Information Security Commons^™

Secure Server-Aided Data Sharing Clique With Attestation, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng, Yong Ding, Qianhong Wu, Bo Qin, Kefeng Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the security issues in data sharing cliques via remote server. We present a public key re-encryption scheme with delegated equality test on ciphertexts (PRE-DET). The scheme allows users to share outsourced data on the server without performing decryption-then-encryption procedures, allows new users to dynamically join the clique, allows clique users to attest the message underlying a ciphertext, and enables the server to partition outsourced user data without any further help of users after being delegated. We introduce the PRE-DET framework, propose a concrete construction and formally prove its security against five types of adversaries regarding …

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 …

Interoperable Ads-B Confidentiality, Brandon C. Burfeind

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption …

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 …

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 …

Longitudinal Analysis With Modes Of Operation For Aes, Dana Geislinger, Cory Thigpen, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present an empirical evaluation of the randomness of the ciphertext blocks generated by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher in Counter (CTR) mode and in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode. Vulnerabilities have been found in the AES cipher that may lead to a reduction in the randomness of the generated ciphertext blocks that can result in a practical attack on the cipher. We evaluate the randomness of the AES ciphertext using the standard key length and NIST randomness tests. We evaluate the randomness through a longitudinal analysis on 200 billion ciphertext blocks using logistic regression and …

Securing Messaging Services Through Efficient Signcryption With Designated Equality Test, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng, Yong Ding, Qianhong Wu, Bo Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To address security and privacy issues in messaging services, we present a public key signcryption scheme with designated equality test on ciphertexts (PKS-DET) in this paper. The scheme enables a sender to simultaneously encrypt and sign (signcrypt) messages, and to designate a tester to perform equality test on ciphertexts, i.e., to determine whether two ciphertexts signcrypt the same underlying plaintext message. We introduce the PKS-DET framework, present a concrete construction and formally prove its security against three types of adversaries, representing two security requirements on message confidentiality against outsiders and the designated tester, respectively, and a requirement on message unforgeability …

Cyber Security- A New Secured Password Generation Algorithm With Graphical Authentication And Alphanumeric Passwords Along With Encryption, Akash Rao

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Graphical passwords are always considered as an alternative of alphanumeric passwords for their better memorability and usability [1]. Alphanumeric passwords provide an adequate amount of satisfaction, but they do not offer better memorability compared to graphical passwords [1].

On the other hand, graphical passwords are considered less secured and provide better memorability [1]. Therefore many researchers have researched on graphical passwords to overcome the vulnerability. One of the most significant weaknesses of the graphical passwords is "Shoulder Surfing Attack," which means, sneaking into a victim's computer to learn the whole password or part of password or some confidential information. Such …

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 …

Compact Hardware Implementation Of A Sha-3 Core For Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Yi Yang, Debiao He, Neeraj Kumar, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

One of the most important Internet of Things applications is the wireless body sensor network (WBSN), which can provide universal health care, disease prevention, and control. Due to large deployments of small scale smart sensors in WBSNs, security, and privacy guarantees (e.g., security and safety-critical data, sensitive private information) are becoming a challenging issue because these sensor nodes communicate using an open channel, i.e., Internet. We implement data integrity (to resist against malicious tampering) using the secure hash algorithm 3 (SHA-3) when smart sensors in WBSNs communicate with each other using the Internet. Due to the limited resources (i.e., storage, …

Application Of Huffman Data Compression Algorithm In Hashing Computation, Lakshmi Narasimha Devulapalli Venkata,

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Cryptography is the art of protecting information by encrypting the original message into an unreadable format. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an arbitrary length of the text message as input and converts that text into a fixed length of encrypted characters which is infeasible to invert. The values returned by the hash function are called as the message digest or simply hash values. Because of its versatility, hash functions are used in many applications such as message authentication, digital signatures, and password hashing [Thomsen and Knudsen, 2005].

