Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

An Accidental Discovery Of Iot Botnets And A Method For Investigating Them With A Custom Lua Dissector, Max Gannon, Gary Warner, Arsh Arora

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper presents a case study that occurred while observing peer-to-peer network communications on a botnet monitoring station and shares how tools were developed to discover what ultimately was identified as Mirai and many related IoT DDOS Botnets. The paper explains how researchers developed a customized protocol dissector in Wireshark using the Lua coding language, and how this enabled them to quickly identify new DDOS variants over a five month period of study.

Kelihos Botnet: A Never-Ending Saga, Arsh Arora, Max Gannon, Gary Warner

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper investigates the recent behavior of the Kelihos botnet, a spam-sending botnet that accounts for many millions of emails sent each day. The paper demonstrates how a team of students are able to perform a longitudinal malware study, making significant observations and contributions to the understanding of a major botnet using tools and techniques taught in the classroom. From this perspective the paper has two objectives: encouragement and observation. First, by providing insight into the methodology and tools used by student researchers to document and understand a botnet, the paper strives to embolden other academic programs to follow a …

Examining And Exposing The Darknet, Ton H. Don

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis consists of two studies; the first study is “Diving into the Darknet” and the second is “Exposing the Darknet on Mobile Devices”. The Darknet is a network of hidden sites and services which are built based on anonymity. In “Diving into the Darknet”, we applied different data science methods to establish the relationships between the data in the data set. This data set has information related to seller, drug types, and transactions. Additionally, we used Tableau to visualize the data set. For the second study, we took a digital forensics perspective of the Darknet. Orfox and Orbot, a …

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.

Practical Application Of Fast Disk Analysis For Selective Data Acquisition, Sergey Gorbov

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Using a forensic imager to produce a copy of the storage is a common practice. Due to the large volumes of the modern disks, the imaging may impose severe time overhead which ultimately delays the investigation process. We proposed automated disk analysis techniques that precisely identify regions on the disk that contain data. We also developed a high performance imager that produces AFFv3 images at rates exceeding 300MB/s. Using multiple disk analysis strategies we can analyze a disk within a few minutes and yet reduce the imaging time of by many hours. Partial AFFv3 images produced by our imager can …

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

Categorizing Blog Spam, Brandon Bevans

Master's Theses

The internet has matured into the focal point of our era. Its ecosystem is vast, complex, and in many regards unaccounted for. One of the most prevalent aspects of the internet is spam. Similar to the rest of the internet, spam has evolved from simply meaning ‘unwanted emails’ to a blanket term that encompasses any unsolicited or illegitimate content that appears in the wide range of media that exists on the internet.

Many forms of spam permeate the internet, and spam architects continue to develop tools and methods to avoid detection. On the other side, cyber security engineers continue to …

Sim Card Forensics: Digital Evidence, Nada Ibrahim, Nuha Al Naqbi, Farkhund Iqbal, Omar Alfandi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the rapid evolution of the smartphone industry, mobile device forensics has become essential in cybercrime investigation. Currently, evidence forensically-retrieved from a mobile device is in the form of call logs, contacts, and SMSs; a mobile forensic investigator should also be aware of the vast amount of user data and network information that are stored in the mobile SIM card such as ICCID, IMSI, and ADN. The aim of this study is to test various forensic tools to effectively gather critical evidence stored on the SIM card. In the first set of experiments, we compare the selected forensic tools in …

Assessing The Gap: Measure The Impact Of Phishing On An Organization, Brad Wardman

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing has become one of the most recognized words associated with cybercrime. As more organizations are being targeted by phishing campaigns, there are more options within the industry to deter such attacks. However, there is little research into how much damage these campaigns are causing organizations. This paper will show how financial organizations can be impacted by phishing and present a method for accurately quantifying resultant monetary losses. The methodology presented in this paper can be adapted to other organizations in order to quantify phishing losses across industries.

