Thesis (MComm)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Enterprise mobility is emerging as a megatrend in the business world. Numerous risks originate from using mobile devices for business-related tasks and most of these risks pose a significant security threat to organisations’ information. Organisations should therefore apply due care during the process of governing the significant enterprise mobility security risks to ensure an effective process to mitigate the impact of these risks. Information technology (IT) governance frameworks, -models and -standards can provide guidance during this governance process to address enterprise mobility security risks on a strategic level. Due to the existence of the IT gap these risks are not effectively governed on an operational level as the IT governance frameworks, -models and -standards do not provide enough practical guidance to govern these risks on a technical, operational level. This study provides organisations with practical, implementable guidance to apply during the process of governing these risks in order to address enterprise mobility security risks in an effective manner on both a strategic and an operational level. The guidance given to organisations by the IT governance frameworks, -models and -standards can, however, lead to the governance process being inefficient and costly. This study therefore provides an efficient and cost-effective solution, in the form of a short list of best practices, for the governance of enterprise mobility security risks on both a strategic and an operational level. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Ondernemingsmobiliteit kom deesdae as ‘n megatendens in die besigheidswêreld te voorskyn. Talle risiko's ontstaan as gevolg van die gebruik van mobiele toestelle vir sake-verwante take en meeste van hierdie risiko's hou 'n beduidende sekuriteitsbedreiging vir organisasies se inligting in. Organisasies moet dus tydens die risikobestuursproses van wesenlike mobiliteit sekuriteitsrisiko’s die nodige sorg toepas om ‘n doeltreffende proses te verseker ten einde die impak van hierdie risiko’s te beperk. Informasie tegnologie (IT)- risikobestuurraamwerke, -modelle en -standaarde kan op ‘n strategiese vlak leiding gee tydens die risikobestuursproses waarin mobiliteit sekuriteitsrisiko’s aangespreek word. As gevolg van die IT-gaping wat bestaan, word hierdie risiko’s nie effektief op ‘n operasionele vlak bestuur nie aangesien die ITrisikobestuurraamwerke, -modelle en -standaarde nie die nodige praktiese leiding gee om hierdie risiko’s op ‘n tegniese, operasionele vlak te bestuur nie. Om te verseker dat organisasies mobiliteit sekuriteitsrisiko’s op ‘n effektiewe manier op beide ‘n strategiese en operasionele vlak bestuur, verskaf hierdie studie praktiese, implementeerbare leiding aan organisasies wat tydens die bestuursproses van hierdie risiko’s toegepas kan word. Die leiding aan organisasies, soos verskaf in die IT-risikobestuurraamwerke, - modelle en -standaarde, kan egter tot’n ondoeltreffende en duur risikobestuursproses lei. Hierdie studie bied dus 'n doeltreffende, koste-effektiewe oplossing, in die vorm van 'n kort lys van beste praktyke, vir die bestuur van die mobiliteit sekuriteitsrisiko’s op beide 'n strategiese en 'n operasionele vlak.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Technology: Information Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / This thesis focuses on the development of an enhanced innovative secure mobile Internet voting system architecture that offers desirable security requirements to theoretically mitigate some of the intrinsic administrative and logistical challenges of voting, inter alia lack of mobility support for voters, voter inconvenience, election misconduct, and possible voter coercion often associated with the conventional poll-site voting system. Systems in existence have tended to revolve around the need to provide ubiquitous voting, but lack adequate control mechanism to address, in particular, the important security requirement of controlling possible coercion in ubiquitous voting. The research work reported in this thesis improves upon a well-developed Sensus reference architecture. It does so by leveraging the auto-coupling capability of near field communication, as well as the intrinsic merits of global positioning system, voice biometric authentication, and computational intelligence techniques. The leveraging of the combination of these features provides a theoretical mitigation of some of the security challenges inherent in electoral systems previously alluded to. This leveraging also offers a more pragmatic approach to ensuring high level, secure, mobile Internet voting such as voter authentication. Experiments were performed using spectral features for realising the voice biometric based authentication of the system architecture developed. The spectral features investigated include Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Mel-frequency Discrete Wavelet Coefficients (MFDWC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC), and Spectral Histogram of Oriented Gradients (SHOG). The MFCC, MFDWC and LPCC usually have higher dimensions that oftentimes lead to high computational complexity of the pattern matching algorithms in automatic speaker authentication systems. In this study, higher dimensions of each of the features were reduced per speaker using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) algorithm, while neural network ensemble was utilised as the pattern-matching algorithm. Out of the four spectral features investigated, the LPCC-HOG gave the best statistical results with an R statistic of 0.9257 and Mean Square Error of 0.0361. These compact LPCC-HOG features are highly promising for implementing the authentication module of the secure mobile Internet voting system architecture reported in this thesis. / D

