Information Security Commons^™

Security, Computation And Data Issues In Clouds, Lifeng Li

Student Theses and Dissertations

Recently, Cloud has become quite attractive due to its elasticity, availability, and scalability. However, the technologies such as virtualization build up Cloud appear like a double-edged sword because of the expansion on attacking surfaces to entire hardware-software stack. Moreover, homogeneous computing in Cloud severely limits the computational power it could potentially provide. As a result, it is strongly desired to have new and comprehensive solutions to take in all benefits from Cloud and suppress backsides. This thesis proposes three new solutions to address security, computation and data issues in Cloud. Firstly, a GPU MapReduce framework specifically aims at improving performance …

Message-Layer Encryption In Ricochet, Liam B. Kirsh

Computer Science and Software Engineering

My intention for this project was to implement encryption and authentication on Ricochet's message layer. This provides two major benefits. The first is a higher level of encryption in the event that a flaw is found in the existing channel-layer encryption, or if increases in computing power make attacks on that encryption feasible. Tor is used by the military, journalists, law enforcement, researchers, and activists, whose communications may be interesting to state-level adversaries and criminal organizations with access to great amount of computing resources. Additionally, message-layer encryption would allow users to specify relay nodes that can temporarily store messages and …

Breathprint: Breathing Acoustics-Based User Authentication, Jagmohan Chauhan, Yining Hu, Suranga Sereviratne, Archan Misra, Aruna Sereviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose BreathPrint, a new behavioural biometric signature based on audio features derived from an individual's commonplace breathing gestures. Specifically, BreathPrint uses the audio signatures associated with the three individual gestures: sniff, normal, and deep breathing, which are sufficiently different across individuals. Using these three breathing gestures, we develop the processing pipeline that identifies users via the microphone sensor on smartphones and wearable devices. In BreathPrint, a user performs breathing gestures while holding the device very close to their nose. Using off-the-shelf hardware, we experimentally evaluate the BreathPrint prototype with 10 users, observed over seven days. We show that users …

What You See Is Not What You Get: Leakage-Resilient Password Entry Schemes For Smart Glasses, Yan Li, Yao Cheng, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart glasses are becoming popular for users to access various services such as email. To protect these services, password-based user authentication is widely used. Unfortunately, the password based user authentication has inherent vulnerability against password leakage. Many efforts have been put on designing leakage resilient password entry schemes on PCs and mobile phones with traditional input equipment including keyboards and touch screens. However, such traditional input equipment is not available on smart glasses. Existing password entry on smart glasses relies on additional PCs or mobile devices. Such solutions force users to switch between different systems, which causes interrupted experience and …

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication And Key Agreement Protocol For Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks, Qi Jiang, Sherali Zeadally, Jianfeng Ma, Debiao He

Information Science Faculty Publications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their …

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.

Trustworthy Authentication On Scalable Surveillance Video With Background Model Support, Zhuo Wei, Zheng Yan, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) codestreams, which consist of a single base layer and multiple enhancement layers, are designed for quality, spatial, and temporal scalabilities. They can be transmitted over networks of different bandwidths and seamlessly accessed by various terminal devices. With a huge amount of video surveillance and various devices becoming an integral part of the security infrastructure, the industry is currently starting to use the SVC standard to process digital video for surveillance applications such that clients with different network bandwidth connections and display capabilities can seamlessly access various SVC surveillance (sub)codestreams. In order to guarantee the trustworthiness and …

Towards Secure Online Distribution Of Multimedia Codestreams, Swee Won Lo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Multimedia codestreams distributed through open and insecure networks are subjected to attacks such as malicious content tampering and unauthorized accesses. This dissertation first addresses the issue of authentication as a mean to integrity - protect multimedia codestreams against malicious tampering. Two cryptographic-based authentication schemes are proposed to authenticate generic scalable video codestreams with a multi-layered structure. The first scheme combines the salient features of hash-chaining and double error correction coding to achieve loss resiliency with low communication overhead and proxy-transparency. The second scheme further improves computation cost by replacing digital signature with a hash-based message authentication code to achieve packet-level …

