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2021-01-15
Khalid, H., Woo, S. S..  2020.  OC-FakeDect: Classifying Deepfakes Using One-class Variational Autoencoder. 2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). :2794—2803.
An image forgery method called Deepfakes can cause security and privacy issues by changing the identity of a person in a photo through the replacement of his/her face with a computer-generated image or another person's face. Therefore, a new challenge of detecting Deepfakes arises to protect individuals from potential misuses. Many researchers have proposed various binary-classification based detection approaches to detect deepfakes. However, binary-classification based methods generally require a large amount of both real and fake face images for training, and it is challenging to collect sufficient fake images data in advance. Besides, when new deepfakes generation methods are introduced, little deepfakes data will be available, and the detection performance may be mediocre. To overcome these data scarcity limitations, we formulate deepfakes detection as a one-class anomaly detection problem. We propose OC-FakeDect, which uses a one-class Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to train only on real face images and detects non-real images such as deepfakes by treating them as anomalies. Our preliminary result shows that our one class-based approach can be promising when detecting Deepfakes, achieving a 97.5% accuracy on the NeuralTextures data of the well-known FaceForensics++ benchmark dataset without using any fake images for the training process.
2020-12-17
Abeykoon, I., Feng, X..  2019.  Challenges in ROS Forensics. 2019 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence Computing, Advanced Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing Communications, Cloud Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovation (SmartWorld/SCALCOM/UIC/ATC/CBDCom/IOP/SCI). :1677—1682.

The usage of robot is rapidly growth in our society. The communication link and applications connect the robots to their clients or users. This communication link and applications are normally connected through some kind of network connections. This network system is amenable of being attached and vulnerable to the security threats. It is a critical part for ensuring security and privacy for robotic platforms. The paper, also discusses about several cyber-physical security threats that are only for robotic platforms. The peer to peer applications use in the robotic platforms for threats target integrity, availability and confidential security purposes. A Remote Administration Tool (RAT) was introduced for specific security attacks. An impact oriented process was performed for analyzing the assessment outcomes of the attacks. Tests and experiments of attacks were performed in simulation environment which was based on Gazbo Turtlebot simulator and physically on the robot. A software tool was used for simulating, debugging and experimenting on ROS platform. Integrity attacks performed for modifying commands and manipulated the robot behavior. Availability attacks were affected for Denial-of-Service (DoS) and the robot was not listened to Turtlebot commands. Integrity and availability attacks resulted sensitive information on the robot.

