic retraining of detection models in existing solutions, SDAC evolves effectively by evaluating new APIs' contributions to malware detection according to existing API's contributions. In SDAC, the contributions of APIs are evaluated by their contexts in the API call sequences extracted from Android apps. A neural network is applied on the sequences to assign APIs to vectors, among which the differences of API …

Update Recovery Attacks On Encrypted Database Within Two Updates Using Range Queries Leakage, Jianting Ning, Geong Sen Poh, Xinyi Huang, Robert H. Deng, Shuwei Cao, Ee-Chien Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, reconstruction attacks on static encrypted database supporting range queries have been proposed. However, attacks on encrypted database within two updates in the similar setting have not been studied extensively. As far as we know, the only work is the update recovery attack presented by Grubbs et al. (CCS 2018). Following their seminal work, we present new update recovery attacks for dense dataset (i.e. at least one record corresponding to each value in the range), which enable a deeper understanding of the impact caused by leakages due to updates on dynamic encrypted database. Our first attack aims at recovering the …

On The Influence Of Biases In Bug Localization: Evaluation And Benchmark, Ratnadira Widyasari, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Ferdian Thung, Jieke Shi, Constance Tan, Fiona Wee, Jack Phan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization is the task of identifying parts of thesource code that needs to be changed to resolve a bug report.As this task is difficult, automatic bug localization tools havebeen proposed. The development and evaluation of these toolsrely on the availability of high-quality bug report datasets. In2014, Kochhar et al. identified three biases in datasets used toevaluate bug localization techniques: (1) misclassified bug report,(2) already localized bug report, and (3) incorrect ground truthfile in a bug report. They reported that already localized bugreports statistically significantly and substantially impact buglocalization results, and thus should be removed. However, theirevaluation is still limited, …

Comparing Online Surveys For Cybersecurity: Sona And Mturk, Anne Wagner, Anna Bakas, Shelia Kennison, Eric Chan-Tin

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

People have many accounts and usually need to create a password for each. They tend to create insecure passwords and re-use passwords, which can lead to compromised data. This research examines if there is a link between personality type and password security among a variety of participants in two groups of participants: SONA and MTurk. Each participant in both surveys answered questions based on password security and their personality type. Our results show that participants in the MTurk survey were more likely to choose a strong password and to exhibit better security behaviors and knowledge than participants in the SONA …

Experimental Study To Assess The Impact Of Timers On User Susceptibility To Phishing Attacks, Amy E. Antonucci, Yair Levy, Laurie P. Dringus, Martha Snyder

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Social engineering costs organizations billions of dollars. It exploits the weakest link of information systems security, the users. It is well-documented in literature that users continue to click on phishing emails costing them and their employers significant monetary resources and data loss. Training does not appear to mitigate the effects of phishing much; other solutions are warranted. Kahneman introduced the concepts of System-One and System-Two thinking. System-One is a quick, instinctual decision-making process, while System-Two is a process by which humans use a slow, logical, and is easily disrupted. The key aim of our experimental field study was to investigate …

Faculty And Advisor Advice For Cybersecurity Students: Liberal Arts, Interdisciplinarity, Experience, Lifelong Learning, Technical Skills, And Hard Work, Brian K. Payne, Bria Cross, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The value of academic advising has been increasingly emphasized in higher education. In this study, attention is given to the most significant types of advice that a sample of cybersecurity faculty and advisors from the Commonwealth of Virginia recommend giving to cybersecurity students. The results show that faculty and advisors recommended that students be aware of six different aspects of cybersecurity education including the value of experience, the need for lifelong learning, the importance of hard work, the need to develop technical skills, the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity, and the need to develop liberal arts or professional/soft skills. Implications of …

Subject Matter Experts’ Feedback On Experimental Procedures To Measure User’S Judgment Errors In Social Engineering Attacks, Tommy Pollock, Yair Levy, Wei Li, Ajoy Kumar

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Distracted users can fail to correctly distinguish the differences between legitimate and malicious emails or search engine results. Mobile phone users can have a more challenging time identifying malicious content due to the smaller screen size and the limited security features in mobile phone applications. Thus, the main goal of this research study was to design, develop, and validate a set of field experiments to assess user’s judgment when exposed to two types of simulated social engineering attacks: phishing and Potentially Malicious Search Engine Results (PMSER), based on the interaction of the environment (distracting vs. non-distracting) and type of device …

A Taxonomy Of Cyberattacks Against Critical Infrastructure, Miloslava Plachkinova, Ace Vo

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The current study proposes a taxonomy to organize existing knowledge on cybercrimes against critical infrastructure such as power plants, water treatment facilities, dams, and nuclear facilities. Routine Activity Theory is used to inform a three-dimensional taxonomy with the following dimensions: hacker motivation (likely offender), cyber, physical, and cyber-physical components of any cyber-physical system (suitable target), and security (capable guardian). The focus of the study is to develop and evaluate the classification tool using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. Publicly available data was used to evaluate the utility and usability of the proposed artifact by exploring three possible scenarios – Stuxnet, …

The 2020 Twitter Hack – So Many Lessons To Be Learned, Paul D. Witman, Scott Mackelprang

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In mid-July 2020, the social media site Twitter had over 100 of its most prominent user accounts start to tweet requests to send Bitcoin to specified Bitcoin wallets. The requests promised that the Bitcoin senders would receive their money back doubled, as a gesture of charity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The attack appears to have been carried out by a small group of hackers, leveraging social engineering to get access to internal Twitter support tools. These tools allowed the hackers to gain full control of the high-profile user accounts and post messages on their behalf. The attack provides many paths …

Editorial Vol 2021, No 2, Herbert J. Mattord, Michael E. Whitman, Hossain Shahriar

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Welcome to the Winter 2021 edition of the Journal for Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice.