New Secure Solutions For Privacy And Access Control In Health Information Exchange, Ahmed Fouad Shedeed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In the current digital age, almost every healthcare organization (HCO) has moved from storing patient health records on paper to storing them electronically. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the ability to share (or transfer) patients’ health information between different HCOs while maintaining national security standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Over the past few years, research has been conducted to develop privacy and access control frameworks for HIE systems. The goal of this dissertation is to address the privacy and access control concerns by building practical and efficient HIE frameworks to secure the sharing …

An Experimental Study On The Role Of Password Strength And Cognitive Load On Employee Productivity, Stephen Mujeye

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of information systems (IS) over the past decades has increased the demand for system authentication. While the majority of system authentications are password-based, it is well documented that passwords have significant limitations. To address this issue, companies have been placing increased requirements on the user to ensure their passwords are more complex and consequently stronger. In addition to meeting a certain complexity threshold, the password must also be changed on a regular basis. As the cognitive load increases on the employees using complex passwords and changing them often, they may have difficulty recalling their passwords. As such, the …

Analysis Of Real-World Passwords For Social Media Sites, Mark J. Quinn

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Textual passwords have dominated all other entity authentication mechanisms since they were introduced in the early 1960’s. Despite an inherent weakness against social engineering, keylogging, shoulder surfing, dictionary, and brute-force attacks, password authentication continues to grow as the Internet expands. Existing research on password authentication proves that dictionary attacks are successful because users make poor choices when creating passwords. To make passwords easier to remember, users select character strings that are shorter in length and contain memorable content, like personal identity information, common words found in a dictionary, backward spellings of common words, recognizable sequences, and easily guessed mnemonic phrases. …

A Dynamic Behavioral Biometric Approach To Authenticate Users Employing Their Fingers To Interact With Touchscreen Devices, Arturo Ponce

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The use of mobile devices has extended to all areas of human life and has changed the way people work and socialize. Mobile devices are susceptible to getting lost, stolen, or compromised. Several approaches have been adopted to protect the information stored on these devices. One of these approaches is user authentication. The two most popular methods of user authentication are knowledge based and token based methods but they present different kinds of problems.

Biometric authentication methods have emerged in recent years as a way to deal with these problems. They use an individual’s unique characteristics for identification and have …

Analysis And Improvement On A Biometric-Based Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards, Fengtong Wen, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a recent paper (BioMed Research International, 2013/491289), Khan et al. proposed an improved biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme with user anonymity. The scheme is believed to be secure against password guessing attack, user impersonation attack, server masquerading attack, and provide user anonymity, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we analyze the security of Khan et al.’s scheme, and demonstrate that their scheme doesn’t provide user anonymity. This also renders that their scheme is insecure against other attacks, such as off-line password guessing attack, user impersonation attacks. Subsequently, we propose a …

An Electroencephalogram (Eeg) Based Biometrics Investigation For Authentication: A Human-Computer Interaction (Hci) Approach, Ricardo J. Rodriguez

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Encephalogram (EEG) devices are one of the active research areas in human-computer interaction (HCI). They provide a unique brain-machine interface (BMI) for interacting with a growing number of applications. EEG devices interface with computational systems, including traditional desktop computers and more recently mobile devices. These computational systems can be targeted by malicious users. There is clearly an opportunity to leverage EEG capabilities for increasing the efficiency of access control mechanisms, which are the first line of defense in any computational system.

Access control mechanisms rely on a number of authenticators, including “what you know”, “what you have”, and “what you …

Towards Usable End-User Authentication, Mohammad Tanviruzzaman

Dissertations (1934 -)

Authentication is the process of validating the identity of an entity, e.g., a person, a machine, etc.; the entity usually provides a proof of identity in order to be authenticated. When the entity - to be authenticated - is a human, the authentication process is called end-user authentication. Making an end-user authentication usable entails making it easy for a human to obtain, manage, and input the proof of identity in a secure manner. In machine-to-machine authentication, both ends have comparable memory and computational power to securely carry out the authentication process using cryptographic primitives and protocols. On the contrary, as …

Technique For Authenticating H.264/Svc And Its Performance Evaluation Over Wireless Mobile Networks, Yifan Zhao, Swee Won Lo, Robert H. Deng, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a bit stream-based authentication scheme for H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is proposed. The proposed scheme seamlessly integrates cryptographic algorithms and Erasure Correction Codes (ECCs) to SVC video streams such that the authenti- cated streams are format compliant with the SVC specifications and preserve the three- dimensional scalability (i.e., spatial, quality and temporal) of the original streams. We implement our scheme on a smart phone and study its performance over a realistic bursty packet-lossy wireless mobile network. Our analysis and experimental results show that the scheme achieves very high verification rates with lower communication overhead and much smaller …

