Information Security Commons^™

Zero Trust Architecture: Framework And Case Study, Cody Shepherd

Cyber Operations and Resilience Program Graduate Projects

The world and business are connected and a business does not exist today that does not have potentially thousands of connections to the Internet in addition to the thousands of connections to other various parts of its own infrastructure. That is the nature of the digital world we live in and there is no chance the number of those interconnections will reduce in the future. Protecting from the “outside” world with a perimeter solution might have been enough to reduce risk to an acceptable level in an organization 20 years ago, but today’s threats are sophisticated, persistent, abundant, and can …

Aligning The Transit Industry And Their Vendors In The Face Of Increasing Cyber Risk: Recommendations For Identifying And Addressing Cybersecurity Challenges, Scott Belcher, Terri Belcher, Kathryn Seckman, Brandon Thomas, Homayun Yaqub

Mineta Transportation Institute

Public transit agencies in the United States depend on external vendors to help deliver and maintain many essential services and to provide critical technologies, from ticket purchases to scheduling to email management. While the integration of new, advanced technologies into the public transit industry brings important advancements to U.S. critical transportation infrastructure, the application of digital technologies also brings with it a new assortment of digital risks. Transit agencies of all sizes are finding themselves subject to cyber incidents—most notably ransomware attacks—like those experienced by larger, more prominent companies and critical infrastructure providers. The findings in this report focus on …

Cybersecurity Of Critical Infrastructures: Challenges And Solutions, Leandros Maglaras, Helge Janicke, Mohamed Amine Ferrag

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

People’s lives are becoming more and more dependent on information and computer technology. This is accomplished by the enormous benefits that the ICT offers for everyday life. Digital technology creates an avenue for communication and networking, which is characterized by the exchange of data, some of which are considered sensitive or private. There have been many reports recently of data being hijacked or leaked, often for malicious purposes. Maintaining security and privacy of information and systems has become a herculean task. It is therefore imperative to understand how an individual’s or organization’s personal data can be protected. Moreover, critical infrastructures …

Actuator Cyberattack Handling Using Lyapunov-Based Economic Model Predictive Control, Keshav Kasturi Rangan, Henrique Oyama, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Cybersecurity has gained increasing interest as a consequence of the potential impacts of cyberattacks on profits and safety. While attacks can affect various components of a plant, prior work from our group has focused on the impact of cyberattacks on control components such as process sensors and actuators and the development of detection strategies for cybersecurity derived from control theory. In this work, we provide greater focus on actuator attacks; specifically, we extend a detection and control strategy previously applied for sensor attacks and based on an optimization-based control technique called Lyapunov-based economic model predictive control (LEMPC) to detect attacks …

Quantum Computing And Resilient Design Perspectives For Cybersecurity Of Feedback Systems, Keshav Kasturi Rangan, Jihan Abou Halloun, Henrique Oyama, Samantha Cherney, Ilham Azali Assoumani, Nazir Jairazbhoy, Helen Durand, Simon Ka Ng

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Cybersecurity of control systems is an important issue in next-generation manufac- turing that can impact both operational objectives (safety and performance) as well as process designs (via hazard analysis). Cyberattacks differ from faults in that they can be coordinated efforts to exploit system vulnerabilities to create otherwise unlikely hazard scenarios. Because coordination and targeted process manipulation can be characteristics of attacks, some of the tactics previously analyzed in our group from a control system cybersecurity perspective have incorporated randomness to attempt to thwart attacks. The underlying assumption for the generation of this randomness has been that it can be achieved …

Small Business Cybersecurity: A Loophole To Consumer Data, Matthew R. Espinosa

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Small businesses and small minority owned businesses are vital to our nation’s economy; therefore legislation, regulation, and policy has been created in order to assist them in overcoming their economic stability issues and ensure they continue to serve the communities that rely on them. However, there is not a focus on regulating nor assisting small businesses to ensure their cybersecurity standards are up to par despite them increasingly becoming a victim of cyberattacks that yield high consequences. The external oversight and assistance is necessary for small businesses due to their lack of knowledge in implementing effective cybersecurity policies, the fiscal …

Active Learning With Cybersecurity, Carole Shook

TFSC Publications and Presentations

A global campus grant was obtained in Spring 2020 to develop modules for Cybersecurity. This presentation encompasses the use of Cyberciege and case studies that require active learning of students.

