Information Security Commons^™

Trace: Securing Smart Contract Repository Against Access Control Vulnerability, Chong Chen, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Yanlin Wang, Zhenyu Shan, Ting Chen, Guangqiang Yin, Jianxing Yu, Zibin Zheng, Jiachi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions of dollars in economic losses. Among these, improper Access Control, which allows unauthorized users to execute restricted functions, is particularly prevalent and has caused significant financial damage. Smart contract repositories contain source code, documentation, configuration files, and other artifacts necessary for building and deploying smart contracts. GitHub hosts numerous open-source repositories of this kind, which serve as intermediate artifacts in development and require compilation and packaging to produce deployable contracts. Third-party developers often reference, reuse, or fork code from these repositories during custom development. However, if the referenced code contains vulnerabilities, it can …

An Efficient Pairing-Free Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme For Internet Of Things, Chong Guo, Bei Gong, Muhammad Waqas, Hisham Alasmary, Shanshan Tu, Sheng Chen

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a heterogeneous network composed of numerous dynamically connected devices. While it brings convenience, the IoT also faces serious challenges in data security. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptography method that supports fine-grained access control, offering a solution to the IoT’s security issues. However, existing CP-ABE schemes are inefficient and unsuitable for IoT devices with limited computing resources. To address this problem, this paper proposes an efficient pairing-free CP-ABE scheme for the IoT. The scheme is based on lightweight elliptic curve scalar multiplication and supports multi-authority and verifiable outsourced decryption. The proposed scheme …

Recovering Access Control Via Disk Forensics On Low-Level Flash Memory, Caleb J. Rother

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In the history of access control, nearly every system designed has relied on the operating system (OS) to enforce the access control protocols. However, if the OS (and specifically root access) is compromised, there are few if any solutions that can get users back into their system efficiently. In this work, we have proposed a novel approach that allows secure and efficient rollback of file access control after an adversary compromises the OS and corrupts the access control metadata. Our key observation is that the underlying flash memory typically performs out-of-place updates. Taking advantage of this unique feature, we can …

An Optimized And Scalable Blockchain-Based Distributed Learning Platform For Consumer Iot, Zhaocheng Wang, Xueying Liu, Xinming Shao, Abdullah Alghamdi, Md. Shirajum Munir, Sujit Biswas

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) manufacturers seek customer feedback to enhance their products and services, creating a smart ecosystem, like a smart home. Due to security and privacy concerns, blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) ecosystems can let CIoT manufacturers update their machine learning (ML) models using end-user data. Federated learning (FL) uses privacy-preserving ML techniques to forecast customers' needs and consumption habits, and blockchain replaces the centralized aggregator to safeguard the ecosystem. However, blockchain technology (BCT) struggles with scalability and quick ledger expansion. In BCFL, local model generation and secure aggregation are other issues. This research introduces a novel architecture, emphasizing …

Reks: Role-Based Encrypted Keyword Search With Enhanced Access Control For Outsourced Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Feng Li, Xiaohua Jia, Huaxiong Wang, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Keyword-based search over encrypted data is an important technique to achieve both data confidentiality and utilization in cloud outsourcing services. While commonly used access control mechanisms, such as identity-based encryption and attribute-based encryption, do not generally scale well for hierarchical access permissions. To solve this problem, we propose a Role-based Encrypted Keyword Search (REKS) scheme by using the role-based access control and broadcast encryption. Specifically, REKS allows owners to deploy hierarchical access control by allowing users with parent roles to have access permissions from child roles. Using REKS, we further facilitate token generation preprocessing and efficient user management, thereby significantly …

Sanitizable Access Control System For Secure Cloud Storage Against Malicious Data Publishers, Willy Susilo, Peng Jiang, Jianchang Lai, Fuchun Guo, Guomin Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing is considered as one of the most prominent paradigms in the information technology industry, since it can significantly reduce the costs of hardware and software resources in computing infrastructure. This convenience has enabled corporations to efficiently use the cloud storage as a mechanism to share data among their employees. At the first sight, by merely storing the shared data as plaintext in the cloud storage and protect them using an appropriate access control would be a nice solution. This is assuming that the cloud is fully trusted for not leaking any information, which is impractical as the cloud …

Lightweight And Expressive Fine-Grained Access Control For Healthcare Internet-Of-Things, Shengmin Xu, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Yinghui Zhang, Xiangyang Luo, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that enables embedded devices to monitor patients vital signals and allows these data to be aggregated and outsourced to the cloud. The cloud enables authorized users to store and share data to enjoy on-demand services. Nevertheless, it also causes many security concerns because of the untrusted network environment, dishonest cloud service providers and resource-limited devices. To preserve patients' privacy, existing solutions usually apply cryptographic tools to offer access controls. However, fine-grained access control among authorized users is still a challenge, especially for lightweight and resource-limited end-devices. In this paper, we propose a novel …

