Matching Items (5)
Description
Smartphones are pervasive nowadays. They are supported by mobile platforms that allow users to download and run feature-rich mobile applications (apps). While mobile apps help users conveniently process personal data on mobile devices, they also pose security and privacy threats and put user's data at risk. Even though modern mobile platforms such as Android have integrated security mechanisms to protect users, most mechanisms do not easily adapt to user's security requirements and rapidly evolving threats. They either fail to provide sufficient intelligence for a user to make informed security decisions, or require great sophistication to configure the mechanisms for enforcing security decisions. These limitations lead to a situation where users are disadvantageous against emerging malware on modern mobile platforms. To remedy this situation, I propose automated and systematic approaches to address three security management tasks: monitoring, assessment, and confinement of mobile apps. In particular, monitoring apps helps a user observe and record apps' runtime behaviors as controlled under security mechanisms. Automated assessment distills intelligence from the observed behaviors and the security configurations of security mechanisms. The distilled intelligence further fuels enhanced confinement mechanisms that flexibly and accurately shape apps' behaviors. To demonstrate the feasibility of my approaches, I design and implement a suite of proof-of-concept prototypes that support the three tasks respectively.
ContributorsJing, Yiming (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
ContributorsRubio Medrano, Carlos Ernesto (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Wireless communication technologies have been playing an important role in modern society. Due to its inherent mobility property, wireless networks are more vulnerable to passive attacks than traditional wired networks. Anonymity, as an important issue in mobile network environment, serves as the first topic that leads to all the research work presented in this manuscript. Specifically, anonymity issue in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is discussed with details as the first section of research.
To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors.
The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components.
Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.
To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors.
The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components.
Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.
ContributorsLi, Bing (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The presence of a rich set of embedded sensors on mobile devices has been fuelling various sensing applications regarding the activities of individuals and their surrounding environment, and these ubiquitous sensing-capable mobile devices are pushing the new paradigm of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) from concept to reality. MCS aims to outsource sensing data collection to mobile users and it could revolutionize the traditional ways of sensing data collection and processing. In the meantime, cloud computing provides cloud-backed infrastructures for mobile devices to provision their capabilities with network access. With enormous computational and storage resources along with sufficient bandwidth, it functions as the hub to handle the sensing service requests from sensing service consumers and coordinate sensing task assignment among eligible mobile users to reach a desired quality of sensing service. This paper studies the problem of sensing task assignment to mobile device owners with specific spatio-temporal traits to minimize the cost and maximize the utility in MCS while adhering to QoS constraints. Greedy approaches and hybrid solutions combined with bee algorithms are explored to address the problem.
Moreover, the privacy concerns arise with the widespread deployment of MCS from both the data contributors and the sensing service consumers. The uploaded sensing data, especially those tagged with spatio-temporal information, will disclose the personal information of the data contributors. In addition, the sensing service requests can reveal the personal interests of service consumers. To address the privacy issues, this paper constructs a new framework named Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowd Sensing (PP-MCS) to leverage the sensing capabilities of ubiquitous mobile devices and cloud infrastructures. PP-MCS has a distributed architecture without relying on trusted third parties for privacy-preservation. In PP-MCS, the sensing service consumers can retrieve data without revealing the real data contributors. Besides, the individual sensing records can be compared against the aggregation result while keeping the values of sensing records unknown, and the k-nearest neighbors could be approximately identified without privacy leaks. As such, the privacy of the data contributors and the sensing service consumers can be protected to the greatest extent possible.
Moreover, the privacy concerns arise with the widespread deployment of MCS from both the data contributors and the sensing service consumers. The uploaded sensing data, especially those tagged with spatio-temporal information, will disclose the personal information of the data contributors. In addition, the sensing service requests can reveal the personal interests of service consumers. To address the privacy issues, this paper constructs a new framework named Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowd Sensing (PP-MCS) to leverage the sensing capabilities of ubiquitous mobile devices and cloud infrastructures. PP-MCS has a distributed architecture without relying on trusted third parties for privacy-preservation. In PP-MCS, the sensing service consumers can retrieve data without revealing the real data contributors. Besides, the individual sensing records can be compared against the aggregation result while keeping the values of sensing records unknown, and the k-nearest neighbors could be approximately identified without privacy leaks. As such, the privacy of the data contributors and the sensing service consumers can be protected to the greatest extent possible.
ContributorsWang, Zhijie (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is a portable, powerful, and suitable technology that integrates 3D virtual content into the physical world in real-time. It has been implemented for multiple intents as it enhances people’s interaction, e.g., shopping, entertainment, gaming, etc. Thus, MAR is expected to grow at a tremendous rate in the upcoming years, as its popularity via mobile devices has increased. But, unfortunately, the applications that implement MAR, hereby referred to as MAR-Apps, bear security issues. Such are imaged in worldwide recorded incidents caused by MAR-Apps, e.g., robberies, authorities requesting banning MAR at specific locations, etc. To further explore these concerns, a case study analyzed several MAR-Apps available in the market to identify the security problems in MAR. As a result of this study, the threats found were classified into three categories. First, Space Invasion implies the intrusive modification through MAR of sensitive spaces, e.g., hospitals, memorials, etc. Then, Space Affectation means the degradation of users’ experience via interaction with undesirable MAR or malicious entities. Finally, MAR-Apps mishandling sensitive data leads to Privacy Leaks. SpaceMediator, a proof-of-concept MAR-App that imitates the well-known and successful MAR-App Pokémon GO, implements the solution approach of a Policy-Governed MAR-App, which assists in preventing the aforementioned mentioned security issues. Furthermore, its feasibility is evaluated through a user study with 40 participants. As a result, uncovering understandability over the security issues as participants recognized and prevented them with success rates as high as 92.50%. Furthermore, there is an enriched interest in Policy-Governed MAR-Apps as 87.50% of participants agreed with restricted MAR-Apps within sensitive spaces, and 82.50% would implement constraints in MAR-Apps. These promising results encourage adopting the Policy-Governed solution approach in future MAR-Apps.
ContributorsClaramunt, Luis Manuel (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Rubio-Medrano, Carlos E (Committee member) / Baek, Jaejong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022