Information Security Commons^™

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption With Partially Hidden Access Structure And Its Application To Privacy-Preserving Electronic Medical Record System In Cloud Environment, Lixian Liu, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of cloud computing, more and more sensitive data are uploaded to cloud by companies or individuals, which brings forth new challenges for outsourced data security and privacy. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) provides fine-grained access control of encrypted data in the cloud; in a CP-ABE scheme, an access structure, also referred to as ciphertext-policy, is sent along with a ciphertext explicitly, and anyone who obtains a ciphertext can know the access structure associated with the ciphertext. In certain applications, access structures contain very sensitive information and must be protected from everyone except the users whose private key attributes …

Attacking Android Smartphone Systems Without Permissions, Mon Kywe Su, Yingjiu Li, Kunal Petal, Michael Grace

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android requires third-party applications to request for permissions when they access critical mobile resources, such as users' personal information and system operations. In this paper, we present the attacks that can be launched without permissions. We first perform call graph analysis, component analysis and data-flow analysis on various parts of Android framework to retrieve unprotected APIs. Unprotected APIs provide a way of accessing resources without any permissions. We then exploit selected unprotected APIs and launch a number of attacks on Android phones. We discover that without requesting for any permissions, an attacker can access to device ID, phone service state, …

Server-Aided Public Key Encryption With Keyword Search, Rongman Chen, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo, Xinyi Huang, Xiaofen Wang, Yongjun Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is a well-known cryptographic primitive for secure searchable data encryption in cloud storage. Unfortunately, it is inherently subject to the (inside) offline keyword guessing attack (KGA), which is against the data privacy of users. Existing countermeasures for dealing with this security issue mainly suffer from low efficiency and are impractical for real applications. In this paper, we provide a practical and applicable treatment on this security vulnerability by formalizing a new PEKS system named server-aided public key encryption with keyword search (SA-PEKS). In SA-PEKS, to generate the keyword ciphertext/trapdoor, the user needs to …

Iterated Random Oracle: A Universal Approach For Finding Loss In Security Reduction, Fuchun Guo, Willy Susilo, Yi Mu, Rongmao Chen, Jianchang Lai, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The indistinguishability security of a public-key cryptosystem can be reduced to a computational hard assumption in the random oracle model, where the solution to a computational hard problem is hidden in one of the adversary’s queries to the random oracle. Usually, there is a finding loss in finding the correct solution from the query set, especially when the decisional variant of the computational problem is also hard. The problem of finding loss must be addressed towards tight(er) reductions under this type. In EUROCRYPT 2008, Cash, Kiltz and Shoup proposed a novel approach using a trapdoor test that can solve the …

Lossy Key Encapsulation Mechanism And Its Applications, Yamin Liu, Xianhui Lu, Bao Li, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce a new notion, lossy key encapsulation mechanism (lossy KEM), which enhances the notion of key encapsulation mechanism with lossiness, and can be more efficient than lossy trapdoor functions. We show that lossy KEM can be constructed from lossy trapdoor functions, lossy trapdoor relations, and entropic projective hashing. Using lossy KEM as a building block, several previous constructions of lossy encryption and deterministic public key encryption can be generalized and improved in efficiency.

Cross-Spectral Biometric Performance Analysis On High-Resolution Face Images, Praveen Kumar Pandian Shanmuganathan

Theses and Dissertations

Biometrics is increasingly being used to authenticate the identity of individuals in critical use case devices like smart phones, laptops, and several other access-control systems in our day-to-day lives. Additionally, biometrics is also used in forensic and security sensitive areas to detect and identify suspects involved in bombings, robberies, and several police investigations. In each of these critical scenarios, the high-quality full-frontal face images of the subjects are not accurately captured as those subjects do not intend to register their identity to the Closed-Circuit Cameras. Hence in such cases, identification of the suspects becomes difficult even though we have the …

Developing An Abac-Based Grant Proposal Workflow Management System, Milson Munakami

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the advent of the digital transformation, online business processes need to be automated and modeled as workflows. A workflow typically involves a sequence of coordinated tasks and shared data that need to be secured and protected from unauthorized access. In other words, a workflow can be described simply as the movement of documents and activities through a business process among different users. Such connected flow of information among various users with different permission level offers many benefits along with new challenges. Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated as skilled and motivated attackers both insiders and outsiders are equipped with …

A Certificateless One-Way Group Key Agreement Protocol For Point-To-Point Email Encryption, Srisarguru Sridhar

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Over the years, email has evolved and grown to one of the most widely used form of communication between individuals and organizations. Nonetheless, the current information technology standards do not value the significance of email security in today's technologically advanced world. Not until recently, email services such as Yahoo and Google started to encrypt emails for privacy protection. Despite that, the encrypted emails will be decrypted and stored in the email service provider's servers as backup. If the server is hacked or compromised, it can lead to leakage and modification of one's email. Therefore, there is a strong need for …

An Interview With The Scorpion: Walter O’Brien, Walter O'Brien

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

An interview with Walter O'Brien (hacker handle: "Scorpion"), known as a businessman, information technologist, executive producer, and media personality who is the founder and CEO of Scorpion Computer Services, Inc. O'Brien is also the inspiration for and executive producer of the CBS television series, Scorpion.

Personal Privacy: A Study To Determine Views On Privacy As It Relates To Technology Acceptance, Keith A. Wuotinen

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This descriptive correlation study sought to learn the relationships, if any, between a person’s concern for privacy and their acceptance of technology, in conjunction with the control factors of the Big Five personality factors. The study employed a modified Concern for Information Privacy (CFIP) scale and a modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) approach in conjunction with the Big Five personality factors using a 51-question survey.

The study surveyed students at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who were enrolled in the College of Technology. The results indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between the CFIP and the TAM. …

Automated Verification Of Timed Security Protocols With Clock Drift, Li Li, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Time is frequently used in security protocols to provide better security. For instance, critical credentials often have limited lifetime which improves the security against brute-force attacks. However, it is challenging to correctly use time in protocol design, due to the existence of clock drift in practice. In this work, we develop a systematic method to formally specify as well as automatically verify timed security protocols with clock drift. We first extend the previously proposed timed applied ππ -calculus as a formal specification language for timed protocols with clock drift. Then, we define its formal semantics based on timed logic rules, …

Early Packet Rejection Using Dynamic Binary Decision Diagram, Vasiqullah Molvizadah

Theses

A firewall is a hardware or software device that performs inspection on a given incoming/outgoing packets and decide whether to allow/deny the packet from entering/leaving the system. Firewall filters the packets by using a set of rules called firewall policies. The policies define what type of packets should be allowed or discarded. These policies describe the field values that the packet header must contain in order to match a policy in the firewall. The decision for any given packet is made by finding the first matching firewall policy, if any.

In a traditional firewall, the packet filter goes through each …

Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Calculation On Floating Point Numbers, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Wenxiu Ding, Rongxing Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving outsourced calculation on floating point numbers (POCF). Using POCF, a user can securely outsource the storing and processing of floating point numbers to a cloud server without compromising on the security of the (original) data and the computed results. In particular, we first present privacy-preserving integer processing protocols for common integer operations. We then present an approach to outsourcing floating point numbers for storage in a privacy-preserving way, and securely processing commonly used floating point number operations on-the-fly. We prove that the proposed POCF achieves the goal of floating point number …

On The Security Of Two Identity-Based Conditional Proxy Re-Encryption Schemes, Kai He, Jian Weng, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proxy re-encryption allows a semi-trusted proxy with a re-encryption key to convert a delegator's ciphertext into a delegatee's ciphertext, and the semi-trusted proxy cannot learn anything about the underlying plaintext. If a proxy re-encryption scheme is indistinguishable against chosen-ciphertext attacks, its initialized ciphertext should be non-malleable. Otherwise, there might exist an adversary who can break the chosen-ciphertext security of the scheme. Recently, Liang et al. proposed two proxy re-encryption schemes. They claimed that their schemes were chosen-ciphertext secure in the standard model. However, we find that the original ciphertext in their schemes are malleable. Thus, we present some concrete attacks …

A Novel Covert Channel Detection Method In Cloud Based On Xsrm And Improved Event Association Algorithm, Lina Wang, Weijie Liu, Neeraj Kumar, Debiao He, Cheng Tan, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Covert channel is a major threat to the information system security and commonly found in operating systems, especially in cloud computing environment. Owing to the characteristics in cloud computing environment such as resources sharing and logic boundaries, covert channels become more varied and difficult to find. Focusing on those problems, this paper presents a universal method for detecting covert channel automatically. To achieve a global detection, we leveraged a virtual machine event record mechanism in hypervisor to gather necessary metadata. Combining the shared resources matrix methodology with events association mechanism, we proposed a distinctive algorithm that can accurately locate and …

M(2)-Abks: Attribute-Based Multi-Keyword Search Over Encrypted Personal Health Records In Multi-Owner Setting, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Fushan Wei, Zhiquan Liu, Xu An Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online personal health record (PHR) is more inclined to shift data storage and search operations to cloud server so as to enjoy the elastic resources and lessen computational burden in cloud storage. As multiple patients' data is always stored in the cloud server simultaneously, it is a challenge to guarantee the confidentiality of PHR data and allow data users to search encrypted data in an efficient and privacy-preserving way. To this end, we design a secure cryptographic primitive called as attribute-based multi-keyword search over encrypted personal health records in multi-owner setting to support both fine-grained access control and multi-keyword search …

A Provably Secure Aggregate Signature Scheme For Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks, Limin Shen, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Meixia Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being used in a wide range of applications for healthcare monitoring, like heart rate monitors and blood pressure monitors, which can minimize the need for healthcare professionals. In medical system, sensors on or in patients produce medical data which can be easily compromised by a vast of attacks. Although signature schemes can protect data authenticity and data integrity, when the number of users involved in the medical system becomes huge, the bandwidth and storage cost will rise sharply so that existing signature schemes are inapplicability for WSNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient aggregate …

A Study On A Feasible No-Root Approach On Android, Yao Cheng, Yingjiu Li, Deng, Robert H., Lingyun Ying, Wei He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Root is the administrative privilege on Android, which is however inaccessible on stock Android devices. Due to the desire for privileged functionalities and the reluctance of rooting their devices, Android users seek for no-root approaches, which provide users with part of root privileges without rooting their devices. Existing no-root approaches require users to launch a separate service via Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on an Android device, which would perform user-desired tasks. However, it is unusual for a third-party Android application to work with a separate native service via sockets, and it requires the application developers to have extra knowledge such …

An Efficient And Expressive Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based-Encryption Scheme With Partially Hidden Access Structures, Hui Cui, Deng, Robert H., Guowei Wu, Junzuo Lai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A promising solution to protect data privacy in cloud storage services is known as ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE). However, in a traditional CP-ABE scheme, a ciphertext is bound with an explicit access structure, which may leak private information about the underlying plaintext in that anyone having access to the ciphertexts can tell the attributes of the privileged recipients by looking at the access structures. A notion called CP-ABE with partially hidden access structures [14, 15, 18, 19, 24] was put forth to address this problem, in which each attribute consists of an attribute name and an attribute value and the …

Efficient Tag Path Authentication Protocol With Less Tag Memory, Hongbing Wang, Yingjiu Li, Zongyang Zhang, Yunlei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Logistical management has been advanced rapidly in these years, taking advantage of the broad connectivity of the Internet. As it becomes an important part of our lives, it also raises many challenging issues, e.g., the counterfeits of expensive goods pose a serious threat to supply chain management. As a result, path authentication becomes especially important in supply chain management, since it helps us maintain object pedigree and supply chain integrity. Meanwhile, tag path authentication must meet a series of security requirements, such as authentication, privacy, and unlinkability. In addition, the authentication protocol must be efficient.In 2011, the first tag path …