A forensically-enabled IASS cloud computing architecture

Current cloud architectures do not support digital forensic investigators, nor comply with today’s digital forensics procedures largely due to the dynamic nature of the cloud. Whilst much research has focused upon identifying the problems that are introduced with a cloud-based system, to date there is a significant lack of research on adapting current digital forensic tools and techniques to a cloud environment. Data acquisition is the first and most important process within digital forensics – to ensure data integrity and admissibility. However, access to data and the control of resources in the cloud is still very much provider-dependent and complicated by the very nature of the multi-tenanted operating environment. Thus, investigators have no option but to rely on cloud providers to acquire evidence, assuming they would be willing or are required to by law. Furthermore, the evidence collected by the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) is still questionable as there is no way to verify the validity of this evidence and whether evidence has already been lost. This paper proposes a forensic acquisition and analysis model that fundamentally shifts responsibility of the data back to the data owner rather than relying upon a third party. In this manner, organisations are free to undertaken investigations at will requiring no intervention or cooperation from the cloud provider. The model aims to provide a richer and complete set of admissible evidence than what current CSPs are able to provide

Exploratory study to explore the role of ICT in the process of knowledge management in an Indian business environment

In the 21st century and the emergence of a digital economy, knowledge and the knowledge base economy are rapidly growing. To effectively be able to understand the processes involved in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge management in the business environment is critical to the success of an organization. This study builds on the previous research of the authors on the enablers of knowledge management by identifying the relationship between the enablers of knowledge management and the role played by information communication technologies (ICT) and ICT infrastructure in a business setting. This paper provides the findings of a survey collected from the four major Indian cities (Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Villupuram) regarding their views and opinions about the enablers of knowledge management in business setting. A total of 80 organizations participated in the study with 100 participants in each city. The results show that ICT and ICT infrastructure can play a critical role in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge in an Indian business environment

Privacy Preserving Threat Hunting in Smart Home Environments

The recent proliferation of smart home environments offers new and transformative circumstances for various domains with a commitment to enhancing the quality of life and experience. Most of these environments combine different gadgets offered by multiple stakeholders in a dynamic and decentralized manner, which in turn presents new challenges from the perspective of digital investigation. In addition, a plentiful amount of data records got generated because of the day to day interactions between these gadgets and homeowners, which poses difficulty in managing and analyzing such data. The analysts should endorse new digital investigation approaches to tackle the current limitations in traditional approaches when used in these environments. The digital evidence in such environments can be found inside the records of logfiles that store the historical events occurred inside the smart home. Threat hunting can leverage the collective nature of these gadgets to gain deeper insights into the best way for responding to new threats, which in turn can be valuable in reducing the impact of breaches. Nevertheless, this approach depends mainly on the readiness of smart homeowners to share their own personal usage logs that have been extracted from their smart home environments. However, they might disincline to employ such service due to the sensitive nature of the information logged by their personal gateways. In this paper, we presented an approach to enable smart homeowners to share their usage logs in a privacy preserving manner. A distributed threat hunting approach has been developed to permit the composition of diverse threat classes without revealing the logged records to other involved parties. Furthermore, a scenario was proposed to depict a proactive threat Intelligence sharing for the detection of potential threats in smart home environments with some experimental results.Comment: In Proc. the International Conference on Advances in Cyber Security, Penang, Malaysia, July 201

Approaches for Future Internet architecture design and Quality of Experience (QoE) Control

Researching a Future Internet capable of overcoming the current Internet limitations is a strategic investment. In this respect, this paper presents some concepts that can contribute to provide some guidelines to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In the authors' vision, a key Future Internet target is to allow applications to transparently, efficiently and flexibly exploit the available network resources with the aim to match the users' expectations. Such expectations could be expressed in terms of a properly defined Quality of Experience (QoE). In this respect, this paper provides some approaches for coping with the QoE provision problem

Patterns of information security postures for socio-technical systems and systems-of-systems

This paper describes a proposal to develop patterns of security postures for computer based socio-technical systems and systems-of-systems. Such systems typically span many organisational boundaries, integrating multiple computer systems, infrastructures and organisational processes. The paper describes the motivation for the proposed work, and our approach to the development, specification, integration and validation of security patterns for socio-technical and system-of-system scale systems