Information Security Commons^™

Towards An In-Depth Understanding Of Deep Packet Inspection Using A Suite Of Industrial Control Systems Protocol Packets, Guillermo A. Francia Iii, Xavier P. Francia, Anthony M. Pruitt

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Industrial control systems (ICS) are increasingly at risk and vulnerable to internal and external threats. These systems are integral part of our nation’s critical infrastructures. Consequently, a successful cyberattack on one of these could present disastrous consequences to human life and property as well. It is imperative that cybersecurity professionals gain a good understanding of these systems particularly in the area of communication protocols. Traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are made to encapsulate some of these ICS protocols which may enable malicious payload to get through the network firewall and thus, gain entry into the …

Planning And Implementing A Successful Nsa-Nsf Gencyber Summer Cyber Academy, Bryson R. Payne, Tamirat Abegaz, Keith Antonia

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The GenCyber program is jointly sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help faculty and cybersecurity experts provide summer cybersecurity camp experiences for K-12 students and teachers. The main objective of the program is to attract, educate, and motivate a new generation of young men and women to help address the nationwide shortage of trained cybersecurity professionals. The curriculum is flexible and centers on ten cybersecurity first principles. Currently, GenCyber provides cyber camp options for three types of audiences: students, teachers, and a combination of both teachers and students. In 2016, over 120 …

Threats To Information Protection - Industry And Academic Perspectives: An Annotated Bibliography, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Threats to information assets have always been a concern to those responsible for making information useful and defending its value. The concepts of threat, threat agent, threat events and threat sources have evolved in recent years have very precise definitions. A summary of threat classification models used in academic research is provided along with a summary of recent industry threat assessment reports. Finally, the results from a recent study, 2015 SEC/CISE Threats to Information Protection Report Including a Current Snapshot of the State of the Industry, are given.

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.

Military Cyber Professionals Have An Important Part To Play In The Obama-Trump Transition, Michael V. Hayden

Military Cyber Affairs

Over the course of decades in service, I have experienced multiple presidential transitions. Each new Commander in Chief updates policies, personnel, and priorities…especially when the transition involves a new political party. In this respect, the current transition from the Obama to the Trump administration is no different. While this periodic exercise of our democracy may seem disruptive to some, it is a true opportunity for military cyber professionals to help shape our future national security posture.

Cryptanalysis Of Homophonic Substitution Cipher Using Hidden Markov Models, Guannan Zhong

Master's Projects

We investigate the effectiveness of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with random restarts as a mean of breaking a homophonic substitution cipher. Based on extensive experiments, we find that such an HMM-based attack outperforms a previously de- veloped nested hill climb approach, particularly when the ciphertext message is short. We then consider a combination cipher, consisting of a homophonic substitution and a column transposition. We develop and analyze an attack on such a cipher. This attack employs an HMM (with random restarts), together with a hill climb to recover the column permutation. We show that this attack can succeed on …

The Paradox Of Social Media Security: A Study Of It Students’ Perceptions Versus Behavior On Using Facebook, Zahra Y. Alqubaiti

Master of Science in Information Technology Theses

Social media plays an essential role in the modern society, enabling people to be better connected to each other and creating new opportunities for businesses. At the same time, social networking sites have become major targets for cyber-security attacks due to their massive user base. Many studies investigated the security vulnerabilities and privacy issues of social networking sites and made recommendations on how to mitigate security risks. Users are an integral part of any security mix. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between users’ security perceptions and their actual behavior on social networking sites. Protection motivation theory (PMT), initially …

Ransomware In High-Risk Environments, Shallaw M. Aziz

Information Technology Capstone Research Project Reports

In today’s modern world, cybercrime is skyrocketing globally, which impacts a variety of organizations and endpoint users. Hackers are using a multitude of approaches and tools, including ransomware threats, to take over targeted systems. These acts of cybercrime lead to huge damages in areas of business, healthcare systems, industry sectors, and other fields. Ransomware is considered as a high risk threat, which is designed to hijack the data. This paper is demonstrating the ransomware types, and how they are evolved from the malware and trojan codes, which is used to attack previous incidents, and explains the most common encryption algorithms …

The Transition Experiences Of International Graduate Students In Clark University School Of Professional Studies, Xuesong Huang, Mingyang Lian, Dang Trung, Jay Sheth, Yuwei Yang, Irina Klimenko

School of Professional Studies

In the last decade, the School of Professional Studies at Clark University has witnessed a sharp increase in international students. More and more international students in the millennial generation have entered the School of Professional Studies pursuing one of the two-year graduate programs: Master of Science in Professional Studies, Master of Science in Public Administration, and Master of Science in Information Technology. In the past, working adult student dominant the program. These students already had a career outside the classrooms before them came to study. The millennial international students have generated new adjustment problems. Some of the transition issues of …

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

Cryptographic Reverse Firewall Via Malleable Smooth Projective Hash Functions, Rongmao Chen, Guomin Yang, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo, Fuchun Guo, Mingwu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by the revelations of Edward Snowden, postSnowden cryptography has become a prominent research direction in recent years. In Eurocrypt 2015, Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz proposed a novel concept named cryptographic reverse firewall (CRF) which can resist exfiltration of secret information from an arbitrarily compromised machine. In this work, we continue this line of research and present generic CRF constructions for several widely used cryptographic protocols based on a new notion named malleable smooth projective hash function. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. – We introduce the notion of malleable smooth projective hash function, which is an extension of the …

Semeo: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework For Obfuscated Android Applications, Zhen Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software repackaging is a common approach for creating malware. In this approach, malware authors inject malicious payloads into legitimate applications; then, to ren- der security analysis more difficult, they obfuscate most or all of the code. This forces analysts to spend a large amount of effort filtering out benign obfuscated methods in order to locate potentially malicious methods for further analysis. If an effective mechanism for filtering out benign obfuscated methods were available, the number of methods that must be analyzed could be reduced, allowing analysts to be more productive. In this thesis, we introduce SEMEO, a highly effective and …

A Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Functional Computation Framework Across Large-Scale Multiple Encrypted Domains, Ximeng Liu, Baodong Qin, Robert H. Deng, Rongxing Lu, Jianfeng Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving outsourced functional computation across large-scale multiple encrypted domains, which we refer to as POFD. With POFD, a user can obtain the output of a function computed over encrypted data from multiple domains while protecting the privacy of the function itself, its input and its output. Specifically, we introduce two notions of POFD, the basic POFD and its enhanced version, in order to tradeoff the levels of privacy protection and performance. We present three protocols, named Multi-domain Secure Multiplication protocol (MSM), Secure Exponent Calculation protocol with private Base (SECB), and Secure Exponent …

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, …

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.

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 …

Security Testing With Misuse Case Modeling, Samer Yousef Khamaiseh

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Having a comprehensive model of security requirements is a crucial step towards developing a reliable software system. An effective model of security requirements which describes the possible scenarios that may affect the security aspects of the system under development can be an effective approach for subsequent use in generating security test cases.

Misuse case was first proposed by Sinder and Opdahl as an approach to extract the security requirements of the system under development [1]. A misuse case is a use case representing scenarios that might be followed by a system adversary in order to compromise the system; that is …

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 …