Information Security Commons^™

Why Penetration Testing Is A Limited Use Choice For Sound Cyber Security Practice, Craig Valli, Andrew J. Woodward, Peter Hannay, Michael N. Johnstone

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Penetration testing of networks is a process that is overused when demonstrating or evaluating the cyber security posture of an organisation. Most penetration testing is not aligned with the actual intent of the testing, but rather is driven by a management directive of wanting to be seen to be addressing the issue of cyber security. The use of penetration testing is commonly a reaction to an adverse audit outcome or as a result of being penetrated in the first place. Penetration testing used in this fashion delivers little or no value to the organisation being tested for a number of …

Cloud Security Meets Telemedicine, Michael N. Johnstone

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Medical systems are potentially one domain where security is seen as an impediment to patient care and not as an essential part of a system. This is an issue for safety-critical systems where reliability and trust are essential for successful operation. Cloud computing services offer a seamless means to allow medical data to be transferred from patient to medical specialist, whilst maintaining security requirements. This paper uses a case study to investigate the use of cloud computing in a mobile application to assist with diagnostics for patients with Parkinson Disease. It was found that the developers of the app ignored …

Editorial - The Changing Face Of Ehealth Security, Patricia Williams, Lizzie Coles-Kemp

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

No abstract provided.

Detecting Click Fraud In Online Advertising: A Data Mining Approach, Richard Oentaryo, Ee Peng Lim, Michael Finegold, David Lo, Feida Zhu, Clifton Phua, Eng-Yeow Cheu, Ghim-Eng Yap, Kelvin Sim, Kasun Perera, Bijay Neupane, Mustafa Faisal, Zeyar Aung, Wei Lee Woon, Wei Chen, Dhaval Patel, Daniel Berrar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Click fraud - the deliberate clicking on advertisements with no real interest on the product or service offered - is one of the most daunting problems in online advertising. Building an elective fraud detection method is thus pivotal for online advertising businesses. We organized a Fraud Detection in Mobile Advertising (FDMA) 2012 Competition, opening the opportunity for participants to work on real-world fraud data from BuzzCity Pte. Ltd., a global mobile advertising company based in Singapore. In particular, the task is to identify fraudulent publishers who generate illegitimate clicks, and distinguish them from normal publishers. The competition was held from …

A Robust Smart Card-Based Anonymous User Authentication Protocol For Wireless Communications, Fengton Wen, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anonymous user authentication is an important but challenging task for wireless communications. In a recent paper, Das proposed a smart cardï based anonymous user authentication protocol for wireless communications. The scheme can protect user privacy and is believed to be secure against a range of network attacks even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we reanalyze the security of Das' scheme, and show that the scheme is in fact insecure against impersonation attacks. We then propose a new smart cardï based anonymous user authentication protocol for wireless communications. Compared with the existing …

Cross-Domain Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange Revisited, Liqun Chen, Hoon Wei Lim, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We revisit the problem of secure cross-domain communication between two users belonging to different security domains within an open and distributed environment. Existing approaches presuppose that either the users are in possession of public key certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA), or the associated domain authentication servers share a long-term secret key. In this article, we propose a generic framework for designing four-party password-based authenticated key exchange (4PAKE) protocols. Our framework takes a different approach from previous work. The users are not required to have public key certificates, but they simply reuse their login passwords, which they share …

On The Security Of Auditing Mechanisms For Secure Cloud Storage, Yong Yu, Lei Niu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing is a novel computing model that enables convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Auditing services are highly essential to make sure that the data is correctly hosted in the cloud. In this paper, we investigate the active adversary attacks in three auditing mechanisms for shared data in the cloud, including two identity privacy-preserving auditing mechanisms called Oruta and Knox, and a distributed storage integrity auditing mechanism.We show that these schemes become insecure when active adversaries are involved in the cloud storage. Specifically, an active adversary can arbitrarily alter the cloud data without …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

Categorization Of Large Corpora Of Malicious Software, Deekshit Kura

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Malware is computer software written by someone with mischievous or, more usually, malicious and/or criminal intent and specifically designed to damage data, hosts or networks. The variety of malware is increasing proportionally with the increase in computers and we are not aware of newly emerging malware. Tools are needed to categorize families of malware, so that analysts can compare new malware samples to ones that have been previously analyzed and determine steps to detect and prevent malware infections.

In this thesis, I developed a technique to catalog and characterize the behavior of malware, so that malware families, the level of …

A Conceptual Model For Federated Authentication In The Cloud, Abdulwahid Al Abdulwahid, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, Ingo Stengel

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Authentication is a key security control for any computing system, whether that is a PC, server, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. However, authentication is traditionally poorly served, with existing implementations falling foul of a variety of weaknesses. Passwords are poorly selected, reused and shared (to name but a few). Research has suggested novel approaches to authentication such as transparent authentication and cooperative and distributed authentication. However, these technologies merely focus upon individual platforms rather than providing a universal and federated authentication approach that can be used across technologies and services. The advent of cloud computing, its universal connectivity, scalability and …

The Effectiveness Of Internet Activity Erasure Tools To Protect Privacy, Brian Cusack, Andrew Woodward, Scott Butson, Benjamin Leber

Australian Information Security Management Conference

When most people go to the trouble of getting erasure tools to remove data from their hard drives they expect the job is done correctly. Using erasure tools is a step to protect privacy by assuming the applied tools erase data rather than simply delete data that may be recovered using forensic tools. In this research we tested the performance of the delete function on three web browsers against the performance of eight erasure tools with alarming results. It was found that the erasure tools had almost the same capability to delete data as the web browsers delete function; and …

Exchanging Demands: Weaknesses In Ssl Implementations For Mobile Platforms, Peter Hannay, Clinton Carpene, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward, Mike Johnstone

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The ActiveSync protocol’s implementation on some embedded devices leaves clients vulnerable to unauthorised remote policy enforcement. This paper discusses a proof of concept attack against the implementation of ActiveSync in common Smart phones including Android devices and iOS devices. A two‐phase approach to exploiting the ActiveSync protocol is introduced. Phase 1 details the usage of a man‐in‐the‐middle attack to gain a vantage point over the client device, whilst Phase 2 involves spoofing the server‐side ActiveSync responses to initiate the unauthorised policy enforcement. These vulnerabilities are demonstrated by experiment, highlighting how the system can be exploited to perform a remote factory …

A Simulation-Based Study Of Server Location Selection Rules In Manets Utilising Threshold Cryptography, Alastair Nisbet

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Truly Ad Hoc wireless networks where a spontaneous formation of a network occurs and there is no prior knowledge of nodes to each other present significant security challenges, especially as entirely online configuration of nodes with encryption keys must be performed. Utilising threshold cryptography in this type of MANET can greatly increase the security by requiring servers to collaborate to form a single Certificate Authority (CA). In this type of CA responsibility for certificate services is shared between a threshold of servers, greatly increasing security and making attack against the CA considerably more difficult. Choosing which nodes to take on …

A Comparison Of Information Security Curricula In China And The Usa, Huaying Chen, Sean B. Maynard, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Information Security (InfoSec) education varies in its content, focus and level of technicality across the world. In this paper we investigate the differences between graduate InfoSec programs in top universities in China and in the United States of America (USA). In China, curriculum emphasises Telecommunication, Computer Science and InfoSec Technology, whilst in the USA in addition to Computer Science and InfoSec Technology the curriculum also emphasises Enterprise‐level Security Strategy and Policy, InfoSec Management, and Cyber Law. The differences are significant and will have a profound impact on both the perceptions and capabilities of future generations of information security professionals on …

Information Security Management: Factors That Influence Security Investments In Smes, Zhi Xian Ng, Atif Ahmad, Sean B. Maynard

Australian Information Security Management Conference

In the modern information economy, the security of information is critically important to organizations. Information‐security risk assessments (ISRAs) allow organizations to identify key information assets and security risks so security expenditure can be directed cost‐effectively. Unfortunately conducting ISRAs requires special expertise and tends to be complex and costly for small to medium sized organizations (SMEs). Therefore, it remains unclear in practice, and unknown in literature, how SMEs address information security imperatives without the benefit of an ISRA process. This research makes a contribution to theory in security management by identifying the factors that influence key decision-makers in SMEs to address …

Determining What Characteristics Constitute A Darknet, Symon Aked, Christopher Bolan, Murray Brand

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Privacy on the Internet has always been a concern, but monitoring of content by both private corporations and Government departments has pushed people to search for ways to communicate over the Internet in a more secure manner. This has given rise to the creations of Darknets, which are networks that operate “inside” the Internet, and allow anonymous participation via a de‐centralised, encrypted, peer‐to‐peer network topology. This research investigates some sources of known Internet content monitoring, and how they provided the template for the creation of a system to avoid such surveillance. It then highlights how communications on the Clearnet is …

Privacy And Legal Issues In Cloud Computing - The Smme Position In South Africa, Mathias Mujinga

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Cloud computing (CC) brings substantial benefits to organizations and their clients. Information technology (IT) users in developing countries, especially those in underdeveloped communities, are gaining easy and cost‐effective access to a variety of services, from entertainment to banking. South Africa has outlined a national e‐strategy that aims to improve those communities, by providing frameworks for access to information and communications technology (ICT). The products and services of small‐, medium and micro‐sized enterprises (SMME) are now reaching a wider audience through the use of technology. CC can go a long way to help government realize the national e‐strategy. There are numerous …