The sources and characteristics of electronic evidence and artificial intelligence

In this updated edition of the well-established practitioner text, Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng have brought together a team of experts in the field to provide an exhaustive treatment of electronic evidence and electronic signatures. This fifth edition continues to follow the tradition in English evidence text books by basing the text on the law of England and Wales, with appropriate citations of relevant case law and legislation from other jurisdictions

Public Commons for Geospatial Data: A Conceptual Model

A wide variety of spatial data collection efforts are ongoing throughout local, state and federal agencies, private firms and non-profit organizations. Each effort is established for a different purpose but organizations and individuals often collect and maintain the same or similar information. The United States federal government has undertaken many initiatives such as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, the National Map and Geospatial One-Stop to reduce duplicative spatial data collection and promote the coordinated use, sharing, and dissemination of spatial data nationwide. A key premise in most of these initiatives is that no national government will be able to gather and maintain more than a small percentage of the geographic data that users want and desire. Thus, national initiatives depend typically on the cooperation of those already gathering spatial data and those using GIs to meet specific needs to help construct and maintain these spatial data infrastructures and geo-libraries for their nations (Onsrud 2001). Some of the impediments to widespread spatial data sharing are well known from directly asking GIs data producers why they are not currently involved in creating datasets that are of common or compatible formats, documenting their datasets in a standardized metadata format or making their datasets more readily available to others through Data Clearinghouses or geo-libraries. The research described in this thesis addresses the impediments to wide-scale spatial data sharing faced by GIs data producers and explores a new conceptual data-sharing approach, the Public Commons for Geospatial Data, that supports user-friendly metadata creation, open access licenses, archival services and documentation of parent lineage of the contributors and value- adders of digital spatial data sets

Dynamic block encryption with self-authenticating key exchange

One of the greatest challenges facing cryptographers is the mechanism used for key exchange. When secret data is transmitted, the chances are that there may be an attacker who will try to intercept and decrypt the message. Having done so, he/she might just gain advantage over the information obtained, or attempt to tamper with the message, and thus, misguiding the recipient. Both cases are equally fatal and may cause great harm as a consequence. In cryptography, there are two commonly used methods of exchanging secret keys between parties. In the first method, symmetric cryptography, the key is sent in advance, over some secure channel, which only the intended recipient can read. The second method of key sharing is by using a public key exchange method, where each party has a private and public key, a public key is shared and a private key is kept locally. In both cases, keys are exchanged between two parties. In this thesis, we propose a method whereby the risk of exchanging keys is minimised. The key is embedded in the encrypted text using a process that we call `chirp coding', and recovered by the recipient using a process that is based on correlation. The `chirp coding parameters' are exchanged between users by employing a USB flash memory retained by each user. If the keys are compromised they are still not usable because an attacker can only have access to part of the key. Alternatively, the software can be configured to operate in a one time parameter mode, in this mode, the parameters are agreed upon in advance. There is no parameter exchange during file transmission, except, of course, the key embedded in ciphertext. The thesis also introduces a method of encryption which utilises dynamic blocks, where the block size is different for each block. Prime numbers are used to drive two random number generators: a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) which takes in the seed and initialises the system and a Blum-Blum Shum (BBS) generator which is used to generate random streams to encrypt messages, images or video clips for example. In each case, the key created is text dependent and therefore will change as each message is sent. The scheme presented in this research is composed of five basic modules. The first module is the key generation module, where the key to be generated is message dependent. The second module, encryption module, performs data encryption. The third module, key exchange module, embeds the key into the encrypted text. Once this is done, the message is transmitted and the recipient uses the key extraction module to retrieve the key and finally the decryption module is executed to decrypt the message and authenticate it. In addition, the message may be compressed before encryption and decompressed by the recipient after decryption using standard compression tools

Image steganography applications for secure communication

To securely communicate information between parties or locations is not an easy task considering the possible attacks or unintentional changes that can occur during communication. Encryption is often used to protect secret information from unauthorised access. Encryption, however, is not inconspicuous and the observable exchange of encrypted information between two parties can provide a potential attacker with information on the sender and receiver(s). The presence of encrypted information can also entice a potential attacker to launch an attack on the secure communication. This dissertation investigates and discusses the use of image steganography, a technology for hiding information in other information, to facilitate secure communication. Secure communication is divided into three categories: self-communication, one-to-one communication and one-to-many communication, depending on the number of receivers. In this dissertation, applications that make use of image steganography are implemented for each of the secure communication categories. For self-communication, image steganography is used to hide one-time passwords (OTPs) in images that are stored on a mobile device. For one-to-one communication, a decryptor program that forms part of an encryption protocol is embedded in an image using image steganography and for one-to-many communication, a secret message is divided into pieces and different pieces are embedded in different images. The image steganography applications for each of the secure communication categories are discussed along with the advantages and disadvantages that the applications have over more conventional secure communication technologies. An additional image steganography application is proposed that determines whether information is modified during communication. CopyrightDissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Computer Scienceunrestricte

The Proceedings of 15th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December, 2017, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Conference Foreword 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 fifteenth 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 papers cover topics from vulnerabilities in “Internet of Things” protocols through to improvements in biometric identification algorithms and surveillance camera weaknesses. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Twenty two papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which eighteen 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 conference. 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

Introductory Computer Forensics

INTERPOL (International Police) built cybercrime programs to keep up with emerging cyber threats, and aims to coordinate and assist international operations for ?ghting crimes involving computers. Although signi?cant international efforts are being made in dealing with cybercrime and cyber-terrorism, ?nding effective, cooperative, and collaborative ways to deal with complicated cases that span multiple jurisdictions has proven dif?cult in practic

Design principles and patterns for computer systems that are simultaneously secure and usable

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 429-464) and index.It is widely believed that security and usability are two antagonistic goals in system design. This thesis argues that there are many instances in which security and usability can be synergistically improved by revising the way that specific functionality is implemented in many of today's operating systems and applications. Specific design principles and patterns are presented that can accomplish this goal. Patterns are presented that minimize the release of confidential information through remnant and remanent data left on hard drives, in web browsers, and in documents. These patterns are based on a study involving the purchase of 236 hard drives on the secondary market, interviews conducted with organizations whose drives had been acquired, and through a detailed examination of modern web browsers and reports of information leakage in documents. Patterns are presented that enable secure messaging through the adoption of new key management techniques. These patterns are supported through an analysis of S/MIME handling in modern email clients, a survey of 469 Amazon.com merchants, and a user study of 43 individuals. Patterns are presented for promoting secure operation and for reducing the danger of covert monitoring. These patterns are supported by the literature review and an analysis of current systems.(cont.) In every case considered, it is shown that the perceived antagonism of security and usability can be scaled back or eliminated by revising the underlying designs on which modern systems are conceived. In many cases these designs can be implemented without significant user interface changes. The patterns described in this thesis can be directly applied by today's software developers and used for educating the next generation of programmers so that longstanding usability problems in computer security can at last be addressed. It is very likely that additional patterns can be identified in other related areas.by Simson L. Garfinkel.Ph.D