Information Security Commons^™

Significant Permission Identification For Android Malware Detection, Lichao Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant …

One-Round Strong Oblivious Signature-Based Envelope, Rongmao Chen, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo, Mingwu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Oblivious Signature-Based Envelope (OSBE) has been widely employed for anonymity-orient and privacy-preserving applications. The conventional OSBE execution relies on a secure communication channel to protect against eavesdroppers. In TCC 2012, Blazy, Pointcheval and Vergnaud proposed a framework of OSBE (BPV-OSBE) without requiring any secure channel by clarifying and enhancing the OSBE security notions. They showed how to generically build an OSBE scheme satisfying the new strong security in the standard model with a common-reference string. Their framework requires 2-round interactions and relies on the smooth projective hash function (SPHF) over special languages, i.e., languages from encryption of signatures. In this …

Edit Distance Based Encryption And Its Application, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Edit distance, also known as Levenshtein distance, is a very useful tool to measure the similarity between two strings. It has been widely used in many applications such as natural language processing and bioinformatics. In this paper, we introduce a new type of fuzzy public key encryption called Edit Distance-based Encryption (EDE). In EDE, the encryptor can specify an alphabet string and a threshold when encrypting a message, and a decryptor can obtain a decryption key generated from another alphabet string, and the decryption will be successful if and only if the edit distance between the two strings is within …

Aviation And Cybersecurity: Opportunities For Applied Research, Jon Haass, Radhakrishna Sampigethaya, Vincent Capezzuto

Publications

Aviation connects the global community and is moving more people and payloads faster than ever. The next decade will experience an increase in manned and unmanned aircraft and systems with new features and unprecedented applications. Cybertechnologies—including software, computer networks, and information technology—are critical and fundamental to these advances in meeting the needs of the aviation ecosystem of aircraft, pilots, personnel, passengers, stakeholders, and society. This article discusses current and evolving threats as well as opportunities for applied research to improve the global cybersecurity stance in the aviation and connected transportation industry of tomorrow.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

From The Editors, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice (JCERP).

Using A Virtual Computing Laboratory To Foster Collaborative Learning For Information Security And Information Technology Education, Abdullah Konak, Michael R. Bartolacci

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Virtual computer laboratories have been an excellent technological solution to the problem of providing students with hands-on experimentation in information technology fields such as information security in a cost effective and secure manner. A virtual computer laboratory was utilized in this work as a collaborative environment for student learning with the goal of measuring its effect on student learning and attitudes toward laboratory assignments. Experiments were carried out utilizing specially-designed computer-based laboratory activities that included student assessments and surveys upon their completion. The experiments involved both small groups and individual students completing their respective laboratory activities and subsequent assessments/surveys. …

Secure Software Engineering Education: Knowledge Area, Curriculum And Resources, Xiaohong Yuan, Li Yang, Bilan Jones, Huiming Yu, Bei-Tseng Chu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper reviews current efforts and resources in secure software engineering education, with the goal of providing guidance for educators to make use of these resources in developing secure software engineering curriculum. These resources include Common Body of Knowledge, reference curriculum, sample curriculum materials, hands-on exercises, and resources developed by industry and open source community. The relationship among the Common Body of Knowledge proposed by the Department of Homeland Security, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and ACM/IEEE are discussed. The recent practices on secure software engineering education, including secure software engineering related programs, courses, and course modules …

VigenèRe Score For Malware Detection, Suchita Deshmukh

Master's Projects

Previous research has applied classic cryptanalytic techniques to the malware detection problem. Speci cally, scores based on simple substitution cipher cryptanal- ysis and various generalizations have been considered. In this research, we analyze two new malware scoring techniques based on classic cryptanalysis. Our rst ap- proach relies on the Index of Coincidence, which is used, for example, to determine the length of the keyword in a Vigenère ciphertext. We also consider a score based on a more complete cryptanalysis of a Vigenère cipher. We nd that the Vigenère score is competitive with previous statistical-based malware scores.

Defeating N-Gram Scores For Http Attack Detection, Samyuktha Sridharan

Master's Projects

Web applications that generate malicious HTTP requests provide a platform that attackers use to exploit vulnerable machines. Such malicious traffic should be identified by network intrusion detection systems, based on traffic analysis. Previous research has shown that n-gram techniques can be successfully applied to detect HTTP attacks. In this research, we analyze the robustness of these n-gram techniques. We show that n-gram scores are surprisingly robust, but can be defeated using certain obfuscation strategies. We also consider the need for a more costlier HMM-based intrusion detection system.

Static And Dynamic Analysis For Android Malware Detection, Ankita Kapratwar

Master's Projects

Static analysis relies on features extracted without executing code, while dynamic analysis extracts features based on code execution (or emulation). In general, static analysis is more e cient, while static analysis is often more informative, particularly in cases of highly obfuscated code. Static analysis of an Android application can rely on features extracted from the manifest le or the Java bytecode, while dynamic analysis of Android applications can deal with features involving dynamic code loading and system calls that are collected while the application is running. In this research, we analyzed the e ectiveness of combining static and dynamic features …

Image Spam Analysis, Annapurna Sowmya Annadatha

Master's Projects

Image spam is unsolicited bulk email, where the message is embedded in an image. This technique is used to evade text-based spam lters. In this research, we analyze and compare two novel approaches for detecting spam images. Our rst approach focuses on the extraction of a broad set of image features and selection of an optimal subset using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our second approach is based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), where we determine eigenvectors for a set of spam images and compute scores by projecting images onto the resulting eigenspace. Both approaches provide high accuracy with low …

Cayley Graphs Of Semigroups And Applications To Hashing, Bianca Sosnovski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1994, Tillich and Zemor proposed a scheme for a family of hash functions that uses products of matrices in groups of the form $SL_2(F_{2^n})$. In 2009, Grassl et al. developed an attack to obtain collisions for palindromic bit strings by exploring a connection between the Tillich-Zemor functions and maximal length chains in the Euclidean algorithm for polynomials over $F_2$.

In this work, we present a new proposal for hash functions based on Cayley graphs of semigroups. In our proposed hash function, the noncommutative semigroup of linear functions under composition is considered as platform for the scheme. We will also …

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

Categorizing Blog Spam, Brandon Bevans

Master's Theses

The internet has matured into the focal point of our era. Its ecosystem is vast, complex, and in many regards unaccounted for. One of the most prevalent aspects of the internet is spam. Similar to the rest of the internet, spam has evolved from simply meaning ‘unwanted emails’ to a blanket term that encompasses any unsolicited or illegitimate content that appears in the wide range of media that exists on the internet.

Many forms of spam permeate the internet, and spam architects continue to develop tools and methods to avoid detection. On the other side, cyber security engineers continue to …

Packet Filter Approach To Detect Denial Of Service Attacks, Essa Yahya M Muharish

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Denial of service attacks (DoS) are a common threat to many online services. These attacks aim to overcome the availability of an online service with massive traffic from multiple sources. By spoofing legitimate users, an attacker floods a target system with a high quantity of packets or connections to crash its network resources, bandwidth, equipment, or servers. Packet filtering methods are the most known way to prevent these attacks via identifying and blocking the spoofed attack from reaching its target. In this project, the extent of the DoS attacks problem and attempts to prevent it are explored. The attacks categories …

Rapid Android Parser For Investigating Dex Files (Rapid), Xiaolu Zhang, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware is a well-known challenging problem and many researchers/vendors/practitioners have tried to address this issue through application analysis techniques. In order to analyze Android applications, tools decompress APK files and extract relevant data from the Dalvik EXecutable (DEX) files. To acquire the data, investigators either use decompiled intermediate code generated by existing tools, e.g., Baksmali or Dex2jar or write their own parsers/dissemblers. Thus, they either need additional time because of decompiling the application into an intermediate representation and then parsing text files, or they reinvent the wheel by implementing their own parsers. In this article, we present Rapid Android …

(Deterministic) Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption From Learning With Rounding Over Small Modulus, Fuyang Fang, Bao Li, Xianhui Lu, Yamin Liu, Dingding Jia, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE) scheme in the random oracle (RO) model based on the learning with rounding (LWR) problem over small modulus $q$. Compared with the previous HIBE schemes based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem, the ciphertext expansion ratio of our scheme can be decreased to 1/2. Then, we utilize the HIBE scheme to construct a deterministic hierarchical identity-based encryption (D-HIBE) scheme based on the LWR problem over small modulus. Finally, with the technique of binary tree encryption (BTE) we can construct HIBE and D-HIBE schemes in the standard model based on …