Global E-Security

Today our commonwealth is protected by firewalls rather than firepower. This is an issue of global importance as new technology has provided a world of opportunity for criminals. As a consequence law enforcement agencies all over the world are struggling to cope. Therefore, today’s top priority is to use computer technology to fight computer crime.

With raising the number of cyber crimes, the need of having a proper digital forensic process also increases. Although digital forensics is practiced in recent years, there is still a big gap between previously suggested digital forensics processes and what is really needed to be done in real cases. Some problems with current processes are lack of flexible transition between phases, not having a clear method or a complete scenario for addressing reliable evidence, and not paying enough attention to management aspects and team roles. This paper provides a process model by paying special attention to the team roles and management aspects as well as both exculpatory and inculpatory evidence.

This paper explores the recent phenomenon of identity theft. In particular, it examines the contact centre environment as a mechanism for this to occur. Through a survey that was conducted amongst forty-five contact centre workers in the Glasgow area we determined that contact centres can and do provide a mechanism for identity theft. Specifically, we found a particularly high incidence of agents who had previously dealt with phone calls that they considered suspicious. Furthermore, there are agents within such environments who have previously been offered money in exchange for customers’ details, or who know of fellow workers who received such offers. Lastly, we identify specific practices within contact centres that may contribute to the likelihood of identity theft.

We illustrate the design of an intelligent agent to aid a merchant to limit fraudulent payment card purchases over the Internet. This is important because increasing fraud may limit the rise of e-commerce, and difficult because of the uncertainty in identifying and authenticating people remotely. The agent can advise the merchant what actions to take to reduce risk without complete knowledge of the circumstances. It can also negotiate flexibly to conclude transactions successfully that would otherwise be rejected. We use the Event Calculus to model the transaction system including the participants and their actions. The idea has applications in other distributed systems where incomplete knowledge of a system may be exploited by adversaries to their advantage.

The introduction of smartcard technologies has reduced the incidence of card fraud in the UK, but there are still significant losses from fraudulent card use. In this paper we detail the context of smartcard introduction and describe the types of fraud that remain a threat to cardholders and other stakeholders in the card system. We discuss the issue of risk and encourage greater cardholder awareness of such risks.

Traceability is a key to the investigation of the internet criminal and a cornerstone of internet research. It is impossible to prevent all internet misuse but may be possible to identify and trace the users, and then take appropriate action. This paper presents the value of traceability within the email/-newsposting utilities, the technologies being using to hide identities, the difficulties in locating the traceable data and the challenges in tracking online trails.

The internet considered a tool that effectively ensures communication globally has been hindered by hackers and crackers continuously. In so doing, a multitude of network facilitated tools such as firewalls, virtual private networks (VPN) and a variety of antivirus software packages has been enabled for dealing with such predicaments. However, more often than not these facilitated tools are marketed as perfect solutions to the ever culminating problems such as loss of data and privacy in networked and world wide intercommunications. We provide a forum for addressing these perceived problems in this paper.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is widely used for signaling in multimedia communications. However, many SIP implementations are still in their infancy and vulnerable to malicious messages. We investigate flaws in the SIP implementations of eight phones, showing that the deficient verification of

SIP dialogs

further aggravates the problem by making it easier for attacks to succeed. Our results show that the majority of the phones we tested are susceptible to these attacks.

In this paper, we evaluate available steganographic techniques for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) that can be used for creating covert channels during signaling phase of VoIP (Voice over IP) call. Apart from characterizing existing steganographic methods we provide new insights by introducing new techniques. We also estimate amount of data that can be transferred in signalling messages for typical IP telephony call.

Interest in voice recognition technologies for internet applications is growing due to the flexibility of speech-based communication. The major drawback with the use of sound for internet access with computers is that the commands will be audible to other people in the vicinity. This paper examines a secure and voice-less method for recognition of speech-based commands using video without evaluating sound signals. The proposed approach represents mouth movements in the video data using 2D spatio-temporal templates (STT). Zernike moments (ZM) are computed from STT and fed into support vector machines (SVM) to be classified into one of the utterances. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique produces a high accuracy of 98% in a phoneme classification task. The proposed technique is demonstrated to be invariant to global variations of illumination level. Such a system is useful for securely interpreting user commands for internet applications on mobile devices.

An extended visual secret sharing scheme uses multiple innocent-looking cover images to hide a secret image such that none discloses any portion of the secret. In this article an extended secret sharing technique is proposed that shares a secret color image in a couple of significant images using a fixed pixel expansion factor of 9 for a color space as large as comprising

2

24

colors. Further more, the data hiding technique employed in this paper uses all three planes of a color image which reduces the number of cover images that would otherwise be needed. Recovery is performed through a simple stacking (XOR) operation and a sequence of random integers.

