Information Security Commons^™

On Return Oriented Programming Threats In Android Runtime, Akshaya Venkateswara Raja, Jehyun Lee, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android has taken a large share of operating systems forsmart devices including smartphones, and has been an attractive target to theattackers. The arms race between attackers and defenders typically occurs ontwo front lines — the latest attacking technology and the latest updates to theoperating system (including defense mechanisms deployed). In terms of attackingtechnology, Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is one of the most sophisticatedattack methods on Android devices. In terms of the operating system updates,Android Runtime (ART) was the latest and biggest change to the Android family.In this paper, we investigate the extent to which Android Runtime (ART) makesReturn-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks …

Seeing Through The Same Lens: Introspecting Guest Address Space At Native Speed, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding, Wen Xu, Dawu Gu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software-based MMU emulation lies at the heart of out-of-VM live memory introspection, an important technique in the cloud setting that applications such as live forensics and intrusion detection depend on. Due to the emulation, the software-based approach is much slower compared to native memory access by the guest VM. The slowness not only results in undetected transient malicious behavior, but also inconsistent memory view with the guest; both undermine the effectiveness of introspection. We propose the immersive execution environment (ImEE) with which the guest memory is accessed at native speed without any emulation. Meanwhile, the address mappings used within the …

Secure Encrypted Data Deduplication With Ownership Proof And User Revocation, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud storage as one of the most important cloud services enables cloud users to save more data without enlarging its own storage. In order to eliminate repeated data and improve the utilization of storage, deduplication is employed to cloud storage. Due to the concern about data security and user privacy, encryption is introduced, but incurs new challenge to cloud data deduplication. Existing work cannot achieve flexible access control and user revocation. Moreover, few of them can support efficient ownership proof, especially public verifiability of ownership. In this paper, we propose a secure encrypted data deduplication scheme with effective ownership proof …

Optimal Security Reductions For Unique Signatures: Bypassing Impossibilities With A Counterexample, Fuchun Fuo, Rongmao Chen, Willy Susilo, Jianchang Lai, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Optimal security reductions for unique signatures (Coron, Eurocrypt 2002) and their generalization, i.e., efficiently re-randomizable signatures (Hofheinz et al. PKC 2012 & Bader et al. Eurocrypt 2016) have been well studied in the literature. Particularly, it has been shown that under a non-interactive hard assumption, any security reduction (with or without random oracles) for a unique signature scheme or an efficiently re-randomizable signature scheme must loose a factor of at least qsqs in the security model of existential unforgeability against chosen-message attacks (EU-CMA), where qsqs denotes the number of signature queries. Note that the number qsqs can be as large …

Designing Secure Access Control Model In Cyber Social Networks, Katanosh Morovat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, information security in online communication has become an indisputable topic. People prefer pursuing their connection and public relations due to the greater flexibility and affordability of online communication. Recently, organizations have established online networking sites concerned with sharing assets among their employees. As more people engage in social network, requirements for protecting information and resources becomes vital. Over the years, many access control methods have been proposed. Although these methods cover various information security aspects, they have not provided an appropriate approach for securing information within distributed online networking sites. Moreover, none of the previous research provides an access …

Data Insertion In Bitcoin's Blockchain, Andrew Sward, Vecna Op_0, Forrest Stonedahl

Computer Science: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of methods for inserting arbitrary data into Bitcoin's blockchain. Historical methods of data insertion are described, along with lesser-known techniques that are optimized for efficiency. Insertion methods are compared on the basis of efficiency, cost, convenience of data reconstruction, permanence, and potentially negative impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Jfix: Semantics-Based Repair Of Java Programs Via Symbolic Pathfinder, Xuan Bach D. Le, Duc-Hiep Chu, David Lo, Goues Le, Willem Visser

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently there has been a proliferation of automated program repair (APR) techniques, targeting various programming languages. Such techniques can be generally classified into two families: syntactic- and semantics-based. Semantics-based APR, on which we focus, typically uses symbolic execution to infer semantic constraints and then program synthesis to construct repairs conforming to them. While syntactic-based APR techniques have been shown success- ful on bugs in real-world programs written in both C and Java, semantics-based APR techniques mostly target C programs. This leaves empirical comparisons of the APR families not fully explored, and developers without a Java-based semantics APR technique. We present …

Hierarchical Functional Encryption For Linear Transformations, Shiwei Zhang, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Xiaofen Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In contrast to the conventional all-or-nothing encryption, functional encryption (FE) allows partial revelation of encrypted information based on the keys associated with different functionalities. Extending FE with key delegation ability, hierarchical functional encryption (HFE) enables a secret key holder to delegate a portion of its decryption ability to others and the delegation can be done hierarchically. All HFE schemes in the literature are for general functionalities and not very practical. In this paper, we focus on the functionality of linear transformations (i.e. matrix product evaluation). We refine the definition of HFE and further extend the delegation to accept multiple keys. …