A Research Project Abstract submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Science in Engineering [Electrical]: Telecommunications at the University Of The Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 07 June 2016 / Utilities use Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems as their industrial control system. The architecture of these systems in the past was based on them being isolated from other networks. Now with recent ever changing requirements of capabilities from these systems there is a need to converge with information technology systems and with the need to have these industrial networks communicating on packet switched networks there are cyber security concerns that come up. This research project looks at the whether using encryption in an IP/MPLS core network for SCADA in an OT IT environment has an effect on the performance requirements. This was done through an experimental simulation with the results recorded. The research project also looks at the key literature study considerations. The key research question for the research project of this MSc 50/50 mini-thesis is “whether using encryption in SCADA systems, the services performance requirements are still met in OT/ IT environment over an MPLS core network”? The research project seeks to determine if SCADA performance requirements are met over an encrypted MPLS/IP core network in an OT/IT environment. The key focus area of the research project is only encryption in the whole cyber security value chain versus SCADA services performances. This means that the research project only focused on the encryption portion of the whole cyber security value chain and the scope did not focus on other aspects of the value chain. This suffices for an MSc 50/50 mini-thesis research project as a focus on the whole value chain would require a full MSc thesis. Thus the primary objective for the research project is to research and demonstrate that encryption is essential for secure SCADA communication over a MPLS/IP core network. As aforementioned encryption forms an essential part of the Cyber Security value chain which has to achieve the following objectives. Confidentiality: ensuring that the information source is really from that source. Integrity: ensuring that the information has not been altered in any way. Availability: ensuring that system is not comprised but that it is available. These objectives of encryption should be met with SCADA service performance requirements not violated which is the objective of the research project. / M T 2016

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>

This dissertation presents the results of research that led to the development of a novel reputation and trust-based monitoring paradigm for secure and reliable computing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs have undergone tremendous technological advances over the last few years. They have caused a giant leap toward "proactive computing," a paradigm where computers anticipate human needs and, when necessary, act on their behalf. Therefore, we cannot deploy such a critical technology without first addressing the security and privacy challenges to ensure that it does not turn against those whom it is meant to benefit. The core application of WSNs is to detect and report events, be it military or civilian applications. The building blocks of a WSN are small, battery-powered, lowcost, self-contained devices called "sensors" that measure factors like light, temperature, pressure, vibration, motion, etc. A WSN usually consists of hundreds of thousands of sensors that operate in unattended, hostile territories to monitor a given geographical area. Once deployed, the wireless sensors self-organize into ad-hoc wireless networks in order to cope with the dynamics of the surveillance field. During the post deployment phase, the wireless sensors aggregate data, then process and generate a report, which is subsequently relayed from one sensor to the next using secure multi-hop routing until the data reaches its desired destination, which is usually the sink. Since sensors operate in unattended and hostile territories, the adversary can capture a sensor node physically and extract all the information stored onboard, including cryptographic keying material. With this unique situation, WSNs are subject to a unique attack referred to as an "Insider Attack," in which the adversary becomes a legitimate member of the network being represented by the captured node. / To overcome this unique situation, a distributed Reputation and Trust-based Monitoring System (RTMS) is required. The most critical contribution of this dissertation work has been the proposal and design of a novel, clique-based, distributed group-key establishment protocol with specific application to RTMSs. We have also proposed and evaluated the application of RTMS models for securing beacon-based localization in WSNs addressing information asymmetry attacks, and proposed a novel k-parent tree model for securing broadcast communication in WSNs with an underlying RTMS model. Other issues addressed in this dissertation work include the proposal of a Connected Dominating Set (CDS) based reputation dissemination and bootstrapping model. This model also enables secure, certificateless node mobility and enables the model to be robust to ID Spoofing and node replication attacks. / by Avinash Srinivasan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Many emerging mobile networks aim to provide wireless network services without relying on any infrastructure. The main challenge in these networks comes from their self-organized and distributed nature. There is an inherent reliance on collaboration among the participants in order to achieve the aimed functionalities. Therefore, establishing and quantifying trust, which is the driving force for collaboration, is important for applications in mobile networks. This dissertation focuses on evaluating and quantifying trust to stimulate collaboration in mobile networks, introducing uncertainty concepts and metrics, as well as providing the various analysis and applications of uncertainty-aware reputation systems. Many existing reputation systems sharply divide the trust value into right or wrong, thus ignoring another core dimension of trust: uncertainty. As uncertainty deeply impacts a node's anticipation of others' behavior and decisions during interaction, we include it in the reputation system. Specifically, we use an uncertainty metric to directly reflect a node's confidence in the sufficiency of its past experience, and study how the collection of trust information may affect uncertainty in nodes' opinions. Higher uncertainty leads to higher transaction cost and reduced acceptance of communication. We exploit mobility to efficiently reduce