Trivium is an eSTREAM candidate cipher first proposed in 2005. It has a key length of 80 while an internal state of 288 bits. Its internal state bits can be related to output bits with simple algebraic equations, but non-linear update results in rising degree of equations with time. Recently a tweaked structure of Trivium is also proposed. This article presents algebraic analysis of the key generating structure of both versions. Our experiments target to recover the internal state bits rather than the key bits, as is generally the case in algebraic cryptanalysis. Our approach is to solve practically the varying degree equations of Trivium structure, with some guessed bits using Groebner basis algorithm. Our analysis shows that although tweaked structure offer more complex equations, still it is not suitable to provide a security level of 128 bits.

This paper proposes a method to create a system that allows data to be stored in several locations in secure and reliable manner. The system should create several shares from the data such that only pre-specified subsets of these shares can be used to retrieve the original data. The shares then will be distributed to shareholders over a local and/or wide area network. The system should allow requesting some/all shares from shareholders and using them to rebuild the data.

In this paper we propose a generalized model of E-trading for the development of GSR Fair Exchange Protocols. Based on the model, a method is narrated to implement E-trading protocols that ensure fairness in true sense without using an additional trusted third party for which either party has to pay. The model provides the scope to include the correctness of the product, money atomicity and customer’s anonymity properties within E-trading protocol. We conclude this paper by indicating the area of applicability for our model.

One of the most important things in PKI(Public Key Infrastructure) is the private key management issue. The private key must be deal with safely for secure PKI service. Even though PKI service is usually used for identification and authentication of user in e-commerce, PKI service has many inconvenient factors. Especially, the fact that storage media of private key for PKI service is limited to PC hard disk drive or smart card users must always carry, gives an inconvenience to user and is not suitable in ubiquitous network. This paper suggests the digital signature service using a mobile phone(m-PKI service) which is suitable in future network. A mobile phone is the most widely used for personal communication means and has a characteristic of high movability. We can use the PKI service anytime and anywhere using m-PKI.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks on public servers after 2000 have become a serious problem. In the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks often seen recently, multiple distributed nodes concurrently attack a single server. To assure that network services will not be interrupted, faster and more effective defense mechanisms is needed to protect against malicious traffic, especially SYN floods. One problem in detecting SYN flood traffic is that server nodes or firewalls cannot distinguish the SYN packets of normal TCP connections from those of a SYN flood attack. Our method, FDFIX, relies on the use of monitoring and measurement techniques to evaluate the impact of DoS attacks. It uses flow based measurements. Capturing flow information is very important for detecting DoS and also other kinds of attacks. Flow monitoring allows detecting suspicious traffics and in the next step can analyze attacking flows and the results can be used for defense methods. Our method provides required information for many mechanisms that use traffic measurement as their input.

With the growing deployment of multisensor fusion systems to gather and analyse pieces of attack evidence from myriad heterogeneous sensors, a requirement is to provide a secure and robust message exchange mechanism for their communication. A message exchange mechanism for multisensor communication is described that is based on security spaces. A security space is a lightweight abstract space based on tuple spaces that allows secure message communication dynamically. In this paper security spaces’ schematic and semantic representations are provided. Its mathematical formalism, and application in distributed and federated multisensor environments are demonstrated.

Our paper introduces a new way to filter spam using as background the Kolmogorov complexity theory and as learning component a Support Vector Machine. Our idea is to skip the classical text analysis in use with standard filtering techniques, and to focus on the measure of the informative content of a message to classify it as spam or legitimate. Exploiting the fact that we can estimate a message information content through compression techniques, we represent an e-mail as a multi-dimensional real vector and we train a Support Vector Machine to get a classifier achieving accuracy rates in the range of 90%-97%, bringing our combined technique at the top of the current spam filtering technologies.

Network Behavior Analysis techniques are designed to detect intrusions and other undesirable behavior in computer networks by analyzing the traffic statistics. We present an efficient framework for integration of anomaly detection algorithms working on the identical input data. This framework is based on high-speed network traffic acquisition subsystem and on trust modeling, a well-established set of techniques from the multi-agent system field. Trust-based integration of algorithms results in classification with lower error rate, especially in terms of false positives. The presented framework is suitable for both online and offline processing, and introduces a relatively low computational overhead compared to deployment of isolated anomaly detection algorithms.

