3,170 research outputs found

    A password generator tool to increase users’ awareness on bad password construction strategies

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    Cybersecurity education and training activities are essential to empower end users to take informed decisions and address cyber threats. An ongoing problem that still troubles the cybersecurity community is the selection of weak passwords. Users keep using weak passwords, cultivating the risk of compromisation. Users often choose passwords that appear to be strong. This creates a false sense of security as users have the belief that their passwords cannot be guessed. Unfortunately, given that attackers are aware of the users’ habits, they often recover users’ passwords. Therefore, it is imperative to educate people about the bad password construction strategies and empower them to select stronger passwords. Educational activities should be enhanced by integrating practical aspects that will assist the users to realize the problem. This work identifies and combines a range of bad password construction strategies and designs a relevant tool to practically demonstrate the strategies to the users

    Highly Secure and Easy to Remember Password-Based Authentication Approach

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    Everyone connected and using the Internet is concerned regarding the security and also the privacy of their sensitive information available on the Internet. As authentication is the fundamental part of security, there are different authentication mechanisms through which the systems can be secured. The password-based authentication mechanism is a cheap and easy method for enforcing authentication in the systems for many years. The weakest aspect in password security is human, as they choose weak and easy to guess passwords or a highly secure and complex password which might be difficult to remember and recover the password. On the other hand, Dictionary and Brute force attacks are widely used to compromise the passwords of the users over the Internet. In this paper, a password generation system is proposed which generates a password based on the user’s input like, time and location data. The system generates a password that is highly secure, easy to remember, easy to recover, and can effectively defend against Brute force and dictionary attacks. The generated passwords have been checked in three online password checkers, which verifies that the system is generating highly secure and crack resistant passwords. The system is implemented using PHP scripting language with a user-friendly environment

    Cyber Security

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    This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2020, held in Beijing, China, in August 2020. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: access control; cryptography; denial-of-service attacks; hardware security implementation; intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation; social network security and privacy; systems security

    Advances in Information Security and Privacy

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    With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

    A Deep Dive into Technical Encryption Concepts to Better Understand Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Legal & Policy Issues

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    Lawyers wishing to exercise a meaningful degree of leadership at the intersection of technology and the law could benefit greatly from a deep understanding of the use and application of encryption, considering it arises in so many legal scenarios. For example, in FTC v. Wyndham1 the defendant failed to implement nearly every conceivable cybersecurity control, including lack of encryption for stored data, resulting in multiple data breaches and a consequent FTC enforcement action for unfair and deceptive practices. Other examples of legal issues requiring use of encryption and other technology concepts include compliance with security requirements of GLBA & HIPAA, encryption safe harbors relative to state data breach notification laws and the CCPA, the NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation, and PCI standards. Further, some policy discussions have taken place in 2020 regarding encrypted DNS over HTTPS, and lawyers would certainly seem to benefit from a better understanding of relevant encryption concepts to assess the privacy effectiveness of emerging encryption technologies, such as encrypted DNS. Finally, the need for technology education for lawyers is evidenced by North Carolina and Florida requiring one or more hours in technology CLE and New York in 2020 moving toward required CLE in the area of cybersecurity specifically. This article observes that there is a continuing desire for strong encryption mechanisms to advance the privacy interests of civilians’ online activities/communications (e.g., messages or web browsing). Law enforcement advocates for a “front door,” requiring tech platforms to maintain a decryption mechanism for online data, which they must produce upon the government providing a warrant. However, privacy advocates may encourage warrant-proof encryption mechanisms where tech platforms remove their ability to ever decrypt. This extreme pro-privacy position could be supported based on viewing privacy interests under a lens such as Blackstone’s ratio. Just as the Blackstone ratio principle favors constitutional protections that allow ten guilty people to go free rather than allowing one innocent person suffer, individual privacy rights could arguably favor fairly unsurveillable encrypted communications at the risk of not detecting various criminal activity. However, given that the internet can support large-scale good or evil activity, law enforcement continues to express a desire for a front door required by legislation and subject to suitable privacy safeguards, striking a balance between strong privacy versus law enforcement’s need to investigate serious crimes. In the last few decades, law enforcement appears to have lost the debate for various reasons, but the debate will likely continue for years to come. For attorneys to exercise meaningful leadership in evaluating the strength of encryption technologies relative to privacy rights, attorneys must generally understand encryption principles, how these principles are applied to data at rest (e.g., local encryption), and how they operate with respect to data in transit. Therefore, this article first explores encryption concepts primarily with regard to data at rest and then with regard to data in transit, exploring some general networking protocols as context for understanding how encryption can applied to data in transit, protecting the data payload of a packet and/or the routing/header information (i.e., the “from” and “to” field) of the packet. Part 1 of this article briefly explores the need for lawyers to understand encryption. Part 2 provides a mostly technical discussion of encryption concepts, with some legal concepts injected therein. Finally, Part 3 provides some high level legal discussion relevant to encryption (including arguments for and against law enforcement’s desire for a front door). To facilitate understanding for a non-technical legal audience, I include a variety of physical world analogies throughout (e.g., postal analogies and the like)

