Information Security Commons^™

Mobile Big Data Analytics In Healthcare, Alramzana Nujum Navaz

Theses

Mobile and ubiquitous devices are everywhere around us generating considerable amount of data. The concept of mobile computing and analytics is expanding due to the fact that we are using mobile devices day in and out without even realizing it. These mobile devices use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or mobile data to be intermittently connected to the world, generating, sending and receiving data on the move. Latest mobile applications incorporating graphics, video and audio are main causes of loading the mobile devices by consuming battery, memory and processing power. Mobile Big data analytics includes for instance, big health data, big location data, …

On The Effectiveness Of Virtualization Based Memory Isolation On Multicore Platforms, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtualization based memory isolation has beenwidely used as a security primitive in many security systems.This paper firstly provides an in-depth analysis of itseffectiveness in the multicore setting; a first in the literature.Our study reveals that memory isolation by itself is inadequatefor security. Due to the fundamental design choices inhardware, it faces several challenging issues including pagetable maintenance, address mapping validation and threadidentification. As demonstrated by our attacks implementedon XMHF and BitVisor, these issues undermine the security ofmemory isolation. Next, we propose a new isolation approachthat is immune to the aforementioned problems. In our design,the hypervisor constructs a fully isolated micro …

What You See Is Not What You Get: Leakage-Resilient Password Entry Schemes For Smart Glasses, Yan Li, Yao Cheng, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart glasses are becoming popular for users to access various services such as email. To protect these services, password-based user authentication is widely used. Unfortunately, the password based user authentication has inherent vulnerability against password leakage. Many efforts have been put on designing leakage resilient password entry schemes on PCs and mobile phones with traditional input equipment including keyboards and touch screens. However, such traditional input equipment is not available on smart glasses. Existing password entry on smart glasses relies on additional PCs or mobile devices. Such solutions force users to switch between different systems, which causes interrupted experience and …

Vulnerabilities, Attacks, And Countermeasures In Balise-Based Train Control Systems, Yongdong Wu, Jian Weng, Zhe Tang, Xin Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern rail transport systems, balises are widely used to exchange track-train information via air-gap interface. In this paper, we first present the vulnerabilities on the standard balise air-gap interface, and then conduct vulnerability simulations using the system parameters that were specified in the European Train Control System. The simulation results show that the vulnerabilities can be exploited to launch effective and practical attacks, which could lead to catastrophic consequences, such as train derailment or collision. To mitigate the vulnerabilities and attacks, we propose to implement a challenge-response authentication process in the air-gap interface in the existing transport infrastructure.

A Secure And Efficient Id-Based Aggregate Signature Scheme For Wireless Sensor Networks, Limin Shen, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Fushan Wei, Meixia Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Affording secure and efficient big data aggregation methods is very attractive in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research. In real settings, the WSNs have been broadly applied, such as target tracking and environment remote monitoring. However, data can be easily compromised by a vast of attacks, such as data interception and data tampering, etc. In this paper, we mainly focus on data integrity protection, give an identity-based aggregate signature (IBAS) scheme with a designated verifier for WSNs. According to the advantage of aggregate signatures, our scheme not only can keep data integrity, but also can reduce bandwidth and …

Identity-Based Data Outsourcing With Comprehensive Auditing In Clouds, Yujue Wang, Qianhong Wu, Bo Qin, Wenchang Shi, Robert H. Deng, Jiankun Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud storage system provides facilitative file storage and sharing services for distributed clients. To address integrity, controllable outsourcing, and origin auditing concerns on outsourced files, we propose an identity-based data outsourcing (IBDO) scheme equipped with desirable features advantageous over existing proposals in securing outsourced data. First, our IBDO scheme allows a user to authorize dedicated proxies to upload data to the cloud storage server on her behalf, e.g., a company may authorize some employees to upload files to the company's cloud account in a controlled way. The proxies are identified and authorized with their recognizable identities, which eliminates complicated certificate …

Characterizing Malicious Android Apps By Mining Topic-Specific Data Flow Signatures, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Li Li, Xin Xia, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: State-of-the-art works on automated detection of Android malware have leveraged app descriptions to spot anomalies w.r.t the functionality implemented, or have used data flow information as a feature to discriminate malicious from benign apps. Although these works have yielded promising performance,we hypothesize that these performances can be improved by a better understanding of malicious behavior. Objective: To characterize malicious apps, we take into account both information on app descriptions,which are indicative of apps’ topics, and information on sensitive data flow, which can be relevant todiscriminate malware from benign apps. Method: In this paper, we propose a topic-specific approach to …

Special Issue Of Best Papers From The 11th International Conference On Systematic Approaches To Digital Forensic Engineering (Sadfe 2016)

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The SADFE series feature the different editions of the International Conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering. Now in its eleventh edition, SADFE has established itself as the premier conference for researchers and practitioners working in Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering.

SADFE 2016, the eleventh international conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering was held in Kyoto, Japan, September 20 - 22, 2016.

Digital forensics engineering and the curation of digital collections in cultural institutions face pressing and overlapping challenges related to provenance, chain of custody, authenticity, integrity, and identity. The generation, analysis and sustainability of digital …

Compression Of Virtual-Machine Memory In Dynamic Malware Analysis, James E. Fowler Ph.D.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Lossless compression of memory dumps from virtual machines that run malware samples is considered with the goal of significantly reducing archival costs in dynamic-malware-analysis applications. Given that, in such dynamic-analysis scenarios, malware samples are typically run in virtual machines just long enough to activate any self-decryption or other detection- avoidance maneuvers, the virtual-machine memory typically changes little from that of the baseline state, with the difference being attributable in large degree to the loading of additional executables and libraries. Consequently, delta coding is proposed to compress the current virtual-machine memory dump by coding its differences with respect to a predicted …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Find Me If You Can: Mobile Gps Mapping Applications Forensic Analysis & Snavp The Open Source, Modular, Extensible Parser, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The use of smartphones as navigation devices has become more prevalent. The ubiquity of hand-held navigation devices such as Garmins or Toms Toms has been falling whereas the ownership of smartphones and their adoption as GPS devices is growing. This work provides a comprehensive study of the most popular smartphone mapping applications, namely Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, MapQuest, Bing, and Scout, on both Android and iOS. It details what data was found, where it was found, and how it was acquired for each application. Based on the findings, the work allowed for the construction of a tool capable of …

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A Forensic Email Analysis Tool Using Dynamic Visualization, Johannes Stadlinger, Andreas Dewald

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Communication between people counts to the most important information of today’s business. As a result, in case of forensic investigations in big companies, analysis of communication data in general and especially email, as the still most widely used business communication platform with an immense and still growing volume, is a typical task in digital forensics. One of the challenges is to identify the relevant communication partners and structures in the suspects surrounding as quickly as possible in order to react appropriately and identify further targets of evaluation. Due to the amount of emails in typical inboxes, reading through all the …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Anti-Forensic Trace Detection In Digital Forensic Triage Investigations, Kyoung Jea Park, Jung-Min Park, Eun-Jin Kim, Chang Geun Cheon, Joshua I. James

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Anti-forensics, whether intentionally to disrupt investigations or simply an effort to make a computer system run better, is becoming of increasing concern to digital investigators. This work attempts to assess the problem of anti-forensics techniques commonly deployed in South Korea. Based on identified challenges, a method of signature-based anti-forensic trace detection is proposed for triage purposes that will assist investigators in quickly making decisions about the suspect digital devices before conducting a full investigation. Finally, a prototype anti-forensic trace detection system is given to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed method.

Ten Simple Rules For Responsible Big Data Research, Matthew Zook, Solon Barocas, Danah Boyd, Kate Crawford, Emily Keller, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Alyssa Goodman, Rachelle Hollander, Barbara A. Koenig, Jacob Metcalf, Arvind Narayanan, Alondra Nelson, Frank Pasquale

Geography Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Framework For Categorization Of Industrial Control System Cyber Training Environments, Evan G. Plumley

Theses and Dissertations

First responders and professionals in hazardous occupations undergo training and evaluations for the purpose of mitigating risk and damage. For example, helicopter pilots train with multiple categorized simulations that increase in complexity before flying a real aircraft. However in the industrial control cyber incident response domain, where incident response professionals help detect, respond and recover from cyber incidents, no official categorization of training environments exist. To address this gap, this thesis provides a categorization of industrial control training environments based on realism. Four levels of environments are proposed and mapped to Blooms Taxonomy. This categorization will help organizations determine which …

Autoprov: An Automated File Provenance Collection Tool, Ryan A. Good

Theses and Dissertations

A file's provenance is a detailing of its origins and activities. There are tools available that are useful in maintaining the provenance of a file. Unfortunately for digital forensics, these tools require prior installation on the computer of interest while provenance generating events happen. The presented tool addresses this by reconstructing a file's provenance from several temporal artifacts. It identifies relevant temporal and user correlations between these artifacts, and presents them to the user. A variety of predefined use cases and real world data are tested against to demonstrate that this software allows examiners to draw useful conclusions about the …

Active Response Using Host-Based Intrusion Detection System And Software-Defined Networking, Jonathon S. Goodgion

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes AHNSR: Active Host-based Network Security Response by utilizing Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to enhance system security by allowing dynamic active response and reconstruction from a global network topology perspective. Responses include traffic redirection, host quarantining, filtering, and more. A testable SDN-controlled network is constructed with multiple hosts, OpenFlow enabled switches, and a Floodlight controller, all linked to a custom, novel interface for the Open-Source SECurity (OSSEC) HIDS framework. OSSEC is implemented in a server-agent architecture, allowing scalability and OS independence. System effectiveness is evaluated against the following factors: alert density and a …

A Framework For Understanding, Prioritizing, And Applying Systems Security Engineering Processes, Activities, And Tasks, Stephen Khou

Theses and Dissertations

Current systems security practices lack an effective approach to prioritize and tailor systems security efforts to develop and field secure systems in challenging operational environments, which results in business and mission stakeholders becoming more susceptible to an array of disruptive events. This work informs Systems Engineers on recent developments in the field of system security engineering and provides a framework for more fully understanding the application of Systems Security Engineering (SSE) processes, activities, and tasks as described in the recently released National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-160. This SSE framework uniquely offers a repeatable and tailorable …