A packet switch with parallel switching planes is a parallel packet switch (PPS). It is an open problem to design a PPS that is feasible to guarantee packet ordering with lower computation and communication overhead. Many solutions proposed previously are essentially impractical because of high communication complexity. In this paper, we attempt to make a PPS practical by using a simple cooperating scheduling mechanism between the round-robin demultiplexing at the inputs and the enhanced longest queue first (ELQF) scheduling at the central scheduler. In our scheme, no communication is needed during normal operation, and only sporadic communication between the central scheduler and demultiplexors is launched during the occurrence of starvation instead of each cell slot. As the experiment results demonstrate, our PPS offers improved delay performance compared to existing PPS designs.

In this paper, a graphical authentication system is presented which is based on a matching scheme. The user is required to match up thumbnail graphical images that belong to a variety of categories – in an order based approach. The number of images in the selection panel was varied to determine how this effects memorability. In addition, timing information was included as a means of enhancing the security level of the system. That is, the user’s mouse clicks were timed and used as part of the authentication process. This is one of the few studies that employ a proper biometric facility, namely mouse dynamics, into a graphical authentication system. Lastly, this study employees the use of the 2-D version of Fitts’ law, the Accot-Zhai streering law, which is used to examine the effect of image size on usability. The results from this study indicate that the combination of biometrics (mouse timing information) into a graphical authentication scheme produces FAR/FRR values that approach textual based authentication schemes.

Algebraic analysis of A5/2, the weaker version of GSM encryption algorithm, is presented in this article. We have enhanced existing cryptanalysis of A5/2 in terms of data requirement. Experimental results using an implementation of Groebner basis algorithm are presented. It has been found that state bits of the cipher can be recovered in fewer number of data frames than required in a previous efficient attack against GSM communication. Number of data frames required for both known-plaintext and ciphertext-only attacks can be reduced if linearization is replaced by Groebner basis technique without changing the time complexity of attack.

Authorization policies for an administrative domain or a composition of multiple domains in multi-domain environments are determined by either one administrator or multiple administrators’ cooperation. Several logic-based models for multi-domain environments’ authorization have been proposed; however, they have not considered administrators and administrative domains in policies’ representation. In this paper, we propose the syntax, proof theory, and semantics of a logic for multi-domain authorization policies including administrators and administrative domains. Considering administrators in policies provides the possibility of presenting composite administration having applicability in many collaborative applications. Indeed, administrators and administrative domains stated in policies can be used in authorization. The presented logic is based on modal logic and utilizes two calculi named the calculus of administrative domains and the calculus of administrators. It is also proved that the logic is sound. A case study is presented signifying the logic application in practical projects.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) uses Quantum Mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random bit string known only to them, which can be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

A secret key can be agreed upon even without a central server. For example,

Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

is a protocol for agreeing on a secret key based on publicly-discussed very large prime numbers. Its security is based on the assumed difficulty of taking discrete logarithms modulo very large prime numbers. Quantum encryption provides a way of agreeing on a secret key without making this assumption.

This work surveys biometric based authentication systems that deploy mouse movements. Typically, timing and movement direction, along with clicking actions are used to build a profile of a user, which is then used for authentication purposes. Most system relies on a continuous monitoring process, or require the user to interact with a program (such as a game) in order to derive sufficient statistical information regarding their mouse dynamics. In this work, a novel graphical authentication system dubbed Mouse-lock is presented. This system deploys the analogy of a safe, and the password is entered via the mouse in a graphical equivalent of combination lock. The question is whether this approach elicits sufficient discriminatory information from a relatively minimalist degree of interaction from the user. The preliminary results from a study with six subjects indicates, based on FAR/FRR values, that this is a viable approach.

LDPC

decoding is based on iterative algorithms. It propagates extrinsic and a priori information through the bipartite graph which is the link between variable nodes and parity check nodes. In this paper, we compute and we compare the performance of the rst introduced

LDPC

decoding algorithms (

BP

and

BP

-Based) in terms of binary operation numbers in order to construct cryptographic shemes.

Mobile IP represents a simple and scalable global mobility solution. However, it inhibits various vulnerabilities to malicious attacks and, therefore, requires the integration of appropriate security services. In this paper, we discuss two authentication schemes suggested for Mobile IP: standard authentication and Mobile IP/AAA authentication. In order to provide Mobile IP roaming services including identity verication, we propose an improvement to Mobile/AAA authentication scheme by applying a local politic key management in each domain, hence we reduce hando latency by avoiding the involvement of AAA infrastructure during mobile node roaming.

Biometric technology allows a computer system to identify and authenticate a person directly based on physical or behavioral traits [1]. However passwords and tokens that are currently widely used for authentication purposes do not directly authenticate a person; whenever a person offers a password or token the system only authenticates the presented password or token as authentic, but not the actual person presenting it [2], [8]. For this reason a lot of research went into developing a protocol that will allow a person to securely use a biometric token for personal authentication. Biometric technology is an attractive option for authenticating a person as there is a direct link between the person and a person’s biometric token. This paper discusses a protocol, named BioVault. BioVault ensures safe transport of biometric tokens over un-secure networked environment without using any encryption technologies. The BioVault protocol also lays the foundation for biometrically based encryption, and biometrically based digital signatures.