    Measuring Information Security Awareness Efforts in Social Networking Sites – A Proactive Approach

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    For Social Network Sites to determine the effectiveness of their Information Security Awareness (ISA) techniques, many measurement and evaluation techniques are now in place to ensure controls are working as intended. While these techniques are inexpensive, they are all incident- driven as they are based on the occurrence of incident(s). Additionally, they do not present a true reflection of ISA since cyber-incidents are hardly reported. They are therefore adjudged to be post-mortem and risk permissive, the limitations that are inacceptable in industries where incident tolerance level is low. This paper aims at employing a non-incident statistic approach to measure ISA efforts. Using an object- oriented programming approach, PhP is employed as the coding language with MySQL database engine at the back-end to develop sOcialistOnline – a Social Network Sites (SNS) fully secured with multiple ISA techniques. Rather than evaluating the effectiveness of ISA efforts by success of attacks or occurrence of an event, password scanning is implemented to proactively measure the effects of ISA techniques in sOcialistOnline. Thus, measurement of ISA efforts is shifted from detective and corrective to preventive and anticipatory paradigms which are the best forms of information security approach

    Cyber Security

    Get PDF
    This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2020, held in Beijing, China, in August 2020. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: access control; cryptography; denial-of-service attacks; hardware security implementation; intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation; social network security and privacy; systems security

    On Security and Privacy for Networked Information Society : Observations and Solutions for Security Engineering and Trust Building in Advanced Societal Processes

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    Our society has developed into a networked information society, in which all aspects of human life are interconnected via the Internet — the backbone through which a significant part of communications traffic is routed. This makes the Internet arguably the most important piece of critical infrastructure in the world. Securing Internet communications for everyone using it is extremely important, as the continuing growth of the networked information society relies upon fast, reliable and secure communications. A prominent threat to the security and privacy of Internet users is mass surveillance of Internet communications. The methods and tools used to implement mass surveillance capabilities on the Internet pose a danger to the security of all communications, not just the intended targets. When we continue to further build the networked information upon the unreliable foundation of the Internet we encounter increasingly complex problems,which are the main focus of this dissertation. As the reliance on communication technology grows in a society, so does the importance of information security. At this stage, information security issues become separated from the purely technological domain and begin to affect everyone in society. The approach taken in this thesis is therefore both technical and socio-technical. The research presented in this PhD thesis builds security in to the networked information society and provides parameters for further development of a safe and secure networked information society. This is achieved by proposing improvements on a multitude of layers. In the technical domain we present an efficient design flow for secure embedded devices that use cryptographic primitives in a resource-constrained environment, examine and analyze threats to biometric passport and electronic voting systems, observe techniques used to conduct mass Internet surveillance, and analyze the security of Finnish web user passwords. In the socio-technical domain we examine surveillance and how it affects the citizens of a networked information society, study methods for delivering efficient security education, examine what is essential security knowledge for citizens, advocate mastery over surveillance data by the targeted citizens in the networked information society, and examine the concept of forced trust that permeates all topics examined in this work.Yhteiskunta, jossa elämme, on muovautunut teknologian kehityksen myötä todelliseksi tietoyhteiskunnaksi. Monet verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan osa-alueet ovat kokeneet muutoksen tämän kehityksen seurauksena. Tämän muutoksen keskiössä on Internet: maailmanlaajuinen tietoverkko, joka mahdollistaa verkottuneiden laitteiden keskenäisen viestinnän ennennäkemättömässä mittakaavassa. Internet on muovautunut ehkä keskeisimmäksi osaksi globaalia viestintäinfrastruktuuria, ja siksi myös globaalin viestinnän turvaaminen korostuu tulevaisuudessa yhä enemmän. Verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan kasvu ja kehitys edellyttävät vakaan, turvallisen ja nopean viestintäjärjestelmän olemassaoloa. Laajamittainen tietoverkkojen joukkovalvonta muodostaa merkittävän uhan tämän järjestelmän vakaudelle ja turvallisuudelle. Verkkovalvonnan toteuttamiseen käytetyt menetelmät ja työkalut eivät vain anna mahdollisuutta tarkastella valvonnan kohteena olevaa viestiliikennettä, vaan myös vaarantavat kaiken Internet-liikenteen ja siitä riippuvaisen toiminnan turvallisuuden. Kun verkottunutta tietoyhteiskuntaa rakennetaan tämän kaltaisia valuvikoja ja haavoittuvuuksia sisältävän järjestelmän varaan, keskeinen uhkatekijä on, että yhteiskunnan ydintoiminnot ovat alttiina ulkopuoliselle vaikuttamiselle. Näiden uhkatekijöiden ja niiden taustalla vaikuttavien mekanismien tarkastelu on tämän väitöskirjatyön keskiössä. Koska työssä on teknisen sisällön lisäksi vahva yhteiskunnallinen elementti, tarkastellaan tiukan teknisen tarkastelun sijaan aihepiirä laajemmin myös yhteiskunnallisesta näkökulmasta. Tässä väitöskirjassa pyritään rakentamaan kokonaiskuvaa verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan turvallisuuteen, toimintaan ja vakauteen vaikuttavista tekijöistä, sekä tuomaan esiin uusia ratkaisuja ja avauksia eri näkökulmista. Työn tavoitteena on osaltaan mahdollistaa entistä turvallisemman verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan rakentaminen tulevaisuudessa. Teknisestä näkökulmasta työssä esitetään suunnitteluvuo kryptografisia primitiivejä tehokkaasti hyödyntäville rajallisen laskentatehon sulautetuviiille järjestelmille, analysoidaan biometrisiin passeihin, kansainväliseen passijärjestelmään, sekä sähköiseen äänestykseen kohdistuvia uhkia, tarkastellaan joukkovalvontaan käytettyjen tekniikoiden toimintaperiaatteita ja niiden aiheuttamia uhkia, sekä tutkitaan suomalaisten Internet-käyttäjien salasanatottumuksia verkkosovelluksissa. Teknis-yhteiskunnallisesta näkökulmasta työssä tarkastellaan valvonnan teoriaa ja perehdytään siihen, miten valvonta vaikuttaa verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan kansalaisiin. Lisäksi kehitetään menetelmiä parempaan tietoturvaopetukseen kaikilla koulutusasteilla, määritellään keskeiset tietoturvatietouden käsitteet, tarkastellaan mahdollisuutta soveltaa tiedon herruuden periaatetta verkottuneen tietoyhteiskunnan kansalaisistaan keräämän tiedon hallintaan ja käyttöön, sekä tutkitaan luottamuksen merkitystä yhteiskunnan ydintoimintojen turvallisuudelle ja toiminnalle, keskittyen erityisesti pakotetun luottamuksen vaikutuksiin

