The rapid growth of the internet over the past two decades has been accompaniedby a significant increase in cyberattacks, including ones targeting websites. Among thevast number of websites, approximately 50% are built using popular Content ManagementSystems (CMS) such as WordPress, Shopify, and Wix. Furthermore, websites created usingCMS platforms may be more attractive targets for attackers due to common frameworksand shared vulnerabilities. This study examines the prevalence of security vulnerabilitiesin the category "Vulnerable and Outdated Components" in these CMS-created websiteswith a focus on the WordPress CMS. From scanning one million of the largest websites,version information of WordPress and related extensions is collected and matched againstexploits in publicly available databases (exploit databases). The study finds that approxi-mately 65% of the WordPress websites are up-to-date, and that approximately 1.1% of thelargest websites running WordPress are susceptible to severe vulnerabilities to the Word-Press Core, and more to plugin vulnerabilities. The study also finds that 70% of all severepublic exploits both recently and historically spawn from 3 categories, including cross-sitescripting attacks, cross-site request forgery, and SQL injection. Based on the results gath-ered, a well-designed demonstration showcasing two vulnerabilities is develo

Mobile health applications (mHealth apps), particularly in the health and fitness category, have experienced an increase in popularity due to their convenience and availability. However, this widespread adoption has raised concerns regarding the security and privacy of user data within these apps. This study investigates the security and privacy risks associated with ten top-ranked Android health and fitness apps, a set which accounts for 237 million downloads. By utilizing tools such as MobSF, Qualys SSL, and CLAUDETTE, we performed a static, dynamic, server-side, and privacy policy analysis in order to gain comprehensive insights into the security and privacy posture of the investigated mobile health and fitness apps. The results from the analysis revealed vulnerabilities in coding practices, hardcoded sensitive information, insecure encryption configurations, misconfiguration, and extensive domain communication. For instance, our analysis revealed that all apps stored their database API key directly in the code, with eight apps additionally exposing the database URL. Furthermore, six apps employed insecure encryption methods, such as CBC mode with PKCS5/PKCS7 padding (five apps) and ECB mode (two apps).In total, the apps interacted with 404 distinct domains. Notably, two apps communicated with more than 230 domains each, while a third app connected with over 100 domains. Despite these findings, developers demonstrated improved awareness and proficiency in addressing privacy and security risks compared to previous studies in the field. The study underscores the importance of continuous research to comprehensively understand the security and privacy landscape of health and fitness apps.

With the increasing use of the Internet, new challenges are presented to employees in the workplace. Employees spend time during work hours on non-work related activities including visiting e-commerce Websites, managing personal email accounts, and engaging in e-banking. These types of actions in the workplace are known as cyberslacking. Cyberslacking affects the employees’ productivity, presents legal concerns, and undermines the security of the organization’s network. This research study addressed the problem of cyberslacking in the public sector, by assessing the ethical severity of cyberslacking activities, as well as how employees perceived that the frequency of such activities occurred by their co-workers. Participants from public sector agencies were asked to report about their amount of time spent and frequency of cyberslacking, what they report about their co-workers’ amount of time spent and frequency of cyberslacking, as well as their perceived ethical severity of cyberslacking in the workplace. First, an expert panel, of 10 cybersecurity subject matter experts, was used to initially validate the instrument, followed by quantitative data collection. This study assessed the measures via a Web-based anonymous survey. Following pre-analysis data screening, this study used a combination of descriptive statistics, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), as well as Ordinal Logistics Regression (OLR) and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analyses to address the research questions (RQs). Comparisons of the measures were also conducted. Results from 183 participants indicate that employees report their co-workers to engage in cyberslacking significantly higher than what they reported about themselves, and ethical severity of cyberslacking was not reported to be high. The problem of personal misuse of the Internet in the workplace was the focal point of this research study. The Internet facilitates productive communication in the workplace. However, it also poses a significant challenge to employees given its availability to enable non-work related activities. As such, it was necessary to examine both the perceptions about the ethical severity of IS misuse in the workplace and the actual self reported amount of cyberslacking by employees, compared to what they claim their co- workers are engaged in, especially in the public sector. Finally, this research study attempted to contribute to the Information Systems body of knowledge by empirically identifying the aforementioned relationships. Discussions and implications for future research are provided.