uncertainty and to speed up trust convergence. We also apply the new reputation system to enhance the analysis of the interactions among mobile nodes, and present three sample uncertainty-aware applications. We integrate the uncertainty-aware reputation model with game theory tools, and enhance the analysis on interactions among mobile nodes. / Instead of reactively protecting the mobile networks from existing attacks as in the traditional security paradigms, the analysis in this dissertation gives more insights on nodes' rationality in the interaction, which will enable the mechanism design in mobile networks to be security and incentive compatible. Moreover, we present three sample applications, in which we clearly identify the challenges, specifically formalize the problems, and cleverly employ the uncertainty mitigation schemes. These applications show that the uncertainty definition and mitigation schemes can benefit a broad range of applications, including fields such as security, network services, and routing. / by Feng Li. / Vita. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis consists of the development of a web based wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring system using smartphones. Typical WSNs consist of networks of wireless sensor nodes dispersed over predetermined areas to acquire, process, and transmit data from these locations. Often it is the case that the WSNs are located in areas too hazardous or inaccessible to humans. We focused on the need for access to this sensed data remotely and present our reference architecture to solve this problem. We developed this architecture for web-based wireless sensor network monitoring and have implemented a prototype that uses Crossbow Mica sensors and Android smartphones for bridging the wireless sensor network with the web services for data storage and retrieval. Our application has the ability to retrieve sensed data directly from a wireless senor network composed of Mica sensors and from a smartphones onboard sensors. The data is displayed on the phone's screen, and then, via Internet connection, they are forwarded to a remote database for manipulation and storage. The attributes sensed and stored by our application are temperature, light, acceleration, GPS position, and geographical direction. Authorized personnel are able to retrieve and observe this data both textually and graphically from any browser with Internet connectivity or through a native Android application. Web-based wireless sensor network architectures using smartphones provides a scalable and expandable solution with applicability in many areas, such as healthcare, environmental monitoring, infrastructure health monitoring, border security, and others. / by Anthony M. Marcus. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

O caráter privativo das informações de saúde, reconhecido e valorizado desde a antigüidade clássica, hoje é considerado como um dos fatores indispensáveis à manutenção da sociedade, das garantias constitucionais de liberdade e também, em última instância, à própria democracia. Essa importância é demonstrada pela existência do segredo profissional, que, para as profissões da área da saúde (como medicina, odontologia, psicologia, nutrição etc.) de um modo positivo, coloca aos profissionais a necessidade de se guardar segredo a respeito de todas as informações sobre as quais adquire-se conhecimento no exercício de suas profissões. No Brasil, a questão da manutenção do segredo profissional das profissões de saúde adquire um caráter dramático quando se leva em consideração a implementação da Troca de Informações em Saúde Suplementar por parte da Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, autarquia especial que regula o setor de saúde suplementar. Pretendendo facilitar a troca de informações entre prestadores de serviços e operadoras, e também permitir e homogeneizar a obtenção de informação para o estabelecimento de políticas públicas, a Troca de Informações em Saúde Suplementar já é realizada desde 2008, envolvendo todas as informações de saúde de mais de 52 milhões de beneficiários. A utilização de tecnologias de troca de informação e a criação de bancos de dados, associados a um histórico de vazamento de dados sensíveis, criam dúvidas sobre a manutenção do segredo profissional e o caráter privado das informações de saúde. Neste trabalho, foi analisada a legislação estruturante da Troca de Informações em Saúde Suplementar no que diz respeito aos requisitos de segurança para a troca e armazenamento de informação sensível com o intuito de verificar se essa legislação supre, de modo eficaz, a exigência de proteção à manutenção do caráter privativo das informações de saúde que existe nos Códigos de Ética Profissionais e no Código Civil Brasileiro. Apesar das exigências para a segurança das informações ser, hoje, adequada à manutenção do segredo profissional enquanto essas informações são trocadas ou encontram-se armazenadas nas operadoras de planos de saúde, a norma se fia nos requisitos estabelecidos por um órgão privado cujas prioridades, naturalmente, podem, no futuro, não estar vinculadas exclusivamente ao maior bem social. Ademais, não se observa na legislação uma atenção ou recomendações dedicadas ao profissional em consultório isolado e que armazena os dados de seus pacientes em computadores pessoais previamente ao envio via internet. Além disso, em consultas realizadas à ANS em agosto e setembro de 2009 a respeito dos dados transmitidos pelas operadoras à Agência para o cumprimento do disposto nos artigos 20 e 32 da lei 9656/98, não se obteve resposta a respeito de quais dados são repassados pelas operadoras à ANS, nem sobre quais os padrões de segurança a que estes dados estão submetidos, nem, tampouco, sobre quais os indivíduos que têm acesso a estes dados, indicando falta da necessária transparência que é essencial a uma autarquia regulatória de um setor de interesse social. Estes fatos indicam claramente que a manutenção do segredo profissional está em risco nas atuais condições. / Health information is valued and recognized as sensible and private since ancient times. It is also considered one of the most important factors in maintaining and supporting the fabric of society, the constitutional guarantee of liberty and also, democracy itself. Health professionals have the duty