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Description
With the increasing user demand for low latency, elastic provisioning of computing resources coupled with ubiquitous and on-demand access to real-time data, cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm to meet growing user demands.

With the increasing user demand for low latency, elastic provisioning of computing resources coupled with ubiquitous and on-demand access to real-time data, cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm to meet growing user demands. However, with the introduction and rising use of wear- able technology and evolving uses of smart-phones, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has become a prevailing notion in the currently growing technology industry. Cisco Inc. has projected a data creation of approximately 403 Zetabytes (ZB) by 2018. The combination of bringing benign devices and connecting them to the web has resulted in exploding service and data aggregation requirements, thus requiring a new and innovative computing platform. This platform should have the capability to provide robust real-time data analytics and resource provisioning to clients, such as IoT users, on-demand. Such a computation model would need to function at the edge-of-the-network, forming a bridge between the large cloud data centers and the distributed connected devices.

This research expands on the notion of bringing computational power to the edge- of-the-network, and then integrating it with the cloud computing paradigm whilst providing services to diverse IoT-based applications. This expansion is achieved through the establishment of a new computing model that serves as a platform for IoT-based devices to communicate with services in real-time. We name this paradigm as Gateway-Oriented Reconfigurable Ecosystem (GORE) computing. Finally, this thesis proposes and discusses the development of a policy management framework for accommodating our proposed computational paradigm. The policy framework is designed to serve both the hosted applications and the GORE paradigm by enabling them to function more efficiently. The goal of the framework is to ensure uninterrupted communication and service delivery between users and their applications.
ContributorsDsouza, Clinton (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Android is currently the most widely used mobile operating system. The permission model in Android governs the resource access privileges of applications. The permission model however is amenable to various attacks, including re-delegation attacks, background snooping attacks and disclosure of private information. This thesis is aimed at understanding, analyzing and

Android is currently the most widely used mobile operating system. The permission model in Android governs the resource access privileges of applications. The permission model however is amenable to various attacks, including re-delegation attacks, background snooping attacks and disclosure of private information. This thesis is aimed at understanding, analyzing and performing forensics on application behavior. This research sheds light on several security aspects, including the use of inter-process communications (IPC) to perform permission re-delegation attacks.

Android permission system is more of app-driven rather than user controlled, which means it is the applications that specify their permission requirement and the only thing which the user can do is choose not to install a particular application based on the requirements. Given the all or nothing choice, users succumb to pressures and needs to accept permissions requested. This thesis proposes a couple of ways for providing the users finer grained control of application privileges. The same methods can be used to evade the Permission Re-delegation attack.

This thesis also proposes and implements a novel methodology in Android that can be used to control the access privileges of an Android application, taking into consideration the context of the running application. This application-context based permission usage is further used to analyze a set of sample applications. We found the evidence of applications spoofing or divulging user sensitive information such as location information, contact information, phone id and numbers, in the background. Such activities can be used to track users for a variety of privacy-intrusive purposes. We have developed implementations that minimize several forms of privacy leaks that are routinely done by stock applications.
ContributorsGollapudi, Narasimha Aditya (Author) / Dasgupta, Partha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The increasing number of continually connected mobile persons has created an environment conducive to real time user data gathering for many uses both public and private in nature. Publicly, one can envision no longer requiring a census to determine the demographic composition of the country and its sub regions. The

The increasing number of continually connected mobile persons has created an environment conducive to real time user data gathering for many uses both public and private in nature. Publicly, one can envision no longer requiring a census to determine the demographic composition of the country and its sub regions. The information provided is vastly more up to date than that of a census and allows civil authorities to be more agile and preemptive with planning. Privately, advertisers take advantage of a persons stated opinions, demographics, and contextual (where and when) information in order to formulate and present pertinent offers.

Regardless of its use this information can be sensitive in nature and should therefore be under the control of the user. Currently, a user has little say in the manner that their information is processed once it has been released. An ad-hoc approach is currently in use, where the location based service providers each maintain their own policy over personal information usage.

In order to allow more user control over their personal information while still providing for targeted advertising, a systematic approach to the release of the information is needed. It is for that reason we propose a User-Centric Context Aware Spatiotemporal Anonymization framework. At its core the framework will unify the current spatiotemporal anonymization with that of traditional anonymization so that user specified anonymization requirement is met or exceeded while allowing for more demographic information to be released.
ContributorsSanchez, Michael Andrew (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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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

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.
ContributorsHolmes, James Edward (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Corporations invest considerable resources to create, preserve and analyze

their data; yet while organizations are interested in protecting against

unauthorized data transfer, there lacks a comprehensive metric to discriminate

what data are at risk of leaking.