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is extensively used in various multifactor authentication protocols. In this work, various recent ECC based authentication and key exchange protocols are subjected to threat modeling and static analysis to detect vulnerabilities, and to enhance them to be more secure against threats. This work demonstrates how currently used ECC based protocols are vulnerable to attacks. If protocols are vulnerable, damages could include critical data loss and elevated privacy concerns. The protocols considered in thiswork differ in their usage of security factors (e.g. passwords, pins, and biometrics), encryption and timestamps. The threatmodel considers various kinds of attacks including denial of service, man in the middle, weak authentication and SQL injection. Countermeasures to reduce or prevent such attacks are suggested. Beyond cryptanalysis of current schemes and proposal of new schemes, the proposed adversary model and criteria set forth provide a benchmark for the systematic evaluation of future two-factor authentication proposals.

The Internet of Things is deploying large numbers of bare-metal systems that have no protection against memory corruption and control-flow hijacking attacks. These attacks have enabled unauthorized entry to hotel rooms, malicious control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and invasions of privacy. Using static and dynamic analysis these systems can utilize state-of-the-art testing techniques to identify and<br>prevent memory-corruption errors and employ defenses against memory corruption and control-flow hijacking attacks in bare-metal systems that match or exceed those currently employed on desktop systems. This is shown using three case studies.<br><br>(1) EPOXY which, automatically applies data execution prevention, diversity, stack defenses, and separating privileged code from unprivileged code using a novel<br>technique called privileged overlaying. These protections prevent code injection attacks, and reduce the number of privileged instruction to 0.06% verses an unprotected<br>application.<br><br>(2) Automatic Compartments for Embedded Systems (ACES), which automatically creates compartments that enforce data integrity and code isolation within bare-metal applications. ACES enables exploring policies to best meet security and performance requirements for individual applications. Results show ACES' can form 10s of compartments within a single thread and has a 15% runtime overhead on average.<br><br><div>(3) HALucinator breaks the requirement for specialized hardware to perform bare-metal system testing. This enables state-of-the-art testing techniques –e.g., coverage based fuzzing – to scale with the availability of commodity computers, leading to the discovery of exploitable vulnerabilities in bare-metal systems. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Combined, these case studies advance the security of embedded system several decades and provide essential protections for today’s connected devices.</div>

Com a tecnologia digital, as redes de comunicação têm sido de fundamental importância para o bom funcionamento das subestações de energia elétrica. Criado em 2002, o padrão IEC 61850 busca harmonizar a diversidade de equipamentos e fabricantes, e possibilitar a integração de dados para que o máximo de benefícios possa ser extraído. Nesse contexto, o protocolo GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event), pertinente ao padrão IEC 61850, é um datagrama multicast concebido para funcionar na rede local ou de longa distância que interliga as subestações de energia elétrica. Nos ambientes de longa distância, o tráfego de dentro para fora, e vice-versa, deveria passar por um firewall. Porém, a tecnologia de firewall atual não é capaz de inspecionar as mensagens GOOSE reais ou originadas a partir de um ataque, e afeta o tempo de transferência das mesmas, que, no enlace de comunicação, não deve exceder 5ms. Dessa forma, o objetivo deste trabalho é desenvolver um firewall em hardware reconfigurável, por meio da plataforma NetFPGA, de modo que o incremento no tempo de propagação de uma mensagem GOOSE, Tipo 1A (Trip), ao transpor o dispositivo de segurança, não ultrapasse 20% do tempo total destinado ao enlace de comunicação. Por ter a capacidade de ser um acelerador, construído por meio de hardware reconfigurável FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), a NetFPGA conduz enlaces Gigabit, e torna possível examinar e estabelecer regras iniciais de autorização ou negação para o tráfego de mensagens GOOSE, manipulando os campos do quadro ISO/IEC 8802-3. O incremento no tempo máximo de propagação de uma mensagem com 1518 bytes foi de 77,39 &#956;s, com 77,38 &#956;s de tempo médio. Um algoritmo de criptografia e outro de autenticação também foram testados e mensagens falsas não conseguiram transpor o firewall. No momento atual da pesquisa, concluiu-se que o firewall em NetFPGA, pertinente ao conjunto de recursos de hardware e software destinados a garantir a segurança de uma rede, é capaz de rejeitar mensagens GOOSE falsas e fornecer segurança aos dispositivos ativos de uma subestação, sem atrasos adicionais superiores a 1ms. / With the digital technology, the communication networks have been of fundamental importance for the good performance of power substations. Created in 2002, the IEC 61850 standard seeks for harmonization of the different equipment and manufacturers, enabling the integration of data for maximum performance. In this context, the GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event) message, concerning the IEC 61850 standard, is a multicast datagram, designed to operate in LAN or WAN that connects power substations. In the long-distance environment, the propagation time in the communication link must not exceed 5ms. The current firewall technology is not able to differ true GOOSE messages from the ones originated from an attack, and it affects the transfer time of messages. The objective of this research is to develop a reconfigurable firewall hardware, using the NetFPGA platform, so that the increase in propagation time of a GOOSE message, Type 1A (Trip), does not exceed 20% of the total time allocated to the link communication. Due to the ability of NetFPGA of being an accelerator, and having been built by using reconfigurable FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) leading to Gigabit links, it was possible to examine and establish initial rules of authorization or denial of GOOSE messages by manipulating some of the fields from the table ISO/IEC 8802-3. The increase in the maximum propagation time of a message of 1518 bytes was 77.39 &#956;s, with the average of 77.38 &#956;s. Fake messages failed to cross the firewall. Results from a process of authentication and encryption were also presented. At the present study, it has been concluded that the firewall using NetFPGA, concerning the hardware and software in order to ensure the security of a network, is able to reject false GOOSE messages and provide security to devices of a power substation without time increments greater than 1ms.