In 2003, Lin et al. have proposed an electronic voting scheme which can be utilized in large-scale elections, and claimed it detects double voting. But in this paper, by presenting an attack, we show that voters can successfully vote more than once without being detected. Hence, we propose a new modified scheme based on the Lin et al.’s scheme with the same efficiency to solve this weakness and analyze its security.

Information security risk management (ISRM) is a major concern of organizations worldwide. Although the number of existing ISRM methodologies is enormous, in practice a lot of resources are invested by organizations in creating new ISRM methodologies in order to capture more accurately the risks of their complex information systems. This is a crucial knowledge-intensive process for organizations, but in most cases it is addressed in an ad hoc manner. The existence of a systematic approach for the development of new or improved ISRM methodologies would enhance the effectiveness of the process. In this paper we propose a systematic meta-process for developing new, or improved ISRM methods. We also present the specifications for a collaboration and knowledge-sharing platform supporting a virtual intra-organizational cross-disciplinary team, which aims at improving its ISRM methodologies by adopting the proposed meta-process.

E-government is one of the most rapidly evolving service domains in the contemporary information society. Many governments have already developed and provided e-government services to businesses and citizens. Nowadays actors in the government domain attempt to take the next step and exploit the latest wireless technologies in order to provide ubiquitous services for mobile users. However, this approach involves some hidden risks mainly due to the inherent insecurity of the air medium and the vulnerabilities of the wireless systems. Thus, in this paper we investigate the security gaps and considerations which should be taken into account for an m-government system. Finally, we provide a list of security guidelines and policies, which the users of the system should be aware of and follow in order to avoid security attacks.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, in order to guarantee a coherent discussion about mobile customer relationship management (mCRM), this paper presents a conceptualization of mCRM delineating its unique characteristics because of Among the variety of mobile services, considerable attention has been devoted to mobile marketing and in particular to mobile customer relationship management services. Second, the authors discusses the security risks in mobile computing in different level(user, mobile device, wireless network,...) and finally we focus on enterprise mobile security and it’s subgroups with a series of suggestion and solution for improve mobile computing security.

Security is very often mentioned as one of the preconditions for the faster growth of e-commerce. Without a secure and reliable internet, customer will continue to be reluctant to provide confidential information online, such as credit card number. Moreover, organizations of all types and sizes around the world rely heavily on technologies of electronic commerce (e-commerce) for conducting their day-to-day business transaction. Providing organizations with a secure e-commerce environment is a major issue and challenging one especially in Middle Eastern countries. Without secure e-commerce, it is almost impossible to take advantage of the opportunities offered by e-commerce technologies. E-commerce can create opportunities for small entrepreneurs in Middle Eastern countries. This requires removing infrastructure blockages in telecommunications and logistics alongside the governance of e-commerce with policies on consumer protection, security of transactions, privacy of records and intellectual property. In this paper, we will explore the legal implications of e-commerce security governance by establishing who is responsible for ensuring compliance with this discipline, demonstrating the value to be derived from information security governance, the methodology of applying information security governance, and liability for non-compliance with this discipline. Our main focus will be on analyzing the importance and implication of e-commerce security governance in developing countries.

My presentation will outline why organisations need to develop effective metrics/measurement mechanisms.

There is a range of practical models being developed for organizations to adopt. For example, ISO 27004 has created a new standard totally devoted to this subject to get to grips with effective IT Governance. IS metrics are vital for business resilience through an effective management/measurement model.

Organisations need to develop formal processes to build an effective measurement model capable of responding to a growing number of threats to meet regulatory and contractual requirements and demonstrate continuous improvement.

The main ingredients are:-

effective measurement management

practical ways to ensure compliance with the growing number of regulations/laws e.g possible disclosure laws

ability to achieve the necessary awareness of why metrics are vital to business resilience

production of continuous monitoring metrics - through both Help Desk & shared responsibility.

Web services development is a key theme in the utilization the commercial exploitation of the semantic web. Paramount to the development and offering of such services is the issue of security features and they way these are applied in instituting trust amongst participants and recipients of the service. Implementing such security features is a major challenge to developers as they need to balance these with performance and interoperability requirements. Being able to evaluate the level of security offered is a desirable feature for any prospective participant. The authors attempt to address the issues of security requirements and evaluation criteria, while they discuss the challenges of security implementation through a simple web service application case.