Information Security Commons^™

Mitigating Man-In-The-Middle Attacks On Mobile Devices By Blocking Insecure Http Traffic Without Using Vpn, Kevin Chong, Muhammad Imran Malik, Peter Hannay

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Mobile devices are constantly connected to the Internet, making countless connections with remote services. Unfortunately, many of these connections are in cleartext, visible to third-parties while in transit. This is insecure and opens up the possibility for man-in-the-middle attacks. While there is little control over what kind of connection running apps can make, this paper presents a solution in blocking insecure HTTP packets from leaving the device. Specifically, the proposed solution works on the device, without the need to tunnel packets to a remote VPN server, and without special privileges such as root access. Speed tests were performed to quantify …

Bringing Defensive Artificial Intelligence Capabilities To Mobile Devices, Kevin Chong, Ahmed Ibrahim

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Traditional firewalls are losing their effectiveness against new and evolving threats today. Artificial intelligence (AI) driven firewalls are gaining popularity due to their ability to defend against threats that are not fully known. However, a firewall can only protect devices in the same network it is deployed in, leaving mobile devices unprotected once they leave the network. To comprehensively protect a mobile device, capabilities of an AI-driven firewall can enhance the defensive capabilities of the device. This paper proposes porting AI technologies to mobile devices for defence against today’s ever-evolving threats. A defensive AI technique providing firewall-like capability is being …

Security Assessment Of Web Applications, Renelada Kushe

UBT International Conference

A web application is an application that is accessed by users over a network such as the internet or intranet. The term also refers an application that is coded in a browser-supported programming language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable. Web applications are vulnerable to varies exploits from those which manipulate the application via its graphical web interface (HTTP exploits), to tampering the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) or tampering HTTPS elements not contained in the URI. Getting started from the accessibility and the variety of exploits, the security assessment is a necessity for providing …

Simple Implementation Of An Elgamal Digital Signature And A Brute Force Attack On It, Valeriia Laryoshyna

Student Works

This study is an attempt to show a basic mathematical usage of the concepts behind digital signatures and to provide a simple approach and understanding to cracking basic digital signatures. The approach takes on simple C programming of the ElGamal digital signature to identify some limits that can be encountered and provide considerations for making more complex code. Additionally, there is a literature review of the ElGamal digital signature and the brute force attack.

The research component of this project provides a list of possible ways to crack the basic implementations and classifies the different approaches that could be taken …

Security, Computation And Data Issues In Clouds, Lifeng Li

Student Theses and Dissertations

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

Secure And Efficient Delegation Of A Single And Multiple Exponentiations To A Single Malicious Server, Matluba Khodjaeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Group exponentiation is an important operation used in many cryptographic protocols, specifically public-key cryptosystems such as RSA, Diffie Hellman, ElGamal, etc. To expand the applicability of group exponentiation to computationally weaker devices, procedures were established by which to delegate this operation from a computationally weaker client to a computationally stronger server. However, solving this problem with a single, possibly malicious, server, has remained open since a formal cryptographic model was introduced by Hohenberger and Lysyanskaya in 2005. Several later attempts either failed to achieve privacy or only achieved constant security probability.

In this dissertation, we study and solve this problem …

Analysis Of Security In Big Data Related To Healthcare, Isabel De La Torre, Begoña García-Zapirain, Miguel López-Coronado

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Big data facilitates the processing and management of huge amounts of data. In health, the main information source is the electronic health record with others being the Internet and social media. Health-related data refers to storage in big data based on and shared via electronic means. Why are criminal organisations interested in this data? These organisations can blackmail people with information related to their health condition or sell the information to marketing companies, etc. This article analyses healthcare-related big data security and proposes different solutions. There are different techniques available to help preserve privacy such as data modification techniques, cryptographic …

