Cloud computing in plain English
By Ryan K. L. Ko, March 2010
Articles Tagged: Security
Articles & Features
State of security readiness
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. With this pay-as-you-go model of computing, cloud solutions are seen as having the potential to both dramatically reduce costs and increase the rapidity of development of applications.
By Ramaswamy Chandramouli, Peter Mell, March 2010
Privacy challenges and solutions in the social web
Research related to online social networks has addressed a number of important problems related to the storage, retrieval, and management of social network data. However, privacy concerns stemming from the use of social networks, or the dissemination of social network data, have largely been ignored. And with more than 250 million active Facebook (http://facebook.com) users, nearly half of whom log in at least once per day [5], these concerns can't remain unaddressed for long.
By Grigorios Loukides, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, December 2009
Introduction
By Justin Solomon, June 2009
An overview of privacy preserving data mining
By Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, Vassilios S. Verykios, June 2009
Detecting steganography on a large scale
By William Ella, December 2008
Data encryption
By Ed DeHart, September 2008
Using software watermarking to discourage piracy
By Ginger Myles, October 2005
Security, anonymity and trust in electronic auctions
By Jarrod Trevathan, May 2005
An introduction to quantum cryptography
By Nick Papanikolaou, May 2005
An introduction to side channel cryptanalysis of RSA
By Artemios G. Voyiatzis, May 2005
Timing attacks on RSA
By Wing H. Wong, May 2005
Obfuscation of the standard XOR Encryption algorithm
By Zachary A. Kissel, May 2005
Learning how to tell ham from spam
By George Sakkis, December 2004
Identifying spam without peeking at the contents
By Shlomo Hershkop, Salvatore J. Stolfo, December 2004
Peer-to-peer collaborative spam detection
By Nathan Dimmock, Ian Maddison, December 2004
Security, privacy, and anonymity
By Thomas Wright, December 2004
Introduction
By William Stevenson, September 2004
Computer security and intrusion detection
Computer attacks are now commonplace. By connecting your computer to the Internet, you increase the risk of having someone break in, install malicious programs and tools on it, and possibly use it to attack other machines on the Internet by controlling it remotely.Several major banks have been subject to attacks, in which attackers gained access into customers' accounts and viewed detailed information about the activities on these accounts. In some instances the attackers stole credit card information to blackmail e-commerce companies by threatening to sell this information to unauthorized entities. Several online trading companies and e-commerce sites were shut down temporarily due to major packet flood attacks, also known as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, causing these companies to lose revenue, customer satisfaction, and trust [10]. A major software development company discovered that attackers had broken into its network and stolen the source code for future releases of its popular products. Just recently, the source code of the future flagship product belonging to a major software development company was stolen and made publicly available on the Internet.In order to combat this growing trend of computer attacks, both academic and industry groups have been developing systems to monitor networks and systems and raise alarms of suspicious activities. These systems are called Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).
By Khaled Labib, September 2004
WiFi exposed
Over the past few years, IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have become increasingly widely deployed. Wireless LANs can be found in coffee shops, airports, hospitals, and all major institutes. However, as for conventional wired networks, the spread of such networks may have been faster than the diffusion of security knowledge about them. As a consequence, 802.11 is the new playground for many hackers, who are attracted to the environment by virtue of its anonymity. Attacks may be traced back to the wireless network, but the intruder could have been anyone driving by within the radius of the network, making it hard, if not impossible, for him/her to be traced. Securing wireless networks is a hard task, because the standard solutions do not work effectively in guaranteeing privacy and authentication, as this article shows; as a consequence, many wireless networks are left open.This article is structured as follows: initially, an overview of the 802.11 protocol is presented. This is followed by an analysis of the steps involved in connection to and use of such a network, first in the absence of encryption and then taking into account WEP. Attacks for these different scenarios are presented and analyzed, leading to the conclusion that WEP is unsuitable as the sole security measure for such links. Finally, attacks on wired networks that are connected to a wireless LAN are analyzed.The article concludes that existing standards for wireless security as applied to the most widely used wireless standard, 802.11, are inadequate in several ways, can be attacked using publicly available tools, and lead to a false sense of security. Some advice about mitigation of threats is offered throughout the article, but the most effective solution is awareness of potential attacks and the maximization of the amount of time and effort needed to break into the network by using defence in depth.
