Information Security Commons^™

Exploring The Privacy Dimension Of Wearables Through Machine Learning-Enabled Inference, Ulku Meteriz Yildiran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Today's hyper-connected consumers demand convenient ways to tune into information without switching between devices, which led the industry leaders to the wearables. Wearables such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality (AR) glasses can be comfortably worn on the body. In addition, they offer limitless features, including activity tracking, authentication, navigation, and entertainment. Wearables that provide digestible information stimulate even higher consumer demand. However, to keep up with the ever-growing user expectations, developers keep adding new features and interaction methods to augment the use cases without considering their privacy impacts. In this dissertation, we explore the privacy dimension of wearables …

Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Smart grid technologies are integral to society’s transition to sustainable energy sources, but they do not come without a cost. As the energy sector shifts away from a century’s reliance on fossil fuels and centralized generation, technology that actively monitors and controls every aspect of the power infrastructure has been widely adopted, resulting in a plethora of new vulnerabilities that have already wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure. Integrity attacks that feedback false data through industrial control systems, which result in possible catastrophic overcorrections and ensuing failures, have plagued grid infrastructure over the past several years. This threat is now at …

Password Managers: Secure Passwords The Easy Way, Alexander Master

CERIAS Technical Reports

Poor passwords are often the central problem identified when data breaches, ransomware attacks, and identity fraud cases occur. This Purdue Extension publication provides everyday users of Internet websites and computer systems with tools and strategies to protect their online accounts. Securing information access with password managers can be convenient and often free of cost, on a variety of devices and platforms. “Do’s and Don’ts” of password practices are highlighted, as well as the benefits of multi-factor authentication. The content is especially applicable for small businesses or non-profits, where employees often share access to systems or accounts.

A Metric For Machine Learning Vulnerability To Adversarial Examples, Matt Bradley

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Machine learning is used in myriad aspects, both in academic research and in everyday life, including safety-critical applications such as robust robotics, cybersecurity products, medial testing and diagnosis where a false positive or negative could have catastrophic results. Despite the increasing prevalence of machine learning applications and their role in critical systems we rely on daily, the security and robustness of machine learning models is still a relatively young field of research with many open questions, particularly on the defensive side of adversarial machine learning. Chief among these open questions is how best to quantify a model’s attack surface against …

Timestamp Estimation From Outdoor Scenes, Tawfiq Salem, Jisoo Hwang, Rafael Padilha

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The increasing availability of smartphones allowed people to easily capture and share images on the internet. These images are often associated with metadata, including the image capture time (timestamp) and the location where the image was captured (geolocation). The metadata associated with images provides valuable information to better understand scenes and events presented in these images. The timestamp can be manipulated intentionally to provide false information to convey a twisted version of reality. Images with manipulated timestamps are often used as a cover-up for wrongdoing or broadcasting false claims and competing views on the internet. Estimating the time of capture …

Anatomy Of An Internet Hijack And Interception Attack: A Global And Educational Perspective, Ben A. Scott, Michael N. Johnstone, Patryk Szewczyk

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Internet’s underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure is a rich target for cyber crime, cyber espionage and cyber warfare operations. The stability and security of the Internet infrastructure are important to the function of global matters of state, critical infrastructure, global e-commerce and election systems. There are global approaches to tackle Internet security challenges that include governance, law, educational and technical perspectives. This paper reviews a number of approaches to these challenges, the increasingly surgical attacks that target the underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure of the Internet, and the extant cyber security education curricula; we find the majority of predominant cyber security …

On Implementing And Testing The Rsa Algorithm, Kien Trung Le

Senior Independent Study Theses

In this work, we give a comprehensive introduction to the RSA cryptosystem, implement it in Java, and compare it empirically to three other RSA implementations. We start by giving an overview of the field of cryptography, from its primitives to the composite constructs used in the field. Then, the paper presents a basic version of the RSA algorithm. With this information in mind, we discuss several problems with this basic conception of RSA, including its speed and some potential attacks that have been attempted. Then, we discuss possible improvements that can make RSA runs faster and more secure. On the …