Biometrics For Internet‐Of‐Things Security: A Review, Wencheng Yang, Song Wang, Nor Masri Sahri, Nickson M. Karie, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The large number of Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) devices that need interaction between smart devices and consumers makes security critical to an IoT environment. Biometrics offers an interesting window of opportunity to improve the usability and security of IoT and can play a significant role in securing a wide range of emerging IoT devices to address security challenges. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive survey on the current biometrics research in IoT security, especially focusing on two important aspects, authentication and encryption. Regarding authentication, contemporary biometric‐based authentication systems for IoT are discussed and classified based on different biometric …

Attribute-Based Keyword Search Over Hierarchical Data In Cloud Computing, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Xinghua Li, Qi Jiang, Junwei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) has been a promising technology which allows users to perform search queries over encrypted data. However, the most of existing SE schemes cannot deal with the shared records that have hierarchical structures. In this paper, we devise a basic cryptographic primitive called as attribute-based keyword search over hierarchical data (ABKS-HD) scheme by using the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technique, but this basic scheme cannot satisfy all the desirable requirements of cloud systems. The facts that the single keyword search will yield many irrelevant search results and the revoked users can access the unauthorized data with the old …

Attribute-Based Encryption For Cloud Computing Access Control: A Survey, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Shengmin Xu, Jianfei Sun, Qi Li, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) for cloud computing access control is reviewed in this article. A taxonomy and comprehensive assessment criteria of ABE are first proposed. In the taxonomy, ABE schemes are assorted into key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) schemes, ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) schemes, anti-quantum ABE schemes, and generic constructions. In accordance with cryptographically functional features, CP-ABE is further divided into nine subcategories with regard to basic functionality, revocation, accountability, policy hiding, policy updating, multi-authority, hierarchy, offline computation, and outsourced computation. In addition, a systematical methodology for discussing and comparing existing ABE schemes is proposed. For KP-ABE and each type of CP-ABE, the corresponding …

Lightweight And Privacy-Aware Fine-Grained Access Control For Iot-Oriented Smart Health, Jianfei Sun, Hu Xiong, Ximeng Liu, Yinghui Zhang, Xuyun Nie, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the booming of Internet of Things (IoT), smart health (s-health) is becoming an emerging and attractive paradigm. It can provide an accurate prediction of various diseases and improve the quality of healthcare. Nevertheless, data security and user privacy concerns still remain issues to be addressed. As a high potential and prospective solution to secure IoT-oriented s-health applications, ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) schemes raise challenges, such as heavy overhead and attribute privacy of the end users. To resolve these drawbacks, an optimized vector transformation approach is first proposed to efficiently transform the access policy and user attribute set into …

An Extended Framework Of Privacy-Preserving Computation With Flexible Access Control, Wenxiu Ding, Rui Hu, Zheng Yan, Xinren Qian, Robert H. Deng, Laurence T. Yang, Mianxiong Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing offers various services based on outsourced data by utilizing its huge volume of resources and great computation capability. However, it also makes users lose full control over their data. To avoid the leakage of user data privacy, encrypted data are preferred to be uploaded and stored in the cloud, which unfortunately complicates data analysis and access control. In particular, few existing works consider the fine-grained access control over the computational results from ciphertexts. Though our previous work proposed a framework to support several basic computations (such as addition, multiplication and comparison) with flexible access control, privacy-preserving division calculations …

A Fully Distributed Hierarchical Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme, Ali Mohammad, Javad Mohajeri, Ximeng Liu, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of cloud computing, many enterprises have been interested in outsourcing their data to cloud servers to decrease IT costs and rise capabilities of provided services. To afford confidentiality and fine-grained data access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE) was proposed and used in several cloud storage systems. However, scalability and flexibility in key delegation and user revocation mechanisms are primary issues in ABE systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a fully distributed revocable ciphertext-policy hierarchical ABE (FDR-CP-HABE) and design the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. Our scheme offers a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key …

Identity-Based Encryption Transformation For Flexible Sharing Of Encrypted Data In Public Cloud, Robert H. Deng, Zheng Qin, Qianhong Wu, Zhenyu Guan, Robert H. Deng, Yujue Wang, Yunya Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of cloud computing, an increasing number of individuals and organizations are sharing data in the public cloud. To protect the privacy of data stored in the cloud, a data owner usually encrypts his data in such a way that certain designated data users can decrypt the data. This raises a serious problem when the encrypted data needs to be shared to more people beyond those initially designated by the data owner. To address this problem, we introduce and formalize an identity-based encryption transformation (IBET) model by seamlessly integrating two well-established encryption mechanisms, namely identity-basedencryption (IBE) and …

