Theme: New threats and defences

Over the last few years, many of the Internet security nightmare scenarios have become true: government-sanctioned cyber attacks, total surveillance, man in the middle on every connection, online bank robberies etc. Is it possible to cope with the new and heightened threats? What are the real issues? How can be old defense mechanisms be adapted to the current security situation, or do we need new ones? We invite the students and tutors to think about these questions, and about other recent developments in network and computer security. As always, the purpose of the annual theme is to provide inspiration, and other security, cryptography and privacy related topics.

Topics:

1. Internet topology - Tutor: Aapo Kalliola
2. Internet Census 2012 - Tutor: Aapo Kalliola
3. Anonymous communications in monitored Internet - Tutor: Aapo Kalliola
4. Security Service Level Agreement (SLA) - Orchestration for cloud Services. - Tutor: Abu Shohel Ahmed
5. Security Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics for cloud Services - Tutor: Abu Shohel Ahmed
6. Implicit certificates and their use to secure the Internet of Thing - Tutor: Andrei Gurtov
7. Study on Cryptographic DB - Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko
8. SQL over ICN - Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko
9. Security aspects of Bluetooth Low Energy - Tutor: Di Francesco Mario
10. Authentication and access control in pervasive scenarios - Tutor: Di Francesco Mario
11. Third-party authentication and social web applications: the OAuth case - Tutor: Di Francesco Mario
12. Relay attacks on NFC and its countermeasures - Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar
13. SSL/TLS session aware user authentication - Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar
14. Possible alternatives to the SSL/TLS protocol - Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar / Mohit Sethi
15. Living under total surveillance - Tutor: Tuomas Aura
16. Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin (topic A) - Tutor: Markku Antikainen
17. Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin (topic B) - Tutor: Markku Antikainen
18. Context-aware security: Estimating device proximity with ambient audio - Tutor: Markku Antikainen
19. Cryptographic Tools for Building Verifiable Cloud Computing - Tutor: Yan Zheng
20. Privacy Preserving Data Mining (RESERVED) - Tutor: Yan Zheng
21. Secure authorization for services - Tutor: Sanna Suoranta
22. Citizen identities and strong identification - Tutor: Sanna Suoranta
23. Digital Traces as sources of privacy vulnerability - Tutor: Sanja Šćepanović
24. Security problems with electric vehicles (EVs) - Tutor: Jukka Nurminen

Topics by Aapo Kalliola

1. Internet topology

While huge amounts of data travel through the internet every second our understanding of the topology of the internet is quite limited and not always up to date.

The purpose of this topic is to analyse existing research concerning the structure of the internet and available network topology datasets. A successful analysis could result in an understanding of what blind spots our current understanding may still contain, and observe the skewing limitations of available datasets.

In addition the security implications of increased interconnectivity have not been exhaustively discussed. New routing attack problems may have risen while increased redundancy should improve the resiliency of the network.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Aapo Kalliola

2. Internet Census 2012

During 2012 anonymous researchers infected a large number of vulnerable embedded devices, thus creating the Carna botnet. This botnet was subsequently used to scan the whole IPv4 address space and the resulting dataset was made publicly available. While unethically gathered, this dataset remains rather interesting.

The purpose of this topic is to survey the published research that is based on this dataset and the techniques and tools used in analysing a dataset of several terabytes.

In addition to examining existing work and practises some novel analysis should also be done using the dataset.

References:

1. http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html
2. http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/355417,353436-exposed-zte-devices-found-in-net-census.aspx

Tutor: Aapo Kalliola

3. Anonymous communications in monitored Internet

Recent news paint a stark picture of the status of anonymity in the Internet. Large governmental organizations have the capability to monitor and analyse Internet traffic at a huge scale making the concept of total surveillance seem like a real possibility in the context of data communications.

The purpose of this topic is to examine the recent revelations about surveillance programs and analyse them together with more well-established methods of surveillance such as the Chinese Golden Shield Project. Additionally, you may be interested in presenting ways to reclaim some of the anonymity lost to government surveillance.

