Information Security Commons^™

Security Posture: A Systematic Review Of Cyber Threats And Proactive Security, Amanda Jones

Senior Honors Theses

In the last decade, several high-profile cyber threats have occurred with global impact and devastating consequences. The tools, techniques, and procedures used to prevent cyber threats from occurring fall under the category of proactive security. Proactive security methodologies, however, vary among professionals where differing tactics have proved situationally effective. To determine the most effective tactics for preventing exploitation of vulnerabilities, the author examines the attack vector of three incidents from the last five years in a systematic review format: the WannaCry incident, the 2020 SolarWinds SUNBURST exploit, and the recently discovered Log4j vulnerability. From the three cases and existing literature, …

Resil: Revivifying Function Signature Inference Using Deep Learning With Domain-Specific Knowledge, Yan Lin, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Function signature recovery is important for binary analysis and security enhancement, such as bug finding and control-flow integrity enforcement. However, binary executables typically have crucial information vital for function signature recovery stripped off during compilation. To make things worse, recent studies show that many compiler optimization strategies further complicate the recovery of function signatures with intended violations to function calling conventions.In this paper, we first perform a systematic study to quantify the extent to which compiler optimizations (negatively) impact the accuracy of existing deep learning techniques for function signature recovery. Our experiments show that a state-of-the-art deep learning technique has …

Verifiable Searchable Encryption Framework Against Insider Keyword-Guessing Attack In Cloud Storage, Yinbin Miao, Robert H. Deng, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Hongwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) allows cloud tenants to retrieve encrypted data while preserving data confidentiality securely. Many SE solutions have been designed to improve efficiency and security, but most of them are still susceptible to insider Keyword-Guessing Attacks (KGA), which implies that the internal attackers can guess the candidate keywords successfully in an off-line manner. Also in existing SE solutions, a semi-honest-but-curious cloud server may deliver incorrect search results by performing only a fraction of retrieval operations honestly (e.g., to save storage space). To address these two challenging issues, we first construct the basic Verifiable SE Framework (VSEF), which can withstand …

Internet Privacy Concerns Revisited: Oversight From Surveillance And Right To Be Forgotten As New Dimensions, Gaurav Bansal, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the post-Snowden revelation era, concerns related to government surveillance and oversight have come to the forefront. The ability of the Internet to remember “everything” (or forget anything) also raises a privacy concern associated with the right to be forgotten (RTBF). In this paper, we examine the conceptualization of Internet privacy concerns (IPC) by extending Hong and Thong's (2013) model with the addition of two dimensions: oversight (i.e., due to surveillance) and the RTBF. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence for our proposed integrated conceptualization. Data were collected from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and analyzed with structural equation modeling using a …

Passing Time And Syncing Secrets: Demonstrating Covert Channel Vulnerabilities In Precision Time Protocol (Ptp), Aron J. Smith-Donovan

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Covert channels use steganographic approaches to transfer secret digital communications; when applied to network protocols, these strategies can facilitate undetectable data exfiltration and insertion attacks. Because covert channel techniques are protocol- and implementation-specific, individual case studies are necessary to assess for vulnerabilities under different conditions. While several investigations have been published evaluating covert channel potential in infrastructure- and manufacturing-based contexts, no existing research explores Precision Time Protocol (PTP), a time synchronization protocol commonly used in industrial control systems. This study aims to fill this gap by demonstrating the feasibility of a covert channel-based attack on a PTP-enabled network.

Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol For Constrained Smart Healthcare Systems Based On Physical Unclonable Function, Abdalla Saleh Elkushli

Theses

Smart healthcare systems are one of the critical applications of the internet of things. They benefit many categories of the population and provide significant improvement to healthcare services. Smart healthcare systems are also susceptible to many threats and exploits because they run without supervision for long periods of time and communicate via open channels. Moreover, in many implementations, healthcare sensor nodes are implanted or miniaturized and are resource-constrained. The potential risks on patients/individuals’ life from the threats necessitate that securing the connections in these systems is of utmost importance. This thesis provides a solution to secure end-to-end communications in such …

A False Sense Of Security - Organizations Need A Paradigm Shift On Protecting Themselves Against Apts, Srinivasulu R. Vuggumudi

