A Cloud-based Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Mobile Voting in South Africa

Publishe ThesisInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) has given rise to new technologies and solutions that were not possible a few years ago. One of these new technologies is electronic voting, also known as e-voting, which is the use of computerised equipment to cast a vote. One of the subsets of e-voting is mobile voting (m-voting). M-voting is the use of mobile phones to cast a vote outside the restricted electoral boundaries. Mobile phones are pervasive; they offer connection anywhere, at any time. However, utilising a fast-growing medium such as the mobile phone to cast a vote, poses various new security threats and challenges. Mobile phones utilise equivalent software design used by personal computers which makes them vulnerable or exposed to parallel security challenges like viruses, Trojans and worms. In the past, security solutions for mobile phones encountered several restrictions in practice. Several methods were used; however, these methods were developed to allow lightweight intrusion detection software to operate directly on the mobile phone. Nevertheless, such security solutions are bound to fail securing a device from intrusions as they are constrained by the restricted memory, storage, computational resources, and battery power of mobile phones. This study compared and evaluated two intrusion detection systems (IDSs), namely Snort and Suricata, in order to propose a cloud-based intrusion detection and prevention system (CIDPS) for m-voting in South Africa. It employed simulation as the primary research strategy to evaluate the IDSs. A quantitative research method was used to collect and analyse data. The researcher established that as much as Snort has been the preferred intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) in the past, Suricata presented more effective and accurate results close to what the researcher anticipated. The results also revealed that, though Suricata was proven effective enough to protect m-voting while saving the computational resources of mobile phones, more work needs to be done to alleviate the false-negative alerts caused by the anomaly detection method. This study adopted Suricata as a suitable cloud-based analysis engine to protect a mobile voting application like XaP

Cloud based intrusion detection architecture for smartphones

Smartphones are phones with advanced capabilities like those of personal computers (PCs). Smartphone technology is more and more becoming the predominant communication tool for people across the world. People use their smartphones to keep their contact data, to browse the internet, to exchange messages, to keep notes, carry their personal files and documents, etc. Users while browsing are also capable of shopping online, thus provoking a need to type their credit card numbers and security codes. As the smartphones are becoming widespread, it's also becoming a popular target for security threats and attack. Since smartphones use the same software architecture as in PCs, they are vulnerable to be exposed to similar threats such as in PCs. Recent news and articles indicate huge increase in malware and viruses for operating systems employed on smartphones (primarily Android and iOS). Major limitations of smartphone technology are its processing power and its scarce energy source since smartphones rely on battery usage. The smartphones have less storage and computational power to put into effect highly complex algorithms for intrusion detection and implementing signature based attack detection. Now in this paper, we propose a cloud based Intrusion Detection System for smartphones to overcome the issues of smartphone resource constraints and to detect any misbehavior or anomalous activity effectively

Securing M-voting Using Cloud Intrusion Detection and Prevention System: A New Dawn

Conference ProceedingsDemocracy has been transformed by the introduction of ICT, which is known as e-voting. E-voting is the use of computerised equipment to cast votes. Mvoting is a subset of e-voting and is the use of mobile phones to cast a vote outside the restricted electoral boundaries. M-voting has a feature that is different from other e-voting solutions: the mobile-phone. Mobile-phones are pervasive; they offer connection everywhere at any time. However, using a fast growing device such as mobile-phone as a tool to cast a vote can raise questions when coming to its security. This paper designed and developed a security solution termed a cloud intrusion detection and prevention system which endeavours to secure the voters’ mobile phone while casting their vote. The security system was developed using android version 6.0 for android phones and MySQL. Simulations were used to evaluate the system and results indicate that the proposed system is efficient, reliable and secure