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying

Tutor: Aapo Kalliola

Topics by Abu Shohel Ahmed

4. Security Service Level Agreement (SLA) - Orchestration for cloud Services.

Service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between service providers and consumers. SLA has couple of main characteristics 1) enforceable, 2) measurable and 3) violation causes penalties.

From the technical perspective, SLA's are constraint over system metrics and those constrains needs to be satisfied at all stages during execution of a customers job. The same argument is true for security SLA in which an orchestrator must fulfill constraints over security metrics to provision a job in a cloud environment. Now considering cloud as a container of resources with varying grades of security, the problem is to assign and provision a customer's job to a resource, which fulfils constraints. Here minimization of cost is always an objective from the customer perspective. As a simple example use case, cloud provider A has three backup services with two security grade (SG1, SG2) assigned to the backup services as (SG1, SG2, SG2) and associated cost as (C1, C2, C3). The objective is to find a backup service to store user data. The selected backup service should meet the customer's constraints over security metrics and minimize the overall cost. This type of problem is also known as constraint based resource allocation.

The objective of this work is to understand to what extent constraint solver can be used during service orchestration in relation to constraint over security metrics. In addition to that, higher achieving student can model a simple scenario using any popular constraint solver tool, for example [4].

References:

1. Evdoxia Spyropoulou et. al. , Anteon Corporation, Calculating Costs for Quality of Security Service (2000). In 15th Computer Security Applications Conference
2. Reijo M. Savola et.al., A visualization and modeling tool for security metrics and measurements management, Information Security South Africa (ISSA), 2011
3. Dragan et.al. . Constraint-Based Runtime Prediction of SLA Violations in Service Orchestrations, Service-Oriented Computing - Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 7084, 2011, pp 62-76
4. Numberjack

Tutor: Abu Shohel Ahmed

5. Security Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics for cloud Services.

Service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between service providers and consumers. SLA has couple of main characteristics 1) enforceable, 2) measurable, and 3) violation causes penalties. Traditionally, in the cloud context, SLA's are defined for QoS metrics such as availability, and average response time. The core of any SLA is to find suitable metrics, which are measurable and easy to collect from the system. Accordingly to measure security, we need to identify measurable security metrics. Shirlei et.al. [6] has presented metrics for security management services. In their work, they have defined metrics based on security objective (SO) of a particular service. Yan Sun et.al. [4] has presented a mechanism for quantifying quality of protection parameters (QoP) of a system. They have used normalized weighted tree to measure the quality of protection. Common Criteria [5], a standard for computer security certification of a product, defines a process for assurance of product security. Despite all these efforts, there are still challenges to define reliable and measurable security metrics. For example, are service specific security parameters such as 'password ageing' or generic parameters such as 'high security', 'medium security' are meaningful in the cloud context.

The objective of this work is to understand security metrics of various granularity levels and present what type of metrics is better suited for different scenarios. To make the scope clear, we can focus on scenarios such as (e.g., an IaaS node, a SaaS Application, or an IDM application). Higher achieving student can also focus on composition and aggregation of lower level metrics to form a composite metrics.

References:

1. Evdoxia Spyropoulou et. al , Anteon Corporation, Calculating Costs for Quality of Security Service (2000). In 15th Computer Security Applications Conference
2. Reijo M. Savola et.al., A visualization and modeling tool for security metrics and measurements management, Information Security South Africa (ISSA), 2011
3. RondaHenning, Security service level agreements: quantifiable security for the enterprise?, Proceedings of the 1999 workshop on New security paradigms
4. Yan Sun et.al., Quality-of-Protection (QoP): A Quantitative Methodology to Grade Security Services, Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 2008.
5. The Common Criteria
6. Shirlei et.al.,SLA Perspective in Security Management for Cloud Computing, 6th International Conference on Networking and Services, IEEE (2010).

Tutor: Abu Shohel Ahmed

Topic by Andrei Gurtov

6. Implicit certificates and their use to secure the Internet of Thing

Implicit certificates have been proposed as an alternative to bulky X.509 PKI certificates. Their use is especially sound for light devices, such as sensors, in the upcoming Internet-of-things. In combination with ECC, implicit certificates can propose a good security solution even for constraint devices. The topic of this assignment is to make a survey and history of implicit certificate development such as ECQV, analyse their pros and cons, and make suggestions on the use in future Internet.