to keep all their patients information private. In Brazil, this acquires a dramatic character when one considers the recently implemented Information Exchange in Suplementary Health (TISS) by the Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, governments regulating bureau for the suplementary health sector. Intending to facilitate the information exchange between service providers and health operators, and also to standardize the process of obtaining and providing information for policy makers, the Information Exchange has been in use since 2008 and involves identifiable health information of more than 52 million users. Technologies to allow health information exchange and the creation of data banks associated with sensible information data leaks raise doubts over the ability to keep health information safe from prying eyes. In this study, the structural legislation of the Information Exchange in Suplementary Health was analysed regarding the safety requirements proposed for the health information exchange and storage, to verify if it addresses the demand that exists in professional codes of ethics and also in Brazils Código Civil to protect the privacy of health information. Although - by todays standards - the requirements for information security are deemed adequate for the safekeeping and in addressing the need for privacy and security while the information is exchanged or stored by the health plans operators, theres no dedicated attention to recomendations for the professionals on their small practice offices, who hold their patients information on their personal computers. Also, the law establishes that a private agency is responsible for dictating the requirements that keep the information safe, a measure that is not entirely risk-safe as the interests of the private sector may shift with the market, leaving the social needs/interests behind. Besides these facts, when consulting the Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar in august and september 2009 regarding what kind of data is transmitted by the Health Plans operators and what kind of security measures are undertaken to protect this data, no answer was obtained, indicating a lack of transparency that is apalling in a regulatory bureau that serves the society. These facts clearly indicate that the maintenance of professional secrecy and patient privacy is threatened in current conditions. Keywords: computer systems security management, professional secrecy, information accountability, Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar (Brazil)

This research addresses communication security in the highly constrained wireless sensor environment. The goal of the research is twofold: (1) to develop a key management scheme that provides these constrained systems with the basic security requirements and evaluate its effectiveness in terms of scalability, efficiency, resiliency, connectivity, and flexibility, and (2) to implement this scheme on an appropriate routing platform and measure its efficiency. / The proposed key management scheme is called Hierarchical Key Establishment Scheme (HIKES). In HIKES, the base station, acting as the central trust authority, empowers randomly selected sensors to act as local trust authorities, authenticating on its behalf the cluster members and issuing to them all secret keys necessary to secure their communications. HIKES uses a novel key escrow scheme that enables any sensor node selected as a cluster head to generate all the cryptographic keys needed to authenticate other sensors within its cluster. This scheme localizes secret key issuance and reduces the communication cost with the base station. The key escrow scheme also provides the HIKES with as large an addressing mechanism as needed. HIKES also provides a one-step broadcast authentication mechanism. HIKES provides entity authentication to every sensor in the network and is robust against most known attacks. We propose a hierarchical routing mechanism called Secure Hierarchical Energy-Efficient Routing protocol (SHEER). SHEER implements HIKES, which provides the communication security from the inception of the network. SHEER uses a probabilistic broadcast mechanism and a three-level hierarchical clustering architecture to improve the network energy performance and increase its lifetime. / Simulation results have shown that HIKES provides an energy-efficient and scalable solution to the key management problem. Cost analysis shows that HIKES is computationally efficient and has low storage requirement. Furthermore, high degree of address flexibility can be achieved in HIKES. Therefore, this scheme meets the desired criteria set forth in this work. Simulation studies also show that SHEER is more energy-efficient and has better scalability than the secure version of LEACH using HIKES. / by Jamil Ibriq. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2007. / Includes bibliography. / Also available in print. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2007. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This work presents the implementation of the the IEEE 1609.2 WAVE Security Services Standard. This implementation provides the ability to generate a message signature, along with the capability to verify that signature for wave short messages transmitted over an unsecured medium. Only the original sender of the message can sign it, allowing for the authentication of a message to be checked. As hashing is used during the generation and verification of signatures, message integrity can be verified because a failed signature verification is a result of a compromised message. Also provided is the ability to encrypt and decrypt messages using AES-CCM to ensure that sensitive information remains safe and secure from unwanted recipients. Additionally this implementation provides a way for the 1609.2 specific data types to be encoded and decoded for ease of message transmittance. This implementation was built to support the Smart Drive initiative’s VANET testbed, supported by the National Science Foundation and is intended to run on the Vehicular Multi-technology Communication Device (VMCD) that is being developed. The VMCD runs on the embedded Linux operating system and this implementation will reside inside of the Linux kernel. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection