Systems Architecture Commons^™

Privacy Assessment Breakthrough: A Design Science Approach To Creating A Unified Methodology, Lisa Mckee

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Recent changes have increased the need for and awareness of privacy assessments. Organizations focus primarily on Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) but rarely take a comprehensive approach to assessments or integrate the results into a privacy risk program. There are numerous industry standards and regulations for privacy assessments, but the industry lacks a simple unified methodology with steps to perform privacy assessments. The objectives of this research project are to create a new privacy assessment methodology model using the design science methodology, update industry standards and present training for conducting privacy assessments that can be …

Two Project On Information Systems Capabilities And Organizational Performance, Giridhar Reddy Bojja

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Information systems (IS), as a multi-disciplinary research area, emphasizes the complementary relationship between people, organizations, and technology and has evolved dramatically over the years. IS and the underlying Information Technology (IT) application and research play a crucial role in transforming the business world and research within the management domain. Consistent with this evolution and transformation, I develop a two-project dissertation on Information systems capabilities and organizational outcomes.

Project 1 examines the role of hospital operational effectiveness on the link between information systems capabilities and hospital performance. This project examines the cross-lagged effects on a sample of 217 hospitals measured over …

A False Sense Of Security - Organizations Need A Paradigm Shift On Protecting Themselves Against Apts, Srinivasulu R. Vuggumudi

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are the most complex cyberattacks and are generally executed by cyber attackers linked to nation-states. The motivation behind APT attacks is political intelligence and cyber espionage. Despite all the awareness, technological advancements, and massive investment, the fight against APTs is a losing battle for organizations. An organization may implement a security strategy to prevent APTs. However, the benefits to the security posture might be negligible if the measurement of the strategy’s effectiveness is not part of the plan. A false sense of security exists when the focus is on implementing a security strategy but not …

Leaderboard Design Principles Influencing User Engagement In An Online Discussion, Brian S. Bovee

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Along with the popularity of gamification, there has been increased interest in using leaderboards to promote engagement with online learning systems. The existing literature suggests that when leaderboards are designed well they have the potential to improve learning, but qualitative investigations are required in order to reveal design principles that will improve engagement. In order to address this gap, this qualitative study aims to explore students' overall perceptions of popular leaderboard designs in a gamified, online discussion. Using two leaderboards reflecting performance in an online discussion, this study evaluated multiple leaderboard designs from student interviews and other data sources regarding …

Improving Adversarial Attacks Against Malconv, Justin Burr

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes several improvements to existing adversarial attacks against MalConv, a raw-byte malware classifier for Windows PE files. The included contributions greatly improve the success rates and performance of gradient-based file overlay attacks. All improvements are included in a new open-source attack utility called BitCamo.

Several new payload initialization strategies for use with gradient-based attacks are proposed and evaluated as potential replacements for the randomized initialization method used by current attacks. An algorithm for determining the optimal payload size is also proposed. The resulting improvements achieve a 100% evasion rate against eligible target executables using an average payload size …

Aligning Recovery Objectives With Organizational Capabilities, Jude C. Ejiobi

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

To reduce or eliminate the impact of a cyber-attack on an organization, preparations to recover a failed system and/or data are usually made in anticipation of such an attack. To avoid a false sense of security, these preparations should, as closely as possible, reflect the organization’s capabilities, in order to inform future improvement and avoid unattainable goals. There is an absence of a strong basis for the selection of the metrics that are used to measure preparation. Informal and unreliable processes are widely used, and they often result in metrics that conflict with the organization’s capabilities and interests. The goal …

A Metric For Machine Learning Vulnerability To Adversarial Examples, Matt Bradley

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Machine learning is used in myriad aspects, both in academic research and in everyday life, including safety-critical applications such as robust robotics, cybersecurity products, medial testing and diagnosis where a false positive or negative could have catastrophic results. Despite the increasing prevalence of machine learning applications and their role in critical systems we rely on daily, the security and robustness of machine learning models is still a relatively young field of research with many open questions, particularly on the defensive side of adversarial machine learning. Chief among these open questions is how best to quantify a model’s attack surface against …

Analysis Of Theoretical And Applied Machine Learning Models For Network Intrusion Detection, Jonah Baron

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS) devices play a crucial role in the realm of network security. These systems generate alerts for security analysts by performing signature-based and anomaly-based detection on malicious network traffic. However, there are several challenges when configuring and fine-tuning these IDS devices for high accuracy and precision. Machine learning utilizes a variety of algorithms and unique dataset input to generate models for effective classification. These machine learning techniques can be applied to IDS devices to classify and filter anomalous network traffic. This combination of machine learning and network security provides improved automated network defense by developing highly-optimized …

Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System, Justin Tank

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Olmsted Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System allows waste generators of certain materials to electronically have their waste assessments evaluated, approved, and tracked through a simple online process. The current process of manually requesting evaluations, prepopulating tracking forms, and filling them out on triplicate carbonless forms is out of sync with other processes in the department. Complying with audit requirements requires pulling physical copies and providing them physically to fulfill information requests.

Waste generators in Minnesota are required to track their waste disposals for certain types of industrial waste streams. This ensures waste is accounted for at the point …

The Role Of Privacy Within The Realm Of Healthcare Wearables' Acceptance And Use, Thomas Jernejcic

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The flexibility and vitality of the Internet along with technological innovation have fueled an industry focused on the design of portable devices capable of supporting personal activities and wellbeing. These compute devices, known as wearables, are unique from other computers in that they are portable, specific in function, and worn or carried by the user. While there are definite benefits attributable to wearables, there are also notable risks, especially in the realm of security where personal information and/or activities are often accessible to third parties. In addition, protecting one’s private information is regularly an afterthought and thus lacking in maturity. …

Efficacy Of Incident Response Certification In The Workforce, Samuel Jarocki

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Numerous cybersecurity certifications are available both commercially and via institutes of higher learning. Hiring managers, recruiters, and personnel accountable for new hires need to make informed decisions when selecting personnel to fill positions. An incident responder or security analyst's role requires near real-time decision-making, pervasive knowledge of the environments they are protecting, and functional situational awareness. This concurrent mixed methods paper studies whether current commercial certifications offered in the cybersecurity realm, particularly incident response, provide useful indicators for a viable hiring candidate.

Managers and non-managers alike do prefer hiring candidates with an incident response certification. Both groups affirmatively believe commercial …

Towards Identity Relationship Management For Internet Of Things, Mohammad Muntasir Nur

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is in the core of any information systems. Traditional IAM systems manage users, applications, and devices within organizational boundaries, and utilize static intelligence for authentication and access control. Identity federation has helped a lot to deal with boundary limitation, but still limited to static intelligence – users, applications and devices must be under known boundaries. However, today’s IAM requirements are much more complex. Boundaries between enterprise and consumer space, on premises and cloud, personal devices and organization owned devices, and home, work and public places are fading away. These challenges get more complicated for Internet …

Block The Root Takeover: Validating Devices Using Blockchain Protocol, Sharmila Paul

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This study addresses a vulnerability in the trust-based STP protocol that allows malicious users to target an Ethernet LAN with an STP Root-Takeover Attack. This subject is relevant because an STP Root-Takeover attack is a gateway to unauthorized control over the entire network stack of a personal or enterprise network. This study aims to address this problem with a potentially trustless research solution called the STP DApp. The STP DApp is the combination of a kernel /net modification called stpverify and a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework in a NodeJS runtime environment in userland. The STP DApp works as an Intrusion …

Traversing Nat: A Problem, Tyler Flaagan

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study measured and analyzed the impacts of adding security to a new bi-directional Network Address Translation (NAT). Literature revolves around various types of NAT, their advantages and disadvantages, their security models, and networking technologies’ adoption. The study of the newly created secure bi-directional model of NAT showed statistically significant changes in the variables than another model using port forwarding. Future research of how data will traverse networks is crucial in an ever-changing world of technology.

A Framework For Identifying Host-Based Artifacts In Dark Web Investigations, Arica Kulm

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The dark web is the hidden part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and is only accessible with a specific browser like The Onion Router (Tor). Tor was originally developed as a means of secure communications and is still used worldwide for individuals seeking privacy or those wanting to circumvent restrictive regimes. The dark web has become synonymous with nefarious and illicit content which manifests itself in underground marketplaces containing illegal goods such as drugs, stolen credit cards, stolen user credentials, child pornography, and more (Kohen, 2017). Dark web marketplaces contribute both to illegal drug usage …

Iot-Hass: A Framework For Protecting Smart Home Environment, Tarig Mudawi

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

While many solutions have been proposed for smart home security, the problem that no single solution fully protects the smart home environment still exists. In this research we propose a security framework to protect the smart home environment. The proposed framework includes three engines that complement each other to protect the smart home IoT devices. The first engine is an IDS/IPS module that monitors all traffic in the home network and then detects, alerts users, and/or blocks packets using anomaly-based detection. The second engine works as a device management module that scans and verifies IoT devices in the home network, …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Detecting X.509 Covert Channels, Cody Welu

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study examined the performance impacts of detecting X.509 covert channels in the Suricata intrusion detection system. Relevant literature and previous studies surrounding covert channels and covert channel detection, X.509 certificates, and intrusion detection system performance were evaluated. This study used Jason Reaves’ X.509 covert channel proof of concept code to generate malicious network traffic for detection (2018). Various detection rules for intrusion detection systems were created to aid in the detection of the X.509 covert channel. The central processing unit (CPU) and memory utilization impacts that each rule had on the intrusion detection system was studied and …

Mirai Bot Scanner Summation Prototype, Charles V. Frank Jr.

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Mirai botnet deploys a distributed mechanism with each Bot continually scanning for a potential new Bot Victim. A Bot continually generates a random IP address to scan the network for discovering a potential new Bot Victim. The Bot establishes a connection with the potential new Bot Victim with a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) handshake. The Mirai botnet has recruited hundreds of thousands of Bots. With 100,000 Bots, Mirai Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on service provider Dyn in October 2016 triggered the inaccessibility to hundreds of websites in Europe and North America (Sinanović & Mrdovic, 2017). A month …

Flashlight In A Dark Room: A Grounded Theory Study On Information Security Management At Small Healthcare Provider Organizations, Gerald Auger

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Healthcare providers have a responsibility to protect patient’s privacy and a business motivation to properly secure their assets. These providers encounter barriers to achieving these objectives and limited academic research has been conducted to examine the causes and strategies to overcome them. A subset of this demographic, businesses with less than 10 providers, compose a majority 57% of provider organizations in the United States. This grounded theory study provides exploratory findings, discovering these small healthcare provider organizations (SHPO) have limited knowledge on information technology (IT) and information security that results in assumptions and misappropriations of information security implementation, who is …

A Malware Analysis And Artifact Capture Tool, Dallas Wright

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Malware authors attempt to obfuscate and hide their execution objectives in their program’s static and dynamic states. This paper provides a novel approach to aid analysis by introducing a malware analysis tool which is quick to set up and use with respect to other existing tools. The tool allows for the intercepting and capturing of malware artifacts while providing dynamic control of process flow. Capturing malware artifacts allows an analyst to more quickly and comprehensively understand malware behavior and obfuscation techniques and doing so interactively allows multiple code paths to be explored. The faster that malware can be analyzed the …

Matching Possible Mitigations To Cyber Threats: A Document-Driven Decision Support Systems Approach, Martha Wagner Mcneil

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Cyber systems are ubiquitous in all aspects of society. At the same time, breaches to cyber systems continue to be front-page news (Calfas, 2018; Equifax, 2017) and, despite more than a decade of heightened focus on cybersecurity, the threat continues to evolve and grow, costing globally up to $575 billion annually (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014; Gosler & Von Thaer, 2013; Microsoft, 2016; Verizon, 2017). To address possible impacts due to cyber threats, information system (IS) stakeholders must assess the risks they face. Following a risk assessment, the next step is to determine mitigations to counter the threats …