The purpose of this study is to apply …

The Rsa Cryptosystem, Rodrigo Iglesias

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper intends to present an overview of the RSA cryptosystem. Cryptosystems are mathematical algorithms that disguise information so that only the people for whom the information is intended can read it. The invention of the RSA cryptosystem in 1977 was a significant event in the history of cryptosystems. We will describe in detail how the RSA cryptosystem works and then illustrate the process with a realistic example using fictional characters. In addition, we will discuss how cryptosystems worked prior to the invention of RSA and the advantage of using RSA over any of the previous cryptosystems. This will help …

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 …

An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Computation Over Public Data, Ximeng Liu, Baodong Qin, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a new efficient privacy preserving outsourced computation framework over public data, called EPOC. EPOC allows a user to outsource the computation of a function over multi-dimensional public data to the cloud while protecting the privacy of the function and its output. Specifically, we introduce three types of EPOC in order to tradeoff different levels of privacy protection and performance. We present a new cryptosystem called Switchable Homomorphic Encryption with Partial Decryption (SHED) as the core cryptographic primitive for EPOC.We introduce two coding techniques, called message pre-coding and message extending and coding respectively, for messages encrypted …

Encryption Backdoors: A Discussion Of Feasibility, Ethics, And The Future Of Cryptography, Jennifer A. Martin

Honors Projects

In the age of technological advancement and the digitization of information, privacy seems to be all but an illusion. Encryption is supposed to be the white knight that keeps our information and communications safe from unwanted eyes, but how secure are the encryption algorithms that we use? Do we put too much trust in those that are charged with implementing our everyday encryption systems? This paper addresses the concept of backdoors in encryption: ways that encryption systems can be implemented so that the security can be bypassed by those that know about its existence. Many governments around the world are …

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 …

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 …

Dual-Server Public-Key Encryption With Keyword Search For Secure Cloud Storage, Rongmao Chen, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo, Xiaofen Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption is of increasing interest for protecting the data privacy in secure searchable cloud storage. In this paper, we investigate the security of a well-known cryptographic primitive, namely, public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) which is very useful in many applications of cloud storage. Unfortunately, it has been shown that the traditional PEKS framework suffers from an inherent insecurity called inside keyword guessing attack (KGA) launched by the malicious server. To address this security vulnerability, we propose a new PEKS framework named dual-server PEKS (DS-PEKS). As another main contribution, we define a new variant of the smooth projective …

An Exploration Of Artefacts Of Remote Desktop Applications On Windows, Paresh Kerai, Vimal Murji Vekariya

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Remote Desktop Applications (RDA) such as Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting and LogMeIn have been adapted and utilised recently. This is because they facilitate tier-one support to configure computers, networks and solve application-related issues from a remote location. The direct benefit from the use of these applications, is the time (and therefore cost) saving for organisations. Unfortunately, “remoting” technology can also be used by criminals to perform illegal activities, hence remote applications are of key interest to law agencies and forensic investigators. The research outlined in this paper aims to identify any artefacts left behind by common remote …

Accelerating Ntruencrypt For In-Browser Cryptography Utilising Graphical Processing Units And Webgl, Dajne Win, Seth Hall, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Information Security Management Conference

One of the challenges encryption faces is it is computationally intensive and therefore slow, it is vital to find faster methods to accelerate modern encryption algorithms to keep performance high whilst also preserving information security. Users often do not want to wait for applications to become responsive, applications on limited devices such as mobiles often compromise security in order to keep execution times quick. Often they use algorithms and key sizes which are not considered cryptographically secure in order to maintain a smooth user experience. Emerging approaches have begun using a devices Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to offload some of …

Homesafe: A Mobile Application Utilizing Encryption And Access Control, Kenneth Trumpoldt

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Our society is becoming more virtual and mobile everyday. The purpose of this application is to transform a physical card system into a virtual card system that meets the demands of a technologically-oriented society. Parents will be able to create their own child identification cards more quickly and cost efficiently. Cards can be easily edited instead of having to order an updated replacement. Immediate and frequent alteration of cards allows for information to be more accurate. Cards can be shared globally and instantly via the Internet or shared connections such as Bluetooth. The fast access to and virtual duplication of …

I Remember Richelieu: Is Anything Secure Anymore?, Michael G. Crowley, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