Keystroke Biometrics: The User Perspective, Chee Meng Tey, Payas Gupta, Kartik Muralidaran, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Usability is an important aspect of security, because poor usability motivates users to find shortcuts that bypass the system. Existing studies on keystroke biometrics evaluate the usability issue in terms of the average false rejection rate (FRR). We show in this paper that such an approach underestimates the user impact in two ways. First, the FRR of keystroke biometrics changes for the worse under a range of common conditions such as background music, exercise and even game playing. In a user study involving 111 participants, the average penalties (increases) in FRR are 0.0360 and 0.0498, respectively, for two different classifiers. …

Authentication And Authorisation In Entrusted Unions, Ayed F. Dhouha, Jan Camenisch, Tanya Ignatenko, Michael N. Johnstone, Paul Koster, Brigitta Lange, Milan Petkovic, Dieter Sommer, John Zic

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two …

Evidentiary Power And Propriety Of Digital Identifiers And The Impact On Privacy Rights In The United States, Michael Losavio, Deborah Keeling

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Media and network systems capture and store data about electronic activity in new, sometimes unprecedented ways; computational systems make for new means of analysis and knowledge development. These new forms offer new, powerful tactical tools for investigations of electronic malfeasance under traditional legal regulation of state power, particular that of Fourth Amendment limitations on police searches and seizures under the U.S. Constitution. But autonomy, identity and authenticity concerns with electronic data raise issues of public policy, privacy and proper police oversight of civil society. We examine those issues and their implications for digital and computational forensics

A Conceptual Model For Federated Authentication In The Cloud, Abdulwahid Al Abdulwahid, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, Ingo Stengel

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Authentication is a key security control for any computing system, whether that is a PC, server, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. However, authentication is traditionally poorly served, with existing implementations falling foul of a variety of weaknesses. Passwords are poorly selected, reused and shared (to name but a few). Research has suggested novel approaches to authentication such as transparent authentication and cooperative and distributed authentication. However, these technologies merely focus upon individual platforms rather than providing a universal and federated authentication approach that can be used across technologies and services. The advent of cloud computing, its universal connectivity, scalability and …

A Secure And Effective Anonymous User Authentication Scheme For Roaming Service In Global Mobility Networks, Fengtong Wen, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In global mobility networks, anonymous user authentication is an essential task for enabling roaming service. In a recent paper, Jiang et al. proposed a smart card based anonymous user authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. This scheme can protect user privacy and is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of network attacks, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we analyze the security of Jiang et al.’s scheme, and show that the scheme is in fact insecure against the stolen-verifier attack and replay attack. Then, we …

Technique For Authenticating H.264/Svc Streams In Surveillance Applications, Wei Zhuo, Robert H. Deng, Jialie Shen, Yongdong Wu, Xuhua Ding, Swee Won Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Surveillance codestreams coded by H.264/SVC (scalable video coding), which consists of one base layer and one or more enhancement layers, supply flexible and various quality, resolution, and temporal (sub)codestreams such that clients with different network bandwidth and terminal devices can seamlessly access them. In this paper, we present a robust authentication scheme for them in order to insure the integrity of SVC surveillance codestreams, named AUSSC (Authenticating SVC Surveillance Codestreams). AUSSC exploits cryptographic-based authentication for base layer and content-based authentication for enhancement layers. For content-based authentication, AUSSC extracts full features from the first frame of each GOP (group of picture) …

Exploiting Human Factors In User Authentication, Payas Gupta

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Our overarching issue in security is the human factor – and dealing with it is perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face today. Human factor is often described as the weakest part of a security system and users are often described as the weakest link in the security chain. In this thesis, we focus on two problems which are caused by human factors in user authentication and propose respective solutions. a) Secrecy information inference attack – publicly available information can be used to infer some secrecy information about the user. b) Coercion attack – where an attacker forces a …

