Unpredictable popular music : history, praxis, perception : cryptography, serialism, pseudorandom generation, chance, improvisation and infinite monkeys.

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The Proceedings of 14th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December 2016, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fourteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Fifteen papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which ten were accepted for final presentation and publication. We wish to thank the reviewers for kindly volunteering their time and expertise in support of this event. We would also like to thank the conference committee who have organised yet another successful congress. Events such as this are impossible without the tireless efforts of such people in reviewing and editing the conference papers, and assisting with the planning, organisation and execution of the conferences. To our sponsors also a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, thank you to the administrative and technical staff, and students of the ECU Security Research Institute for their contributions to the running of the conference

On security and privacy of consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid

In recent times, distributed consensus protocols have received widespread attention in the area of blockchain and smart grid. Consensus algorithms aim to solve an agreement problem among a set of nodes in a distributed environment. Participants in a blockchain use consensus algorithms to agree on data blocks containing an ordered set of transactions. Similarly, agents in the smart grid employ consensus to agree on specific values (e.g., energy output, market-clearing price, control parameters) in distributed energy management protocols. This thesis focuses on the security and privacy aspects of a few popular consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid. In the blockchain area, we analyze the consensus protocol of one of the most popular payment systems: Ripple. We show how the parameters chosen by the Ripple designers do not prevent the occurrence of forks in the system. Furthermore, we provide the conditions to prevent any fork in the Ripple network. In the smart grid area, we discuss the privacy issues in the Economic Dispatch (ED) optimization problem and some of its recent solutions using distributed consensus-based approaches. We analyze two state of the art consensus-based ED protocols from Yang et al. (2013) and Binetti et al. (2014). We show how these protocols leak private information about the participants. We propose privacy-preserving versions of these consensus-based ED protocols. In some cases, we also improve upon the communication cost

Secure privacy-preserving computing applications on cloud using homomorphic cryptography

The advancement of cloud computing technologies has provided users and business organisations with various cloud-based options to store and access information externally, across multiple platforms and geographic locations. The cloud also has the ability to deliver scalable and high-performance computing services on demand and in a cost-effective manner while helping users to avoid the trouble of maintaining large data centres and complex computing facilities. The economies of scale increase revenue for cloud providers and lower costs for cloud users. The resulting on-demand model of computing allows providers to achieve better resource utilization through statistical multiplexing, and enables users to avoid the costs of resource over-provisioning through dynamic scaling. However, there are major security and privacy concerns when data is stored in external cloud storage systems. For example, when personal information is stored in unencrypted formats on the cloud, service providers can learn many details about the users such as their preferences, past behaviours and biometric identities. The widely distributed nature of cloud architectures means that server farms can be located in many countries or geographic locations that might be under different laws and regulations regarding user privacy. Furthermore, cloud service providers may encrypt data in-transit, but not while user data is stored on their servers, causing the reluctance of many business organisations to outsource the storage of their sensitive and valuable data, which can be major targets for attacks coming from both outside attackers and insiders. Therefore, encrypting the data when it is stored on the cloud is an important task to guarantee the confidentiality and privacy of users data. However, traditional cryptographic techniques make it difficult for processing tasks such as searching, updating or checking the integrity of encrypted data without asking clients to download and decrypt large amounts of data from the cloud. To realise the full potential of cloud computing, better cryptographic schemes are required. They should enable the cloud to perform various computing operations on encrypted data and return encrypted results to customers. Another desirable feature is how a cryptographic scheme can allow different parties to combine their encrypted data and perform some computing tasks on the cloud without compromising the confidentiality and privacy of the data of each party. Recently, homomorphic cryptography has increasingly been the focus of researchers because this technology has a great potential to provide the desirable features described above. Homomorphic encryption can be implemented either as a symmetric or a public-private asymmetric key paradigm. This technique allows many types of computing operations to be performed on ciphertext and output encrypted results which, when decrypted, are found to be identical to the results of the same operations performed on plaintext data. With a homomorphic cryptosystem, many computational circuits can now be homomorphically evaluated, producing programs that might be run on encryptions of their inputs to produce an encryption of their output. Since the inputs of such programs are encrypted, a computation task can be performed on an untrusted cloud without revealing any inputs and internal states. In this thesis, we focus the design and implementation of various application models of homomorphic cryptography so that the cloud can be used more effective and securely to store and process sensitive customer data. Our research works throughout many chapters of this thesis also provide valuable information regarding the security of homomorphic cryptography in many use case scenarios. We illustrate how homomorphic cryptography can be applied effectively with all of its flexibility, power and usefulness in many applications ranging from smart grid, e-commerce to secret sharing. In this thesis, we also propose approaches to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of homomorphic cryptography, so that these cryptographic schemes can be applied not only in current cloud-based application, but also in larger, more mission-critical applications in the future

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

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

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

An architecture and protocol, an access control model, and a sighting blurring algorithm for improving users' security in the context of location based services operating over the internet

A new type of service, known as a Location Based Service (LBS), is emerging that incorporates users' location information, and many of these LBSs operate over the Internet. However, the potential misuse of this location information is a serious concern. Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is to develop techniques, which increase users' security and privacy, for use with these LBSs. The �rst technique that we propose is a three-party protocol that is used to mutually identify and authenticate users, LBSs, and a trusted middleware infrastructure that is responsible for managing the users' identity and location information. This protocol enables users to simultaneously identify and authenticate themselves to the infrastructure using real identities, and to the LBSs using pseudonyms. This protocol can be subsequently used to securely exchange messages containing location information. The second technique that we propose is an access control model that enables users to create permissions that specify which users and LBSs are entitled to obtain location information about which other users, under what circumstances the location information is released to the users and LBSs, and the accuracy of any location information that is released to the users and LBSs. The third technique that we propose is a blurring algorithm that performs spatial blurring on users' location information. It does not perform temporal blurring, because this reduces an LBS's ability to �offer a useful service. Instead, our blurring algorithm introduces a new parameter that speci�es the frequency with which location information is released for a particular user. This frequency parameter is a function of the size of the blurred location. These three techniques can be used as part of an overall solution for providing users with increased security while using LBSs that operate over the Internet