Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: Computer security
- All Subjects: Electronic mail messages
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Ahn, Gail-Joon
Description
With the growth of IT products and sophisticated software in various operating systems, I observe that security risks in systems are skyrocketing constantly. Consequently, Security Assessment is now considered as one of primary security mechanisms to measure assurance of systems since systems that are not compliant with security requirements may lead adversaries to access critical information by circumventing security practices. In order to ensure security, considerable efforts have been spent to develop security regulations by facilitating security best-practices. Applying shared security standards to the system is critical to understand vulnerabilities and prevent well-known threats from exploiting vulnerabilities. However, many end users tend to change configurations of their systems without paying attention to the security. Hence, it is not straightforward to protect systems from being changed by unconscious users in a timely manner. Detecting the installation of harmful applications is not sufficient since attackers may exploit risky software as well as commonly used software. In addition, checking the assurance of security configurations periodically is disadvantageous in terms of time and cost due to zero-day attacks and the timing attacks that can leverage the window between each security checks. Therefore, event-driven monitoring approach is critical to continuously assess security of a target system without ignoring a particular window between security checks and lessen the burden of exhausted task to inspect the entire configurations in the system. Furthermore, the system should be able to generate a vulnerability report for any change initiated by a user if such changes refer to the requirements in the standards and turn out to be vulnerable. Assessing various systems in distributed environments also requires to consistently applying standards to each environment. Such a uniformed consistent assessment is important because the way of assessment approach for detecting security vulnerabilities may vary across applications and operating systems. In this thesis, I introduce an automated event-driven security assessment framework to overcome and accommodate the aforementioned issues. I also discuss the implementation details that are based on the commercial-off-the-self technologies and testbed being established to evaluate approach. Besides, I describe evaluation results that demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the approaches.
ContributorsSeo, Jeong-Jin (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Access control is necessary for information assurance in many of today's applications such as banking and electronic health record. Access control breaches are critical security problems that can result from unintended and improper implementation of security policies. Security testing can help identify security vulnerabilities early and avoid unexpected expensive cost in handling breaches for security architects and security engineers. The process of security testing which involves creating tests that effectively examine vulnerabilities is a challenging task. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been widely adopted to support fine-grained access control. However, in practice, due to its complexity including role management, role hierarchy with hundreds of roles, and their associated privileges and users, systematically testing RBAC systems is crucial to ensure the security in various domains ranging from cyber-infrastructure to mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we introduce i) a security testing technique for RBAC systems considering the principle of maximum privileges, the structure of the role hierarchy, and a new security test coverage criterion; ii) a MTBDD (Multi-Terminal Binary Decision Diagram) based representation of RBAC security policy including RHMTBDD (Role Hierarchy MTBDD) to efficiently generate effective positive and negative security test cases; and iii) a security testing framework which takes an XACML-based RBAC security policy as an input, parses it into a RHMTBDD representation and then generates positive and negative test cases. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through case studies.
ContributorsGupta, Poonam (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The digital forensics community has neglected email forensics as a process, despite the fact that email remains an important tool in the commission of crime. Current forensic practices focus mostly on that of disk forensics, while email forensics is left as an analysis task stemming from that practice. As there is no well-defined process to be used for email forensics the comprehensiveness, extensibility of tools, uniformity of evidence, usefulness in collaborative/distributed environments, and consistency of investigations are hindered. At present, there exists little support for discovering, acquiring, and representing web-based email, despite its widespread use. To remedy this, a systematic process which includes discovering, acquiring, and representing web-based email for email forensics which is integrated into the normal forensic analysis workflow, and which accommodates the distinct characteristics of email evidence will be presented. This process focuses on detecting the presence of non-obvious artifacts related to email accounts, retrieving the data from the service provider, and representing email in a well-structured format based on existing standards. As a result, developers and organizations can collaboratively create and use analysis tools that can analyze email evidence from any source in the same fashion and the examiner can access additional data relevant to their forensic cases. Following, an extensible framework implementing this novel process-driven approach has been implemented in an attempt to address the problems of comprehensiveness, extensibility, uniformity, collaboration/distribution, and consistency within forensic investigations involving email evidence.
