CPTC - A Security Competition Unlike Any Other

Participating in cybersecurity competitions has become increasing popular for students in higher education programs that have a focus on computing or cyber security. The Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition was developed to address the industry skills gap and assist in identifying ethically minded security personnel with experience identifying, exercising, and mitigating vulnerabilities

DRONESCAPE:Distributed Rapid On-site NEtwork Self-deploying Cellular Advanced Phone Environment

When disasters happen, the speed with which first responders and emergency personnel can contact and be contacted by the people affected by the disaster during the first minutes or hours is critical. Early communications can make the difference between life and death. During a disaster communications infrastructure of the affected area is likely to be compromised. This project proposes an inexpensive, rapidly deployable cloud of autonomous drones, each coupled with a micro-cellular base station that deploys from a transportable deployment module. The goal is to temporarily restore communications for both first responders to communicate amongst themselves as well as for the rest of the impacted population

A Hands-On Approach to Computing Security Education: Metasploit Module Development

As the demand for skilled computer security professionals continues to increase, curricula at colleges and universities must continually evolve to meet current industry needs. Incorporating Metasploit module development into these curricula increases the value of the education received by the graduate and makes them a more attractive candidate to potential employers. The flexibility of the Metasploit framework, especially for targeting mobile device platforms, proves to be a valuable tool in evaluating the security of many different devices. This paper discusses the importance of incorporating Metasploit module development into computing security curricula to better prepare graduates for the constantly changing environment they will encounter. Hands-on lab outline, module development experiences, and related work are also discussed in the paper

Security Datasets for Network Research

This document describes the content of the security traffic datasets included in this collection and the conditions under which the packets were collected. These datasets were assembled from 2023 onward There are periodic updates or additions to the dataset collection. The current collection includes a variety of nmap intense scans. Both text and pcap (pcapng) file types can be opened with Wireshark. When referencing these datasets, please use the following DOI

Forensic course development

In recent years, digital technology has experienced dramatic growth. Many of these advances have also provided malicious users with the ability to conceal their activities and destroy evidence of their actions. This has raised the need of developing specialists in computer digital forensics -- the preservation, identification, extraction and documentation of evidence stored in the form of digitally encoded information (data). In this paper, we present the procedures and rationale used in the development of forensic courses at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. We also demonstrate our decision making process of selecting topics included in each course

Computer forensics technologies for personally identifiable information detection and audits

Identity theft has become more prevalent in recent years; about 10 million incidents occur each year.1 IT professionals must understand the need for personally identifiable information (PII) discovery to protect themselves and their company from the civil, legal and financial liabilities caused by data loss. As documents migrate to digital form from hard copy, sensitive personal information gets stored in a variety of places digitally. National and international laws are in place requiring companies to search for confidential data to ensure compliance. Some US examples include the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). At the state level in the US, New York State’s Disposal of Personal Records Law (2006) requires businesses to “properly dispose of records containing personal information,” implying that this information must be unreadable and unrecoverable. International privacy laws, many of which are more stringent than those in the US, require similar activity.2 To comply with these laws, security professionals use a variety of sensitive information discovery tools to find and remove readily available information stored on end-point devices. While current PII discovery tools can find information that is readily available, they are not capable of discovering information that has been encrypted, obfuscated, hidden, deleted or is otherwise unrecoverable. It is critical to note that the content and metadata of deleted files can be easily recovered using standard forensics tools. This paper will introduce computer forensics techniques to reveal sensitive data that are likely to be missed by PII tools, including data in RAM memory, graphics files, registry information or files marked as deleted

Developing Small Team-Based Cyber Security Exercises

The growth of the security industry is sparking a significant interest in well-rounded security professionals. Regional and national competitions in the academic community have been developed to help identify qualified candidates to support this industry. A course has been built to allow students to improve their skills in this area. This paper describes the process used to administer events in the support of such a competitive environment, and the process by which appropriate infrastructures are developed

Forensic Acquisition and Analysis of VMware Virtual Hard Disks

With the advancement in virtualization technology, virtual machines (VMs) are becoming a common and integral part of datacenters. As the popularity and the use of VMs increases, incidents involving them are also on the rise. There is substantial research on using VMs and virtual appliances to aid forensic investigation, but research on the appropriate forensics procedures for collecting and analyzing evidence within a VM following is lacking. This paper presents a forensically sound way to acquire and analyze VM hard disks. A forensics tool for analyzing VM snapshots and vmdk files is developed and has been proven to be forensically sound

The Benefits of Hosting the NECCDC at Your Institution

The Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NECCDC) [2] is a regional competition that feeds the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)[1]. Since RIT organized the first NECCDC in 2008, the NECCDC has selected a representative to compete in the CCDC. It has been relatively successful and has produced the national champion twice and the runner up three times during its eight years of existence. The NECCDC has been hosted on a rotating basis by one of the universities in the northeast and has become a popular event for both the hosting schools and for the students. We feel that the NECCDC has continued to be an exciting event in part because it has been hosted by different universities which have all made important contributions to the event. This paper describes some of the benefits that come from hosting. Our hope is to convince other universities to host the NECCDC and similar competitions