Com a tecnologia digital, as redes de comunicação têm sido de fundamental importância para o bom funcionamento das subestações de energia elétrica. Criado em 2002, o padrão IEC 61850 busca harmonizar a diversidade de equipamentos e fabricantes, e possibilitar a integração de dados para que o máximo de benefícios possa ser extraído. Nesse contexto, o protocolo GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event), pertinente ao padrão IEC 61850, é um datagrama multicast concebido para funcionar na rede local ou de longa distância que interliga as subestações de energia elétrica. Nos ambientes de longa distância, o tráfego de dentro para fora, e vice-versa, deveria passar por um firewall. Porém, a tecnologia de firewall atual não é capaz de inspecionar as mensagens GOOSE reais ou originadas a partir de um ataque, e afeta o tempo de transferência das mesmas, que, no enlace de comunicação, não deve exceder 5ms. Dessa forma, o objetivo deste trabalho é desenvolver um firewall em hardware reconfigurável, por meio da plataforma NetFPGA, de modo que o incremento no tempo de propagação de uma mensagem GOOSE, Tipo 1A (Trip), ao transpor o dispositivo de segurança, não ultrapasse 20% do tempo total destinado ao enlace de comunicação. Por ter a capacidade de ser um acelerador, construído por meio de hardware reconfigurável FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), a NetFPGA conduz enlaces Gigabit, e torna possível examinar e estabelecer regras iniciais de autorização ou negação para o tráfego de mensagens GOOSE, manipulando os campos do quadro ISO/IEC 8802-3. O incremento no tempo máximo de propagação de uma mensagem com 1518 bytes foi de 77,39 &#956;s, com 77,38 &#956;s de tempo médio. Um algoritmo de criptografia e outro de autenticação também foram testados e mensagens falsas não conseguiram transpor o firewall. No momento atual da pesquisa, concluiu-se que o firewall em NetFPGA, pertinente ao conjunto de recursos de hardware e software destinados a garantir a segurança de uma rede, é capaz de rejeitar mensagens GOOSE falsas e fornecer segurança aos dispositivos ativos de uma subestação, sem atrasos adicionais superiores a 1ms. / With the digital technology, the communication networks have been of fundamental importance for the good performance of power substations. Created in 2002, the IEC 61850 standard seeks for harmonization of the different equipment and manufacturers, enabling the integration of data for maximum performance. In this context, the GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event) message, concerning the IEC 61850 standard, is a multicast datagram, designed to operate in LAN or WAN that connects power substations. In the long-distance environment, the propagation time in the communication link must not exceed 5ms. The current firewall technology is not able to differ true GOOSE messages from the ones originated from an attack, and it affects the transfer time of messages. The objective of this research is to develop a reconfigurable firewall hardware, using the NetFPGA platform, so that the increase in propagation time of a GOOSE message, Type 1A (Trip), does not exceed 20% of the total time allocated to the link communication. Due to the ability of NetFPGA of being an accelerator, and having been built by using reconfigurable FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) leading to Gigabit links, it was possible to examine and establish initial rules of authorization or denial of GOOSE messages by manipulating some of the fields from the table ISO/IEC 8802-3. The increase in the maximum propagation time of a message of 1518 bytes was 77.39 &#956;s, with the average of 77.38 &#956;s. Fake messages failed to cross the firewall. Results from a process of authentication and encryption were also presented. At the present study, it has been concluded that the firewall using NetFPGA, concerning the hardware and software in order to ensure the security of a network, is able to reject false GOOSE messages and provide security to devices of a power substation without time increments greater than 1ms.