Keywords: phishing, cybercrime, economics

Wban Security Management In Healthcare Enterprise Environments, Karina Bahena, Manghui Tu

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As healthcare data are pushed online, consumers have raised big concerns on the breach of their personal information. Law and regulations have placed businesses and public organizations under obligations to take actions to prevent such data breaches. Various vulnerabilities have been identified in healthcare enterprise environments, in which the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) remains to be a major vulnerability, which can be easily taken advantage of by determined adversaries. Thus, vulnerabilities of WBAN systems and the effective countermeasure mechanisms to secure WBAN are urgently needed. In this research, first, the architecture of WBAN system has been explored, and the …

Forensics Analysis Of Privacy Of Portable Web Browsers, Ahmad Ghafarian

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Web browser vendors offer a portable web browser option which is considered as one of the features that provides user privacy. Portable web browser is a browser that can be launched from a USB flash drive without the need for its installation on the host machine. Most popular web browsers have portable versions of their browsers as well. Portable web browsing poses a great challenge to computer forensic investigators who try to reconstruct the past browsing history, in case of any computer incidence. This research examines various sources in the host machine such as physical memory, temporary, recent, event files, …

Reverse Engineering A Nit That Unmasks Tor Users, Matthew Miller, Joshua Stroschein, Ashley Podhradsky

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper is a case study of a forensic investigation of a Network Investigative Technique (NIT) used by the FBI to deanonymize users of a The Onion Router (Tor) Hidden Service. The forensic investigators were hired by the defense to determine how the NIT worked. The defendant was ac- cused of using a browser to access illegal information. The authors analyzed the source code, binary files and logs that were used by the NIT. The analysis was used to validate that the NIT collected only necessary and legally authorized information. This paper outlines the publicly available case details, how the …

Forensic Analysis Of Smartphone Applications For Privacy Leakage, Diana Hintea, Chrysanthi Taramonli, Robert Bird, Rezhna Yusuf

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smartphone and tablets are personal devices that have diffused to near universal ubiquity in recent years. As Smartphone users become more privacy-aware and -conscious, research is needed to understand how “leakage” of private information (personally identifiable information – PII) occurs. This study explores how leakage studies in Droid devices should be adapted to Apple iOS devices. The OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is examined for 50 apps in various categories. This study confirms that: (1) most apps transmit unencrypted sensitive PII, (2) SSL is used by some recipient websites, but without corresponding app compliance with SSL, and (3) most apps …

Malware In The Mobile Device Android Environment, Diana Hintea, Robert Bird, Andrew Walker

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

exploit smartphone operating systems has exponentially expanded. Android has become the main target to exploit due to having the largest install base amongst the smartphone operating systems and owing to the open access nature in which application installations are permitted. Many Android users are unaware of the risks associated with a malware infection and to what level current malware scanners protect them. This paper tests how efficient the currently available malware scanners are. To achieve this, ten representative Android security products were selected and tested against a set of 5,560 known and categorized Android malware samples. The tests were carried …

Inferring Previously Uninstalled Applications From Residual Partial Artifacts, Jim Jones, Tahir Khan, Kathryn Laskey, Alex Nelson, Mary Laamanen, Douglas White

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper, we present an approach and experimental results to suggest the past presence of an application after the application has been uninstalled and the system has remained in use. Current techniques rely on the recovery of intact artifacts and traces, e.g., whole files, Windows Registry entries, or log file entries, while our approach requires no intact artifact recovery and leverages trace evidence in the form of residual partial files. In the case of recently uninstalled applications or an instrumented infrastructure, artifacts and traces may be intact and complete. In most cases, however, digital artifacts and traces are al- …

One-Time Pad Encryption Steganography System, Michael J. Pelosi, Gary Kessler, Michael Scott S. Brown

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper we introduce and describe a novel approach to adaptive image steganography which is combined with One-Time Pad encryption, and demonstrate the software which implements this methodology. Testing using the state-of-the-art steganalysis software tool StegExpose concludes the image hiding is reliably secure and undetectable using reasonably-sized message payloads (≤25% message bits per image pixel; bpp). Payload image file format outputs from the software include PNG, BMP, JP2, JXR, J2K, TIFF, and WEBP. A variety of file output formats is empirically important as most steganalysis programs will only accept PNG, BMP, and possibly JPG, as the file inputs.

Keywords: …

Library Writers Reward Project, Saravana Kumar Gajendran

Master's Projects

Open-source library development exploits the distributed intelligence of participants in Internet communities. Nowadays, contribution to the open-source community is fading [16] (Stackalytics, 2016) as there is not much recognition for library writers. They can start exploring ways to generate revenue as they actively contribute to the open-source community.

This project helps library writers to generate revenue in the form of bitcoins for their contribution. Our solution to generate revenue for library writers is to integrate bitcoin mining with existing JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery. More use of the library leads to more revenue for the library writers. It uses the …

Applying Grounded Theory Methods To Digital Forensics Research, Ahmed Almarzooqi, Andrew Jones, Richard Howley

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Deciding on a suitable research methodology is challenging for researchers. In this paper, grounded theory is presented as a systematic and comprehensive qualitative methodology in the emergent field of digital forensics research. This paper applies grounded theory in a digital forensics research project undertaken to study how organisations build and manage digital forensics capabilities. This paper gives a step-by-step guideline to explain the procedures and techniques of using grounded theory in digital forensics research. The paper gives a detailed explanation of how the three grounded theory coding methods (open, axial, and selective coding) can be used in digital forensics research. …

Covert6: A Tool To Corroborate The Existence Of Ipv6 Covert Channels, Raymond A. Hansen, Lourdes Gino, Dominic Savio

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Covert channels are any communication channel that can be exploited to transfer information in a manner that violates the system’s security policy. Research in the field has shown that, like many communication channels, IPv4 and the TCP/IP protocol suite have been susceptible to covert channels, which could be exploited to leak data or be used for anonymous communications. With the introduction of IPv6, researchers are acutely aware that many vulnerabilities of IPv4 have been remediated in IPv6. However, a proof of concept covert channel system was demonstrated in 2006. A decade later, IPv6 and its related protocols have undergone major …

Acceleration Of Statistical Detection Of Zero-Day Malware In The Memory Dump Using Cuda-Enabled Gpu Hardware, Igor Korkin, Iwan Nesterow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper focuses on the anticipatory enhancement of methods of detecting stealth software. Cyber security detection tools are insufficiently powerful to reveal the most recent cyber-attacks which use malware. In this paper, we will present first an idea of the highest stealth malware, as this is the most complicated scenario for detection because it combines both existing anti-forensic techniques together with their potential improvements. Second, we will present new detection methods which are resilient to this hidden prototype. To help solve this detection challenge, we have analyzed Windows’ memory content using a new method of Shannon Entropy calculation; methods of …

Using Computer Behavior Profiles To Differentiate Between Users In A Digital Investigation, Shruti Gupta, Marcus Rogers

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Most digital crimes involve finding evidence on the computer and then linking it to a suspect using login information, such as a username and a password. However, login information is often shared or compromised. In such a situation, there needs to be a way to identify the user without relying exclusively on login credentials. This paper introduces the concept that users may show behavioral traits which might provide more information about the user on the computer. This hypothesis was tested by conducting an experiment in which subjects were required to perform common tasks on a computer, over multiple sessions. The …

Current Challenges And Future Research Areas For Digital Forensic Investigation, David Lillis, Brett A. Becker, Tadhg O’Sullivan, Mark Scanlon

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Given the ever-increasing prevalence of technology in modern life, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of digital devices being pertinent to a criminal investigation or civil litigation. As a direct consequence, the number of investigations requiring digital forensic expertise is resulting in huge digital evidence backlogs being encountered by law enforcement agencies throughout the world. It can be anticipated that the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis will greatly increase in the future. It is also likely that each case will require the analysis of an increasing number of devices including computers, smartphones, tablets, cloud-based services, Internet …