An Improved Authentication Scheme For H.264/Svc And Its Performance Evaluation Over Non-Stationary Wireless Mobile Networks, Yifan Zhao, Swee-Won Lo, Robert H. Deng, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a bit stream-based authentication scheme for H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is proposed. The proposed scheme seamlessly integrates cryptographic algorithms and erasure correction codes (ECCs) to SVC video streams such that the authenticated streams are format compliant with the SVC specifications and preserve the three dimensional scalability (i. e., spatial, quality and temporal) of the original streams. We implement our scheme on a smart phone and study its performance over a realistic bursty packet-lossy wireless mobile network. Our analysis and experimental results show that the scheme achieves very high verification rates with lower communication overhead and much smaller …

Coercion Resistance In Authentication Responsibility Shifting, Payas Gupta, Xuhua Ding, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Responsibility shifting, a popular solution used in the event of failure of primary authentication where a human helper is involved in regaining access, is vulnerable to coercion attacks. In this work, we report our user study which investigates the helper’s emotional status when being coerced to assist in an attack. Results show that the coercion causes involuntary skin conductance fluctuation on the helper, which indicates that he/she is nervous and stressed. This response can be used to strengthen the security of the authentication system by providing coercion resistance.

Cryptanalysis Of Hsiang-Shih's Authentication Scheme For Multi-Server Architecture, Kuo-Hui Yeh, Nai-Wei Lo, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

From user point of view, password-based remote user authentication technique is one of the most convenient and easy-to-use mechanisms to provide necessary security on system access. As the number of computer crimes in modern cyberspace has increased dramatically, the robustness of password-based authentication schemes has been investigated by industries and organizations in recent years. In this paper, a well-designed password-based authentication protocol for multi-server communication environment, introduced by Hsiang and Shih, is evaluated. Our security analysis indicates that their scheme is insecure against session key disclosure, server spoofing attack, and replay attack and behavior denial.

A Preliminary Investigation Of Distributed And Cooperative User Authentication, C G. Hocking, S M. Furnell, N L. Clarke, P L. Reynolds

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Smartphones and other highly mobile yet sophisticated technologies are rapidly spreading through society and increasingly finding their way into pockets and handbags. As reliance upon these intensifies and familiarity grows, human nature dictates that more and more personal details and information is now to be found upon such devices. The need to secure and protect this valuable and desirable information is becoming ever more prevalent. Building upon previous work which proposed a novel approach to user authentication, an Authentication Aura, this paper investigates the latent security potential contained in surrounding devices in everyday life. An experiment has been undertaken to …

Vulnerability Analysis Of Rfid Protocols For Tag Ownership Transfer, Pedro Peris-Lopez, Julio Hernandez-Castro, Juan Tapiador, Tieyan Li, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In RFIDSec’08, Song proposed an ownership transfer scheme, which consists of an ownership transfer protocol and a secret update protocol [7]. The ownership transfer protocol is completely based on a mutual authentication protocol proposed in WiSec’08 [8]. In Rizomiliotis et al. (2009) [6], van Deursen and Radomirovic (2008), the first weaknesses to be identified (tag and server impersonation) were addressed and this paper completes the consideration of them all. We find that the mutual authentication protocol, and therefore the ownership transfer protocol, possesses certain weaknesses related to most of the security properties initially required in protocol design: tag information leakage, …

Strong Authentication For Web Services Using Smartcards, D S. Stienne, Nathan Clarke, Paul Reynolds

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The popularity of the Internet and the variety of services it provides has been immense. Unfortunately, many of these services require the user to register and subsequently login to the system in order to access them. This has resulted in the user having to remember a multitude of username and password combinations in order to use the service securely. However, literature has clearly demonstrated this is not an effective approach, as users will frequently choose simple passwords, write them down, share them or use the same password for multiple systems. This paper proposes a novel concept where Internet users authenticate …

On The Untraceability Of Anonymous Rfid Authentication Protocol With Constant Key-Lookup, Bing Liang, Yingjiu Li, Tieyan Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In ASIACCS'08, Burmester, Medeiros and Motta proposed an anonymous RFID authentication protocol (BMM protocol [2]) that preserves the security and privacy properties, and achieves better scalability compared with other contemporary approaches. We analyze BMM protocol and find that some of security properties (especial untraceability) are not fulfilled as originally claimed. We consider a subtle attack, in which an adversary can manipulate the messages transmitted between a tag and a reader for several continuous protocol runs, and can successfully trace the tag after these interactions. Our attack works under a weak adversary model, in which an adversary can eavesdrop, intercept and …