Petraeus-gate, hacked nude celebrity photos in the cloud and the recent use of a search and seizure warrant in the United States of America to seek production of customer email contents on an extraterritorial server raises important issues for the supposably safe storage of data on the World Wide Web. Not only may there be nowhere to hide in cyberspace but nothing in cyberspace may be private. This paper explores the legal and technical issues raised by the these matters with emphasis on the courts decision “In the Matter of a Warrant to Search a Certain E-Mail Account Controlled and …

Persistent Issues In Encryption Software: A Heuristic And Cognitive Walkthrough, Jad El-Abed, Patryk Szewczyk

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The support information accompanying security software can be difficult to understand by end-users, who have little knowledge in cyber security. One mechanism for ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of information is encryption software. Unfortunately, software usability issues can hinder an end-user’s capability to properly utilise the security features effectively. To date there has been little research in investigating the usability of encryption software and proposing solutions for improving them. This research paper analysed the usability of encryption software targeting end-users. The research identified several issues that could impede the ability of a novice end-user to adequately utilise the encryption software. …

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 …

Fighting Child Pornography: A Review Of Legal And Technological Developments, Jasmine V. Eggestein, Kenneth J. Knapp

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In our digitally connected world, the law is arguably behind the technological developments of the Internet age. While this causes many issues for law enforcement, it is of particular concern in the area of child pornography in the United States. With the wide availability of technologies such as digital cameras, peer-to-peer file sharing, strong encryption, Internet anonymizers and cloud computing, the creation and distribution of child pornography has become more widespread. Simultaneously, fighting the growth of this crime has become more difficult. This paper explores the development of both the legal and technological environments surrounding digital child pornography. In doing …

Determining What Characteristics Constitute A Darknet, Symon Aked, Christopher Bolan, Murray Brand

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Privacy on the Internet has always been a concern, but monitoring of content by both private corporations and Government departments has pushed people to search for ways to communicate over the Internet in a more secure manner. This has given rise to the creations of Darknets, which are networks that operate “inside” the Internet, and allow anonymous participation via a de‐centralised, encrypted, peer‐to‐peer network topology. This research investigates some sources of known Internet content monitoring, and how they provided the template for the creation of a system to avoid such surveillance. It then highlights how communications on the Clearnet is …

Rule-Based Conditional Trust With Openpgp., Andrew Jackson

Theses

This thesis describes a new trust model for OpenPGP encryption. This trust model uses conditional rule-based trust to establish key validity and trust. This thesis describes "Trust Rules" that may be used to sort and categorize keys automatically without user interaction. "Trust Rules" are also capable of integrating key revocation status into its calculations so it too is automated. This thesis presents that conditional trust established through "Trust Rules" can enforce stricter security while reducing the burden of use and automating the process of key validity, trust, and revocation.

A Modified Anonymisation Algorithm Towards Reducing Information Loss., Rose Tinabo

Doctoral

The growth of various technologies in the modern digital world results in the col- lection and storage of huge amounts of individual's data. In addition of providing direct services delivery, this data can be used for other non-direct activities known as secondary use. This includes activities such as doing research, analysis, quality and safety measurement, public health, and marketing.

A Longitudinal Study Of Wi-Fi Access Point Security Inthe Perth Central Business District, Emil Jacobson, Andrew Woodward

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This study collected data in 2008 and 2011 in relation to the level of apparent security of wireless network access points in the Perth CBD. It also compared this data to a comparable study conducted in 2004. The aim was to determine whether businesses were using an appropriate level of encryption to protect their wireless networks. A pre-determined route was followed which traced the Perth CBD and the open source wireless network auditing tool Kismet was used to survey the wireless networks. In 2008, approximately 1300 access points were discovered in the Perth CBD, this number climbing to approximately 3400 …

An Empirical Study Of Challenges In Managing The Security In Cloud Computing, Bupesh Mansukhani, Tanveer A. Zia

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Cloud computing is being heralded as an important trend in information technology throughout the world. Benefits for business and IT include reducing costs and increasing productivity. The downside is that many organizations are moving swiftly to the cloud without making sure that the information they put in the cloud is secure. The purpose of this paper is to learn from IT and IT security practitioners in the Indian Continent the current state of cloud computing security in their organizations and the most significant changes anticipated by respondents as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud. As organizations grapple with …