Basheer, M. M., Varol, A..  2019.  An Overview of Robot Operating System Forensics. 2019 1st International Informatics and Software Engineering Conference (UBMYK). :1—4.
Autonomous technologies have been rapidly replacing the traditional manual intervention nearly in every aspect of our life. These technologies essentially require robots to carry out their automated processes. Nowadays, with the emergence of industry 4.0, robots are increasingly being remote-controlled via client-server connection, which creates uncommon vulnerabilities that allow attackers to target those robots. The development of an open source operational environment for robots, known as Robot Operating System (ROS) has come as a response to these demands. Security and privacy are crucial for the use of ROS as the chance of a compromise may lead to devastating ramifications. In this paper, an overview of ROS and the attacks targeting it are detailed and discussed. Followed by a review of the ROS security and digital investigation studies.
2020-09-04
Wu, Yan, Luo, Anthony, Xu, Dianxiang.  2019.  Forensic Analysis of Bitcoin Transactions. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). :167—169.
Bitcoin [1] as a popular digital currency has been a target of theft and other illegal activities. Key to the forensic investigation is to identify bitcoin addresses involved in bitcoin transfers. This paper presents a framework, FABT, for forensic analysis of bitcoin transactions by identifying suspicious bitcoin addresses. It formalizes the clues of a given case as transaction patterns defined over a comprehensive set of features. FABT converts the bitcoin transaction data into a formal model, called Bitcoin Transaction Net (BTN). The traverse of all bitcoin transactions in the order of their occurrences is captured by the firing sequence of all transitions in the BTN. We have applied FABT to identify suspicious addresses in the Mt.Gox case. A subgroup of the suspicious addresses has been found to share many characteristics about the received/transferred amount, number of transactions, and time intervals.
2020-08-28
Kommera, Nikitha, Kaleem, Faisal, Shah Harooni, Syed Mubashir.  2016.  Smart augmented reality glasses in cybersecurity and forensic education. 2016 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). :279—281.
Augmented reality is changing the way its users see the world. Smart augmented-reality glasses, with high resolution Optical Head Mounted display, supplements views of the real-world using video, audio, or graphics projected in front of user's eye. The area of Smart Glasses and heads-up display devices is not a new one, however in the last few years, it has seen an extensive growth in various fields including education. Our work takes advantage of a student's ability to adapt to new enabling technologies to investigate improvements teaching techniques in STEM areas and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency in teaching the new course content. In this paper, we propose to focus on the application of Smart Augmented-Reality Glasses in cybersecurity education to attract and retain students in STEM. In addition, creative ways to learn cybersecurity education via Smart Glasses will be explored using a Discovery Learning approach. This mode of delivery will allow students to interact with cybersecurity theories in an innovative, interactive and effective way, enhancing their overall live experience and experimental learning. With the help of collected data and in-depth analysis of existing smart glasses, the ongoing work will lay the groundwork for developing augmented reality applications that will enhance the learning experiences of students. Ultimately, research conducted with the glasses and applications may help to identify the unique skillsets of cybersecurity analysts, learning gaps and learning solutions.
2020-07-30
Bays, Jason, Karabiyik, Umit.  2019.  Forensic Analysis of Third Party Location Applications in Android and iOS. IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS). :1—6.
Location sharing applications are becoming increasingly common. These applications allow users to share their own locations and view contacts’ current locations on a map. Location applications are commonly used by friends and family members to view Global Positioning System (GPS) location of an individual, but valuable forensic evidence may exist in this data when stored locally on smartphones. This paper aims to discover forensic artifacts from two popular third-party location sharing applications on iOS and Android devices. Industry standard mobile forensic suites are utilized to discover if any locally stored data could be used to assist investigations reliant on knowing the past location of a suspect. Security issues raised regarding the artifacts found during our analysis is also discussed.
2020-07-27
Sudozai, M. A. K., Saleem, Shahzad.  2018.  Profiling of secure chat and calling apps from encrypted traffic. 2018 15th International Bhurban Conference on Applied Sciences and Technology (IBCAST). :502–508.
Increased use of secure chat and voice/ video apps has transformed the social life. While the benefits and facilitations are seemingly limitless, so are the asscoiacted vulnerabilities and threats. Besides ensuring confidentiality requirements for common users, known facts of non-readable contents over the network make these apps more attractive for criminals. Though access to contents of cryptograhically secure sessions is not possible, network forensics of secure apps can provide interesting information which can be of great help during criminal invetigations. In this paper, we presented a novel framework of profiling the secure chat and voice/ video calling apps which can be employed to extract hidden patterns about the app, information of involved parties, activities of chatting, voice/ video calls, status indications and notifications while having no information of communication protocol of the app and its security architecture. Signatures of any secure app can be developed though our framework and can become base of a large scale solution. Our methodology is considered very important for different cases of criminal investigations and bussiness intelligence solutions for service provider networks. Our results are applicable to any mobile platform of iOS, android and windows.
2020-07-06
Ben, Yongming, Han, Yanni, Cai, Ning, An, Wei, Xu, Zhen.  2019.  An Online System Dependency Graph Anomaly Detection based on Extended Weisfeiler-Lehman Kernel. MILCOM 2019 - 2019 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). :1–6.
Modern operating systems are typical multitasking systems: Running multiple tasks at the same time. Therefore, a large number of system calls belonging to different processes are invoked at the same time. By associating these invocations, one can construct the system dependency graph. In rapidly evolving system dependency graphs, how to quickly find outliers is an urgent issue for intrusion detection. Clustering analysis based on graph similarity will help solve this problem. In this paper, an extended Weisfeiler-Lehman(WL) kernel is proposed. Firstly, an embedded vector with indefinite dimensions is constructed based on the original dependency graph. Then, the vector is compressed with Simhash to generate a fingerprint. Finally, anomaly detection based on clustering is carried out according to these fingerprints. Our scheme can achieve prominent detection with high efficiency. For validation, we choose StreamSpot, a relevant prior work, to act as benchmark, and use the same data set as it to carry out evaluations. Experiments show that our scheme can achieve the highest detection precision of 98% while maintaining a perfect recall performance. Moreover, both quantitative and visual comparisons demonstrate the outperforming clustering effect of our scheme than StreamSpot.
2020-06-03
Cedillo, Priscila, Camacho, Jessica, Campos, Karina, Bermeo, Alexandra.  2019.  A Forensics Activity Logger to Extract User Activity from Mobile Devices. 2019 Sixth International Conference on eDemocracy eGovernment (ICEDEG). :286—290.

Nowadays, mobile devices have become one of the most popular instruments used by a person on its regular life, mainly due to the importance of their applications. In that context, mobile devices store user's personal information and even more data, becoming a personal tracker for daily activities that provides important information about the user. Derived from this gathering of information, many tools are available to use on mobile devices, with the restrain that each tool only provides isolated information about a specific application or activity. Therefore, the present work proposes a tool that allows investigators to obtain a complete report and timeline of the activities that were performed on the device. This report incorporates the information provided by many sources into a unique set of data. Also, by means of an example, it is presented the operation of the solution, which shows the feasibility in the use of this tool and shows the way in which investigators have to apply the tool.

Qawasmeh, Ethar, Al-Saleh, Mohammed I., Al-Sharif, Ziad A..  2019.  Towards a Generic Approach for Memory Forensics. 2019 Sixth HCT Information Technology Trends (ITT). :094—098.

The era of information technology has, unfortunately, contributed to the tremendous rise in the number of criminal activities. However, digital artifacts can be utilized in convicting cybercriminal and exposing their activities. The digital forensics science concerns about all aspects related to cybercrimes. It seeks digital evidence by following standard methodologies to be admitted in court rooms. This paper concerns about memory forensics for the unique artifacts it holds. Memory contains information about the current state of systems and applications. Moreover, an application's data explains how a criminal has been interacting the application just before the memory is acquired. Memory forensics at the application level is currently random and cumbersome. Targeting specific applications is what forensic researchers and practitioner are currently striving to provide. This paper suggests a general solution to investigate any application. Our solution aims to utilize an application's data structures and variables' information in the investigation process. This is because an application's data has to be stored and retrieved in the means of variables. Data structures and variables' information can be generated by compilers for debugging purposes. We show that an application's information is a valuable resource to the investigator.

Amato, Giuseppe, Falchi, Fabrizio, Gennaro, Claudio, Massoli, Fabio Valerio, Passalis, Nikolaos, Tefas, Anastasios, Trivilini, Alessandro, Vairo, Claudio.  2019.  Face Verification and Recognition for Digital Forensics and Information Security. 2019 7th International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS). :1—6.

In this paper, we present an extensive evaluation of face recognition and verification approaches performed by the European COST Action MULTI-modal Imaging of FOREnsic SciEnce Evidence (MULTI-FORESEE). The aim of the study is to evaluate various face recognition and verification methods, ranging from methods based on facial landmarks to state-of-the-art off-the-shelf pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), as well as CNN models directly trained for the task at hand. To fulfill this objective, we carefully designed and implemented a realistic data acquisition process, that corresponds to a typical face verification setup, and collected a challenging dataset to evaluate the real world performance of the aforementioned methods. Apart from verifying the effectiveness of deep learning approaches in a specific scenario, several important limitations are identified and discussed through the paper, providing valuable insight for future research directions in the field.

Khalaf, Rayan Sulaiman, Varol, Asaf.  2019.  Digital Forensics: Focusing on Image Forensics. 2019 7th International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS). :1—5.

The world is continuously developing, and people's needs are increasing as well; so too are the number of thieves increasing, especially electronic thieves. For that reason, companies and individuals are always searching for experts who will protect them from thieves, and these experts are called digital investigators. Digital forensics has a number of branches and different parts, and image forensics is one of them. The budget for the images branch goes up every day in response to the need. In this paper we offer some information about images and image forensics, image components and how they are stored in digital devices and how they can be deleted and recovered. We offer general information about digital forensics, focusing on image forensics.

2020-04-17
Zollner, Stephan, Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond, Le-Khac, Nhien-An.  2019.  An Automated Live Forensic and Postmortem Analysis Tool for Bitcoin on Windows Systems. IEEE Access. 7:158250—158263.

Bitcoin is popular not only with consumers, but also with cybercriminals (e.g., in ransomware and online extortion, and commercial online child exploitation). Given the potential of Bitcoin to be involved in a criminal investigation, the need to have an up-to-date and in-depth understanding on the forensic acquisition and analysis of Bitcoins is crucial. However, there has been limited forensic research of Bitcoin in the literature. The general focus of existing research is on postmortem analysis of specific locations (e.g. wallets on mobile devices), rather than a forensic approach that combines live data forensics and postmortem analysis to facilitate the identification, acquisition, and analysis of forensic traces relating to the use of Bitcoins on a system. Hence, the latter is the focus of this paper where we present an open source tool for live forensic and postmortem analysing automatically. Using this open source tool, we describe a list of target artifacts that can be obtained from a forensic investigation of popular Bitcoin clients and Web Wallets on different web browsers installed on Windows 7 and Windows 10 platforms.