This thesis motivates the need for a quantitative leakage risk metric, and

provides a risk assessment system,

Corporations invest considerable resources to create, preserve and analyze

their data; yet while organizations are interested in protecting against

unauthorized data transfer, there lacks a comprehensive metric to discriminate

what data are at risk of leaking.

This thesis motivates the need for a quantitative leakage risk metric, and

provides a risk assessment system, called Whispers, for computing it. Using

unsupervised machine learning techniques, Whispers uncovers themes in an

organization's document corpus, including previously unknown or unclassified

data. Then, by correlating the document with its authors, Whispers can

identify which data are easier to contain, and conversely which are at risk.

Using the Enron email database, Whispers constructs a social network segmented

by topic themes. This graph uncovers communication channels within the

organization. Using this social network, Whispers determines the risk of each

topic by measuring the rate at which simulated leaks are not detected. For the

Enron set, Whispers identified 18 separate topic themes between January 1999

and December 2000. The highest risk data emanated from the legal department

with a leakage risk as high as 60%.
ContributorsWright, Jeremy (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Yau, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Due to the shortcomings of modern Mobile Device Management solutions, businesses

have begun to incorporate forensics to analyze their mobile devices and respond

to any incidents of malicious activity in order to protect their sensitive data. Current

forensic tools, however, can only look a static image of the device being examined,

making it difficult

Due to the shortcomings of modern Mobile Device Management solutions, businesses

have begun to incorporate forensics to analyze their mobile devices and respond

to any incidents of malicious activity in order to protect their sensitive data. Current

forensic tools, however, can only look a static image of the device being examined,

making it difficult for a forensic analyst to produce conclusive results regarding the

integrity of any sensitive data on the device. This research thesis expands on the

use of forensics to secure data by implementing an agent on a mobile device that can

continually collect information regarding the state of the device. This information is

then sent to a separate server in the form of log files to be analyzed using a specialized

tool. The analysis tool is able to look at the data collected from the device over time

and perform specific calculations, according to the user's specifications, highlighting

any correlations or anomalies among the data which might be considered suspicious

to a forensic analyst. The contribution of this paper is both an in-depth explanation

on the implementation of an iOS application to be used to improve the mobile forensics

process as well as a proof-of-concept experiment showing how evidence collected

over time can be used to improve the accuracy of a forensic analysis.
ContributorsWhitaker, Jeremy (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Yau, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Hardware-Assisted Security (HAS) is an emerging technology that addresses the shortcomings of software-based virtualized environment. There are two major weaknesses of software-based virtualization that HAS attempts to address - performance overhead and security issues. Performance overhead caused by software-based virtualization is due to the use of additional software layer (i.e.,

Hardware-Assisted Security (HAS) is an emerging technology that addresses the shortcomings of software-based virtualized environment. There are two major weaknesses of software-based virtualization that HAS attempts to address - performance overhead and security issues. Performance overhead caused by software-based virtualization is due to the use of additional software layer (i.e., hypervisor). Since the performance is highly related to efficiency of processing data and providing services, reducing performance overhead is one of the major concerns in data centers and enterprise networks. Software-based virtualization also imposes additional security issues in the virtualized environments. To resolve those issues, HAS is developed to offload security functions from application layer to a dedicated hardware, thereby achieving almost bare-metal performance and enhanced security. As a result, HAS gained

more popularity and the number of studies regarding efficiency of the technology is increasing.

However, there exists no attempt to our knowledge that provides a generic test mechanism that is universally applicable to all HAS devices. Preparing such a testbed for each specific HAS device is a time-consuming and costly task for hardware manufacturers and network administrators. Therefore, we try to address the demands of hardware vendors and researchers for a generic testbed that can evaluate both performance and security functions of the HAS-enabled systems.