In order to develop secure Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is vital that security isconsidered throughout the development process. However, this is not enough as vulnerabledevices still making it to the open market. To try and solve this issue, this thesis presentsa structured methodology for performing security analysis of IoT platforms. The presented methodology is based on a black box perspective, meaning that theanalysis starts without any prior knowledge of the system. The aim of the presentedmethodology is to obtain information in such a way as to recreate the system design fromthe implementation. In turn, the recreated system design can be used to identify potentialvulnerabilities. Firstly the potential attack surfaces are identified, which the methodology calls inter-faces. These interfaces are the point of communication or interaction between two partsof a system. Secondly, since interfaces do not exist in isolation, the surrounding contextsin which these interfaces exist in are identified. Finally the information processed by theseinterfaces and their contexts are analyzed. Once the information processed by the iden-tified interfaces in their respective contexts are analysed, a risk assessment is performedbased on this information. The methodology is evaluated by performing an analysis of the IKEA “TRÅDFRI”smart lighting platform. By analysing the firmware update process of the IKEA “TRÅD-FRI” platform it can be concluded that the developers have used standardized protocolsand standardized cryptographic algorithms and use these to protect devices from ma-licious firmware. The analysis does however find some vulnerabilities, even though thedevelopers have actively taken steps to protect the system.

A cyber-security problem is a conflict-resolution scenario that typically consists of a security system and at least two decision makers (e.g. attacker and defender) that can each have competing objectives. In this thesis, we are interested in cyber-security problems where one decision maker has superior or better information. Game theory is a well-established mathematical tool that can be used to analyze such problems and will be our tool of choice. In particular, we will formulate cyber-security problems as stochastic games with asymmetric information, where game-theoretic methods can then be applied to the problems to derive optimal policies for each decision maker. A severe limitation of considering optimal policies is that these policies are computationally prohibitive. We address the complexity issues by introducing methods, based on the ideas of model predictive control, to compute suboptimal polices. Specifically, we first prove that the methods generate suboptimal policies that have tight performance bounds. We then show that the suboptimal polices can be computed by solving a linear program online, and the complexity of the linear program remains constant with respect to the game length. Finally, we demonstrate how the suboptimal policy methods can be applied to cyber-security problems to reduce the computational complexity of forecasting cyber-attacks.

Security is one of the major issues in any network and on the Internet. It encapsulates many different areas, such as protecting individual users against intruders, protecting corporate systems against damage, and protecting data from intrusion. It is obviously impossible to make a network totally secure, as there are so many areas that must be protected. This thesis includes an evaluation of current techniques for internal misuse of computer systems, and tries to propose a new way of dealing with this problem. This thesis proposes that it is impossible to fully protect a computer network from intrusion, and shows how different methods are applied at differing levels of the OSI model. Most systems are now protected at the network and transport layer, with systems such as firewalls and secure sockets. A weakness, though, exists in the session layer that is responsible for user logon and their associated password. It is thus important for any highly secure system to be able to continually monitor a user, even after they have successfully logged into the system. This is because once an intruder has successfully logged into a system, they can use it as a stepping-stone to gain full access (often right up to the system administrator level). This type of login identifies another weakness of current intrusion detection systems, in that they are mainly focused on detecting external intrusion, whereas a great deal of research identifies that one of the main problems is from internal intruders, and from staff within an organisation. Fraudulent activities can often he identified by changes in user behaviour. While this type of behaviour monitoring might not be suited to most networks, it could be applied to high secure installations, such as in government, and military organisations. Computer networks are now one of the most rapidly changing and vulnerable systems, where security is now a major issue. A dynamic approach, with the capacity to deal with and adapt to abrupt changes, and be simple, will provide an effective modelling toolkit. Analysts must be able to understand how it works and be able to apply it without the aid of an expert. Such models do exist in the statistical world, and it is the purpose of this thesis to introduce them and to explain their basic notions and structure. One weakness identified is the centralisation and complex implementation of intrusion detection. The thesis proposes an agent-based approach to monitor the user behaviour of each user. It also proposes that many intrusion detection systems cannot cope with new types of intrusion. It thus applies Bayesian statistics to evaluate user behaviour, and predict the future behaviour of the user. The model developed is a unique application of Bayesian statistics, and the results show that it can improve future behaviour prediction than existing ARIMA models. The thesis argues that the accuracy of long-term forecasting questionable, especially in systems that have a rapid and often unexpected evolution and behaviour. Many of the existing models for prediction use long-term forecasting, which may not be the optimal type for intrusion detection systems. The experiments conducted have varied the number of users and the time interval used for monitoring user behaviour. These results have been compared with ARIMA, and an increased accuracy has been observed. The thesis also shows that the new model can better predict changes in user behaviour, which is a key factor in identifying intrusion detection. The thesis concludes with recommendations for future work, including how the statistical model could be improved. This includes research into changing the specification of the design vector for Bayesian. Another interesting area is the integration of standard agent communication agents, which will make the security agents more social in their approach and be able to gather information from other agents