References:

1. http://www.certicom.com/index.php/explaining-implicit-certificate
2. http://www.secg.org/download/aid-775/sec4-ECQV-v091.pdf

Tutor: Andrei Gurtov

Topics by Andrey Lukyanenko

7. Study on Cryptographic DB

We know that dominant online services and companies are using SQL to keep the client databases. In order to provide fast access to the data, the data is kept unsecured and completely accessible for local users (database username/password normally controls access and if logged in the user can view/change/modify anything it wants). That threat includes many vulnerabilities such as SQL inject, when machine which has root access to the database implement unwanted SQL-queries, full data access by database management personal, cypher-attacks, and so on. This topics is about one of the recent technologies that tries to hide data (encrypt it) from local administrators and unwanted parties -- CryptDB. Here the student has to study the protocol, explain the idea and compare the SQL operations with CryptDB analogs. Not every operation is possible when the data is Encrypted and special interest of this topic is to study what tradeoff should be made to make the data more encrypted.

References:

1. Cryptographic treatment of CryptDB's Adjustable Join, Report, 2012.
2. CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing, SOSP'11.
3. CryptDB: A Practical Encrypted Relational DBMS.

Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko

8. SQL over ICN

ICN (information-centric networking) has many benefits, out of which the dominating is, most likely, security. The data is encrypted, self-certified and published. The data can be accessed by subscribers any given moment of time by the data id and decrypted. Now assume that we decide to encrypt the data, but instead of storing it somewhere in the network, we will keep it different databases across the globe. We know that the data is encrypted and can be understood only by those who have the key for the data. However, if we think about such ICN architecture as a substitute for traditional server-based storage, then we need to think about efficiency. Assume, the storage owners not always have the key to decrypt that data. The subscriber wants to get some latest update for the data, in order to get the most appropriate data the subscriber have to be able to perform itself an SQL query or ask 3rd party which has access to data or part of the data, to perform the query.

This topic is exactly about construction of structure of such queries in ICN environment. Student have to suggest a solution or vision for SQL over ICN architecture and compare pros/cons of it over traditional SQL/No-SQL datastore access.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko

Topics by Di Francesco Mario

9. Security aspects of Bluetooth Low Energy

Version 4.0 of the Bluetooth specifications includes a new short-range wireless communication technology known as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Bluetooth SMART. The diffusion of BLE has recently been very fast as smartphones (e.g., the iPhone) and smart objects (e.g., sport sensors) have started being equipped with BLE transceivers. The design goals of BLE include low cost and low energy consumption of devices. As a consequence, some security mechanisms of Bluetooth classic were redesigned in to reduce their complexity. The impact of these changes on the security of communications with BLE is still unclear.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn the essential features of the BLE protocol stack; analyze the security features of the communication between BLE devices; analyze possible security issues in the protocol specification and propose solutions to overcome them.

References:

1. Robin Heydon, "Bluetooth low energy: the developer's handbook", Prentice Hall, 2013
2. Tomasz Rosa, "Bypassing Passkey Authentication in Bluetooth Low Energy", IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2013/309, May 2013
3. Mike Ryan, "How Smart Is Bluetooth Smart?", ShmooCon 2013

Tutor: Di Francesco Mario

10. Authentication and access control in pervasive scenarios

Technological advances and the widespread adoption of both smart objects and personal devices, such as smartphones and PDAs, are making pervasive systems a reality. Different from traditional scenarios related to network and computers, the concept of security in pervasive systems has a different scope. In fact, it is deeply linked to contextual information (e.g., activity and location or proximity) rather than to identity.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn the basic concepts of pervasive systems; review the approaches for authentication and access control in such scenarios; characterize the pitfalls of current systems and propose solutions to improve their security.