By Andrea Bittau, September 2004
DNA smart card for financial transactions
In this paper, a secure environment for electronic commerce is introduced. The environment is formed via a synthesis of biometrics consumer authentication with a security token. Such a token is a smart card containing cryptographic keys and a cryptographic microprocessor for data encryption. The keys are used to further authenticate the possessor of the card as the actual owner and also to facilitate secure electronic financial transactions. New technologies like these bring benefits to society by enhancing the standard of living, however, numerous challenges are introduced [1].Biometrics is a Greek composite word stemming from the synthesis of bio and metric, meaning life measurement. In this context, the science of biometrics is concerned with the accurate measurement of unique biological characteristics of an individual in order to securely identify them to a computer or other electronic system. Biological characteristics measured usually include fingerprints, voice patterns, retinal and iris scans, face patterns, and even the chemical composition of an individual's DNA [9].
By Sofia Gleni, Panagiotis Petratos, September 2004
A distributed security scheme for ad hoc networks
In an ad hoc wireless network where wired infrastructures are not feasible, energy and bandwidth conservation are the two key elements presenting challenges to researchers. Limited bandwidth makes a network easily congested by the control signals of the routing protocol. Routing schemes developed for wired networks seldom consider restrictions of this type. Instead, they assume that the network is mostly stable and that the overhead for routing messages is negligible. Considering these differences between wired and wireless network, it is necessary to develop a wireless routing protocol that limits congestion in the network [1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11].This paper proposes minor modifications to the existing Ad hoc On Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol (RFC 3561) in order to restrict congestion in networks during a particular type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In addition to this, it incurs absolutely no additional overhead [4]. We describe the DoS attack caused due to Route Request (RREQ) flooding and its implications on existing AODV-driven Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) [2, 14]. To combat this DoS attack, a proactive scheme [12] is proposed. We present an illustration to describe the implications of RREQ flooding on pure AODV and the modified AODV protocols. To quantify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we simulated a DoS [6] attack in a mobile environment and study the performance results.
By Dhaval Gada, Rajat Gogri, Punit Rathod, Zalak Dedhia, Nirali Mody, Sugata Sanyal, Ajith Abraham, September 2004
Using software watermarking to discourage piracy
By Ginger Myles, April 2004
Multilevel security
By Stephany Filimon, April 2004
Q2ADPZ* an open source, multi-platform system for distributed computing
By Zoran Constantinescu, Pavel Petrovic, December 2002
Technologies for the development of agent-based distributed applications
By Tobias Butte, April 2002
On patrol
By David Molnar, March 2001
Public key cryptography
By Pradosh Kumar Mohapatra, September 2000
Electronic commerce universal access device-the knowledge-acquiring layered infrastructure (KALI) project
By Theodore Chiasson, Carrie Gates, September 2000
Getting started with PGP
By Kevin Henry, July 2000
The world of data compression
By Eric Scheirer, March 2000
Introduction to Linux networking and security
By Wei-Mei Shyr, Brian Borowski, September 1999
Protecting the integrity of agents
By Michael J. Grimley, Brian D. Monroe, June 1999
Confidentially using authentication
By Robert Schlaff, November 1998
Book review:Bandits on the information Superhighway
By Paul Rubel, September 1996
Computer security past and future
By Michael Neuman, Diana Moore, April 1996
An introduction to intrusion detection
By Aurobindo Sundaram, April 1996
Trust mechanisms for Hummingbird
By Jason Evans, Deborah Frincke, April 1996
Electronic voting
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, April 1996
Mutual authenticating protocol with key distribution in client/server environment
The explosive growth of networked and internetworked computer systems during the past decade has brought about a need for increased protection mechanisms. This paper discusses three authentication protocols that incorporate the use of methods that present effective user authentication. The first two protocols have been previously discussed in the literature; the third protocol draws from the first two and others to produce an authentication scheme that provides both mutual authentication and secure key distribution which is easy to use, is compatible with present operating systems, is transparent across systems, and provides password file protection.
By Charles Cavaiani, Jim Alves-Foss, April 1996
Objective View Point: statics
By G. Bowden Wise, April 1996
Ask Jack: negotiating with companies
By Jack Wilson, April 1996
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, April 1996
Copyright law meets the World Wide Web
By Matt Rosenberg, November 1995
Networking: introduction
By Mark Allman, September 1995
Network security, filters and firewalls
By Darren Bolding, September 1995
Book review: Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bug
By Saveen Reddy, September 1995