Microsoft Defender Will Be Defended: Memoryranger Prevents Blinding Windows Av, Denis Pogonin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Windows OS is facing a huge rise in kernel attacks. An overview of popular techniques that result in loading kernel drivers will be presented. One of the key targets of modern threats is disabling and blinding Microsoft Defender, a default Windows AV. The analysis of recent driver-based attacks will be given, the challenge is to block them. The survey of user- and kernel-level attacks on Microsoft Defender will be given. One of the recently published attackers’ techniques abuses Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) and Security Reference Monitor (SRM) by modifying Integrity Level and Debug Privileges for the Microsoft Defender via syscalls. …

The Effects Of Antecedents And Mediating Factors On Cybersecurity Protection Behavior, Ling Li, Li Xu, Wu He

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper identifies opportunities for potential theoretical and practical improvements in employees' awareness of cybersecurity and their motivational behavior to protect themselves and their organizations from cyberattacks using the protection motivation theory. In addition, it contributes to the literature by examining additional variables and mediators besides the core constructs of the Protection Motivation Model (PMT). This article uses empirical data and structural equation modeling to test the antecedents and mediators of employees' cybersecurity motivational behavior. The study offers theoretical and pragmatic guidance for cybersecurity programs. First, the model developed in this study can partially explain how people may change their …

Proxy Re-Encryption In Blockchain-Based Application, Wangcheng Yuan

Master's Projects

Nowadays, blockchain-based technology has risen to a new dimension. With the advantage of the decentralized identity, data are transferred through decentralized and public ledgers. Those new contracts provide great visibility. However, there is still a need to keep some data private in many cases. Those private data should be encrypted while still benefiting from the decentralized on-chain protocol. Securing those private data in such a decentralized blockchain-based system is thus a critical problem. Our solution provides a decentralized protocol that lets users grant access to their private data with proxy re-encryption in SpartanGold (a blockchain-based cryptocurrency). We implement a third-party …

Darknet Traffic Classification, Nhien Rust-Nguyen

Master's Projects

The anonymous nature of darknets is commonly exploited for illegal activities. Previous research has employed machine learning and deep learning techniques to automate the detection of darknet traffic to block these criminal activities. This research aims to improve darknet traffic detection by assessing Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Auxiliary-Classifier Generative Adversarial Networks (AC-GAN) for classification of network traffic and the underlying application types. We find that our RF model outperforms the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used by prior work with the CIC-Darknet2020 dataset. To evaluate the robustness of our RF classifier, we degrade …

Robustness Of Image-Based Malware Analysis, Katrina Tran

Master's Projects

Being able to identify malware is important in preventing attacks. Image-based malware analysis is the study of images that are created from malware. Analyzing these images can help identify patterns in malware families. In previous work, "gist descriptor" features extracted from images have been used in malware classification problems and have shown promising results. In this research, we determine whether gist descriptors are robust with respect to malware obfuscation techniques, as compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained directly on malware images. Using the Python Image Library, we create images from malware executables and from malware that we obfuscate. We …

Generative Adversarial Networks For Image-Based Malware Classification, Huy Nguyen

Master's Projects

Malware detection and analysis are important topics in cybersecurity. For efficient malware removal, determination of malware threat levels, and damage estimation, malware family classification plays a critical role. With the rise in computing power and the advent of cloud computing, deep learning models for malware analysis has gained in popularity. In this paper, we extract features from malware executable files and represent them as images using various approaches. We then focus on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for multiclass classification and compare our GAN results to other popular machine learning techniques, including Support Vector Machine

(SVM), XGBoost, and Restricted Boltzmann Machines …

Investigating Lattice-Based Cryptography, Michaela Molina

Master's Projects

Cryptography is important for data confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Public key cryptosystems allow for the encryption and decryption of data using two different keys, one that is public and one that is private. This is beneficial because there is no need to securely distribute a secret key. However, the development of quantum computers implies that many public-key cryptosystems for which security depends on the hardness of solving math problems will no longer be secure. It is important to develop systems that have harder math problems which cannot be solved by a quantum computer.