2020-03-18
Zkik, Karim, Sebbar, Anass, Baadi, Youssef, Belhadi, Amine, Boulmalf, Mohammed.  2019.  An efficient modular security plane AM-SecP for hybrid distributed SDN. 2019 International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob). :354–359.

Software defined networks (SDNs) represent new centralized network architecture that facilitates the deployment of services, applications and policies from the upper layers, relatively the management and control planes to the lower layers the data plane and the end user layer. SDNs give several advantages in terms of agility and flexibility, especially for mobile operators and for internet service providers. However, the implementation of these types of networks faces several technical challenges and security issues. In this paper we will focus on SDN's security issues and we will propose the implementation of a centralized security layer named AM-SecP. The proposed layer is linked vertically to all SDN layers which ease packets inspections and detecting intrusions. The purpose of this architecture is to stop and to detect malware infections, we do this by denying services and tunneling attacks without encumbering the networks by expensive operations and high calculation cost. The implementation of the proposed framework will be also made to demonstrate his feasibility and robustness.

2020-03-09
Flores, Denys A., Jhumka, Arshad.  2019.  Hybrid Logical Clocks for Database Forensics: Filling the Gap between Chain of Custody and Database Auditing. 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE). :224–231.
Database audit records are important for investigating suspicious actions against transactional databases. Their admissibility as digital evidence depends on satisfying Chain of Custody (CoC) properties during their generation, collection and preservation in order to prevent their modification, guarantee action accountability, and allow third-party verification. However, their production has relied on auditing capabilities provided by commercial database systems which may not be effective if malicious users (or insiders) misuse their privileges to disable audit controls, and compromise their admissibility. Hence, in this paper, we propose a forensically-aware distributed database architecture that implements CoC properties as functional requirements to produce admissible audit records. The novelty of our proposal is the use of hybrid logical clocks, which compared with a previous centralised vector-clock architecture, has evident advantages as it (i) allows for more accurate provenance and causality tracking of insider actions, (ii) is more scalable in terms of system size, and (iii) although latency is higher (as expected in distributed environments), 70 per cent of user transactions are executed within acceptable latency intervals.
2020-02-24
Brotsis, Sotirios, Kolokotronis, Nicholas, Limniotis, Konstantinos, Shiaeles, Stavros, Kavallieros, Dimitris, Bellini, Emanuele, Pavué, Clément.  2019.  Blockchain Solutions for Forensic Evidence Preservation in IoT Environments. 2019 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft). :110–114.
The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks, emerge as areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.
2020-02-17
Thomopoulos, Stelios C. A..  2019.  Maritime Situational Awareness Forensics Tools for a Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE). 2019 4th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech). :1–5.
CISE stands for Common Information Sharing Environment and refers to an architecture and set of protocols, procedures and services for the exchange of data and information across Maritime Authorities of EU (European Union) Member States (MS's). In the context of enabling the implementation and adoption of CISE by different MS's, EU has funded a number of projects that enable the development of subsystems and adaptors intended to allow MS's to connect and make use of CISE. In this context, the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) has led the development of the corresponding Hellenic and Cypriot CISE by developing a Control, Command & Information (C2I) system that unifies all partial maritime surveillance systems into one National Situational Picture Management (NSPM) system, and adaptors that allow the interconnection of the corresponding national legacy systems to CISE and the exchange of data, information and requests between the two MS's. Furthermore, a set of forensics tools that allow geospatial & time filtering and detection of anomalies, risk incidents, fake MMSIs, suspicious speed changes, collision paths, and gaps in AIS (Automatic Identification System), have been developed by combining motion models, AI, deep learning and fusion algorithms using data from different databases through CISE. This paper briefly discusses these developments within the EU CISE-2020, Hellenic CISE and CY-CISE projects and the benefits from the sharing of maritime data across CISE for both maritime surveillance and security. The prospect of using CISE for the creation of a considerably rich database that could be used for forensics analysis and detection of suspicious maritime traffic and maritime surveillance is discussed.
2019-10-15
Saleh, Z., Mashhour, A..  2018.  Using Keystroke Authentication Typing Errors Pattern as Non-Repudiation in Computing Forensics. 2018 International Conference on Innovation and Intelligence for Informatics, Computing, and Technologies (3ICT). :1–6.
Access to information and data is becoming an essential part of nearly every aspect of modern business operation. Unfortunately, accessing information systems comes with increased chances of intrusion and unauthorized access. Acquiring and maintaining evidence from a computer or networks in the current high-tech world is essential in any comprehensive forensic investigation. Software and hardware tools are used to easily manage the evidence and view all relevant files. In an effort to enhance computer access security, keystroke authentication, is one of the biometric solutions that were proposed as a solution for enhancing users' identification. This research proposes using user's keystroke errors to determine guilt during forensics investigations, where it was found that individuals keystroke patters are repeatable and variant from those of others, and that keystroke patterns are impossible to steal or imitate. So, in this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of relying on ``user's mistakes'' as another behavioral biometric keystroke dynamic.
2019-08-26
Mavroeidis, V., Vishi, K., Jøsang, A..  2018.  A Framework for Data-Driven Physical Security and Insider Threat Detection. 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). :1108–1115.

