Information Security Commons^™

How To Resuscitate A Sick Vm In The Cloud, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A guest virtual machine in a cloud platform may fall “sick” when its kernel encounters a fatal low-level bug or is subverted by an adversary. The VM owner is hence likely to lose her control over it due to a kernel hang or being denied of remote accesses. While the VM can be rebooted with the assistance from the cloud server, the owner not only faces service disruption but also is left with no opportunity to make an in-depth diagnosis and forensics on the spot, not to mention a live rectification. Currently, the cloud service provider has neither incentive nor …

Internet Of Things Software And Hardware Architectures And Their Impacts On Forensic Investigations: Current Approaches And Challenges, Abel Alex Boozer, Arun John, Tathagata Mukherjee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The never-before-seen proliferation of interconnected low-power computing devices, patently dubbed the Internet of Things (IoT), is revolutionizing how people, organizations, and malicious actors interact with one another and the Internet. Many of these devices collect data in different forms, be it audio, location data, or user commands. In civil or criminal nature investigations, the data collected can act as evidence for the prosecution or the defense. This data can also be used as a component of cybersecurity efforts. When data is extracted from these devices, investigators are expected to do so using proven methods. Still, unfortunately, given the heterogeneity in …

A Domain Specific Language For Digital Forensics And Incident Response Analysis, Christopher D. Stelly

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

One of the longstanding conceptual problems in digital forensics is the dichotomy between the need for verifiable and reproducible forensic investigations, and the lack of practical mechanisms to accomplish them. With nearly four decades of professional digital forensic practice, investigator notes are still the primary source of reproducibility information, and much of it is tied to the functions of specific, often proprietary, tools.

The lack of a formal means of specification for digital forensic operations results in three major problems. Specifically, there is a critical lack of:

a) standardized and automated means to scientifically verify accuracy of digital forensic tools; …

Map My Murder: A Digital Forensic Study Of Mobile Health And Fitness Applications, Courtney Hassenfeldt, Shabana Baig, Ibrahim Baggili, Xiaolu Zhang

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The ongoing popularity of health and fitness applications catalyzes

the need for exploring forensic artifacts produced by them. Sensitive

Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is requested by the applications

during account creation. Augmenting that with ongoing

user activities, such as the user’s walking paths, could potentially

create exculpatory or inculpatory digital evidence. We conducted

extensive manual analysis and explored forensic artifacts produced

by (n = 13) popular Android mobile health and fitness applications.

We also developed and implemented a tool that aided in the timely

acquisition and identification of artifacts from the examined applications.

Additionally, our work explored the type of …

Chip-Off Success Rate Analysis Comparing Temperature And Chip Type, Choli Ence, Joan Runs Through, Gary D. Cantrell

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Throughout the digital forensic community, chip-off analysis provides examiners with a technique to obtain a physical acquisition from locked or damaged digital device. Thermal based chip-analysis relies upon the application of heat to remove the flash memory chip from the circuit board. Occasionally, a flash memory chip fails to successfully read despite following similar protocols as other flash memory chips. Previous research found the application of high temperatures increased the number of bit errors present in the flash memory chip. The purpose of this study is to analyze data collected from chip-off analyses to determine if a statistical difference exists …

Digital Forensics In The Next Five Years, Laoise Luciano, Ibrahim Baggili, Mateusz Topor, Peter Casey, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyber forensics has encountered major obstacles over the last decade and is at a crossroads. This paper presents data that was obtained during the National Workshop on Redefining Cyber Forensics (NWRCF) on May 23-24, 2017 supported by the National Science Foundation and organized by the University of New Haven. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed from twenty-four cyber forensics expert panel members. This work identified important themes that need to be addressed by the community, focusing on (1) where the domain currently is; (2) where it needs to go and; (3) steps needed to improve it. Furthermore, based on the …

Forensic Analysis Of Immersive Virtual Reality Social Applications: A Primary Account, Ananya Yarramreddy, Peter Gromkowski, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our work presents the primary account for exploring the forensics of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems and their social applications. The Social VR applications studied in this work include Bigscreen, Altspace VR, Rec Room and Facebook Spaces. We explored the two most widely adopted consumer VR systems: the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Our tests examined the efficacy of reconstructing evidence from network traffic as well as the systems themselves. The results showed that a significant amount of forensically relevant data such as user names, user profile pictures, events, and system details may be recovered. We anticipate that this …

Experience Constructing The Artifact Genome Project (Agp): Managing The Domain's Knowledge One Artifact At A Time, Cinthya Grajeda, Laura Sanchez, Ibrahim Baggili, Devon R. Clark, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

While various tools have been created to assist the digital forensics community with acquiring, processing, and organizing evidence and indicating the existence of artifacts, very few attempts have been made to establish a centralized system for archiving artifacts. The Artifact Genome Project (AGP) has aimed to create the largest vetted and freely available digital forensics repository for Curated Forensic Artifacts (CuFAs). This paper details the experience of building, implementing, and maintaining such a system by sharing design decisions, lessons learned, and future work. We also discuss the impact of AGP in both the professional and academic realms of digital forensics. …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

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 …

A Centralised Platform For Digital Forensic Investigations In Cloud-Based Environments, Shaunak Mody, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Forensic investigations of digital media traditionally involve seizing a device and performing a forensic investigation. Often legal and physical obstructions must be overcome so that the investigator has access to the device and the right to secure it for investigation purposes. Taking a forensic image of a hard disk may need to be done in the field but analysis can usually be performed at a later time. With the rapid increase in hard disk size, the acquiring of a forensic image can take hours or days. This poses significant issues for forensic investigators when potential evidence resides in the cloud. …

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.

Memory Forensic Data Recovery Utilising Ram Cooling Methods, Kedar Gupta, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Forensic investigations of digital devices is generally conducted on a seized device in a secure environment. This usually necessitates powering down the device and taking an image of the hard drive or semi-permanent storage in the case of solid state technology. Guidelines for forensic investigations of computers advise that the computer should be shut down by removing the power supply and thereby maintaining the hard disk in the state it was in whilst running. However, valuable forensic evidence often exists in the volatile memory which is lost when this process is followed. The issues of locked accounts on running computers …

A Forensic Examination Of Several Mobile Device Faraday Bags & Materials To Test Their Effectiveness, Ashleigh Lennox-Steele, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

A Faraday bag is designed to shield a mobile phone or small digital device from radio waves entering the bag and reaching the device, or to stop radio waves escaping through the bag from the device. The effectiveness of these shields is vital for security professionals and forensic investigators who seize devices and wish to ensure that their contents are not read, modified or deleted prior to a forensic examination. This research tests the effectiveness of several readily available Faraday bags. The Faraday bags tested are all available through online means and promise complete blocking of all signals through the …

Ios Device Forensics, Lauren Drish

All Capstone Projects

Many people today have an iPhone, iPad or iPod. Not many would realize that valuable information is stored on these devices. When a crime occurs, an iOS Device could hold key information to help solve said crime that criminals are not aware are present on the device. This can include GPS information as well as application history on the device itself.

The project I wish to do and complete is to create a class where students can learn the about iOS Forensics. Student will be able to learn the basics of an iDevice, as well as how to work with …

Exploring Forensic Implications Of The Fusion Drive, Shruti Gupta, Marcus Rogers

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper explores the forensic implications of Apple’s Fusion Drive. The Fusion Drive is an example of auto-tiered storage. It uses a combination of a flash drive and a magnetic drive. Data is moved between the drives automatically to maximize system performance. This is different from traditional caches because data is moved and not simply copied. The research included understanding the drive structure, populating the drive, and then accessing data in a controlled setting to observe data migration strategies. It was observed that all the data is first written to the flash drive with 4 GB of free space always …

Relating Admissibility Standards For Digital Evidence To Attack Scenario Reconstruction, Changwei Liu, Anoop Singhal, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Attackers tend to use complex techniques such as combining multi-step, multi-stage attack with anti-forensic tools to make it difficult to find incriminating evidence and reconstruct attack scenarios that can stand up to the expected level of evidence admissibility in a court of law. As a solution, we propose to integrate the legal aspects of evidence correlation into a Prolog based reasoner to address the admissibility requirements by creating most probable attack scenarios that satisfy admissibility standards for substantiating evidence. Using a prototype implementation, we show how evidence extracted by using forensic tools can be integrated with legal reasoning to reconstruct …

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

Effects Of The Factory Reset On Mobile Devices, Riqui Schwamm, Neil C. Rowe

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Mobile devices usually provide a “factory-reset” tool to erase user-specific data from the main secondary storage. 9 Apple iPhones, 10 Android devices, and 2 BlackBerry devices were tested in the first systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of factory resets. Tests used the Cellebrite UME-36 Pro with the UFED Physical Analyzer, the Bulk Extractor open-source tool, and our own programs for extracting metadata, classifying file paths, and comparing them between images. Two phones were subjected to more detailed analysis. Results showed that many kinds of data were removed by the resets, but much user-specific configuration data was left. Android devices did …

Analysis Of A Second Hand Google Mini Search Appliance, Stephen Larson

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Information and the technological advancements for which mankind develops with regards to its storage has increased tremendously over the past few decades. As the total amount of data stored rapidly increases in conjunction with the amount of widely available computer-driven devices being used, solutions are being developed to better harness this data (LaTulippe, 2011). One of these solutions is commonly known as a search appliance. Search appliances have been used in e-discovery for several years. The Google Mini Search Appliance (Mini) has not only been used for e-discovery, but for indexing and searching internal documents. To accomplish these tasks, search …

Comparing Android Applications To Find Copying, Larry Melling, Bob Zeidman

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Android smartphone operating system includes a Java virtual machine that enables rapid development and deployment of a wide variety of applications. The open nature of the platform means that reverse engineering of applications is relatively easy, and many developers are concerned as applications similar to their own show up in the Android marketplace and want to know if these applications are pirated. Fortunately, the same characteristics that make an Android application easy to reverse engineer and copy also provide opportunities for Android developers to compare downloaded applications to their own. This paper describes the process for comparing a developer’s …

