{"title":"Commentary : Cloud computing – A security problem or solution?","authors":"P.G. Dorey , A. Leite","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The move to cloud computing is the next stage of an unstoppable trend in the breakdown of the enterprise perimeter, both technically and organisationally. This new paradigm presents a number of security challenges that still need to be resolved but sufficient change in the IT environment has already happened - so that most organisations are working in a transitional state where security exploits are happening across the enterprise boundary. In this situation, the compartmentalisation introduced by migrating to cloud services could result in much improved security.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 3","pages":"Pages 89-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.08.004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114134649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Socio-technological phishing prevention","authors":"Gaurav Gupta, Josef Pieprzyk","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Phishing is deceptive collection of personal information leading to embezzlement, identity theft, and so on. Preventive and combative measures have been taken by banking institutions, software vendors, and network authorities to fight phishing. At the forefront of this resilience are consortiums such as APWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group) and PhishTank, the latter being a collaborative platform where everyone can submit potentially phishing web-pages and classify web-pages as either phish or genuine. PhishTank also has an API that the browsers use to notify users when she tries to load a phishing page. There are some organizations and individuals who are very active and highly accurate in classifying web-pages on PhishTank. In this paper, we propose a defense model that uses these experts to fight phishing.</p></div><div><h3>Categories and subject descriptors</h3><p>Identity theft</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 67-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116751855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The threats of social networking: Old wine in new bottles?","authors":"George R.S. Weir , Fergus Toolan , Duncan Smeed","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Despite the many potential benefits to its users, social networking appears to provide a rich setting for criminal activities and other misdeeds. In this paper we consider whether the risks of social networking are unique and novel to this context. Having considered the nature and range of applications to which social networks may be applied, we conclude that there are no exploits or fundamental threats inherent to the social networking setting. Rather, the risks and associated threats treat this communicative and social context as an enabler for existing, long established and well-recognised exploits and activities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 38-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127648124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social networking searching and privacy issues","authors":"Man Qi, Denis Edgar-Nevill","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The explosion of social networking sites has not only changed the way people communicate, but also added a new dimension to the way for searching or investigating people. As users share a wide variety of information on social networking sites, concerns are growing about organisations’ access to personally identifiable data and users are increasingly worried about privacy on social network sites. The main threat with data gathering is not only from where gathering it, but also where it goes afterwards. Neither social network sites providers nor the governments have any way to effectively protect users against privacy violations. However, a variety of efforts need to be explored to change the situation. Social network sites should continue work to strengthen privacy settings. Laws and policies should be improved to regulate the social networking searching in its legality, necessity and proportionality.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 74-78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127534170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Real-time detection of children’s skin on social networking sites using Markov random field modelling","authors":"Mofakharul Islam, Paul A. Watters, John Yearwood","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Social networking sites are increasingly being used as the source for paedophiles to search for, download and exchange child exploitation images. Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) around the world face a difficult challenge to combat technologically-savvy paedophiles. In this paper, we propose a framework for detecting images containing children’s pictures in different poses, with the ultimate view of identifying and classifying images as corresponding to the COPINE scale. To achieve the goal of automatic detection, we present a novel stochastic vision model based on a Markov Random Fields (MRF) prior, which will employ a skin model and human affine-invariant geometric descriptor to detect and identify skin regions containing pornographic contexts.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 51-58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132547056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social networking as a nexus for engagement and exploitation of young people","authors":"Ethel Quayle , Max Taylor","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper addresses commonalities between two different forms of exploitation of young people – child abuse images and online solicitation and radicalisation. A number of areas of similarity are identified, and the implications of these commonalities are discussed. The role of social networking as a critical factor is particularly explored.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 44-50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123004072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bucket attack on numeric set watermarking model and safeguards","authors":"Gaurav Gupta , Josef Pieprzyk , Len Hamey","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Numeric set watermarking is a way to provide ownership proof for numerical data. Numerical data can be considered to be primitives for multimedia types such as images and videos since they are organized forms of numeric information. Thereby, the capability to watermark numerical data directly implies the capability to watermark multimedia objects and discourage information theft on social networking sites and the Internet in general. Unfortunately, there has been very limited research done in the field of numeric set watermarking due to underlying limitations in terms of number of items in the set and LSBs in each item available for watermarking. In 2009, Gupta et al. proposed a numeric set watermarking model that embeds watermark bits in the items of the set based on a hash value of the items’ most significant bits (MSBs). If an item is chosen for watermarking, a watermark bit is embedded in the least significant bits, and the replaced bit is inserted in the fractional value to provide reversibility. The authors show their scheme to be resilient against the traditional subset addition, deletion, and modification attacks as well as secondary watermarking attacks.</p><p>In this paper, we present a bucket attack on this watermarking model. The attack consists of creating buckets of items with the same MSBs and determine if the items of the bucket carry watermark bits. Experimental results show that the bucket attack is very strong and destroys the entire watermark with close to 100% success rate. We examine the inherent weaknesses in the watermarking model of Gupta et al. that leave it vulnerable to the bucket attack and propose potential safeguards that can provide resilience against this attack.</p></div><div><h3>Categories and subject descriptors</h3><p>[intellectual-property protection]</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 59-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.09.002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116224193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How much material on BitTorrent is infringing content? A case study","authors":"Paul A. Watters, Robert Layton, Richard Dazeley","doi":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.10.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.istr.2011.10.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>BitTorrent is a widely used protocol for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, including material which is often suspected to be infringing content. However, little systematic research has been undertaken to establish to measure the true extent of illegal file sharing. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for measuring the extent of infringing content. Our initial results indicate that at least 89.9% of files shared contain infringing content, with a replication study on another sample finding 97%. We discuss the limitations of the approach in this case study, including sampling biases, and outline proposals to further verify the results. The implications of the work vis-à-vis the management of piracy at the network level are discussed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":100669,"journal":{"name":"Information Security Technical Report","volume":"16 2","pages":"Pages 79-87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.istr.2011.10.001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129508915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}