Seqseg: A Sequential Method To Achieve Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation Free From Background Dominance, Guihua Tao, Haojiang Li, Jiabin Huang, Chu Han, Jiazhou Chen, Guangying Ruan, Wenjie Huang, Yu Hu, Tingting Dan, Bin Zhang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reliable nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) segmentation plays an important role in radiotherapy planning. However, recent deep learning methods fail to achieve satisfactory NPC segmentation in magnetic resonance (MR) images, since NPC is infiltrative and typically has a small or even tiny volume with indistinguishable border, making it indiscernible from tightly connected surrounding tissues from immense and complex backgrounds. To address such background dominance problems, this paper proposes a sequential method (SeqSeg) to achieve accurate NPC segmentation. Specifically, the proposed SeqSeg is devoted to solving the problem at two scales: the instance level and feature level. At the instance level, SeqSeg is …

Provably Weak Instances Of Plwe Revisited, Again, Katherine Mendel

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Learning with Errors has emerged as a promising possibility for postquantum cryptography. Variants known as RLWE and PLWE have been shown to be more efficient, but the increased structure can leave them vulnerable to attacks for certain instantiations. This work aims to identify specific cases where proposed cryptographic schemes based on PLWE work particularly poorly under a specific attack.

Automated Reverse Engineering Of Role-Based Access Control Policies Of Web Applications, Ha Thanh Le, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Cu Duy Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Access control (AC) is an important security mechanism used in software systems to restrict access to sensitive resources. Therefore, it is essential to validate the correctness of AC implementations with respect to policy specifications or intended access rights. However, in practice, AC policy specifications are often missing or poorly documented; in some cases, AC policies are hard-coded in business logic implementations. This leads to difficulties in validating the correctness of policy implementations and detecting AC defects.In this paper, we present a semi-automated framework for reverse-engineering of AC policies from Web applications. Our goal is to learn and recover role-based access …

Optimal Eavesdropping In Quantum Cryptography, Atanu Acharyya Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has raised some promise for more secured communication than its classical counterpart. It allows the legitimate parties to detect eavesdropping which introduces error in the channel. If disturbed, there are ways to distill a secure key within some threshold error-rate. The amount of information gained by an attacker is generally quantified by (Shannon) mutual information. Knowing the maximum amount of information that an intruder can gain is important for post-processing purposes, and we mainly focus on that side in the thesis. Renyi information is also useful especially when post-processing is considered. The scope of this thesis …

Using Memory Forensics To Analyze Programming Language Runtimes, Modhuparna Manna

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The continued increase in the use of computer systems in recent times has led to a significant rise in the capabilities of malware and attacker toolkits that target different operating systems and their users. Over the last several years, cybersecurity threat reports have documented numerous instances of users that were targeted by governments, intelligence agencies, and criminal groups, and the result was that the victims ended up having highly sophisticated malware installed on their systems. Unfortunately, the rise of these threats has not been met with equal research and development of defensive mechanisms that can detect and analyze such malware. …

Digital Evidence In Appeals Of Criminal Cases Before The U.S. Courts Of Appeal: A Review Of Decisions And Examination Of The Legal Landscape From 2016 – 2020, Martin Novak

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This study is a follow-up to Digital Evidence in Criminal Cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeal: Trends and Issues for Consideration – 2010 to 2015. The current study examines appeals of criminal cases before the United States Courts of Appeal from January 2016 through August 2020, where one or more appeal claims were related to digital evidence. The purpose of this research was to determine if the legal landscape has changed since 2015; examine the most relevant legal issues related to digital evidence; and analyze how precedential cases may have affected digital forensics as evidence.

Security Strategy In Combating Online Extremist Ideologies In Uae, Khalid Al-Qasimi

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

This study aims at identifying the role of security strategies; the foundations of correct belief and good upbringing in the face of extremist ideology in order to protect the intellectual security of society. The researcher adopted the descriptive analytical approach in order to describe and analyze the role of the security strategy, the foundations of the correct faith and good upbringing in spreading moderation and combating extremist ideology through electronic websites.

The study has arrived at a number of findings, the most important of which are: extremist ideology cannot be confronted by traditional methods, but must be combated through modern …

Combating Terrorism Financing In The Cyber Environment A Study In Light Of The Egyptian And Emirati Experiences, Amar Elbably

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The research deals with the study of combating the financing of terrorism on the dark Internet, where terrorism "cyber has become an international actor, engages in interactions with states, individuals and institutions, and creates an agreement between the intelligence services and some terrorist movements, that these movements obtain information, finance, arm or training, in exchange for cyber-attacks against a mutual adversary, and the Internet plays a prominent role in the manufacture of extremism, terrorism, incitement to violence, promotion of radical ideas and attracting elements qualified for deviation, exploited in That's the dark part of the Internet, with an expansion of …