The discipline of information security management is still in its infancy as evidenced by the lack of empirical scholarly work in this area. Most research within the information security domain focuses on specific technologies and algorithms and how it impacts the principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. But, an important area receiving little attention is the antecedents of effective information security management at the organizational level (Stanton, Guzman, Stam & Caldera, 2003). The little empirical research that has been conducted in this area has shown that information security management in many organizations is poor (Baskerville, 1993; Shimeall & McDermott, 1999). Several researchers have identified the need for methods to measure the organization-wide information security posture of organizations (Eloff & Von Solms, 2000; James, 1996). This dissertation attempts to measure the organization-wide information security posture by examining benchmark variables that assess role, planning orientation, and performance structure within the organization. Through this conceptualization of an organization's information security posture, a means is presented to measure overall information security and how it impacts the effective utilization of information security strategies. The presence of the dependent variable, effectiveness, gives academics and practitioners a success measure which can guide more effective decision making in the information security domain. An additional aim of this dissertation is to empirically examine the influence of management practices and decisions on effective use of information security strategies within the organization. The issues of centralization versus decentralization of information security activities will be evaluated along with its impact on information security posture of organizations and the effectiveness of the organization's information security strategies. Data was collected from 119 IT and information security executives. Results show that how the organization structures information security activities is not correlated with more effective utilization of information security strategies. Meanwhile, the organization's information security posture is significantly correlated with more effective utilization of information security strategies. The implications of this research is discussed.

Today's environment is filled with the proliferation of cyber-attacks that result in losses for organizations and individuals. Hackers often use compromised websites to distribute malware, making it difficult for individuals to detect. The impact of clicking through a link on the Internet that is malware infected can result in consequences such as private information theft and identity theft. Hackers are also known to perpetrate cyber-attacks that result in organizational security breaches that adversely affect organizations' finances, reputation, and market value. Risk management approaches for minimizing and recovering from cyber-attack losses and preventing further cyber-attacks are gaining more importance. Many studies exist that have increased our understanding of how individuals and organizations are motivated to reduce or avoid the risks of security breaches and cyber-attacks using safeguard mechanisms. The safeguards are sometimes technical in nature, such as intrusion detection software and anti-virus software. Other times, the safeguards are procedural in nature such as security policy adherence and security awareness and training. Many of these safeguards fall under the risk mitigation and risk avoidance aspects of risk management, and do not address other aspects of risk management, such as risk transfer. Researchers have argued that technological approaches to security risks are rarely sufficient for providing an overall protection of information system assets. Moreover, others argue that an overall protection must include a risk transfer strategy. Hence, there is a need to understand the risk transfer approach for managing information security risks. Further, in order to effectively address the information security puzzle, there also needs to be an understanding of the nature of the perpetrators of the problem – the hackers. Though hacker incidents proliferate the news, there are few theory based hacker studies. Even though the very nature of their actions presents a difficulty in their accessibility to research, a glimpse of how hackers perpetrate attacks can be obtained through the examination of their knowledge sharing behavior. Gaining some understanding about hackers through their knowledge sharing behavior may help researchers fine-tune future information security research. The insights could also help practitioners design more effective defensive security strategies and risk management efforts aimed at protecting information systems. Hence, this dissertation is interested in understanding the hackers that perpetrate cyber-attacks on individuals and organizations through their knowledge sharing behavior. Then, of interest also is how individuals form their URL click-through intention in the face of proliferated cyber risks. Finally, we explore how and why organizations that are faced with the risk of security breaches, commit to cyberinsurance as a risk management strategy. Thus, the fundamental research question of this dissertation is: how do individuals and organizations manage information security risks?

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A large portion of system breaches are caused by authentication failure either during the system login process or even in the post-authentication session, which is further related to the limitations associated with existing authentication approaches. Current authentication methods, whether proxy based or biometrics based, are hardly user-centric; and they either put burdens on users or endanger users' (biometric) security and privacy. In this research, we propose a biometrics based user-centric authentication approach. The main idea is to introduce a reference subject (RS) (for each system), securely fuse the user's biometrics with the RS, generate a BioCapsule (BC) (from the fused biometrics), and employ BCs for authentication. Such an approach is user-friendly, identity-bearing yet privacy-preserving, resilient, and revocable once a BC is compromised. It also supports "one-click sign on" across multiple systems by fusing the user's biometrics with a distinct RS on each system. Moreover, active and non-intrusive authentication can be automatically performed during the user's post-authentication on-line session. In this research, we also formally prove that the proposed secure fusion based BC approach is secure against various attacks and compare the new approach with existing biometrics based approaches. Extensive experiments show that the performance (i.e., authentication accuracy) of the new BC approach is comparable to existing typical biometric authentication approaches, and the new BC approach also possesses other desirable features such as diversity and revocability.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A wireless sensor network consists of lightweight nodes with a limited power source. They can be used in a variety of environments, especially in environments for which it is impossible to utilize a wired network. They are easy/fast to deploy. Nodes collect data and send it to a processing center (base station) to be analyzed, in order to detect an event and/or determine information/characteristics of the environment. The challenges for securing a sensor network are numerous. Nodes in this network have a limited amount of power, therefore they could be faulty because of a lack of battery power and broadcast faulty information to the network. Moreover, nodes in this network could be prone to different attacks from an adversary who tries to eavesdrop, modify or repeat the data which is collected by other nodes. Nodes may be mobile. There is no possibility of having a fixed infrastructure. Because of the importance of extracting information from the data collected by the sensors in the network there needs to be some level of security to provide trustworthy information. The goal of this thesis is to organize part of the network in an energy efficient manner in order to produce a suitable amount of integrity/security. By making nodes monitor each other in small organized clusters we increase security with a minimal energy cost. To increase the security of the network we use cryptographic techniques such as: public/ private key, manufacturer signature, cluster signature, etc. In addition, nodes monitor each other's activity in the network, we call it a "neighborhood watch" In this case, if a node does not forward data, or modifies it, and other nodes which are in their transmission range can send a claim against that node.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Derived from the field of art curation, digital provenance is an unforgeable record of a digital object's chain of successive custody and sequence of operations performed on the object. It plays an important role in accessing the trustworthiness of the object, verifying its reliability and conducting audit trails of its lineage. Digital provenance forms an immutable directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Since history of an object cannot be changed, once a provenance chain has been created it must be protected in order to guarantee its reliability. Provenance can face attacks against the integrity of records and the confidentiality of user information, making security an important trait required for digital provenance. The digital object and its associated provenance can have different security requirements, and this makes the security of provenance different from that of traditional data. Research on digital provenance has primarily focused on provenance generation, storage and management frameworks in different fields. Security of digital provenance has also gained attention in recent years, particularly as more and more data is migrated in cloud environments which are distributed and are not under the complete control of data owners. However, there still lacks a viable secure digital provenance scheme which can provide comprehensive security for digital provenance, particularly for generic and dynamic ones. In this work, we address two important aspects of secure digital provenance that have not been investigated thoroughly in existing works: 1) capturing the DAG structure of provenance and 2) supporting dynamic information sharing. We propose a scheme that uses signature-based mutual agreements between successive users to clearly delineate the transition of responsibility of the digital object as it is passed along the chain of users. In addition to preserving the properties of confidentiality, immutability and availability for a digital provenance chain, it supports the representation of DAG structures of provenance. Our scheme supports dynamic information sharing scenarios where the sequence of users who have custody of the document is not predetermined. Security analysis and empirical results indicate that our scheme improves the security of the typical secure provenance schemes with comparable performance.