    Usability, Efficiency and Security of Personal Computing Technologies

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    New personal computing technologies such as smartphones and personal fitness trackers are widely integrated into user lifestyles. Users possess a wide range of skills, attributes and backgrounds. It is important to understand user technology practices to ensure that new designs are usable and productive. Conversely, it is important to leverage our understanding of user characteristics to optimize new technology efficiency and effectiveness. Our work initially focused on studying older users, and personal fitness tracker users. We applied the insights from these investigations to develop new techniques improving user security protections, computational efficiency, and also enhancing the user experience. We offer that by increasing the usability, efficiency and security of personal computing technology, users will enjoy greater privacy protections along with experiencing greater enjoyment of their personal computing devices. Our first project resulted in an improved authentication system for older users based on familiar facial images. Our investigation revealed that older users are often challenged by traditional text passwords, resulting in decreased technology use or less than optimal password practices. Our graphical password-based system relies on memorable images from the user\u27s personal past history. Our usability study demonstrated that this system was easy to use, enjoyable, and fast. We show that this technique is extendable to smartphones. Personal fitness trackers are very popular devices, often worn by users all day. Our personal fitness tracker investigation provides the first quantitative baseline of usage patterns with this device. By exploring public data, real-world user motivations, reliability concerns, activity levels, and fitness-related socialization patterns were discerned. This knowledge lends insight to active user practices. Personal user movement data is captured by sensors, then analyzed to provide benefits to the user. The dynamic time warping technique enables comparison of unequal data sequences, and sequences containing events at offset times. Existing techniques target short data sequences. Our Phase-aware Dynamic Time Warping algorithm focuses on a class of sinusoidal user movement patterns, resulting in improved efficiency over existing methods. Lastly, we address user data privacy concerns in an environment where user data is increasingly flowing to manufacturer remote cloud servers for analysis. Our secure computation technique protects the user\u27s privacy while data is in transit and while resident on cloud computing resources. Our technique also protects important data on cloud servers from exposure to individual users
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