Ipad2 Logical Acquisition: Automated Or Manual Examination?, Somaya Ali, Sumaya Alhosani, Farah Alzarooni, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Due to their usage increase worldwide, iPads are on the path of becoming key sources of digital evidence in criminal investigations. This research investigated the logical backup acquisition and examination of the iPad2 device using the Apple iTunes backup utility while manually examining the backup data (manual examination) and automatically parsing the backup data (Lantern software-automated examination).The results indicate that a manual examination of the logical backup structure from iTunes reveals more digital evidence, especially if installed application data is required for an investigation. However, the researchers note that if a quick triage is needed of an iOS device, then …

Kindle Forensics: Acquisition & Analysis, Peter Hannay

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Amazon Kindle eBook reader supports a wide range of capabilities beyond reading books. This functionality includes an inbuilt cellular data connection known as Whispernet. The Kindle provides web browsing, an application framework, eBook delivery and other services over this connection. The historic data left by user interaction with this device may be of forensic interest. Analysis of the Amazon Kindle device has resulted in a method to reliably extract and interpret data from these devices in a forensically complete manner.

Working Inside The Box: An Example Of Google Desktop Search In A Forensic Examination, Timothy J. Latulippe

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Information and the technological advancements for which mankind develops with regards to its storage has increased tremendously over the past few decades. As the total amount of data stored rapidly increases in conjunction with the amount of widely available computer-driven devices being used, solutions are being developed to better harness this data. These types of advancements are continually assisting investigators and computer forensic examiners. One such application which houses copious amounts of fruitful data is the Google Desktop Search program. Coupled with tested and verified techniques, examiners can exploit the power of this application to cater to their investigative needs. …

Generating System Requirements For A Mobile Digital Evidence Collection System: A Preliminary Step Towards Enhancing The Forensic Collection Of Digital Devices, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Collecting digital devices in a forensically sound manner is becoming more critical since 80% of all cases have some sort of digital evidence involved in them (Rogers, 2006, p. 1) .The process of documenting and tagging digital devices is cumbersome and involves details that might not apply to other types of evidence, since each evidence item has unique physical characteristics (Hesitis & Wilbon, 2005, p. 17). The process becomes less manageable when a large number of digital devices are seized. This paper examines the information and issues investigators should be aware of when collecting digital devices at crime scenes. Furthermore, …

Computer Forensics For Graduate Accountants: A Motivational Curriculum Design Approach, Grover S. Kearns

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Computer forensics involves the investigation of digital sources to acquire evidence that can be used in a court of law. It can also be used to identify and respond to threats to hosts and systems. Accountants use computer forensics to investigate computer crime or misuse, theft of trade secrets, theft of or destruction of intellectual property, and fraud. Education of accountants to use forensic tools is a goal of the AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants). Accounting students, however, may not view information technology as vital to their career paths and need motivation to acquire forensic knowledge and skills. …

Graduate Accounting Students' Perception Of It Forensics: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Grover S. Kearns

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Forensics and information technology (IT) have become increasingly important to accountants and auditors. Undergraduate accounting students are introduced to general IT topics but discussion of forensic knowledge is limited. A few schools have introduced an undergraduate major in forensic accounting. Some graduate schools offer accounting students an emphasis in forensic or fraud accounting that includes instruction in forensics and information technology. When students do not view the IT topics as being equally important to their careers as traditional accounting topics, these attitudes may reduce the quality of the course. In an effort to assess student attitudes, a survey of 46 …

Who Is Reading The Data On Your Old Computer?, Vivienne Mee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Researchers at Rits Information Security performed a study in how the Irish population disposes of their old computers. How would you dispose of your old computer, or how would the company you work for dispose of their old computers?

The majority of Irish homeowners, would bring their old computers to local civic amenity centres, give it away to a relative or sell it on to another party.

Some organisations would give their old equipment to a staff member, as a gift gesture, others may simply discard in the local civic amenity site.

What is wrong with the methods currently being …

The Effectiveness Of Investigative Tools For Secure Digital (Sd) Memory Card Forensics, Haitham Al-Hajri, Patricia Williams

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

There are many freeware based tools that can be downloaded from the World Wide Web. This paper reports the retrieval results of using these tools on digital images which have been deleted from Secure Digital (SD) cards. Since SD cards and USB flash drives are considered solid state technology, the tools selected are specifically for solid state drives. This research helps classify the selection of the most effective freeware tools that could be used to recover lost or deleted images. Further, it includes some of the issues that would face forensic examiners undertaking such investigations. The tools were tested using …

The Design And Implementation Of An Automated Security Compliance Toolkit: A Pedagogical Exercise, Guillermo Francia, Brian Estes, Rahjima Francia, Vu Nguyen, Alex Scroggins

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The demand, through government regulations, for the preservation of the security, integrity, and privacy of corporate and customer information is increasing at an unprecedented pace. Government and private entities struggle to comply with these regulations through various means—both automated and manual controls. This paper presents an automated security compliance toolkit that is designed and developed using mostly open source tools to demonstrate that 1) meeting regulatory compliance does not need to be a very expensive proposition and 2) an undertaking of this magnitude could be served as a pedagogical exercise for students in the areas of collaboration, project management, software …