Tlel: A Two-Layer Ensemble Learning Approach For Just-In-Time Defect Prediction, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Defect prediction is a very meaningful topic, particularly at change-level. Change-level defect prediction, which is also referred as just-in-time defect prediction, could not only ensure software quality in the development process, but also make the developers check and fix the defects in time [1].Objective: Ensemble learning becomes a hot topic in recent years. There have been several studies about applying ensemble learning to defect prediction [2–5]. Traditional ensemble learning approaches only have one layer, i.e., they use ensemble learning once. There are few studies that leverages ensemble learning twice or more. To bridge this research gap, we try to …

Mergeable And Revocable Identity-Based Encryption, Shengmin Xu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identity-based encryption (IBE) has been extensively studied and widely used in various applications since Boneh and Franklin proposed the first practical scheme based on pairing. In that seminal work, it has also been pointed out that providing an efficient revocation mechanism for IBE is essential. Hence, revocable identity-based encryption (RIBE) has been proposed in the literature to offer an efficient revocation mechanism. In contrast to revocation, another issue that will also occur in practice is to combine two or multiple IBE systems into one system, e.g., due to the merge of the departments or companies. However, this issue has not …

A Secure, Usable, And Transparent Middleware For Permission Managers On Android, Daibin Wang, Haixia Yao, Yingjiu Li, Hai Jin, Deqing Zou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android’s permission system offers an all-or-nothing choice when installing an app. To make it more flexible and fine-grained, users may choose a popular app tool, called permission manager, to selectively grant or revoke an app’s permissions at runtime. A fundamental requirement for such permission manager is that the granted or revoked permissions should be enforced faithfully. However, we discover that none of existing permission managers meet this requirement due to permission leaks, in which an unprivileged app can exercise certain permissions which are revoked or not-granted through communicating with a privileged app. To address this problem, we propose a secure, …

Automatically Locating Malicious Packages In Piggybacked Android Apps, Li Li, Daoyuan Li, Tegawende Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Haipeng Cai, David Lo, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To devise efficient approaches and tools for detecting malicious packages in the Android ecosystem, researchers are increasingly required to have a deep understanding of malware. There is thus a need to provide a framework for dissecting malware and locating malicious program fragments within app code in order to build a comprehensive dataset of malicious samples. Towards addressing this need, we propose in this work a tool-based approach called HookRanker, which provides ranked lists of potentially malicious packages based on the way malware behaviour code is triggered. With experiments on a ground truth set of piggybacked apps, we are able to …

Attribute-Based Encryption With Expressive And Authorized Keyword Search, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To protect data security and privacy in cloud storage systems, a common solution is to outsource data in encrypted forms so that the data will remain secure and private even if storage systems are compromised. The encrypted data, however, must be pliable to search and access control. In this paper, we introduce a notion of attribute-based encryption with expressive and authorized keyword search (ABE-EAKS) to support both expressive keyword search and fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. In ABE-EAKS, every data user is associated with a set of attributes and is issued a private attribute-key corresponding to …

Privacy-Preserving K-Time Authenticated Secret Handshakes, Yangguang Tian, Shiwei Zhang, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Yong Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Secret handshake allows a group of authorized users to establish a shared secret key and at the same time authenticate each other anonymously. A straightforward approach to design an unlinkable secret handshake protocol is to use either long-term certificate or one-time certificate provided by a trusted authority. However, how to detect the misusing of certificates by an insider adversary is a challenging security issue when using those approaches for unlinkable secret handshake. In this paper, we propose a novel k-time authenticated secret handshake (k-ASH) protocol where each authorized user is only allowed to use the credential for k times. We …

Sql Injection: The Longest Running Sequel In Programming History, Matthew Horner, Thomas Hyslip

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

One of the risks to a company operating a public-facing website with a Structure Query Language (SQL) database is an attacker exploiting the SQL injection vulnerability. An attacker can cause an SQL database to perform actions that the developer did not intend like revealing, modifying, or deleting sensitive data. This can cause a loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information in a company’s database, and it can lead to severe costs of up to $196,000 per successful injection attack (NTT Group, 2014). This paper discusses the history of the SQL injection vulnerability, focusing on:

• How an attacker can exploit …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A Power Grid Incident Identification Based On Physically Derived Cyber-Event Detection, Travis Atkison, Nathan Wallace