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 …

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 …

Pedagogical Resources For Industrial Control Systems Security: Design, Implementation, Conveyance, And Evaluation, Guillermo A. Francia Iii, Greg Randall, Jay Snellen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Industrial Control Systems (ICS), which are pervasive in our nation’s critical infrastructures, are becoming increasingly at risk and vulnerable to internal and external threats. It is imperative that the future workforce be educated and trained on the security of such systems. However, it is equally important that careful and deliberate considerations must be exercised in designing and implementing the educational and training activities that pertain to ICS. To that end, we designed and implemented pedagogical materials and tools to facilitate the teaching and learning processes in the area of ICS security. In this paper, we describe those resources, the professional …

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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

Malware Analysis And Privacy Policy Enforcement Techniques For Android Applications, Aisha Ibrahim Ali-Gombe

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The rapid increase in mobile malware and deployment of over-privileged applications over the years has been of great concern to the security community. Encroaching on user’s privacy, mobile applications (apps) increasingly exploit various sensitive data on mobile devices. The information gathered by these applications is sufficient to uniquely and accurately profile users and can cause tremendous personal and financial damage.

On Android specifically, the security and privacy holes in the operating system and framework code has created a whole new dynamic for malware and privacy exploitation. This research work seeks to develop novel analysis techniques that monitor Android applications for …

Evaluating Ip Surveillance Camera Vulnerabilities, Brian Cusack, Zhuang Tian

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Hacking of IP surveillance camera systems came to public attention in 2016 when the high bandwidth and resources were exploited for a massive DDoS attack that affected one third of all US Internet services. A review of previous studies show that a vast number of IP cameras have been hacked because the default usernames and passwords have not been changed from the factory defaults. In this research we asked, What are the vulnerabilities of an IP surveillance camera? The purpose of the study was to provide identification of vulnerabilities and guidance for the protection of surveillance camera systems. The research …

Neurosecurity For Brainware Devices, Brian Cusack, Kaushik Sundararajan, Reza Khaleghparast

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Brainware has a long history of development down into the present day where very simple and usable devices are available to train for the control of games and services. One of the big areas of application has been in the health sciences to provide compensatory control to humans who may lack the usual capabilities. Our concern has been the protection of information in brainware so that a human intention may have confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility to the required implementation mechanisms for services. The research question was: What are the consequences of security failure in brainware? Our research tested a brainware …

The Proceedings Of 15th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December, 2017, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, Craig Valli (Ed.)

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Conference Foreword

The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fifteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The papers cover topics from vulnerabilities in “Internet of Things” protocols through to improvements in biometric identification algorithms and surveillance camera weaknesses. The conference has drawn interest and …

The Paradox Of Social Media Security: A Study Of It Students’ Perceptions Versus Behavior On Using Facebook, Zahra Y. Alqubaiti

Master of Science in Information Technology Theses

Social media plays an essential role in the modern society, enabling people to be better connected to each other and creating new opportunities for businesses. At the same time, social networking sites have become major targets for cyber-security attacks due to their massive user base. Many studies investigated the security vulnerabilities and privacy issues of social networking sites and made recommendations on how to mitigate security risks. Users are an integral part of any security mix. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between users’ security perceptions and their actual behavior on social networking sites. Protection motivation theory (PMT), initially …

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.

Semeo: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework For Obfuscated Android Applications, Zhen Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software repackaging is a common approach for creating malware. In this approach, malware authors inject malicious payloads into legitimate applications; then, to ren- der security analysis more difficult, they obfuscate most or all of the code. This forces analysts to spend a large amount of effort filtering out benign obfuscated methods in order to locate potentially malicious methods for further analysis. If an effective mechanism for filtering out benign obfuscated methods were available, the number of methods that must be analyzed could be reduced, allowing analysts to be more productive. In this thesis, we introduce SEMEO, a highly effective and …

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

Knowledge Modeling Of Phishing Emails, Courtney Falk

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates whether or not malicious phishing emails are detected better when a meaningful representation of the email bodies is available. The natural language processing theory of Ontological Semantics Technology is used for its ability to model the knowledge representation present in the email messages. Known good and phishing emails were analyzed and their meaning representations fed into machine learning binary classifiers. Unigram language models of the same emails were used as a baseline for comparing the performance of the meaningful data. The end results show how a binary classifier trained on meaningful data is better at detecting phishing …

Significant Permission Identification For Android Malware Detection, Lichao Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant …

A Survey On Future Internet Security Architectures, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) networks are facing unprecedented challenges, such as network attacks and the exhaustion of IP addresses. Motivated by emerging demands for security, mobility, and distributed networking, many research projects have been initiated to design the future Internet from a clean slate. In order to obtain a thorough knowledge of security in future Internet architecture, we review a number of well-known projects, including named data networking, Content Aware Searching Retrieval and sTreaming, MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture Project (MobilityFirst), eXpressive Internet Architecture, and scalability, control, and isolation on next-generation network. These projects aim to move away from the …

Mobipot: Understanding Mobile Telephony Threats With Honeycards, Marco Balduzzi, Payas Gupta, Lion Gu, Debin Gao, Mustaque Ahamad

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, the number of mobile phones has increased dramatically, overtaking the world population in October 2014. In developing countries like India and China, mobile subscribers outnumber traditional landline users and account for over 90% of the active population. At the same time, convergence of telephony with the Internet with technologies like VoIP makes it possible to reach a large number of telephone users at a low or no cost via voice calls or SMS (short message service) messages. As a consequence, cybercriminals are abusing the telephony channel to launch attacks, e.g., scams that offer fraudulent services and …

Ultrasonic Data Steganography, Alexander Orosz Edwards

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

What started off as a question on the possibly of data transmission via sound above the level of human hearing evolved into a project exploring the possibility of ultrasonic data infiltration and exfiltration in an information security context. It is well known that sound can be used to transmit data as this can be seen in many old technologies, most notably and simply DTMF tones for phone networks. But what if the sound used to transmit signals was in in the ultrasonic range? It would go generally unnoticed to anyone not looking for it with tools such as a spectrum …

Establishing Effective And Economical Traffic Surveillance In Tonga, Brian Cusack, George Maeakafa

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The Pacific Islands are seriously challenged by the growth in wealth and the expansion of international material possessions. On the roads traffic has grown dramatically and the types of vehicles now using Island roads has greatly changed. With the importation of cheap second hand vehicles designed for freeway speeds serious safety issues have grown proportionally with the increasing numbers. In this research we consider the prohibitive costs of traditional traffic controls to economy and propose a light weight highly mobile aerial surveillance system that integrates with ground policing capability. Our research question was: How can road safety and security be …

A Privacy Gap Around The Internet Of Things For Open-Source Projects, Brian Cusack, Reza Khaleghparast

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The Internet of Things (IoT) is having a more important role in the everyday lives of people. The distribution of connectivity across social and personal interaction discloses personalised information and gives access to a sphere of sensitivities that were previously masked. Privacy measures and security to protect personal sensitivities are weak and in their infancy. In this paper we review the issue of privacy in the context of IoT open-source projects, and the IoT security concerns. A proposal is made to create a privacy bubble around the interoperability of devices and systems and a filter layer to mitigate the exploitation …

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

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

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

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 …

An Empirical Assessment Of Employee Cyberslacking In The Public Sector, Wilnelia Hernández

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing use of the Internet, new challenges are presented to employees in the workplace. Employees spend time during work hours on non-work related activities including visiting e-commerce Websites, managing personal email accounts, and engaging in e-banking. These types of actions in the workplace are known as cyberslacking. Cyberslacking affects the employees’ productivity, presents legal concerns, and undermines the security of the organization’s network. This research study addressed the problem of cyberslacking in the public sector, by assessing the ethical severity of cyberslacking activities, as well as how employees perceived that the frequency of such activities occurred by their …

Using Graphic Methods To Challenge Cryptographic Performance, Brian Cusack, Erin Chapman

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Block and stream ciphers have formed the traditional basis for the standardisation of commercial ciphers in the DES, AES, RC4, and so on. More recently alternative graphic methods such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have been adopted for performance gains. In this research we reviewed a range of graphic and non-graphic methods and then designed our own cipher system based on several graphic methods, including Visual Cryptography (VC). We then tested our cipher against RC4 and the AES algorithms for performance and security. The results showed that a graphics based construct may deliver comparable or improved security and performance in …