ContributorsPaglierani, Justin W (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu T (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The rate at which new malicious software (Malware) is created is consistently increasing each year. These new malwares are designed to bypass the current anti-virus countermeasures employed to protect computer systems. Security Analysts must understand the nature and intent of the malware sample in order to protect computer systems from these attacks. The large number of new malware samples received daily by computer security companies require Security Analysts to quickly determine the type, threat, and countermeasure for newly identied samples. Our approach provides for a visualization tool to assist the Security Analyst in these tasks that allows the Analyst to visually identify relationships between malware samples.
This approach consists of three steps. First, the received samples are processed by a sandbox environment to perform a dynamic behavior analysis. Second, the reports of the dynamic behavior analysis are parsed to extract identifying features which are matched against other known and analyzed samples. Lastly, those matches that are determined to express a relationship are visualized as an edge connected pair of nodes in an undirected graph.
This approach consists of three steps. First, the received samples are processed by a sandbox environment to perform a dynamic behavior analysis. Second, the reports of the dynamic behavior analysis are parsed to extract identifying features which are matched against other known and analyzed samples. Lastly, those matches that are determined to express a relationship are visualized as an edge connected pair of nodes in an undirected graph.
ContributorsHolmes, James Edward (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
With the rise of mobile technology, the personal lives and sensitive information of everyday citizens are carried about without a thought to the risks involved. Despite this high possibility of harm, many fail to use simple security to protect themselves because they feel the benefits of securing their devices do not outweigh the cost to usability. The main issue is that beyond initial authentication, sessions are maintained using optional timeout mechanisms where a session will end if a user is inactive for a period of time. This interruption-based form of continuous authentication requires constant user intervention leading to frustration, which discourages its use. No solution currently exists that provides an implementation beyond the insecure and low usability of simple timeout and re-authentication. This work identifies the flaws of current mobile authentication techniques and provides a new solution that is not limiting to the user, has a system for secure, active continuous authentication, and increases the usability and security over current methods.
ContributorsRomo, James Tyler (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
E-Mail header injection vulnerability is a class of vulnerability that can occur in web applications that use user input to construct e-mail messages. E-Mail injection is possible when the mailing script fails to check for the presence of e-mail headers in user input (either form fields or URL parameters). The vulnerability exists in the reference implementation of the built-in “mail” functionality in popular languages like PHP, Java, Python, and Ruby. With the proper injection string, this vulnerability can be exploited to inject additional headers and/or modify existing headers in an e-mail message, allowing an attacker to completely alter the content of the e-mail.
This thesis develops a scalable mechanism to automatically detect E-Mail Header Injection vulnerability and uses this mechanism to quantify the prevalence of E- Mail Header Injection vulnerabilities on the Internet. Using a black-box testing approach, the system crawled 21,675,680 URLs to find URLs which contained form fields. 6,794,917 such forms were found by the system, of which 1,132,157 forms contained e-mail fields. The system used this data feed to discern the forms that could be fuzzed with malicious payloads. Amongst the 934,016 forms tested, 52,724 forms were found to be injectable with more malicious payloads. The system tested 46,156 of these and was able to find 496 vulnerable URLs across 222 domains, which proves that the threat is widespread and deserves future research attention.
This thesis develops a scalable mechanism to automatically detect E-Mail Header Injection vulnerability and uses this mechanism to quantify the prevalence of E- Mail Header Injection vulnerabilities on the Internet. Using a black-box testing approach, the system crawled 21,675,680 URLs to find URLs which contained form fields. 6,794,917 such forms were found by the system, of which 1,132,157 forms contained e-mail fields. The system used this data feed to discern the forms that could be fuzzed with malicious payloads. Amongst the 934,016 forms tested, 52,724 forms were found to be injectable with more malicious payloads. The system tested 46,156 of these and was able to find 496 vulnerable URLs across 222 domains, which proves that the threat is widespread and deserves future research attention.
ContributorsChandramouli, Sai Prashanth (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016