Forensic Analysis Of Ares Galaxy Peer-To-Peer Network, Frank Kolenbrander, Nhien-An Le-Khac, Tahar Kechadi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Child Abuse Material (CAM) is widely available on P2P networks. Over the last decade several tools were made for 24/7 monitoring of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to discover suspects that use these networks for downloading and distribution of CAM. For some countries the amount of cases generated by these tools is so great that Law Enforcement (LE) just cannot handle them all. This is not only leading to backlogs and prioritizing of cases but also leading to discussions about the possibility of disrupting these networks and sending warning messages to potential CAM offenders. Recently, investigators are reporting that they are creating …

Keynote Speaker, Chuck Easttom

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Conference Keynote Speaker, Chuck Easttom

An Empirical Study Of Authentication Methods To Secure E-Learning System Activities Against Impersonation Fraud, Shauna Beaudin

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Studies have revealed that securing Information Systems (IS) from intentional misuse is a concern among organizations today. The use of Web-based systems has grown dramatically across industries including e-commerce, e-banking, e-government, and e learning to name a few. Web-based systems provide e-services through a number of diverse activities. The demand for e-learning systems in both academic and non-academic organizations has increased the need to improve security against impersonation fraud. Although there are a number of studies focused on securing Web-based systems from Information Systems (IS) misuse, research has recognized the importance of identifying suitable levels of authenticating strength for various …

An Immersive Telepresence System Using Rgb-D Sensors And Head-Mounted Display, Xinzhong Lu, Ju Shen, Saverio Perugini, Jianjun Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The …

Automatic Video Self Modeling For Voice Disorder, Ju Shen, Changpeng Ti, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Rita Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him- or herself. In the field of speech language pathology, the approach of VSM has been successfully used for treatment of language in children with Autism and in individuals with fluency disorder of stuttering. Technical challenges remain in creating VSM contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that synthesizes new video sequences for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorders. Starting with a video recording of a voice-disorder patient, the proposed …

Tracking Criminals On Facebook: A Case Study From A Digital Forensics Reu Program, Daniel Weiss, Gary Warner

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The 2014 Digital Forensics Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) focused its summer efforts on tracking criminal forums and Facebook groups. The UAB-REU Facebook team was provided with a list of about 60 known criminal groups on Facebook, with a goal to track illegal information posted in these groups and ultimately store the information in a searchable database for use by digital forensic analysts. Over the course of about eight weeks, the UAB-REU Facebook team created a database with over 400 Facebook groups conducting criminal activity along with over 100,000 unique users …

Towards A Digital Forensics Competency-Based Program: Making Assessment Count, Rose Shumba

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper describes an approach that UMUC has initiated to revise its graduate programs to a Competency-Based Education (CBE) curriculum. The approach, which is Learning Demonstration (LD) centric, includes the identification of learning goals and competences, identification and description of the LDs, mapping of the LDs to the competences, scripting the LDs, placing the LDs into the respective courses, validating the developed materials, and the development of the open learning resources. Programs in the Cybersecurity and Information Assurance Department, including the Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigations program, are being revised. An LD centric approach to curriculum development helps align programs …

Phishing Intelligence Using The Simple Set Comparison Tool, Jason Britt, Alan Sprague, Gary Warner

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing websites, phish, attempt to deceive users into exposing their passwords, user IDs, and other sensitive information by imitating legitimate websites, such as banks, product vendors, and service providers. Phishing investigators need fast automated tools to analyze the volume of phishing attacks seen today. In this paper, we present the Simple Set Comparison tool. The Simple Set Comparison tool is a fast automated tool that groups phish by imitated brand allowing phishing investigators to quickly identify and focus on phish targeting a particular brand. The Simple Set Comparison tool is evaluated against a traditional clustering algorithm over a month's worth …