In this thesis, the HAS device evaluation framework (HEF) is defined for hardware vendors, network administrators, and researchers to measure performance of the system with HAS devices. HEF provides a generic test environments for a given HAS device by providing generic test metrics and evaluation mechanisms. HEF is also designed to take user-defined test metrics and test cases to support various hardware. The framework performs the entire process in an automated fashion, and thus it requires no user intervention. Finally, the efficacy of HEF is demonstrated by performing a case study using Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) adapter, which is a dedicated PCI express device for cryptographic tasks.
ContributorsKyung, Sukwha (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
The Internet of Things has conjured up a storm in the technology world by providing novel methods to connect, exchange, aggregate, and monitor data across a system of inter-related devices and entities. Of the myriad technologies that aid in the functioning of these IoT devices, Bluetooth Low Energy also known

The Internet of Things has conjured up a storm in the technology world by providing novel methods to connect, exchange, aggregate, and monitor data across a system of inter-related devices and entities. Of the myriad technologies that aid in the functioning of these IoT devices, Bluetooth Low Energy also known as BLE plays a major role in establishing inter-connectivity amongst these devices. This thesis aims to provide a background on BLE, the type of attacks that could occur in an IoT setting, the possible defenses that are available to prevent the occurrence of such attacks, and a discussion on the research trends that hold great promise in presenting seamless solutions to integrate IoT devices across different industry verticals.
ContributorsPammi, Ashwath Anand (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Web applications continue to remain as the most popular method of interaction for businesses over the Internet. With it's simplicity of use and management, they often function as the "front door" for many companies. As such, they are a critical component of the security ecosystem as vulnerabilities present in these

Web applications continue to remain as the most popular method of interaction for businesses over the Internet. With it's simplicity of use and management, they often function as the "front door" for many companies. As such, they are a critical component of the security ecosystem as vulnerabilities present in these systems could potentially allow malicious users access to sensitive business and personal data.

The inherent nature of web applications enables anyone to access them anytime and anywhere, this includes any malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities present in the web application. In addition, the static configurations of these web applications enables attackers the opportunity to perform reconnaissance at their leisure, increasing their success rate by allowing them time to discover information on the system. On the other hand, defenders are often at a disadvantage as they do not have the same temporal opportunity that attackers possess in order to perform counter-reconnaissance. Lastly, the unchanging nature of web applications results in undiscovered vulnerabilities to remain open for exploitation, requiring developers to adopt a reactive approach that is often delayed or to anticipate and prepare for all possible attacks which is often cost-prohibitive.

Moving Target Defense (MTD) seeks to remove the attackers' advantage by reducing the information asymmetry between the attacker and defender. This research explores the concept of MTD and the various methods of applying MTD to secure Web Applications. In particular, MTD concepts are applied to web applications by implementing an automated application diversifier that aims to mitigate specific classes of web application vulnerabilities and exploits. Evaluation is done using two open source web applications to determine the effectiveness of the MTD implementation. Though developed for the chosen applications, the automation process can be customized to fit a variety of applications.
ContributorsTaguinod, Marthony (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Web applications are ubiquitous. Accessible from almost anywhere, web applications support multiple platforms and can be easily customized. Most people interact with web applications daily for social media, communication, research, purchases, etc. Node.js has gained popularity as a programming language for web applications. A server-side JavaScript implementation, Node.js, allows both

Web applications are ubiquitous. Accessible from almost anywhere, web applications support multiple platforms and can be easily customized. Most people interact with web applications daily for social media, communication, research, purchases, etc. Node.js has gained popularity as a programming language for web applications. A server-side JavaScript implementation, Node.js, allows both the front-end and back-end to be coded in JavaScript. Node.js contains many features such as dynamic inclusion of other modules using a built-in function named require which dynamically locates and loads code.

To be effective, web applications must perform actions quickly while avoiding unexpected interruptions. However, dynamically linked libraries can cause delays and thus downtime, because dynamically linked code must load multiple files, often from disk. As loading is one of the slowest operations a computer performs, seeking from disk can have a negative impact on performance which causes the server to feel less responsive for users. Dynamically linked code can also break when the underlying library is updated. Normally, when trying to update a server, developers will use test servers. However, if the developer accidentally updates a library in a dynamically linked system, it may be incompatible with another portion of the program.

Statically linking code makes it more reliable and faster (to load) than dynamically linking code. The static linking process varies by programming language. Therefore, different static linkers need to be developed for different languages. This thesis describes the creation of a static linker, called FrozenNode, for the popular back-end web application language, Node.js. FrozenNode resolves Node.js applications into a single file that does not rely on dynamic libraries. FrozenNode was built on top of Closure Compiler to accurately process JavaScript. We found that the resolved application was faster and self-contained yielding significant advantages over the dynamically loaded application. Furthermore, both had the same output.

Vulnerabilities in web applications can be found using static analysis tools, however static analysis tools must reason about dynamically linked application. FrozenNode can be used to statically link a Node.js application before being used by a JavaScript static analysis tool.
ContributorsHutchins, James (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Shoshitaishvili, Yan (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018