In this project, two public-key cryptosystems which …

Virtual Machine For Spartangold, William Wang

Master's Projects

The field of blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be both difficult to grasp and improve upon, which makes aids that can assist in these tasks very useful. SpartanGold is a simplified blockchain-based cryptocurrency created at San Jose State University as a learning aid for blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In its current state, it closely resembles Bitcoin, and it is also easily expandable to implement other features.

This project extends SpartanGold with a virtual machine resembling the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Implementing this feature results in SpartanGold having Ethereum- related features, which would allow the cryptocurrency to both be a helpful learning aid for …

Nft Sneaker Marketplace Design, Testing, And Challenges, Chris Zhu

Honors Theses

This paper introduces the preliminary background and implementation of the NFT sneaker marketplace. Specifically, we build sneaker NFTs on top of ERC-20 within the Ethereum network and use a top-to-bottom design mechanism. Our website performs well in its functionality, compatibility, and performance. We discuss possible future steps for security implementation. In particular, we recommend using a cold wallet for clients' transactions and implementing multi-signature contracts to avoid spoofing and repudiation. Introducing the sneaker NFT marketplace will vastly reduce the costs of transactions and delivery time in the physical sneaker marketplace. We hope investors in the physical asset space can find …

Toward A Student-Ready Cybersecurity Program: Findings From A Survey Of Stem-Students, Lora Pitman, Brian K. Payne, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin, Lenora Thorbjornsen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As the number of available cybersecurity jobs continues to grow, colleges strive to offer to their cybersecurity students an environment which will make them sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce after graduation. This paper explores the academic and professional needs of STEM-students in various higher education institutions across Virginia and how cybersecurity programs can cater to these needs. It also seeks to propose an evidence-based approach for improving the existing cybersecurity programs so that they can become more inclusive and student-ready. A survey of 251 college students in four higher-education institutions in Virginia showed that while there are common patterns …

A Review Of Distributed Identity Technology In Iot Devices, Myles Perry

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Distributed identity technology provides solutions to many of the faults currently found in federated identity systems. Applying this technology to internet of things devices has many possible benefits in the realm of device authentication. However, this also provides new challenges not present in existing distributed identity systems. The large number of devices that would enter and leave the system means balancing sybil attack vulnerability and linkage attack vulnerability becomes challenging. Internet of things devices also have less memory and computing power than a standard personal computer or phone. This means any protocol to execute distributed identity in these devices must …

Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences conducting cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) competition for cybersecurity enthusiast participants (inclusive of both tertiary students and working professionals) local and abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning and appreciation of cybersecurity concepts for our participants with little to no technical background can be challenging. Gamification methods such as capture the flag competition style is a popular form of cybersecurity education to help participants overcome this challenge and identify talents. Participants get to apply theoretical concepts in a controlled environment, solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting and gain hands-on active learning …

Orchestration Or Automation: Authentication Flaw Detection In Android Apps, Siqi Ma, Juanru Li, Surya Nepal, Diethelm Ostry, David Lo, Sanjay K. Jha, Robert H. Deng, Elisa Bertino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passwords are pervasively used to authenticate users' identities in mobile apps. To secure passwords against attacks, protection is applied to the password authentication protocol (PAP). The implementation of the protection scheme becomes an important factor in protecting PAP against attacks. We focus on two basic protection in Android, i.e., SSL/TLS-based PAP and timestamp-based PAP. Previously, we proposed an automated tool, GLACIATE, to detect authentication flaws. We were curious whether orchestration (i.e., involving manual-effort) works better than automation. To answer this question, we propose an orchestrated approach, AUTHEXPLOIT and compare its effectiveness GLACIATE. We study requirements for correct implementation of PAP …