149 research outputs found

    Safeguarding health data with enhanced accountability and patient awareness

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    Several factors are driving the transition from paper-based health records to electronic health record systems. In the United States, the adoption rate of electronic health record systems significantly increased after "Meaningful Use" incentive program was started in 2009. While increased use of electronic health record systems could improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare services, it can also lead to a number of security and privacy issues, such as identity theft and healthcare fraud. Such incidents could have negative impact on trustworthiness of electronic health record technology itself and thereby could limit its benefits. In this dissertation, we tackle three challenges that we believe are important to improve the security and privacy in electronic health record systems. Our approach is based on an analysis of real-world incidents, namely theft and misuse of patient identity, unauthorized usage and update of electronic health records, and threats from insiders in healthcare organizations. Our contributions include design and development of a user-centric monitoring agent system that works on behalf of a patient (i.e., an end user) and securely monitors usage of the patient's identity credentials as well as access to her electronic health records. Such a monitoring agent can enhance patient's awareness and control and improve accountability for health records even in a distributed, multi-domain environment, which is typical in an e-healthcare setting. This will reduce the risk and loss caused by misuse of stolen data. In addition to the solution from a patient's perspective, we also propose a secure system architecture that can be used in healthcare organizations to enable robust auditing and management over client devices. This helps us further enhance patients' confidence in secure use of their health data.PhDCommittee Chair: Mustaque Ahamad; Committee Member: Douglas M. Blough; Committee Member: Ling Liu; Committee Member: Mark Braunstein; Committee Member: Wenke Le

    Impact and key challenges of insider threats on organizations and critical businesses

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    The insider threat has consistently been identified as a key threat to organizations and governments. Understanding the nature of insider threats and the related threat landscape can help in forming mitigation strategies, including non-technical means. In this paper, we survey and highlight challenges associated with the identification and detection of insider threats in both public and private sector organizations, especially those part of a nation’s critical infrastructure. We explore the utility of the cyber kill chain to understand insider threats, as well as understanding the underpinning human behavior and psychological factors. The existing defense techniques are discussed and critically analyzed, and improvements are suggested, in line with the current state-of-the-art cyber security requirements. Finally, open problems related to the insider threat are identified and future research directions are discussed

    Honeypot boulevard: understanding malicious activity via decoy accounts

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    This thesis describes the development and deployment of honeypot systems to measure real-world cybercriminal activity in online accounts. Compromised accounts expose users to serious threats including information theft and abuse. By analysing the modus operandi of criminals that compromise and abuse online accounts, we aim to provide insights that will be useful in the development of mitigation techniques. We explore account compromise and abuse across multiple online platforms that host webmail, social, and cloud document accounts. First, we design and create realistic decoy accounts (honeypots) and build covert infrastructure to monitor activity in them. Next, we leak credentials of those accounts online to lure miscreants to the accounts. Finally, we record and analyse the resulting activity in the compromised accounts. Our top three findings on what happens after online accounts are attacked can be summarised as follows. First, attackers that know the locations of webmail account owners tend to connect from places that are closer to those locations. Second, we show that demographic attributes of social accounts influence how cybercriminals interact with them. Third, in cloud documents, we show that document content influences the activity of cybercriminals. We have released a tool for setting up webmail honeypots to help other researchers that may be interested in setting up their own honeypots

    Self-adaptive Authorisation Infrastructures

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    Traditional approaches in access control rely on immutable criteria in which to decide and award access. These approaches are limited, notably when handling changes in an organisation’s protected resources, resulting in the inability to accommodate the dynamic aspects of risk at runtime. An example of such risk is a user abusing their privileged access to perform insider attacks. This thesis proposes self-adaptive authorisation, an approach that enables dynamic access control. A framework for developing self-adaptive authorisation is defined, where autonomic controllers are deployed within legacy based authorisation infrastructures to enable the runtime management of access control. Essential to the approach is the use of models and model driven engineering (MDE). Models enable a controller to abstract from the authorisation infrastructure it seeks to control, reason about state, and provide assurances over change to access. For example, a modelled state of access may represent an active access control policy. Given the diverse nature in implementations of authorisation infrastructures, MDE enables the creation and transformation of such models, whereby assets (e.g., policies) can be automatically generated and deployed at runtime. A prototype of the framework was developed, whereby management of access control is focused on the mitigation of abuse of access rights. The prototype implements a feedback loop to monitor an authorisation infrastructure in terms of modelling the state of access control and user behaviour, analyse potential solutions for handling malicious behaviour, and act upon the infrastructure to control future access control decisions. The framework was evaluated against mitigation of simulated insider attacks, involving the abuse of access rights governed by access control methodologies. In addition, to investigate the framework’s approach in a diverse and unpredictable environment, a live experiment was conducted. This evaluated the mitigation of abuse performed by real users as well as demonstrating the consequence of self-adaptation through observation of user response