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are the most complex cyberattacks and are generally executed by cyber attackers linked to nation-states. The motivation behind APT attacks is political intelligence and cyber espionage. Despite all the awareness, technological advancements, and massive investment, the fight against APTs is a losing battle for organizations. An organization may implement a security strategy to prevent APTs. However, the benefits to the security posture might be negligible if the measurement of the strategy’s effectiveness is not part of the plan. A false sense of security exists when the focus is on implementing a security strategy but not …

Chosen-Instruction Attack Against Commercial Code Virtualization Obfuscators, Shijia Li, Chunfu Jia, Pengda Qiu, Qiyuan Chen, Jiang Ming, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

—Code virtualization is a well-known sophisticated obfuscation technique that uses custom virtual machines (VM) to emulate the semantics of original native instructions. Commercial VM-based obfuscators (e.g., Themida and VMProtect) are often abused by malware developers to conceal malicious behaviors. Since the internal mechanism of commercial obfuscators is a black box, it is a daunting challenge for the analyst to understand the behavior of virtualized programs. To figure out the code virtualization mechanism and design deobfuscation techniques, the analyst has to perform reverse-engineering on large-scale highly obfuscated programs. This knowledge learning process suffers from painful cost and imprecision. In this project, …

Proposed L-Shape Pattern On Ufs Acm For Risk Analysis, Abhishek Asthana, Padma Lochan Pradhan Dr

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

At this cloud age, there is tremendous growth in business, services, resources, and cloud technology. This growth comes with a risk of unsafe, unordered, and uncertainty due to unauthorized access and theft of confidential propriety data. Our objective is to model around Read, Write and Execute to resolve these unordered, unsafe, and uncertain issues. We will develop a L-Shape pattern model matching UFS ACM to minimize the accessibilities based on RIGHT & ROLE of the resources and maximize the quality of services for safety and high availability. The preventive, detective, corrective (PDC) services are the major roles for all levels …

A Combined Approach For Private Indexing Mechanism, Pranita Maruti Desai Ms., Vijay Maruti Shelake Mr.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Private indexing is a set of approaches for analyzing research data that are similar or resemble similar ones. This is used in the database to keep track of the keys and their values. The main subject of this research is private indexing in record linkage to secure the data. Because unique personal identification numbers or social security numbers are not accessible in most countries or databases, data linkage is limited to attributes such as date of birth and names to distinguish between the number of records and the real-life entities they represent. For security reasons, the encryption of these identifiers …

The Global Rise Of Online Devices, Cyber Crime And Cyber Defense: Enhancing Ethical Actions, Counter Measures, Cyber Strategy, And Approaches, Naresh Kshetri

Dissertations

The rise of online devices, online users, online shopping, online gaming, and online teaching has ultimately given rise to online attacks and online crimes. As cases of COVID-19 seem to increase day by day, so do online crimes and attacks (as many sectors and organizations went 100% online). Technological advancements and cyber warfare already generated many ethical issues, as internet users increasingly need ethical cyber defense strategies.

Individual internet users have challenges on their end; and on the other end, nation states (some secretly, some openly), are investing in robot weapons and autonomous weapons systems (AWS). New technologies have combined …

Zero Trust And Advanced Persistent Threats: Who Will Win The War?, Bilge Karabacak, Todd Whittaker

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are state-sponsored actors who break into computer networks for political or industrial espionage. Because of the nature of cyberspace and ever-changing sophisticated attack techniques, it is challenging to prevent and detect APT attacks. 2020 United States Federal Government data breach once again showed how difficult to protect networks from targeted attacks. Among many other solutions and techniques, zero trust is a promising security architecture that might effectively prevent the intrusion attempts of APT actors. In the zero trust model, no process insider or outside the network is trusted by default. Zero trust is also called perimeterless …

Establishing Trust In Vehicle-To-Vehicle Coordination: A Sensor Fusion Approach, Jakob Veselsky, Jack West, Isaac Ahlgren, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith, Abhinav Goel, Wenxin Jiang, James C. Davis, Kyuin Lee, Younghyun Kim

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

As we add more autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles (AVs) to our roads, their effects on passenger and pedestrian safety are becoming more important. Despite extensive testing, AVs do not always identify roadway hazards. Failures in object recognition components have already led to several fatal collisions, e.g. as a result of faults in sensors, software, or vantage point. Although a particular AV may fail, there is an untapped pool of information held by other AVs in the vicinity that could be used to identify roadway hazards before they present a safety threat.

Intrusion Attacks On Automotive Can And Their Detection, Halley M. Paulson

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

The main highway of communication in a vehicle is the Controller Area Network, commonly known by the acronym CAN. Any vulnerability in this network could allow bad actors to block communication between vehicle subsystems, risking the safety of the vehicle’s occupants. With the ever growing list of vulnerabilities being exposed in the CAN, it is critical to address its safety. This paper looks at one of the known vulnerabilities in the data link layer of the CAN and an Intrusion Detection System that could detect attacks on this network. We detail a few processes of the CAN, arbitration and error …

A Critical Comparison Of Brave Browser And Google Chrome Forensic Artefacts, Stuart Berham, Sarah Morris

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensic practitioners are tasked with the identification, recovery and analysis of Internet browser artefacts which may have been used in the pursuit of committing a civil or criminal offence. This research paper critically compares the most downloaded browser, Google Chrome, against an increasingly popular Chromium browser known as Brave, said to offer privacy-by-default. With increasing forensic caseloads, data complexity, and requirements for method validation to satisfy ISO 17025 accreditation, recognising the similarities and differences between the browsers, developed on the same underlying technology is essential. The paper describes a series of conducted experiments and subsequent analysis to identify artefacts …

The Mathematics Of Risk: An Introduction To Guaranteed Data De-Identification, Kristi Thompson

Western Libraries Presentations

This webinar is devoted to the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of guaranteed data anonymization. Topics covered include an overview of identifiers and quasi-identifiers, an introduction to k-anonymity, a look at some cases where k-anonymity breaks down, and anonymization hierarchies. The presenter will describe a method to assess a survey dataset for anonymization using standard statistical software and consider the question of "anonymization overkill". Much of the academic material looking at data anonymization is quite abstract and aimed at computer scientists, while material aimed at data curators does not always consider recent developments. This webinar is intended to help bridge the …

Technical Analysis Of Thanos Ransomware, Ikuromor Ogiriki, Christopher Beck, Vahid Heydari

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

Ransomware is a developing menace that encrypts users’ files and holds the decryption key hostage until the victim pays a ransom. This particular class of malware has been in charge of extortion hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Adding to the problem, generating new variations is cheap. Therefore, new malware can detect antivirus and intrusion detection systems and evade them or manifest in ways to make themselves undetectable. We must first understand the characteristics and behavior of various varieties of ransomware to create and construct effective security mechanisms to combat them. This research presents a novel dynamic and behavioral …

Understanding Cybercrime Offending And Victimization Patterns From A Global Perspective, Jin R. Lee

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Cybercrime research within criminology and criminal justice sciences has increased over the past few decades, improving the knowledge and evidence-base around cybercrime offending and victimization generally. While earlier cybercrime studies were based primarily in the United States, there has been a recent surge in studies using international samples and multidisciplinary approaches to understand cybercrime patterns. The current issue of the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime consists of four articles that seek to advance our understanding of cybercrime behaviors from a global perspective. To that end, the objective of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the …

Improving Adversarial Attacks Against Malconv, Justin Burr

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes several improvements to existing adversarial attacks against MalConv, a raw-byte malware classifier for Windows PE files. The included contributions greatly improve the success rates and performance of gradient-based file overlay attacks. All improvements are included in a new open-source attack utility called BitCamo.

Several new payload initialization strategies for use with gradient-based attacks are proposed and evaluated as potential replacements for the randomized initialization method used by current attacks. An algorithm for determining the optimal payload size is also proposed. The resulting improvements achieve a 100% evasion rate against eligible target executables using an average payload size …

Analyzing Offline Social Engagements: An Empirical Study Of Meetup Events Related To Software Development, Abhishek Sharma, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Anamika Sawhney, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers use a variety of social mediachannels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date,collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contributeto. Meetup is one of such social media used by softwaredevelopers to organize community gatherings. We in this work,investigate the dynamics of Meetup groups and events relatedto software development. Our work is different from previouswork as we focus on the actual event and group data that wascollected using Meetup API.In this work, we performed an empirical study of eventsand groups present on Meetup which are related to softwaredevelopment. First, we identified 6,327 Meetup groups related …