Privacy-Preserving Data Processing With Flexible Access Control, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing provides an efficient and convenient platform for cloud users to store, process and control their data. Cloud overcomes the bottlenecks of resource-constrained user devices and greatly releases their storage and computing burdens. However, due to the lack of full trust in cloud service providers, the cloud users generally prefer to outsource their sensitive data in an encrypted form, which, however, seriously complicates data processing, analysis, as well as access control. Homomorphic encryption (HE) as a single key system cannot flexibly control data sharing and access after encrypted data processing. How to realize various computations over encrypted data in …

An Assessment Of Practical Hands-On Lab Activities In Network Security Management, Te-Shun Chou, Nicholas Hempenius

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

With the advancement in technology over the past decades, networks have become increasingly large and complex. In the meantime, cyberattacks have become highly sophisticated making them difficult to detect. These changes make securing a network more challenging than ever before. Hence, it is critical to prepare a comprehensive guide of network security management for students assist them in becoming network security professionals.

The objective of this paper is to introduce a variety of techniques related to network security management, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), event management, security policy management, risk management, access control, and remote monitoring. With the …

Lightweight Sharable And Traceable Secure Mobile Health System, Yang Yang, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile health (mHealth) has emerged as a new patient centric model which allows real-time collection of patient data via wearable sensors, aggregation and encryption of these data at mobile devices, and then uploading the encrypted data to the cloud for storage and access by healthcare staff and researchers. However, efficient and scalable sharing of encrypted data has been a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Sharable and Traceable (LiST) secure mobile health system in which patient data are encrypted end-to-end from a patient’s mobile device to data users. LiST enables efficient keyword search and finegrained access …

Server-Aided Revocable Attribute-Based Encryption For Cloud Computing Services, Hui Cui, Tsz Hon Yuen, Robert H. Deng, Guilin Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been regarded as a promising solution in cloud computing services to enable scalable access control without compromising the security. Despite of the advantages, efficient user revocation has been a challenge in ABE. One suggestion for user revocation is using the binary tree in the key generation phase of an ABE scheme, which enables a trusted key generation center to periodically distribute the key update information to all nonrevoked users over a public channel. This revocation approach reduces the size of key updates from linear to logarithmic in the number of users. But it requires each user …

Computing Maximum And Minimum With Privacy Preservation And Flexible Access Control, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Xinren Qian, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the fast development of Internet of Things, huge volume of data is being collected from various sensors and devices, aggregated at gateways, and processed in the cloud. Due to privacy concern, data are usually encrypted before being outsourced to the cloud. However, encryption seriously impedes both computation over the data and sharing of the computation results. Computing maximum and minimum among a data set are two of the most basic operations in machine learning and data mining algorithms. In this paper, we study how to compute maximum and minimum over encrypted data and control the access to the computation …

Lightweight Fine-Grained Search Over Encrypted Data In Fog Computing, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Jian Weng, Hongwei Li, Hui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fog computing, as an extension of cloud computing, outsources the encrypted sensitive data to multiple fog nodes on the edge of Internet of Things (IoT) to decrease latency and network congestion. However, the existing ciphertext retrieval schemes rarely focus on the fog computing environment and most of them still impose high computational and storage overhead on resource-limited end users. In this paper, we first present a Lightweight Fine-Grained ciphertexts Search (LFGS) system in fog computing by extending Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and Searchable Encryption (SE) technologies, which can achieve fine-grained access control and keyword search simultaneously. The LFGS can shift …

Integration Of Biometrics And Steganography: A Comprehensive Review, Ian Mcateer, Ahmed Ibrahim, Guanglou Zhang, Wencheng Yang, Craig Valli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The use of an individual’s biometric characteristics to advance authentication and verification technology beyond the current dependence on passwords has been the subject of extensive research for some time. Since such physical characteristics cannot be hidden from the public eye, the security of digitised biometric data becomes paramount to avoid the risk of substitution or replay attacks. Biometric systems have readily embraced cryptography to encrypt the data extracted from the scanning of anatomical features. Significant amounts of research have also gone into the integration of biometrics with steganography to add a layer to the defence-in-depth security model, and this has …

Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Keyword Search In Shared Multi-Owner Setting, Yibin Miao, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Robert H. Deng, Jjguo Li, Hongwei Li, Jianfeng Ma

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Keyword Search (CP-ABKS) facilitates search queries and supports fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. However, prior CP-ABKS schemes were designed to support unshared multi-owner setting, and cannot be directly applied in the shared multi-owner setting (where each record is accredited by a fixed number of data owners), without incurring high computational and storage costs. In addition, due to privacy concerns on access policies, most existing schemes are vulnerable to off-line keyword-guessing attacks if the keyword space is of polynomial size. Furthermore, it is difficult to identify malicious users who leak the secret keys when more …