    Securing Medical Devices and Protecting Patient Privacy in the Technological Age of Healthcare

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    The healthcare industry has been adopting technology at an astonishing rate. This technology has served to increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of healthcare around the country. While technological adoption has undoubtedly improved the quality of healthcare, it also has brought new security and privacy challenges to the industry that healthcare IT manufacturers are not necessarily fully prepared to address. This dissertation explores some of these challenges in detail and proposes solutions that will make medical devices more secure and medical data more private. Compared to other industries the medical space has some unique challenges that add significant constraints on possible solutions to problems. For example, medical devices must operate reliably even in the face of attack. Similarly, due to the need to access patient records in an emergency, strict enforcement of access controls cannot be used to prevent unauthorized access to patient data. Throughout this work we will explore particular problems in depth and introduce novel technologies to address them. Each chapter in this dissertation explores some aspect of security or privacy in the medical space. We present tools to automatically audit accesses in electronic medical record systems in order to proactively detect privacy violations; to automatically fingerprint network-facing protocols in order to non-invasively determine if particular devices are vulnerable to known attacks; and to authenticate healthcare providers to medical devices without a need for a password in a way that protects against all known attacks present in radio-based authentication technologies. We also present an extension to the widely-used beacon protocol in order to add security in the face of active attackers; and we demonstrate an overhead-free solution to protect embedded medical devices against previously unpreventable attacks that evade existing control- flow integrity enforcement techniques by leveraging insecure built-in features in order to maliciously exploit configuration vulnerabilities in devices

    A Framework for Hybrid Intrusion Detection Systems

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    Web application security is a definite threat to the world’s information technology infrastructure. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), generally defines web application security violations as unauthorized or unintentional exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information. These breaches occur without the company’s knowledge and it often takes a while before the web application attack is revealed to the public, specifically because the security violations are fixed. Due to the need to protect their reputation, organizations have begun researching solutions to these problems. The most widely accepted solution is the use of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Such systems currently rely on either signatures of the attack used for the data breach or changes in the behavior patterns of the system to identify an intruder. These systems, either signature-based or anomaly-based, are readily understood by attackers. Issues arise when attacks are not noticed by an existing IDS because the attack does not fit the pre-defined attack signatures the IDS is implemented to discover. Despite current IDSs capabilities, little research has identified a method to detect all potential attacks on a system. This thesis intends to address this problem. A particular emphasis will be placed on detecting advanced attacks, such as those that take place at the application layer. These types of attacks are able to bypass existing IDSs, increase the potential for a web application security breach to occur and not be detected. In particular, the attacks under study are all web application layer attacks. Those included in this thesis are SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal and remote file inclusion. This work identifies common and existing data breach detection methods as well as the necessary improvements for IDS models. Ultimately, the proposed approach combines an anomaly detection technique measured by cross entropy and a signature-based attack detection framework utilizing genetic algorithm. The proposed hybrid model for data breach detection benefits organizations by increasing security measures and allowing attacks to be identified in less time and more efficiently

    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

    Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

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    Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects

    Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

    Get PDF
    Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects

    An investigation of issues of privacy, anonymity and multi-factor authentication in an open environment

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    This thesis performs an investigation into issues concerning the broad area ofIdentity and Access Management, with a focus on open environments. Through literature research the issues of privacy, anonymity and access control are identified. The issue of privacy is an inherent problem due to the nature of the digital network environment. Information can be duplicated and modified regardless of the wishes and intentions ofthe owner of that information unless proper measures are taken to secure the environment. Once information is published or divulged on the network, there is very little way of controlling the subsequent usage of that information. To address this issue a model for privacy is presented that follows the user centric paradigm of meta-identity. The lack of anonymity, where security measures can be thwarted through the observation of the environment, is a concern for users and systems. By an attacker observing the communication channel and monitoring the interactions between users and systems over a long enough period of time, it is possible to infer knowledge about the users and systems. This knowledge is used to build an identity profile of potential victims to be used in subsequent attacks. To address the problem, mechanisms for providing an acceptable level of anonymity while maintaining adequate accountability (from a legal standpoint) are explored. In terms of access control, the inherent weakness of single factor authentication mechanisms is discussed. The typical mechanism is the user-name and password pair, which provides a single point of failure. By increasing the factors used in authentication, the amount of work required to compromise the system increases non-linearly. Within an open network, several aspects hinder wide scale adoption and use of multi-factor authentication schemes, such as token management and the impact on usability. The framework is developed from a Utopian point of view, with the aim of being applicable to many situations as opposed to a single specific domain. The framework incorporates multi-factor authentication over multiple paths using mobile phones and GSM networks, and explores the usefulness of such an approach. The models are in tum analysed, providing a discussion into the assumptions made and the problems faced by each model.Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.5.1Adobe Acrobat 9.51 Paper Capture Plug-i
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