Attack on WiFi-based Location Services and SSL using Proxy Servers

Wireless LANs are very common in any household or business today. It allows access to their home or business network and the Internet without using wires. Their wireless nature allows mobility and convenience for the user and that opens up a lot of new possibilities in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. One application that makes use of wireless LANs is positioning, which can be used in areas where Global Positioning Systems may have trouble functioning or not at all. However, a drawback of using wireless communication is that it is susceptible to eavesdropping and jamming. Once the wireless signal is jammed, an attacker can set up fake access points on different channels or frequencies to impersonate a legitimate access point. In this thesis, this attack is performed specifically to trick WiFi-based location services. The attack is shown to work on Skyhook, Google, Apple and Microsoft location services, four of the major location service providers, and on dual-band hardware. Some countermeasures to such an attack are also presented. The web is an important part of many people’s lives nowadays. People expect that their privacy and confidentiality is preserved when they use the web. Previously, web traffic uses HTTP which meant traffic is all unencrypted and can be intercepted and read by attackers. This is clearly a security problem so many websites now default to using a more secure protocol, namely HTTPS which uses HTTP with SSL, and forces the user to HTTPS if they connect to the no SSL protocol. SSL works by exchanging keys between the client and server and the actual data is protected using the key and the cipher suite that is negotiated between the two. However, if a network uses a proxy server, it works slightly different. The SSL connection is broken up into two separate ones and that creates the potential for man-in-the-middle attacks that allow an attacker to intercept the data being transmitted. This thesis analyzes several scenarios in which an adversary can conduct such a man-in-the-middle attack, and potential detection and mitigation methods

Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the Cyber Domain

Unmanned Aircraft Systems are an integral part of the US national critical infrastructure. The authors have endeavored to bring a breadth and quality of information to the reader that is unparalleled in the unclassified sphere. This textbook will fully immerse and engage the reader / student in the cyber-security considerations of this rapidly emerging technology that we know as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The first edition topics covered National Airspace (NAS) policy issues, information security (INFOSEC), UAS vulnerabilities in key systems (Sense and Avoid / SCADA), navigation and collision avoidance systems, stealth design, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms; weapons systems security; electronic warfare considerations; data-links, jamming, operational vulnerabilities and still-emerging political scenarios that affect US military / commercial decisions. This second edition discusses state-of-the-art technology issues facing US UAS designers. It focuses on counter unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) – especially research designed to mitigate and terminate threats by SWARMS. Topics include high-altitude platforms (HAPS) for wireless communications; C-UAS and large scale threats; acoustic countermeasures against SWARMS and building an Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) acoustic library; updates to the legal / regulatory landscape; UAS proliferation along the Chinese New Silk Road Sea / Land routes; and ethics in this new age of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI).https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1027/thumbnail.jp

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

Attacking and Defending Android Browsers

Android permission is a system of safeguards designed to restrict access to potentially sensitive data and privileged components. While third-party applications are restricted from accessing privileged resources without appropriate permissions, mobile browsers are treated by Android OS differently. Android mobile browsers are the privileged applications that have access to sensitive data based on the permissions implicitly granted to them. In this research, we present a novel attack approach that allows a zero-permission app to access sensitive data and privileged resources using mobile browsers as a proxy with the aid of toast overlay. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proxy attack on 8 mobile browsers across 12 Android devices ranging from Android 8.1 to Android 13. Our findings show that all current versions of Android mobile browsers are susceptible to this attack. Despite Android touch prevention mechanisms for external apps, internal apps and those sharing the same userID remain susceptible. Contrary to Android’s claims, devices continue to exhibit background toasts opening an opportunity window for these overlay attacks and posing a threat to browser apps and webview activities within the same app. We propose a detection approach that leverages a blend of static detection and activity behavior analysis. Our detection approach enhances Android device security by addressing overlay vulnerabilities and their potential impact on user privacy and data security. Overall, the findings of this study highlight the need for improved security measures in Android browsers to protect against privilege escalation and privacy leakag

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

System engineering toolbox for design-oriented engineers

This system engineering toolbox is designed to provide tools and methodologies to the design-oriented systems engineer. A tool is defined as a set of procedures to accomplish a specific function. A methodology is defined as a collection of tools, rules, and postulates to accomplish a purpose. For each concept addressed in the toolbox, the following information is provided: (1) description, (2) application, (3) procedures, (4) examples, if practical, (5) advantages, (6) limitations, and (7) bibliography and/or references. The scope of the document includes concept development tools, system safety and reliability tools, design-related analytical tools, graphical data interpretation tools, a brief description of common statistical tools and methodologies, so-called total quality management tools, and trend analysis tools. Both relationship to project phase and primary functional usage of the tools are also delineated. The toolbox also includes a case study for illustrative purposes. Fifty-five tools are delineated in the text

SoK: The Ghost Trilemma

Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try as it might, the security community has been unable to stem the rising tide of such problems. We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties of identity -- sentience, location, and uniqueness -- that cannot be simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. Many fully-decentralized systems -- whether for communication or social coordination -- grapple with this trilemma in some way, perhaps unknowingly. We examine the design space, use cases, problems with prior approaches, and possible paths forward. We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options for practical, incrementally deployable schemes to achieve an acceptable tradeoff of trust in centralized trust anchors, decentralized operation, and an ability to withstand a range of attacks, while protecting user privacy.Comment: 22 pages with 1 figure and 8 table

Lusitania: An Examination of Captaincy and Seamanship in the Face of Disaster

The last voyage of the RMS Lusitania is examined. The Cunard liner left New York for Liverpool on May 1, 1915 as the conflict in Europe began to escalate. The research separates the act of war from the actions of the ship\u27s command and control infrastructure and the seamanship of its crew. This distinction is made under a thesis that more lives could have and should have been saved. The central question of the research was therefore: to what extent should the captain and crew of RMS Lusitania be held to account for the elevated loss of life in the hostile sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915 and to what degree did this singular tragedy influence American public opinion toward the War

Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems

Every day, more users access services and electronically transmit information which is usually disseminated over insecure networks and processed by websites and databases, which lack proper security protection mechanisms and tools. This may have an impact on both the users’ trust as well as the reputation of the system’s stakeholders. Designing and implementing security enhanced systems is of vital importance. Therefore, this book aims to present a number of innovative security enhanced applications. It is titled “Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems” and includes 11 chapters. This book is a quality guide for teaching purposes as well as for young researchers since it presents leading innovative contributions on security enhanced applications on various Information Systems. It involves cases based on the standalone, network and Cloud environments

Measuring and Disrupting Malware Distribution Networks: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Malware Delivery Networks (MDNs) are networks of webpages, servers, computers, and computer files that are used by cybercriminals to proliferate malicious software (or malware) onto victim machines. The business of malware delivery is a complex and multifaceted one that has become increasingly profitable over the last few years. Due to the ongoing arms race between cybercriminals and the security community, cybercriminals are constantly evolving and streamlining their techniques to beat security countermeasures and avoid disruption to their operations, such as by security researchers infiltrating their botnet operations, or law enforcement taking down their infrastructures and arresting those involved. So far, the research community has conducted insightful but isolated studies into the different facets of malicious file distribution. Hence, only a limited picture of the malicious file delivery ecosystem has been provided thus far, leaving many questions unanswered. Using a data-driven and interdisciplinary approach, the purpose of this research is twofold. One, to study and measure the malicious file delivery ecosystem, bringing prior research into context, and to understand precisely how these malware operations respond to security and law enforcement intervention. And two, taking into account the overlapping research efforts of the information security and crime science communities towards preventing cybercrime, this research aims to identify mitigation strategies and intervention points to disrupt this criminal economy more effectively