This paper presents PSO, an ontological framework and a methodology for improving physical security and insider threat detection. PSO can facilitate forensic data analysis and proactively mitigate insider threats by leveraging rule-based anomaly detection. In all too many cases, rule-based anomaly detection can detect employee deviations from organizational security policies. In addition, PSO can be considered a security provenance solution because of its ability to fully reconstruct attack patterns. Provenance graphs can be further analyzed to identify deceptive actions and overcome analytical mistakes that can result in bad decision-making, such as false attribution. Moreover, the information can be used to enrich the available intelligence (about intrusion attempts) that can form use cases to detect and remediate limitations in the system, such as loosely-coupled provenance graphs that in many cases indicate weaknesses in the physical security architecture. Ultimately, validation of the framework through use cases demonstrates and proves that PS0 can improve an organization's security posture in terms of physical security and insider threat detection.

2019-07-01
Senthivel, Saranyan, Dhungana, Shrey, Yoo, Hyunguk, Ahmed, Irfan, Roussev, Vassil.  2018.  Denial of Engineering Operations Attacks in Industrial Control Systems. Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy. :319–329.
We present a new type of attack termed denial of engineering operations in which an attacker can interfere with the normal cycle of an engineering operation leading to a loss of situational awareness. Specifically, the attacker can deceive the engineering software during attempts to retrieve the ladder logic program from a programmable logic controller (PLC) by manipulating the ladder logic on the PLC, such that the software is unable to process it while the PLC continues to execute it successfully. This attack vector can provide sufficient cover for the attacker»s actual scenario to play out while the owner tries to understand the problem and reestablish positive operational control. To enable the forensic analysis and, eventually, eliminate the threat, we have developed the first decompiler for ladder logic programs. Ladder logic is a graphical programming language for PLCs that control physical processes such as power grid, pipelines, and chemical plants; PLCs are a common target of malicious modifications leading to the compromise of the control behavior (and potentially serious consequences). Our decompiler, Laddis, transforms a low-level representation to its corresponding high-level original representation comprising of graphical symbols and connections. The evaluation of the accuracy of the decompiler on the program of varying complexity demonstrates perfect reconstruction of the original program. We present three new attack scenarios on PLC-deployed ladder logic and demonstrate the effectiveness of the decompiler on these scenarios.
Rasin, A., Wagner, J., Heart, K., Grier, J..  2018.  Establishing Independent Audit Mechanisms for Database Management Systems. 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST). :1-7.

The pervasive use of databases for the storage of critical and sensitive information in many organizations has led to an increase in the rate at which databases are exploited in computer crimes. While there are several techniques and tools available for database forensic analysis, such tools usually assume an apriori database preparation, such as relying on tamper-detection software to already be in place and the use of detailed logging. Further, such tools are built-in and thus can be compromised or corrupted along with the database itself. In practice, investigators need forensic and security audit tools that work on poorlyconfigured systems and make no assumptions about the extent of damage or malicious hacking in a database.In this paper, we present our database forensics methods, which are capable of examining database content from a storage (disk or RAM) image without using any log or file system metadata. We describe how these methods can be used to detect security breaches in an untrusted environment where the security threat arose from a privileged user (or someone who has obtained such privileges). Finally, we argue that a comprehensive and independent audit framework is necessary in order to detect and counteract threats in an environment where the security breach originates from an administrator (either at database or operating system level).

2019-05-08
Ning, W., Zhi-Jun, L..  2018.  A Layer-Built Method to the Relevancy of Electronic Evidence. 2018 2nd IEEE Advanced Information Management,Communicates,Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IMCEC). :416–420.

