Information Security Commons^™

Tanzanian Adolescents In The Digital Age Of Cell Phones And The Internet: Access, Use And Risks, Hezron Zacharia Onditi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This study explored cell phones and internet access, use, and potential risks among Tanzanian secondary school adolescents. A total of 778 students aged 14-18 in Form I to Form IV responded to a self-report questionnaire, and a subset of 20 participants participated in semi-structured interviews. Results revealed a remarkable uptake of cell phones and internet technologies among Tanzanian adolescents. In particular, whereas about 50% of the students reported to own cell phones (nearly 60% own simcards), 76% admitted using cell phones at home, and 86% reported to connect to the Internet. Results showed that male and older adolescents seem to …

Tkse: Trustworthy Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data With Two-Side Verifiability Via Blockchain, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Jiangang Shu, Kan Yang, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a very attractive computing paradigm, cloud computing makes it possible for resource-constrained users to enjoy cost-effective and flexible resources of diversity. Considering the untrustworthiness of cloud servers and the data privacy of users, it is necessary to encrypt the data before outsourcing it to the cloud. However, the form of encrypted storage also poses a series of problems, such as: How can users search over the outsourced data? How to realize user-side verifiability of search results to resist malicious cloud servers? How to enable server-side verifiability of outsourced data to check malicious data owners? How to achieve payment fairness …

An Integrated Approach For Effective Injection Vulnerability Analysis Of Web Applications Through Security Slicing And Hybrid Constraint Solving, Julian Thome, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel Briand

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malicious users can attack Web applications by exploiting injection vulnerabilities in the source code. This work addresses the challenge of detecting injection vulnerabilities in the server-side code of Java Web applications in a scalable and effective way. We propose an integrated approach that seamlessly combines security slicing with hybrid constraint solving; the latter orchestrates automata-based solving with meta-heuristic search. We use static analysis to extract minimal program slices relevant to security from Web programs and to generate attack conditions. We then apply hybrid constraint solving to determine the satisfiability of attack conditions and thus detect vulnerabilities. The experimental results, using …

Ensuring Data Confidentiality Via Plausibly Deniable Encryption And Secure Deletion – A Survey, Qionglu Zhang, Shijie Jia, Bing Chang, Bo Chen

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Ensuring confidentiality of sensitive data is of paramount importance, since data leakage may not only endanger dataowners’ privacy, but also ruin reputation of businesses as well as violate various regulations like HIPPA andSarbanes-Oxley Act. To provide confidentiality guarantee, the data should be protected when they are preserved inthe personal computing devices (i.e.,confidentiality duringtheirlifetime); and also, they should be rendered irrecoverableafter they are removed from the devices (i.e.,confidentiality after their lifetime). Encryption and secure deletion are usedto ensure data confidentiality during and after their lifetime, respectively.This work aims to perform a thorough literature review on the techniques being used to protect …

Deaddrop: Message Passing Without Metadata Leakage, Davis Mike Arndt

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Even when network data is encrypted, observers can make inferences about content based on collected metadata. DeadDrop is an exploratory API designed to protect the metadata of a conversation from both outside observers and the facilitating server. To do so, DeadDrop servers are passed no recipient address, instead relying upon the recipient to check for messages of their own volition. In addition, the recipient downloads a copy of every encrypted message on the server to prevent even the server from knowing to whom each message is intended. To these purposes, DeadDrop is mostly successful. However, it does not obscure all …

Analyzing Global Cyber Attack Correlates Through An Open Database, Brady Benjamin Aiello

Master's Theses

As humanity becomes more reliant on digital storage and communication for every aspect of life, cyber attacks pose a growing threat. However, cyber attacks are generally understood as individual incidents reported in technological circles, sometimes tied to a particular vulnerability. They are not generally understood through the macroscopic lens of statistical analysis spanning years over several countries and sectors, leaving researchers largely ignorant of the larger trends and correlates between attacks. This is large part due to the lack of a coherent and open database of prominent attacks. Most data about cyber attacks has been captured using a repository of …

Verifiably Encrypted Cascade-Instantiable Blank Signatures To Secure Progressive Decision Management, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce the notion of verifiably encrypted cascade-instantiable blank signatures (CBS) in a multi-user setting. In CBS, there is a delegation chain that starts with an originator and is followed by a sequence of proxies. The originator creates and signs a template, which may comprise fixed fields and exchangeable fields. Thereafter, each proxy along the delegation chain is able to make an instantiation of the template from the choices passed down from her direct predecessor, before generating a signature for her instantiation. First, we present a non-interactive basic CBS construction that does not rely on any shared …

Modern Cryptography, Samuel Lopez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

We live in an age where we willingly provide our social security number, credit card information, home address and countless other sensitive information over the Internet. Whether you are buying a phone case from Amazon, sending in an on-line job application, or logging into your on-line bank account, you trust that the sensitive data you enter is secure. As our technology and computing power become more sophisticated, so do the tools used by potential hackers to our information. In this paper, the underlying mathematics within ciphers will be looked at to understand the security of modern ciphers.

An extremely important …

To Detect Stack Buffer Overflow With Polymorphic Canaries, Zhilong Wang, Xuhua Ding, Chengbin Pang, Jian Guo, Jun Zhu, Bing Mao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Smashing Protection (SSP) is a simple and highly efficient technique widely used in practice as the front line defense against stack buffer overflow attacks. Unfortunately, SSP is known to be vulnerable to the so-called byte-by-byte attack. Although several remedy schemes are proposed in the recent literature, their security is achieved at the price of practicality, because their complex logics ruin SSP's simplicity and high-efficiency. In this paper, we present an elegant solution named as Polymorphic SSP (P-SSP) that attains the same security without sacrificing SSP's strengths. We also propose three extensions of the basic scheme for better compatibility, stronger …

Fimce: A Fully Isolated Micro-Computing Environment For Multicore Systems, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtualization-based memory isolation has been widely used as a security primitive in various security systems to counter kernel-level attacks. In this article, our in-depth analysis on this primitive shows that its security is significantly undermined in the multicore setting when other hardware resources for computing are not enclosed within the isolation boundary. We thus propose to construct a fully isolated micro-computing environment (FIMCE) as a new primitive. By virtue of its architectural niche, FIMCE not only offers stronger security assurance than its predecessor, but also features a flexible and composable environment with support for peripheral device isolation, thus greatly expanding …

Towards Dynamically Monitoring Android Applications On Non-Rooted Devices In The Wild, Xiaoxiao Tang, Daoyuan Wu, Yan Lin, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic analysis is an important technique to reveal sensitive behavior of Android apps. Current works require access to the code-level and system-level events (e.g., API calls and system calls) triggered by the running apps and consequently they can only be conducted on in-lab running environments (e.g., emulators and modified OS). The strict requirement of running environment hinders their deployment in scale and makes them vulnerable to anti-analysis techniques. Furthermore, current dynamic analysis of Android apps exploits input generators to invoke app behavior, which, however, cannot provide sufficient code coverage. We propose to dynamically analyze app behavior on non-rooted devices used …

Security And Privacy In Smart Health: Efficient Policy-Hiding Attribute-Based Access Control, Yinghui Zhang, Dong Zheng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies, smart health (s-health) is expected to significantly improve the quality of health care. However, data security and user privacy concerns in s-health have not been adequately addressed. As a well-received solution to realize fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has the potential to ensure data security in s-health. Nevertheless, direct adoption of the traditional CP-ABE in s-health suffers two flaws. For one thing, access policies are in cleartext form and reveal sensitive health-related information in the encrypted s-health records (SHRs). For another, it usually supports …

Mobiceal: Towards Secure And Practical Plausibly Deniable Encryption On Mobile Devices, Bing Chang, Fengwei Zhang, Bo Chen, Yingjiu Li, Wen Tao Zhu, Yangguang Tian, Zhan Wang, Albert Ching

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce MobiCeal, the first practical Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) system for mobile devices that can defend against strong coercive multi-snapshot adversaries, who may examine the storage medium of a user's mobile device at different points of time and force the user to decrypt data. MobiCeal relies on 'dummy write' to obfuscate the differences between multiple snapshots of storage medium due to existence of hidden data. By incorporating PDE in block layer, MobiCeal supports a broad deployment of any block-based file systems on mobile devices. More importantly, MobiCeal is secure against side channel attacks which pose a serious threat to …

H-Securebox: A Hardened Memory Data Protection Framework On Arm Devices, Zhangkai Zhang, Zhoujun Li, Chunhe Xia, Jinhua Cui, Jinxin Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

ARM devices (mobile phone, IoT devices) are getting more popular in our daily life due to the low power consumption and cost. These devices carry a huge number of user's private information, which attracts attackers' attention and increase the security risk. The operating systems (e.g., Android, Linux) works out many memory data protection strategies on user's private information. However, the monolithic OS may contain security vulnerabilities that are exploited by the attacker to get root or even kernel privilege. Once the kernel privilege is obtained by the attacker, all data protection strategies will be gone and user's private information can …

Survey Of Randomization Defenses On Cloud Computing, Jianming Fu, Yan Lin, Xiuwen Liu, Xu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing has changed the processing mode on resources of individuals and industries by providing computing and storage services to users. However, existing defenses on cloud, such as virtual machine monitoring and integrity detection, cannot counter against attacks result from the homogeneity and vulnerability of services effectively. In this paper, we have investigated the threats on cloud computing platform from the perspective of cloud service, service interface and network interface, such as code reuse attack, side channel attack and SQL injection. Code reuse attack chains code snippets (gadgets) located in binaries to bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP). Side channel attack …

Position Manipulation Attacks To Balise-Based Train Automatic Stop Control, Yongdong Wu, Zhuo Wei, Jian Weng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Balise is a popular wayside device to provide accurate location information for subway station parking by sending telegrams to passing trains. By craftily disturbing wireless signals of balise telegrams, this paper proposes three attacks that may make passengers fall and even cause injury. Concretely, the first attack is to jam telegrams such that balises cannot be detected by a passing train; the second attack changes the location of transmitting telegrams by jamming and replaying; and the third attack is to change the total time of transmitting telegrams. All the attacks exploit the train localization mechanism such that a passing train …

Fimce: A Fully Isolated Micro-Computing Environment For Multicore Systems, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtualization-based memory isolation has been widely used as a security primitive in various security systems to counter kernel-level attacks. In this article, our in-depth analysis on this primitive shows that its security is significantly undermined in the multicore setting when other hardware resources for computing are not enclosed within the isolation boundary. We thus propose to construct a fully isolated micro-computing environment (FIMCE) as a new primitive. By virtue of its architectural niche, FIMCE not only offers stronger security assurance than its predecessor, but also features a flexible and composable environment with support for peripheral device isolation, thus greatly expanding …

Contents, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A Survey Of Lawyers’ Cyber Security Practises In Western Australia, Craig Valli, Mike Johnstone, Rochelle Fleming

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper reports on the results of a survey that is the initial phase of an action research project being conducted with the Law Society of Western Australia. The online survey forms a baseline for the expression of a targeted training regime aimed at improving the cyber security awareness and posture of the membership of the Society. The full complement of over 3000 members were given the opportunity to participate in the survey, with 122 members responding in this initial round. The survey was designed to elicit responses about information technology use and the awareness of good practices with respect …