18,130 research outputs found
Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed
On Known-Plaintext Attacks to a Compressed Sensing-based Encryption: A Quantitative Analysis
Despite the linearity of its encoding, compressed sensing may be used to
provide a limited form of data protection when random encoding matrices are
used to produce sets of low-dimensional measurements (ciphertexts). In this
paper we quantify by theoretical means the resistance of the least complex form
of this kind of encoding against known-plaintext attacks. For both standard
compressed sensing with antipodal random matrices and recent multiclass
encryption schemes based on it, we show how the number of candidate encoding
matrices that match a typical plaintext-ciphertext pair is so large that the
search for the true encoding matrix inconclusive. Such results on the practical
ineffectiveness of known-plaintext attacks underlie the fact that even
closely-related signal recovery under encoding matrix uncertainty is doomed to
fail.
Practical attacks are then exemplified by applying compressed sensing with
antipodal random matrices as a multiclass encryption scheme to signals such as
images and electrocardiographic tracks, showing that the extracted information
on the true encoding matrix from a plaintext-ciphertext pair leads to no
significant signal recovery quality increase. This theoretical and empirical
evidence clarifies that, although not perfectly secure, both standard
compressed sensing and multiclass encryption schemes feature a noteworthy level
of security against known-plaintext attacks, therefore increasing its appeal as
a negligible-cost encryption method for resource-limited sensing applications.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, accepted for
publication. Article in pres
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