Issues affecting Security Design Pattern engineering

Security Design Patterns present the tried and tested design decisions made by security engineers within a well documented format. Patterns allow for complex security concepts, and mechanisms, to be expressed such that non domain experts can make use of them. Our research is concerned with the development of pattern languages for advanced crypto-systems. From our experience developing pattern languages we have encountered several recurring issues within security design pattern engineering. These issues, if not addressed, will affect the adoption of security design patterns. This paper describes these issues and discusses how they could be addressed.Publisher PD

Security pattern evaluation

Current Security Pattern evaluation techniques are demonstrated to be incomplete with respect to quantitative measurement and comparison. A proposal for a dynamic testbed system is presented as a potential mechanism for evaluating patterns within a constrained environment.Postprin

What's the PREMES behind your pattern?

Design patterns are supposed to be the well documented, tried and tested solutions to recurrent problems. Current evaluation techniques do not provide a demonstrable and holistic means to evaluate pattern quality. This paper introduces Pattern Report Cards an evaluation process for software design patterns that is demonstrable, measurable, and reproducible. A set of quality indicators for determining pattern quality has been identified, and a set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation techniques assembled to determine the quality of adherence to these indicators. Further, management and execution of the evaluation process is controlled by the PREMES framework. This framework describes a management cycle that facilitates the construction of bespoke evaluation systems for design patterns. Process tailoring is achieved by providing guidance over the selection and construction of the techniques used to assess pattern quality. Use of these techniques will help bolster existing evaluation processes, and lead to the improvement of design pattern evaluation techniques.Postprin

A novel method to prevent phishing by using OCR technology

Phishing is one of the most common attacks in the world, especially with the increasing usage of mobile platforms and e-commerce. Although many users are weary of phishing attacks from suspicious paths in the URL address, phishing still accounts for a large proportion of all of malicious attacks as it is easy to deploy. Most browser vendors mainly adopt two approaches against phishing; the blacklist and the heuristic-based. However, both have related limitations. In this paper, a novel method was proposed to protect against phishing attacks. By using image recognition (OCR) technology, phishing attacks can be distinguished from the actual website by reading the logos on the website and comparing with the site URL. An easy to implement prototype demonstrated a high accuracy of detection in the experimental trials.Postprin

Improving visual representations of code

This work was done in 1997 at the Centre for Software Maintenance at the University of DurhamThe contents of this paper describe the work carried out by the Visual Research Group in the Centre for Software Maintenance at the University of Durham.Publisher PD

Investigation of Virtual Network Isolation security in Cloud computing : data leakage issues

Software Defined Networking (SDN) or Virtual Networks (VNs) are required for cloud tenants to leverage demands. However, multi-tenancy can be compromised without proper isolation. Much research has been conducted into VN Isolation; many researchers are not tackling security aspects or checking if their isolation evaluation is complete. Therefore, data leakage is a major security worry in the cloud in general. This paper uses an OpenStack VN and OpenStack Tenant Network to test multi-tenancy features. We aim to evaluate the relationship between isolation methods used in cloud VN and the amount of data being leaked through using penetration tests. These tests will be used to identify the vulnerabilities causing cloud VN data leakage and to investigate how the vulnerabilities, and the leaked data, can compromise the tenant Virtual Networks.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Improving intrusion detection model prediction by threshold adaptation

This research was supported and funded by the Government of the Sultanate of Oman represented by the Ministry of Higher Education and the Sultan Qaboos University.Network traffic exhibits a high level of variability over short periods of time. This variability impacts negatively on the accuracy of anomaly-based network intrusion detection systems (IDS) that are built using predictive models in a batch learning setup. This work investigates how adapting the discriminating threshold of model predictions, specifically to the evaluated traffic, improves the detection rates of these intrusion detection models. Specifically, this research studied the adaptability features of three well known machine learning algorithms: C5.0, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine. Each algorithm’s ability to adapt their prediction thresholds was assessed and analysed under different scenarios that simulated real world settings using the prospective sampling approach. Multiple IDS datasets were used for the analysis, including a newly generated dataset (STA2018). This research demonstrated empirically the importance of threshold adaptation in improving the accuracy of detection models when training and evaluation traffic have different statistical properties. Tests were undertaken to analyse the effects of feature selection and data balancing on model accuracy when different significant features in traffic were used. The effects of threshold adaptation on improving accuracy were statistically analysed. Of the three compared algorithms, Random Forest was the most adaptable and had the highest detection rates.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Requirements for educational support tools in Virtual Worlds

Paper number 65Virtual Worlds have been used for online gaming, socialising, business advertising and education. As the educational uses become more sophisticated from early information advertising and teaching resources to simulated laboratory and scenarios, it is necessary to determine requirements for tools and virtual systems to achieve the optimal support possible. This paper discusses the current educational uses of Virtual Worlds and applies this to a set of support requirements derived for an evaluated support tool for learning to program. The result is a layered approach, or checklist, to support learning and evaluation for effective and adaptive online educational support tools including virtual world educational systems.Postprin