Information Security Commons^™

Vpsearch: Achieving Verifiability For Privacy-Preserving Multi-Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although cloud computing offers elastic computation and storage resources, it poses challenges on verifiability of computations and data privacy. In this work we investigate verifiability for privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over outsourced documents. As the cloud server may return incorrect results due to system faults or incentive to reduce computation cost, it is critical to offer verifiability of search results and privacy protection for outsourced data at the same time. To fulfill these requirements, we design aVerifiablePrivacy-preserving keywordSearch scheme, called VPSearch, by integrating an adapted homomorphic MAC technique with a privacy-preserving multi-keyword search scheme. The proposed scheme enables the client to …

A Lightweight Cloud Sharing Phr System With Access Policy Updating, Zuobin Ying, Wenjie Jang, Shuanlong Cao, Ximeng Liu, Jie Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid development of smart wearable devices makes personal health management feasible, which also stimulates the evolution of personal health records (PHRs). However, PHRs face many security challenges ever since it has been created. Besides, the complicated policy adjusting operation makes the PHRs stored in the cloud not so easy to use. In this paper, we propose a lightweight PHRs system on the basis of attribute-based encryption with policy updating. To update an outsourced ciphertext PHRs in the cloud, PHRs owners only need to generate an updating key, then upload it to the cloud server instead of retrieving the entire …

Rationality And Efficient Verifiable Computation, Matteo Campanelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study protocols for delegating computation in a model where one of the parties is rational. In our model, a delegator outsources the computation of a function f on input x to a worker, who receives a (possibly monetary) reward. Our goal is to design very efficient delegation schemes where a worker is economically incentivized to provide the correct result f(x). In this work we strive for not relying on cryptographic assumptions, in particular our results do not require the existence of one-way functions.

We provide several results within the framework of rational proofs introduced by Azar …

Secure And Efficient Outsourcing Of Large-Scale Overdetermined Systems Of Linear Equations, Shiran Pan, Wen-Tao Zhu, Qiongxiao Wang, Bing Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address overdetermined systems of linear equations, where the number of unknowns is smaller than the number of equations so that only approximate solutions exist instead of exact solutions. Such systems are prevalent in many areas of science and engineering, and finding the optimal solutions is mathematically known as the linear least squares (LLS) problem. Real-world overdetermined systems are often large-scale and computationally expensive to solve. Consequently, we are interested in connecting the LLS problem with cloud computing, where a resource-constrained client outsources the problem to a powerful but untrusted cloud. Among several security considerations is that the input of …

Privacy-Preserving Mining Of Association Rule On Outsourced Cloud Data From Multiple Parties, Lin Liu, Jinshu Su, Rongmao Chen, Ximeng Liu, Xiaofeng Wang, Shuhui Chen, Ho-Fung Fung Leung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It has been widely recognized as a challenge to carry out data analysis and meanwhile preserve its privacy in the cloud. In this work, we mainly focus on a well-known data analysis approach namely association rule mining. We found that the data privacy in this mining approach have not been well considered so far. To address this problem, we propose a scheme for privacy-preserving association rule mining on outsourced cloud data which are uploaded from multiple parties in a twin-cloud architecture. In particular, we mainly consider the scenario where the data owners and miners have different encryption keys that are …

Tkse: Trustworthy Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data With Two-Side Verifiability Via Blockchain, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Jiangang Shu, Kan Yang, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a very attractive computing paradigm, cloud computing makes it possible for resource-constrained users to enjoy cost-effective and flexible resources of diversity. Considering the untrustworthiness of cloud servers and the data privacy of users, it is necessary to encrypt the data before outsourcing it to the cloud. However, the form of encrypted storage also poses a series of problems, such as: How can users search over the outsourced data? How to realize user-side verifiability of search results to resist malicious cloud servers? How to enable server-side verifiability of outsourced data to check malicious data owners? How to achieve payment fairness …

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 …

Survey Of Randomization Defenses On Cloud Computing, Jianming Fu, Yan Lin, Xiuwen Liu, Xu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing has changed the processing mode on resources of individuals and industries by providing computing and storage services to users. However, existing defenses on cloud, such as virtual machine monitoring and integrity detection, cannot counter against attacks result from the homogeneity and vulnerability of services effectively. In this paper, we have investigated the threats on cloud computing platform from the perspective of cloud service, service interface and network interface, such as code reuse attack, side channel attack and SQL injection. Code reuse attack chains code snippets (gadgets) located in binaries to bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP). Side channel attack …

Efficient And Expressive Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data In The Cloud, Hui Cui, Zhiguo Wan, Deng, Robert H., Guilin Wang, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption allows a cloud server to conduct keyword search over encrypted data on behalf of the data users without learning the underlying plaintexts. However, most existing searchable encryption schemes only support single or conjunctive keyword search, while a few other schemes that are able to perform expressive keyword search are computationally inefficient since they are built from bilinear pairings over the composite-order groups. In this paper, we propose an expressive public-key searchable encryption scheme in the prime-order groups, which allows keyword search policies (i.e., predicates, access structures) to be expressed in conjunctive, disjunctive or any monotonic Boolean formulas and …

Doas: Efficient Data Owner Authorized Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Zhiquan Liu, Junwei Zhang, Fushan Wei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data outsourcing service can shift the local data storage and maintenance to cloud service provider (CSP) to ease the burden from data owner, but it brings the data security threats as CSP is always considered to honest-but-curious. Therefore, searchable encryption (SE) technique which allows cloud clients (including data owner and data user) to securely search over ciphertext through keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest is of prime importance. However, in practice, data user’s access permission always dynamically varies with data owner’s preferences. Moreover, existing SE schemes which are based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) incur heavy computational burden through attribution …

A Survey Of Security And Privacy In Mobile Cloud Computing, Bhuvaneswari Rayapuri

Masters Theses

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology that provides shared processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand. On the other hand, Mobile Computing allows transmission of data, voice and video. From these two there emerges a new concept Mobile Cloud Computing which not only overcomes the problems of Mobile Computing but also integrates Cloud Computing into Mobile Environments to overcome obstacles related to Performance, Security and Environment. This paper also provides a decent description on Security and Privacy, its related problems, threats and challenges. This paper first provides details on survey of Mobile Cloud Computing, then it …

An Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Biometric Identification Scheme In Cloud Computing, Liehuang Zhu, Chuan Zhang, Chang Xu, Ximeng Liu, Cheng Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Biometric identification has become increasingly popular in recent years.With the development of cloud computing, database owners are motivated to outsource the large size of biometric data and identification tasks to the cloud to get rid of the expensive storage and computation costs, which, however, brings potential threats to users’ privacy. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving biometric identification outsourcing scheme. Specifically, the biometric: To execute a biometric identification, the database owner encrypts the query data and submits it to the cloud. The cloud performs identification operations over the encrypted database and returns the result to the database …

Hybrid Privacy-Preserving Clinical Decision Support System In Fog-Cloud Computing, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Yang Yang, Ngoc Hieu Tran, Shangping Zhong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for hybrid privacy-preserving clinical decision support system in fog cloud computing, called HPCS. In HPCS, a fog server uses a lightweight data mining method to securely monitor patients' health condition in real-time. The newly detected abnormal symptoms can be further sent to the cloud server for high-accuracy prediction in a privacy-preserving way. Specifically, for the fog servers, we design a new secure outsourced inner-product protocol for achieving secure lightweight single-layer neural network. Also, a privacy-preserving piecewise polynomial calculation protocol allows cloud server to securely perform any activation functions in multiple-layer neural network. Moreover, …

A Lightweight Policy Preserving Ehr Sharing Scheme In The Cloud, Zuobin Ying, Lu Wei, Qi Li, Ximeng Liu, Jie Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a digital health documentary. It contains not only the health-related records but also the personal sensitive information. Therefore, how to reliably share EHR through the cloud is a challenging issue. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptography prototype, which can achieve fine-grained access control as well as one-to-many encryption. In CP-ABE, access policy is attached to the ciphertext, and however, the access policy is not protected, which will also cause some privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose a policy preserving EHR system on the basis of CP-ABE. Specifically, we designed an algorithm, which …

Multi-User Multi-Keyword Rank Search Over Encrypted Data In Arbitrary Language, Yang Yang, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-keyword rank searchable encryption (MRSE) returns the top-k results in response to a data user's request of multi-keyword search over encrypted data, and hence provides an efficient way for preserving data privacy in cloud storage systems while without loss of data usability. Many existing MRSE systems are constructed based on an algorithm which we term as k-nearest neighbor for searchable encryption (KNN-SE). Unfortunately, KNN-SE has a number of shortcomings which limit its practical applications. In this paper, we propose a new MRSE system which overcomes almost all the defects of the KNN-SE based MRSE systems. Specifically, our new system does …

Enforcing Database Security On Cloud Using A Trusted Third Party Based Model, Victor Fuentes Tello

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing offers a considerable number of advantages to clients and organizations that use several capabilities to store sensitive data, interact with applications, or use technology infrastructure to perform daily activities. The development of new models in cloud computing brings with it a series of elements that must be considered by companies, particularly when the sensitive data needs to be protected. There are some concerns related to security that need to be taken into consideration when a service provider manage and store the data in a location outside the company. In this research, a model that uses a trusted third …

Applying A Contingency Framework To Digital Forensic Processes In Cloud Based Acquisitions, Diane Barrett

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The change in business models to incorporate a wide variety of cloud computing environments has resulted in the escalation of computer crimes in the areas of security breaches and hacking. Methods to acquire evidence in a cloud computing environment are limited due to the complexity of the cloud environment. Since digital acquisition processes in cloud computing environments are still in the infancy stages, there have been no studies in the application of existing frameworks to this type environment based on traditional forensic processes.

This paper describes a qualitative study conducted to develop a robust contingency framework for deciding when to …

Flexible Wildcard Searchable Encryption System, Yang Yang, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Jian Weng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption is an important technique for public cloud storage service to provide user data confidentiality protection and at the same time allow users performing keyword search over their encrypted data. Previous schemes only deal with exact or fuzzy keyword search to correct some spelling errors. In this paper, we propose a new wildcard searchable encryption system to support wildcard keyword queries which has several highly desirable features. First, our system allows multiple keywords search in which any queried keyword may contain zero, one or two wildcards, and a wildcard may appear in any position of a keyword and represent …

Ten Simple Rules For Responsible Big Data Research, Matthew Zook, Solon Barocas, Danah Boyd, Kate Crawford, Emily Keller, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Alyssa Goodman, Rachelle Hollander, Barbara A. Koenig, Jacob Metcalf, Arvind Narayanan, Alondra Nelson, Frank Pasquale

Geography Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Literature-Based Analysis Of The Influences Of The New Forces On Isms: A Conceptual Framework, Zahir Al-Rashdi, Martin Dick, Ian Storey

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This paper presents an analysis that arose from a comprehensive review of the academic and professional literature of two areas – information security management systems (ISMS) and information resources – and their relationship with information security. It analyzes the role of ISMS in protecting an organization’s information environment and infrastructure. It has identified four key areas that strongly influence the safety of information resources: cloud computing; social media/networking; mobility; and information management/big data. Commonly referred to as ‘new forces’, these four aspects are all growing exponentially and are not easily controlled by IT. Another key finding of the paper is …

A System For Detecting Malicious Insider Data Theft In Iaas Cloud Environments, Jason Nikolai, Yong Wang

Research & Publications

The Cloud Security Alliance lists data theft and insider attacks as critical threats to cloud security. Our work puts forth an approach using a train, monitor, detect pattern which leverages a stateful rule based k-nearest neighbors anomaly detection technique and system state data to detect inside attacker data theft on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) nodes. We posit, instantiate, and demonstrate our approach using the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure where we observe a 100 percent detection rate for abnormal login events and data copies to outside systems.

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption With Partially Hidden Access Structure And Its Application To Privacy-Preserving Electronic Medical Record System In Cloud Environment, Lixian Liu, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of cloud computing, more and more sensitive data are uploaded to cloud by companies or individuals, which brings forth new challenges for outsourced data security and privacy. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) provides fine-grained access control of encrypted data in the cloud; in a CP-ABE scheme, an access structure, also referred to as ciphertext-policy, is sent along with a ciphertext explicitly, and anyone who obtains a ciphertext can know the access structure associated with the ciphertext. In certain applications, access structures contain very sensitive information and must be protected from everyone except the users whose private key attributes …

Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Calculation On Floating Point Numbers, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Wenxiu Ding, Rongxing Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving outsourced calculation on floating point numbers (POCF). Using POCF, a user can securely outsource the storing and processing of floating point numbers to a cloud server without compromising on the security of the (original) data and the computed results. In particular, we first present privacy-preserving integer processing protocols for common integer operations. We then present an approach to outsourcing floating point numbers for storage in a privacy-preserving way, and securely processing commonly used floating point number operations on-the-fly. We prove that the proposed POCF achieves the goal of floating point number …

Deduplication On Encrypted Big Data In Cloud, Zheng Yan, Wenxiu Ding, Xixun Yu, Haiqi Zhu, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing offers a new way of service provision by re-arranging various resources over the Internet. The most important and popular cloud service is data storage. In order to preserve the privacy of data holders, data are often stored in cloud in an encrypted form. However, encrypted data introduce new challenges for cloud data deduplication, which becomes crucial for big data storage and processing in cloud. Traditional deduplication schemes cannot work on encrypted data. Existing solutions of encrypted data deduplication suffer from security weakness. They cannot flexibly support data access control and revocation. Therefore, few of them can be readily …

Information-Theoretic Secure Outsourced Computation In Distributed Systems, Zhaohong Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Secure multi-party computation (secure MPC) has been established as the de facto paradigm for protecting privacy in distributed computation. One of the earliest secure MPC primitives is the Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) scheme. SSS has many advantages over other popular secure MPC primitives like garbled circuits (GC) -- it provides information-theoretic security guarantee, requires no complex long-integer operations, and often leads to more efficient protocols. Nonetheless, SSS receives less attention in the signal processing community because SSS requires a larger number of honest participants, making it prone to collusion attacks. In this dissertation, I propose an agent-based computing framework using …

Controlled Access To Cloud Resources For Mitigating Economic Denial Of Sustainability (Edos) Attacks, Zubair A. Baig, Sadiq M. Sait, Farid Binbeshr

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Cloud computing is a paradigm that provides scalable IT resources as a service over the Internet. Vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure have been readily exploited by the adversary class. Therefore, providing the desired level of assurance to all stakeholders through safeguarding data (sensitive or otherwise) which is stored in the cloud, is of utmost importance. In addition, protecting the cloud from adversarial attacks of diverse types and intents, cannot be understated. Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack is considered as one of the concerns that has stalled many organizations from migrating their operations and/or data to the cloud. This is …

Teaching Cybersecurity Using The Cloud, Khaled Salah, Mohammad Hammoud, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our …

Resilient And Trustworthy Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (Dddas) Services For Crisis Management Environments, Youakim Badr, Salim Hariti, Youssif Al-Nashif, Erik Blasch

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Future crisis management systems needresilient and trustworthy infrastructures to quickly develop reliable applications and processes, andensure end-to-end security, trust, and privacy. Due to the multiplicity and diversity of involved actors, volumes of data, and heterogeneity of shared information;crisis management systems tend to be highly vulnerable and subjectto unforeseen incidents. As a result, the dependability of crisis management systems can be at risk. This paper presents a cloud-based resilient and trustworthy infrastructure (known as rDaaS) to quickly develop secure crisis management systems. The rDaaS integrates the Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) paradigm into a service-oriented architecture over cloud technology and provides …

A Forensically-Enabled Iaas Cloud Computing Architecture, Saad Alqahtany, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, Christoph Reich

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Current cloud architectures do not support digital forensic investigators, nor comply with today’s digital forensics procedures largely due to the dynamic nature of the cloud. Whilst much research has focused upon identifying the problems that are introduced with a cloud-based system, to date there is a significant lack of research on adapting current digital forensic tools and techniques to a cloud environment. Data acquisition is the first and most important process within digital forensics – to ensure data integrity and admissibility. However, access to data and the control of resources in the cloud is still very much provider-dependent and complicated …

A State-Of-The-Art Review Of Cloud Forensics, Sameera Almulla, Youssef Iraqi, Andrew Jones

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cloud computing and digital forensics are emerging fields of technology. Unlike traditional digital forensics where the target environment can be almost completely isolated, acquired and can be under the investigators control; in cloud environments, the distribution of computation and storage poses unique and complex challenges to the investigators. Recently, the term “cloud forensics” has an increasing presence in the field of digital forensics. In this state-of-the-art review, we included the most recent research efforts that used “cloud forensics” as a keyword and then classify the literature into three dimensions: (1) survey-based, (2) technology-based and (3) forensics-procedural-based. We discuss widely accepted …