Secure Smart Health With Privacy-Aware Aggregate Authentication And Access Control In Internet Of Things, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Gang Han, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid technological advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless communication and cloud computing, smart health is expected to enable comprehensive and qualified healthcare services. It is important to ensure security and efficiency in smart health. However, existing smart health systems still have challenging issues, such as aggregate authentication, fine-grained access control and privacy protection. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing SSH, a Secure Smart Health system with privacy-aware aggregate authentication and access control in IoT. In SSH, privacy-aware aggregate authentication is enabled by an anonymous certificateless aggregate signature scheme, in which users' identity information …

Lightweight Break-Glass Access Control System For Healthcare Internet-Of-Things, Yang Yang, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare Internet-of-things (IoT) has been proposed as a promising means to greatly improve the efficiency and quality of patient care. Medical devices in healthcare IoT measure patients' vital signs and aggregate these data into medical files which are uploaded to the cloud for storage and accessed by healthcare workers. To protect patients' privacy, encryption is normally used to enforce access control of medical files by authorized parties while preventing unauthorized access. In healthcare, it is crucial to enable timely access of patient files in emergency situations. In this paper, we propose a lightweight break-glass access control (LiBAC) system that supports …

Security And Privacy In Smart Health: Efficient Policy-Hiding Attribute-Based Access Control, Yinghui Zhang, Dong Zheng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies, smart health (s-health) is expected to significantly improve the quality of health care. However, data security and user privacy concerns in s-health have not been adequately addressed. As a well-received solution to realize fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has the potential to ensure data security in s-health. Nevertheless, direct adoption of the traditional CP-ABE in s-health suffers two flaws. For one thing, access policies are in cleartext form and reveal sensitive health-related information in the encrypted s-health records (SHRs). For another, it usually supports …

An Efficient And Expressive Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme With Partially Hidden Access Structures, Revisited, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Junzuo Lai, Xun Yi, Surya Nepal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has been regarded as one of the promising solutions to protect data security and privacy in cloud storage services. In a CP-ABE scheme, an access structure is included in the ciphertext, which, however, may leak sensitive information about the underlying plaintext and the privileged recipients in that anyone who sees the ciphertext is able to learn the attributes of the privileged recipients from the associated access structure. In order to address this issue, CP-ABE with partially hidden access structures was introduced where each attribute is divided into an attribute name and an attribute value and the …

Sclib: A Practical And Lightweight Defense Against Component Hijacking In Android Applications, Daoyuan Wu, Yao Cheng, Debin Gao, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-app collaboration via inter-component communication is a fundamental mechanism on Android. Although it brings the benefits such as functionality reuse and data sharing, a threat called component hijacking is also introduced. By hijacking a vulnerable component in victim apps, an attack app can escalate its privilege for operations originally prohibited. Many prior studies have been performed to understand and mitigate this issue, but no defense is being deployed in the wild, largely due to the deployment difficulties and performance concerns. In this paper we present SCLib, a secure component library that performs in-app mandatory access control on behalf of app …

An Efficient And Expressive Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme With Partially Hidden Access Structures, Revisited, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Junzuo Lai, Xun Yi, Surya Nepal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has been regarded as one of the promising solutions to protect data security and privacy in cloud storage services. In a CP-ABE scheme, an access structure is included in the ciphertext, which, however, may leak sensitive information about the underlying plaintext and the privileged recipients in that anyone who sees the ciphertext is able to learn the attributes of the privileged recipients from the associated access structure. In order to address this issue, CP-ABE with partially hidden access structures was introduced where each attribute is divided into an attribute name and an attribute value and the …

Attribute-Based Cloud Storage With Secure Provenance Over Encrypted Data, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To securely and conveniently enjoy the benefits of cloud storage, it is desirable to design a cloud data storage system which protects data privacy from storage servers through encryption, allows fine-grained access control such that data providers can expressively specify who are eligible to access the encrypted data, enables dynamic user management such that the total number of data users is unbounded and user revocation can be carried out conveniently, supports data provider anonymity and traceability such that a data provider’s identity is not disclosed to data users in normal circumstances but can be traced by a trusted authority if …

Secure Fine-Grained Access Control And Data Sharing For Dynamic Groups In The Cloud, Shengmin Xu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm that enables users to store their data in a cloud server to enjoy scalable and on-demand services. Nevertheless, it also brings many security issues, since cloud service providers (CSPs) are not in the same trusted domain as users. To protect data privacy against untrusted CSPs, existing solutions apply cryptographic methods (e.g., encryption mechanisms) and provide decryption keys only to authorized users. However, sharing cloud data among authorized users at a fine-grained level is still a challenging issue, especially when dealing with dynamic user groups. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient …