Information Security Commons^™

A Novel Qkd Approach To Enhance Iiot Privacy And Computational Knacks, Kranthi Kumar Singamaneni, Gaurav Dhiman, Sapna Juneja, Ghulam Muhammad, Salman A Alqahtani, John Zaki

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The industry-based internet of things (IIoT) describes how IIoT devices enhance and extend their capabilities for production amenities, security, and efficacy. IIoT establishes an enterprise-to-enterprise setup that means industries have several factories and manufacturing units that are dependent on other sectors for their services and products. In this context, individual industries need to share their information with other external sectors in a shared environment which may not be secure. The capability to examine and inspect such large-scale information and perform analytical protection over the large volumes of personal and organizational information demands authentication and confidentiality so that the total data …

Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet Supporting Stealth Address, Xin Yin, Zhen Liu, Guomin Yang, Guoxing Chen, Haojin Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, cryptocurrency has been undergoing a rapid development. Digital wallet, as the tool to store and manage the cryptographic keys, is the primary entrance for the public to access cryptocurrency assets. Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HDW), proposed in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 32 (BIP32), has attracted much attention and been widely used in the community, due to its virtues such as easy backup/recovery, convenient cold-address management, and supporting trust-less audits and applications in hierarchical organizations. While HDW allows the wallet owner to generate and manage his keys conveniently, Stealth Address (SA) allows a payer to generate fresh address (i.e., …

On The Cryptographic Deniability Of The Signal Protocol, Nihal Vatandas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Offline deniability is the ability to a posteriori deny having participated in a particular communication session. This property has been widely assumed for the Signal messaging application, yet no formal proof has appeared in the literature. In this work, we present the first formal study of the offline deniability of the Signal protocol. Our analysis shows that building a deniability proof for Signal is non-trivial and requires strong assumptions on the underlying mathematical groups where the protocol is run.

To do so, we study various implicitly authenticated key exchange protocols, including MQV, HMQV, and 3DH/X3DH, the latter being the core …

Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange, Kelsey G. Melissaris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation we investigate Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE), a key agreement protocol in which each party is authenticated through knowledge of a witness to an arbitrary NP statement. We provide both game-based and universally composable definitions. Thereby, this thesis presents solutions for the most flexible and general method of authentication for group key exchange, providing simple constructions from (succinct) signatures of knowledge (SOK) and a two round UC-secure protocol.

After a discussion of flaws in previous definitions for WAKE we supply a new and improved game-based definition along with the first definition for witness-authenticated key exchange between groups of …

A Traitor-Resistant And Dynamic Anonymous Communication Service For Cloud-Based Vanets, Huiying Hou, Jianting Ning, Yunlei Zhao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-based VANETs are designed to enable communication between high-speed vehicles. In such a highly dynamic environment, how to provide secure and anonymous communication service is a challenge. In this article, we affirmatively address the challenge by proposing a traitor-resistant and dynamic anonymous communication framework (TD-ACF) for cloud-based VANETs, which supports several advantageous features. In TD-ACF, each vehicle is represented by a set of attributes instead of its real identity, and the driving data is transmitted in encrypted form. Therefore, the anonymous authentication and the confidentiality of driving data are achieved in this way. Meanwhile, TD-ACF supports two practical requirements in …

Fine-Grained And Controllably Editable Data Sharing With Accountability In Cloud Storage, Huiying Hou, Jianting Ning, Yunlei Zhao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing cloud storage service, users can enjoy non-interactive data sharing. Nonetheless, the data owner cannot timely update the shared data all the while. To ensure the timeliness and the authoritative source of the data, some users should be allowed to update the data on behalf of an authoritative data owner without changing data source. However, this allows harmful information to be injected into the data unnoticeably. How to efficiently realize editable cloud-based data sharing supporting malicious user tracing has not been fully explored. To address the problem, we propose a fine-grained and controllably editable cloud-based data sharing scheme …

Val: Volume And Access Pattern Leakage-Abuse Attack With Leaked Documents, Steven Lambregts, Huanhuan Chen, Jianting Ning, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable Encryption schemes provide secure search over encrypted databases while allowing admitted information leakages. Generally, the leakages can be categorized into access and volume pattern. In most existing SE schemes, these leakages are caused by practical designs but are considered an acceptable price to achieve high search efficiency. Recent attacks have shown that such leakages could be easily exploited to retrieve the underlying keywords for search queries. Under the umbrella of attacking SE, we design a new Volume and Access Pattern Leakage-Abuse Attack (VAL-Attack) that improves the matching technique of LEAP (CCS ’21) and exploits both the access and volume …

Toward Intention Discovery For Early Malice Detection In Bitcoin, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Yong Wang, Huiwen Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bitcoin has been subject to illicit activities more often than probably any other financial assets, due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of its transacting entities. An ideal detection model is expected to achieve all the three properties of (I) early detection, (II) good interpretability, and (III) versatility for various illicit activities. However, existing solutions cannot meet all these requirements, as most of them heavily rely on deep learning without satisfying interpretability and are only available for retrospective analysis of a specific illicit type.First, we present asset transfer paths, which aim to describe addresses' early characteristics. Next, with a decision tree based …

Secure Deterministic Wallet And Stealth Address: Key-Insulated And Privacy-Preserving Signature Scheme With Publicly Derived Public Key, Zhen Liu, Guomin Yang, Duncan S. Wong, Khoa Nguyen, Huaxiong Wang, Xiaorong Ke, Yining Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deterministic Wallet (DW) and Stealth Address (SA) mechanisms have been widely adopted in the cryptocurrency community, due to their virtues on functionality and privacy protection, which come from a key derivation mechanism that allows an arbitrary number of derived keys to be generated from a master key. However, these algorithms suffer a vulnerability that, when one derived key is compromised somehow, the damage is not limited to the leaked derived key only, but to the master key and in consequence all derived keys are compromised. In this article, we introduce and formalize a new signature variant, called Key-Insulated and Privacy-Preserving …

Research On Uncertainties And Challenges Of Cyber Security In Maritime Industry, Qianrong Chen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Challenges Of Cryptography-Related Cybercrime And Its Investigation, Sinyong Choi, Katalin Parti

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Cryptography has been applied to a range of modern technologies which criminals also exploit to gain criminal rewards while hiding their identity. Although understanding of cybercrime involving this technique is necessary in devising effective preventive measures, little has been done to examine this area. Therefore, this paper provides an overview of the two articles, featured in the special issue of the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, that will enhance our understanding of cryptography-related crime, ranging from cryptocurrency and darknet market to password-cracking. The articles were presented by the winners of the student paper competition at the 2022 International …

Dynamics Of Dark Web Financial Marketplaces: An Exploratory Study Of Underground Fraud And Scam Business, Bo Ra Jung, Kyung-Shick Choi, Claire Seungeun Lee

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The number of Dark Web financial marketplaces where Dark Web users and sellers actively trade illegal goods and services anonymously has been growing exponentially in recent years. The Dark Web has expanded illegal activities via selling various illicit products, from hacked credit cards to stolen crypto accounts. This study aims to delineate the characteristics of the Dark Web financial market and its scams. Data were derived from leading Dark Web financial websites, including Hidden Wiki, Onion List, and Dark Web Wiki, using Dark Web search engines. The study combines statistical analysis with thematic analysis of Dark Web content. Offering promotions …

Kerberoasting: Case Studies Of An Attack On A Cryptographic Authentication Technology, D Demers, Hannarae Lee

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Kerberoasting, an attack vector aimed at the Kerberos authentication protocol, can be used as part of an adversary’s attack arsenal. Kerberos is a type of network authentication protocol that allows a client and server to conduct a mutual verification before providing the requested resource to the client. A successful Kerberoasting attack allows an adversary to leverage the architectural limitations of Kerberos, providing access to user password hashes that can be subject to offline cracking. A cracked user password could give a bad actor the ability to maintain persistence, move laterally, or escalate privileges in a system. Persistence or movement within …

Verifying Neural Networks Against Backdoor Attacks, Long Hong Pham, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in solving many problems, including many applications in safety/security-critical systems. Researchers also discovered multiple security issues associated with neural networks. One of them is backdoor attacks, i.e., a neural network may be embedded with a backdoor such that a target output is almost always generated in the presence of a trigger. Existing defense approaches mostly focus on detecting whether a neural network is ‘backdoored’ based on heuristics, e.g., activation patterns. To the best of our knowledge, the only line of work which certifies the absence of backdoor is based on randomized smoothing, which is …

Multimodal Private Signatures, Khoa Nguyen, Fuchun Guo, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce Multimodal Private Signature (MPS) - an anonymous signature system that offers a novel accountability feature: it allows a designated opening authority to learn some partial information op about the signer’s identity id, and nothing beyond. Such partial information can flexibly be defined as op = id (as in group signatures), or as op = 0 (like in ring signatures), or more generally, as op = Gj (id), where Gj (·) is a certain disclosing function. Importantly, the value of op is known in advance by the signer, and hence, the latter can decide whether she/he wants to disclose …

Efficient Resource Allocation With Fairness Constraints In Restless Multi-Armed Bandits, Dexun Li, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMAB) is an apt model to represent decision-making problems in public health interventions (e.g., tuberculosis, maternal, and child care), anti-poaching planning, sensor monitoring, personalized recommendations and many more. Existing research in RMAB has contributed mechanisms and theoretical results to a wide variety of settings, where the focus is on maximizing expected value. In this paper, we are interested in ensuring that RMAB decision making is also fair to different arms while maximizing expected value. In the context of public health settings, this would ensure that different people and/or communities are fairly represented while making public health intervention …

Cyber Deception For Critical Infrastructure Resiliency, Md Ali Reza Al Amin

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The high connectivity of modern cyber networks and devices has brought many improvements to the functionality and efficiency of networked systems. Unfortunately, these benefits have come with many new entry points for attackers, making systems much more vulnerable to intrusions. Thus, it is critically important to protect cyber infrastructure against cyber attacks. The static nature of cyber infrastructure leads to adversaries performing reconnaissance activities and identifying potential threats. Threats related to software vulnerabilities can be mitigated upon discovering a vulnerability and-, developing and releasing a patch to remove the vulnerability. Unfortunately, the period between discovering a vulnerability and applying a …

Effective Knowledge Graph Aggregation For Malware-Related Cybersecurity Text, Phillip Ryan Boudreau

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rate at which malware spreads in the modern age, it is extremely important that cyber security analysts are able to extract relevant information pertaining to new and active threats in a timely and effective manner. Having to manually read through articles and blog posts on the internet is time consuming and usually involves sifting through much repeated information. Knowledge graphs, a structured representation of relationship information, are an effective way to visually condense information presented in large amounts of unstructured text for human readers. Thusly, they are useful for sifting through the abundance of cyber security information that …

Efficient Resource Allocation With Fairness Constraints In Restless Multi-Armed Bandits, Dexun Li, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMAB) is an apt model to represent decision-making problems in public health interventions (e.g., tuberculosis, maternal, and child care), anti-poaching planning, sensor monitoring, personalized recommendations and many more. Existing research in RMAB has contributed mechanisms and theoretical results to a wide variety of settings, where the focus is on maximizing expected value. In this paper, we are interested in ensuring that RMAB decision making is also fair to different arms while maximizing expected value. In the context of public health settings, this would ensure that different people and/or communities are fairly represented while making public health intervention …

Ransomsoc: A More Effective Security Operations Center To Detect And Respond To Ransomware Attacks, Anthony Cheuk Tung Lai, Ping Fan Ke, Kelvin Chan, Siu Ming Yiu, Dongsun Kim, Wai Kin Wong, Shuai Wang, Joseph Muppala, Alan Ho

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ransomware remains a major threat for organizations. Despite a lot of research done, existing solutions still have at least two shortcomings. (I) Slow detection time: by the time we realize that the system is under ransomware attack, almost all files have been encrypted. (II) Without a ransomwareaware backup scheme: Most existing systems, in particular those in SMEs (small and medium enterprises), do not have a proper backup system. Even they have it, either it is not a remote-site backup (i.e., files in the backup system may also be encrypted) or it is not designed for ransomware attacks. In this paper, …