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This article proposes a cyber-event detection framework to aid in incident Identification and digital forensics cases aimed at investigating cyber crime committed against the critical infrastructure power grid. However, unlike other similar investigative techniques, the proposed approach examines only the physical information to derive a cyber conclusion. The developed framework extracts information from the physical parameters stored in historical databases of SCADA systems. The framework uses a pseudo-trusted model derived from randomly selected power system observations found in the historical databases. Afterwards, a technique known as Bayesian Model Averaging is used to average the models and create a more trusted …

Towards A More Representative Definition Of Cyber Security, Daniel Schatz, Rabih Bashroush, Julie Wall

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent years, ‘Cyber Security’ has emerged as a widely-used term with increased adoption by practitioners and politicians alike. However, as with many fashionable jargon, there seems to be very little understanding of what the term really entails. Although this is may not be an issue when the term is used in an informal context, it can potentially cause considerable problems in context of organizational strategy, business objectives, or international agreements. In this work, we study the existing literature to identify the main definitions provided for the term ‘Cyber Security’ by authoritative sources. We then conduct various lexical and semantic …

Forensic Cell Site Analysis: A Validation & Error Mitigation Methodology, John B. Minor

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The E911 Initiative in the mid-1990s established an opportunity to obtain location specific digital evidence of subscriber activity from cellular carriers. Call Detail Records (CDR) containing Cell Site Location Information (CSLI) evidence production was made available from cellular carriers in response to the CALEA, 911 and ECPA acts. In the late 1990s, cellular carriers began to produce evidence for investigative and litigation purposes. CDR/CSLI evidence has become an important evidentiary focus in the courtroom. This research project resulted in the creation of a method of validating cellular carrier records accuracy and mitigating errors in forensic cell site analyst conclusions. The …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

File Type Identification - Computational Intelligence For Digital Forensics, Konstantinos Karampidis, Giorgos Papadourakis

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In modern world, the use of digital devices for leisure or professional reasons is growing quickly; nevertheless, criminals try to fool authorities and hide evidence in a computer by changing the file type. File type detection is a very demanding task for a digital forensic examiner. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed – in a digital forensics perspective- to identify altered file types with high accuracy by employing computational intelligence techniques. The proposed methodology is applied to the three most common image file types (jpg, png and gif) as well as to uncompressed tiff images. A three-stage process …

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Signatures Of Viber Security Traffic, M.A.K. Sudozai, N. Habib, S. Saleem, A.A. Khan

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Viber is one of the widely used mobile chat application which has over 606 million users on its platform. Since the recent release of Viber 6.0 in March/April 2016 and its further updates, Viber provides end-to-end encryption based on Open Whisper Signal security architecture. With proprietary communication protocol scattered on distributed cluster of servers in different countries and secure cryptographic primitives, Viber offers a difficult paradigm of traffic analysis. In this paper, we present a novel methodology of identification of Viber traffic over the network and established a model which can classify its services of audio and audio/video calls, message …

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 …

Protecting Digital Evidence Integrity And Preserving Chain Of Custody, Makhdoom Syed Muhammad Baqir Shah, Shahzad Saleem, Roha Zulqarnain

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Evidence is the key to solve any crime. Evidence integrity needs to be protected in order to make it admissible in the court of law. Digital evidence is more revealing, but it is fragile; it can easily be tampered with or modified. There are different techniques available to protect the integrity of digital evidence. Different automated digital evidence acquisition tools are available in the market. In this paper, we have analyzed two automated tools (EnCase and FTK Imager) that are used for disk imaging. These tools claim to protect the integrity of digital evidence. The techniques used by these tools …

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

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 …

Cyber Security For Everyone: An Introductory Course For Non-Technical Majors, Marc J. Dupuis

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In this paper, we describe the need for and development of an introductory cyber security course. The course was designed for non-technical majors with the goal of increasing cyber security hygiene for an important segment of the population—college undergraduates. While the need for degree programs that focus on educating and training individuals for occupations in the ever-growing cyber security field is critically important, the need for improved cyber security hygiene from the average everyday person is of equal importance. This paper discusses the approach used, curriculum developed, results from two runs of the course, and frames the overall structure of …

How Much Should We Teach The Enigma Machine?, Jeffrey A. Livermore

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Developing courses and programs in Information Assurance can feel like trying to force ten pounds of flour into a five pound sack. We want to pack more into our courses than we have time to teach. As new technologies develop, we often find it necessary to drop old technologies out of the curriculum and our students miss out on the historical impacts the old technologies had. The discipline is so broad and deep that we have to carefully choose what concepts and technologies we study in depth, what we mention in passing, and what we leave out. Leaving out important …

From The Editors, Carole L. Hollingsworth, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Welcome to the third issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice (JCERP).