T138 combat cyber crimes, electronic evidence have played an increasing role, but in judicial practice the electronic evidence were not highly applied because of the natural contradiction between the epistemic uncertainty of electronic evidence and the principle of discretionary evidence of judge in the court. in this paper, we put forward a layer-built method to analyze the relevancy of electronic evidence, and discussed their analytical process combined with the case study. The initial practice shows the model is feasible and has a consulting value in analyzing the relevancy of electronic evidence.

Barni, M., Stamm, M. C., Tondi, B..  2018.  Adversarial Multimedia Forensics: Overview and Challenges Ahead. 2018 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO). :962–966.

In recent decades, a significant research effort has been devoted to the development of forensic tools for retrieving information and detecting possible tampering of multimedia documents. A number of counter-forensic tools have been developed as well in order to impede a correct analysis. Such tools are often very effective due to the vulnerability of multimedia forensics tools, which are not designed to work in an adversarial environment. In this scenario, developing forensic techniques capable of granting good performance even in the presence of an adversary aiming at impeding the forensic analysis, is becoming a necessity. This turns out to be a difficult task, given the weakness of the traces the forensic analysis usually relies on. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the advances made over the last decade in the field of adversarial multimedia forensics. We first consider the view points of the forensic analyst and the attacker independently, then we review some of the attempts made to simultaneously take into account both perspectives by resorting to game theory. Eventually, we discuss the hottest open problems and outline possible paths for future research.

2019-04-05
Huang, M. Chiu, Wan, Y., Chiang, C., Wang, S..  2018.  Tor Browser Forensics in Exploring Invisible Evidence. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC). :3909-3914.
Given the high frequency of information security incidents, feeling that we may soon become innocent victims of these events may be justified. Perpetrators of information security offenses take advantage of several methods to leave no evidence of their crimes, and this pattern of hiding tracks has caused difficulties for investigators searching for digital evidence. Use of the onion router (Tor) is a common way for criminals to conceal their identities and tracks. This paper aims to explain the composition and operation of onion routing; we conduct a forensic experiment to detect the use of the Tor browser and compare several browser modes, including incognito and normal. Through the experimental method described in this paper, investigators can learn to identify perpetrators of Internet crimes, which will be helpful in future endeavors in digital forensics.
2019-02-22
Anderson, Ross.  2018.  Covert and Deniable Communications. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security. :1-1.

At the first Information Hiding Workshop in 1996 we tried to clarify the models and assumptions behind information hiding. We agreed the terminology of cover text and stego text against a background of the game proposed by our keynote speaker Gus Simmons: that Alice and Bob are in jail and wish to hatch an escape plan without the fact of their communication coming to the attention of the warden, Willie. Since then there have been significant strides in developing technical mechanisms for steganography and steganalysis, with new techniques from machine learning providing ever more powerful tools for the analyst, such as the ensemble classifier. There have also been a number of conceptual advances, such as the square root law and effective key length. But there always remains the question whether we are using the right security metrics for the application. In this talk I plan to take a step backwards and look at the systems context. When can stegosystems actually be used? The deployment history is patchy, with one being Trucrypt's hidden volumes, inspired by the steganographic file system. Image forensics also find some use, and may be helpful against some adversarial machine learning attacks (or at least help us understand them). But there are other contexts in which patterns of activity have to be hidden for that activity to be effective. I will discuss a number of examples starting with deception mechanisms such as honeypots, Tor bridges and pluggable transports, which merely have to evade detection for a while; then moving on to the more challenging task of designing deniability mechanisms, from leaking secrets to a newspaper through bitcoin mixes, which have to withstand forensic examination once the participants come under suspicion. We already know that, at the system level, anonymity is hard. However the increasing quantity and richness of the data available to opponents may move a number of applications from the deception category to that of deniability. To pick up on our model of 20 years ago, Willie might not just put Alice and Bob in solitary confinement if he finds them communicating, but torture them or even execute them. Changing threat models are historically one of the great disruptive forces in security engineering. This leads me to suspect that a useful research area may be the intersection of deception and forensics, and how information hiding systems can be designed in anticipation of richer and more complex threat models. The ever-more-aggressive censorship systems deployed in some parts of the world also raise the possibility of using information hiding techniques in censorship circumvention. As an example of recent practical work, I will discuss Covertmark, a toolkit for testing pluggable transports that was partly inspired by Stirmark, a tool we presented at the second Information Hiding Workshop twenty years ago.