Demonstration Of Cyberattacks And Mitigation Of Vulnerabilities In A Webserver Interface For A Cybersecure Power Router, Benjamin Allen

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cyberattacks are a threat to critical infrastructure, which must be secured against them to ensure continued operation. A defense-in-depth approach is necessary to secure all layers of a smart-grid system and contain the impact of any exploited vulnerabilities. In this undergraduate thesis a webserver interface for smart-grid devices communicating over Modbus TCP was developed and exposed to SQL Injection attacks and Cross-Site Scripting attacks. Analysis was performed on Supply-Chain attacks and a mitigation developed for attacks stemming from compromised Content Delivery Networks. All attempted attacks were unable to exploit vulnerabilities in the webserver due to its use of input sanitization …

Canary: An Automated Approach To Security Scanning And Remediation, David Wiles

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Modern software has a smaller attack surface today than in the past. Memory-safe languages, container runtimes, virtual machines, and a mature web stack all contribute to the relative safety of the web and software in general compared to years ago. Despite this, we still see high-profile bugs, hacks, and outages which affect major companies and widely-used technologies. The extensive work that has gone into hardening virtualization, containerization, and commonly used applications such as Nginx still depends on the end-user to configure correctly to prevent a compromised machine.

In this paper, I introduce a tool, which I call Canary, which can …

“Lasso The Moon? Is It Possible? What About Hack The Moon? Today’S International Framework For Activities On The Moon”, Diane M. Janosek, Armando Seay, Josa P. Natera

Military Cyber Affairs

The global interest in the moon and outer space continues to skyrocket. The current U.S. commercial investment in space is $350 billion annually, and it is expected to grow to $1 Trillion or more by 2040. The U.S. military investment in space defense and research likewise continues to grow, with the total investment amount remaining classified. With the frequent activity in space, as well as concerns about attacks to US space assets to and from space, the U.S, created the United States Space Command and its Space Force. With private space travel, nanosatellites, lunar exploration, and the proliferation of space …

Malware And Memory Forensics On M1 Macs, Charles E. Glass

LSU Master's Theses

As malware continues to evolve, infection mechanisms that can only be seen in memory are increasingly commonplace. These techniques evade traditional forensic analysis, requiring the use of memory forensics. Memory forensics allows for the recovery of historical data created by running malware, including information that it tries to hide. Memory analysis capabilities have lagged behind on Apple's new M1 architecture while the number of malicious programs only grows. To make matters worse, Apple has developed Rosetta 2, the translation layer for running x86_64 binaries on an M1 Mac. As a result, all malware compiled for Intel Macs is theoretically functional …

Deapsecure Computational Training For Cybersecurity: Third-Year Improvements And Impacts, Bahador Dodge, Jacob Strother, Rosby Asiamah, Karina Arcaute, Wirawan Purwanto, Masha Sosonkina, Hongyi Wu

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

The Data-Enabled Advanced Training Program for Cybersecurity Research and Education (DeapSECURE) was introduced in 2018 as a non-degree training consisting of six modules covering a broad range of cyberinfrastructure techniques, including high performance computing, big data, machine learning and advanced cryptography, aimed at reducing the gap between current cybersecurity curricula and requirements needed for advanced research and industrial projects. By its third year, DeapSECURE, like many other educational endeavors, experienced abrupt changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The training had to be retooled to adapt to fully online delivery. Hands-on activities were reformatted to accommodate self-paced learning. In this paper, …

Medical Devices And Cybersecurity, Hilary Finch

School of Cybersecurity Posters

I begin by looking at the role of cybersecurity in the medical world. The healthcare industry adopted information technology quite quickly. While the advancement was obviously beneficial and necessary to keep up with an ever-growing demand, the healthcare industry did not place any kind of pointed focus on the security of their IT department, or the sensitive information housed therein.

When rapid advancements of technology outpaced the gradual advancement of hospital cybersecurity, security concerns became a difficult issue to control. There is a serious need for more advancements in hospital security. Each interconnected medical device has its own unique security …

Security Posture: A Systematic Review Of Cyber Threats And Proactive Security, Amanda Jones

Senior Honors Theses

In the last decade, several high-profile cyber threats have occurred with global impact and devastating consequences. The tools, techniques, and procedures used to prevent cyber threats from occurring fall under the category of proactive security. Proactive security methodologies, however, vary among professionals where differing tactics have proved situationally effective. To determine the most effective tactics for preventing exploitation of vulnerabilities, the author examines the attack vector of three incidents from the last five years in a systematic review format: the WannaCry incident, the 2020 SolarWinds SUNBURST exploit, and the recently discovered Log4j vulnerability. From the three cases and existing literature, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Smart grid technologies are integral to society’s transition to sustainable energy sources, but they do not come without a cost. As the energy sector shifts away from a century’s reliance on fossil fuels and centralized generation, technology that actively monitors and controls every aspect of the power infrastructure has been widely adopted, resulting in a plethora of new vulnerabilities that have already wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure. Integrity attacks that feedback false data through industrial control systems, which result in possible catastrophic overcorrections and ensuing failures, have plagued grid infrastructure over the past several years. This threat is now at …

Password Managers: Secure Passwords The Easy Way, Alexander Master

CERIAS Technical Reports

Poor passwords are often the central problem identified when data breaches, ransomware attacks, and identity fraud cases occur. This Purdue Extension publication provides everyday users of Internet websites and computer systems with tools and strategies to protect their online accounts. Securing information access with password managers can be convenient and often free of cost, on a variety of devices and platforms. “Do’s and Don’ts” of password practices are highlighted, as well as the benefits of multi-factor authentication. The content is especially applicable for small businesses or non-profits, where employees often share access to systems or accounts.

The Impact Of A Gencyber Camp On In-Service Teachers’ Tpack, Kevin M. Thomas, Jessica Ivy, Kristin Cook, Robert R. Kelley

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a GenCyber camp curriculum on teachers’ technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK). The camp was designed to engage participants in developing the knowledge and skills to incorporate GenCyber Cybersecurity First Principles and GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts (GenCyber, 2019) into their curriculums. Participants (37 middle and high school teachers from a variety of disciplines) attended one of two weeklong camps held at a Midwestern liberal arts university. Using the TPACK Self-Reflection and TPACK Self-Assessment Surveys, pre- and post-camp data were collected from participants. Findings indicate that participants demonstrated an increase in …

Toward A Student-Ready Cybersecurity Program: Findings From A Survey Of Stem-Students, Lora Pitman, Brian K. Payne, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin, Lenora Thorbjornsen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As the number of available cybersecurity jobs continues to grow, colleges strive to offer to their cybersecurity students an environment which will make them sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce after graduation. This paper explores the academic and professional needs of STEM-students in various higher education institutions across Virginia and how cybersecurity programs can cater to these needs. It also seeks to propose an evidence-based approach for improving the existing cybersecurity programs so that they can become more inclusive and student-ready. A survey of 251 college students in four higher-education institutions in Virginia showed that while there are common patterns …

Cybersecurity Logging & Monitoring Security Program, Thai H. Nguyễn

School of Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Publications

With ubiquitous computing becoming pervasive in every aspect of societies around the world and the exponential rise in cyber-based attacks, cybersecurity teams within global organizations are spending a massive amount of human and financial capital on their logging and monitoring security programs. As a critical part of global organizational security risk management processes, it is important that log information is aggregated in a timely, accurate, and relevant manner. It is also important that global organizational security operations centers are properly monitoring and investigating the security use-case alerting based on their log data. In this paper, the author proposes a model …

C2 Microservices Api: Ch4rl3sch4l3m4gn3, Thai H. Nguyễn

School of Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Publications

In the 21^st century, cyber-based attackers such as advance persistent threats are leveraging bots in the form of botnets to conduct a plethora of cyber-attacks. While there are several social engineering techniques used to get targets to unknowingly download these bots, it is the command-and-control techniques advance persistent threats use to control their bots that is of critical interest to the author. In this research paper, the author aims to develop a command-and-control microservice application programming interface infrastructure to facilitate botnet command-and-control attack simulations. To achieve this the author will develop a simple bot skeletal framework, utilize the latest …

An Exploration On Apts In Biocybersecurity And Cyberbiosecurity, Xavier-Lewis Palmer, Lucas Potter, Saltuk Karahan

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Novel and complex digital threats that are increasingly interwoven with means and products of biology that can affect society. Much work in Biocybersecurity/Cyberbiosecurity (BCS/CBS) discuss vulnerabilities, but few deeply address malicious actor varieties as attacks at this intersection are new. The path to those attacks remains mostly theoretical, presenting considerable difficulty to accomplish in practical scenarios. In terms of advanced persistent threats (APTs) this of course needs to change as biomanufacturing facilities are at risk, considering Covid-19 and other potential pandemics. Further attacks are not out of reach and thus we must start to imagine how BCS APTs may appear. …

Zero Trust Architecture, Ahmed Abdullah Syed

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and IT organizations need to continue to modernize their approaches to cybersecurity in light of today's dynamic cyber threat environment. Cybersecurity professionals must adopt a zero-trust security model and the mindset needed to engineer and operate a system specifically designed to operate according to zero trust principles in order to ensure the security of sensitive data, systems, and services as enterprise networks become increasingly dispersed and complex.

Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences conducting cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) competition for cybersecurity enthusiast participants (inclusive of both tertiary students and working professionals) local and abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning and appreciation of cybersecurity concepts for our participants with little to no technical background can be challenging. Gamification methods such as capture the flag competition style is a popular form of cybersecurity education to help participants overcome this challenge and identify talents. Participants get to apply theoretical concepts in a controlled environment, solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting and gain hands-on active learning …

Collaborcrack: A Collaborative Password Cracking Solution For Windows Penetration Testing, Andrew Griess

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Cybersecurity professionals attempt to crack password hashes during penetration tests to determine if they are strong enough. A password hash is a way to encode a password securely. This paper describes a proof-of-concept program called CollaborCrack, a team-based password cracking solution. CollaborCrack addresses the issues of computational complexity, remote cracking security, duplication of work, and the cost associated with password cracking. To address computational complexity, CollaborCrack enables remote password cracking. Remote cracking requires additional safeguards, which CollaborCrack mitigates by storing sensitive information locally. To reduce the duplication of work, CollaborCrack provides a shared interface designed around collaboration and teamwork. CollaborCrack …