CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

The recent and new concept of "Cloud Brokers" and Brokerage came to light with the recent release of the GSA Cloud Broker RFI. What does that mean for the cloud professionals of today (skills they need) and the cloud professionals of tomorrow (skills they are going to need). About the speaker: Scott Andersen, Director of Cloud Computing, Commercial StrategiesScott Andersen recently joined Lockheed...

Differential privacy is a very powerful approach to protecting individual privacy in data-mining; it's also an approach that hasn't seen much application outside academic circles. There's a reason for this: many people aren't quite certain how it works. Uncertainty poses a serious problem when considering the public release of sensitive data. Intuitively, differentially private data-mining applica...

Many security professionals look to software on hardrives as the source of compromise. To detect compromises, they use systems to check the hashes of all files on disk, When a machine is compromised, they wipe the hardrive, and assume that the machine in clean. The battlefield between attackers and defenders is moving to the firmware level. This presentation will explore what firmware exists in yo...

The proliferation of social networks, where individuals share private information, has caused, in the last few years, a growth in the volume of sensitive data being stored in these networks. As users subscribe to more services and connect more with their friends, families, and colleagues, the desire to use this information from the networks has increased. Online social interaction has become very...

Group key management (GKM) is a fundamental building block in any secure group communication applications. In fact, successful management of group keys is critical to the security of any cryptosystem. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the traditional GKM approaches and their limitations to support current technological trends and large dynamic systems. Then I will present a new approa...

There is a long history of supply chain management, from which many related policies, practices, processes, and enabling artifacts have been developed and employed by those business enterprises that acquire hardware and software components from a third party. Traditionally, Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) has been the focal point of supply chain practices and has focused on business and contra...

Assessing the trustworthiness of location data corresponding toindividuals is essential in several applications, such as forensicscience and epidemic control. To obtain accurate and trustworthylocation data, analysts must often gather and correlate informationfrom several independent sources, e.g., physical observation, witnesstestimony, surveillance footage, etc. However, such information may bef...

With the advent of cloud computing, our view of cryptographic protocols has changed dramatically. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the newer challenges that we face in cloud cryptography and outline some of the techniques used to solve these problems. In particular, a few questions that I will address are:1) How can we store sensitive data in the cloud, in an encrypted manner, and...

US Government, Department of Defense, and Enterprise computer systems must be trusted to protect data with varying levels of sensitivity / security. Affordability requirements are driving the need to incorporate many diverse commercial software products of unknown quality and pedigree into said systems. While there exist many Static Code Analysis products, the depth, rigor, and coverage of these t...

Using validated carving techniques, we show that popular operating systems (\eg Windows, Linux, and OSX) frequently have residual IP packets, Ethernet frames, and associated data structures present in system memory from long-terminated network traffic. Such information is useful for many forensic purposes including establishment of prior connection activity and services used; identification of oth...

As technological advancements continue to expand the range of information access, issues of privacy and cyber security have risen to the forefront. Technology is only one part of a larger conversation. Looking through a different lens, consider the humans behind the machines. Technology can now be used with unprecedented ease and anonymity as a malicious vehicle to harass, defame and stalk.  This...

The future web, and Internet, are undergoing a humanization of their technologies which increasingly make their services more personalized, individualized and transparent. This is jointly fueled by the inexpensive yet easily accessible huge computing and storage capacities in clouds, the adoption of personal, mobile smart devices used across consumer/enterprise interchangeably, and the emergence o...

A variety of mechanisms have been used in access control systems to support enterprises' diverse security needs. For example, some enterprises might allow individual users to assign privileges on files that they own, whereas others might require that permissions be granted and revoked by security administrators only; some enterprises wish to operate under closed access policies (where permission i...

Many application domains, such as real-time financial analysis, e-healthcare systems, sensor networks, are characterizedby continuous data streaming from multiple sources and through intermediate processing by multiple aggregators. Keeping track ofdata provenance in such highly dynamic context is an important requirement, since data provenance is a key factor in assessingdata trustworthiness which...

A discussion about biometrics, performance and error. Learn more about biometric technologies and challenges related to performance. About the speaker: Dr. Stephen Elliott is the Director of the Biometric Standards, Performance and Assurance Laboratory at Purdue University, and Associate Director of CERIAS. His research interests are biometrics including human factors and usability issues as they...

We introduce Soundcomber, a "sensory malware" for smartphones that uses the microphone to steal private information from phone conversations. Soundcomber is lightweight and stealthy. It uses targeted profiles to locally analyze portions of speech likely to contain information such as credit card numbers. It evades known defenses by transferring small amounts of private data to the malware server u...

The open nature of the wireless medium leaves wireless communications exposed to interference caused by the concurrent operation of co-located wireless devices over the same frequency bands. While unintentional signal interference is managed at the physical and mac layers using an array of techniques (advanced signal processing, channel coding and error correction, spread spectrum communications,...

Previous research on virtual machine introspection proposed "out-of-box" approach by moving out security tools from the guest operating system. However, compared to the traditional "in-the-box" approach, it remains a challenge to obtain a complete semantic view due to the semantic gap between the guest VM and the hypervisor. In this paper, we present Process Implanting, a new active VM introspecti...

Learn how organization's proactivly protect against malware that traditional signature-based anti virus solutions miss.

Peer-to-peer real-time communication and media streaming applicationsoptimize their performance by using application-level topology estimationservices such as virtual coordinate systems. Virtual coordinate systems allownodes in a peer-to-peer network to accurately predict latency between arbitrarynodes without the need of performing extensive measurements. However, systemsthat leverage virtual coo...

The talk reports on an early stage of on-going research on the application of computational semantic techniques to detect phishing, i. e., mass mailings intended to sweep up personal details for later malicious use by the phishers themselves or their potential customers. Our personal experience as targets of phishing has shown that the texts are getting increasingly polished, plausible, and sophis...

Since early 2010 Google, Sony, Epsilon CitiBank, International Monetary Fund, RSA, various law enforcement agencies and many other organizations have been compromised by different attack groups. These groups include hacktivist organizations like Anonymous, Eastern European organized crime and state-sponsored teams referred to as the Advanced Persistent Threat. Mandiant will draw upon investigation...

Computer hardware and software that perform real-world functions such as flight control, telecommunications switching, and network routing form a class of systems called embedded systems. These embedded systems have challenges that differ from general purpose computing. The security challenges of embedded systems have become a topic of concern in critical infrastructure such as SmartGrid. This pre...

Secret sharing is important in information and network security and has broad applications in the real world. Since an elegant secret sharing mechanism was first proposed by Shamir in 1979 (also Blakley did the similar work then), many schemes have appeared in literature. These schemes deal with either single or multiple secrets and their shares have either the same weight or different weights. We...

The ongoing explosion of data and information throughout the enterprise is undeniable. Sensitive data, whether structured or unstructured, finds itself replicated and dispersed. This creates a challenge for information security professionals to prevent the flow of this information to unauthorized or inappropriate destinations. The security community has made great progress in protecting this data...