References:

1. Mahadev Satyanarayanan, "Pervasive computing: vision and challenges", IEEE Personal Communications, 8(4):10-17, August 2001
2. Roy Campbell, Jalal Al-Muhtadi, Prasad Naldurg, Geetanjali Sampemane, M. Dennis Mickunas, "Towards Security and Privacy for Pervasive Computing", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2609:1-15, 2003

Tutor: Di Francesco Mario

11. Third-party authentication and social web applications: the OAuth case

Online social networks (OSNs) have recently become extremely popular. As a consequence, several web applications are exploiting social features made available by OSNs. Among those features, delegated authorization is the most widely used, wherein a third-party website exploits OSN user credentials to provide its own services. Currently, most of OSNs use OAuth for authorization purposes. However, delegated authorization poses some risks to security and privacy. Specifically, the original version (1.0) of OAuth had a security flaw, and there is still ongoing debate about the security of the most recent (2.0) version of the specifications.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn about authentication and authorization mechanisms used by OSNs; understand the security features of the OAuth specifications; review the weaknesses of the OAuth delegate authorization mechanism and propose solutions to overcome them.

References:

1. Moo Nam Ko, G.P. Cheek, M. Shehab, and R. Sandhu, "Social-Networks Connect Services", IEEE Computer, 43(8):37-43, August 2010
2. OAuth, "Security Advisories"
3. R. Paul, "Compromising Twitter's OAuth security system", Ars Technica, September 10, 2010

Tutor: Di Francesco Mario

Topics by Sandeep Tamrakar

12. Relay attacks on NFC and its countermeasures

NFC allows any two NFC-enabled devices to communicate with each other by bringing them close together or simply by touching each other a distance of less than 10 cm. NFC has been widely used in applications such as public transport, payments, identification etc. NFC relies on proximity smart card specifications ISO 14443 and ISO 18092 for low-level data exchange. These specifications do not provide any encryption mechanisms to secure NFC communication. Similarly, higher layer NFC data exchange format (NDEF) and simple NDEF exchange protocol (SNEP) defined by NFC forum do not define any security mechanisms besides NDEF signatures for integrity of the NDEF messages. Although short communication range of NFC minimizes attacks on data being exchanged over NFC, the communication end-points may be prone to various attacks. For example, during an NFC communication, a malicious end-point can steal all the user information from the mobile phone of a user.

One major threats to NFC communication is a relay attack where an adversary manipulates the communication by relaying the messages between two NFC devices. For example, an NFC device presenting itself as a contactless payment card to a POS terminal forwards all messages received from the terminal to another NFC device which is in close proximity of a real card. These proxy NFC devices collaborates to make a payment from the card without the card being present at the proximity of the POS terminal. Further, the card owner may be unaware of such attack. The purpose of this work is to explore relay attacks on different modes of NFC and study ways to mitigate such attacks, e.g. using distance bound protocols.

References:

1. Francis, Lishoy, et al. "Practical NFC peer-to-peer relay attack using mobile phones." Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 35-49.
2. S. Brands and D. Chaum. Distance-Bounding Protocols. In EUROCRYPT'93, vol. 765 of LNCS, pp 344{359, May 1993. Springer.

Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar

13. SSL/TLS session aware user authentication

SSL/TLS is one of the widely used cryptographic protocol in everyday Internet. These protocols are designed to provide communication security over the Internet by encrypting the network traffic between the communication end points. Nevertheless, SSL/TLS is susceptible to man in the middle attacks where an attacker tricks a user trying to connect to a server and establishes independent connections with the user and the server. MITM attack allows the attacker to receive all the messages from the user, modify them, forward them to the server and vise versa.

Many Internet based applications establish SSL/TLS connection to protect the communication channel with the client prior to the user authentication procedure. However, the user authentication procedure does not include any information about the state of the SSL/TLS session which makes it hard to detect any MITM attack in within the SSL/TLS session. The purpose of this work is to study different SSL/TLS extensions and authentication protocols and explore how SSL/TLS session information can be integrated into the user authentication procedure.

References:

1. Keying Material Exporters for Transport Layer Security (TLS)
2. Oppliger, Rolf, Ralf Hauser, and David Basin. "SSL/TLS session-aware user authentication–Or how to effectively thwart the man-in-the-middle." Computer Communications 29.12 (2006): 2238-2246.

Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar

14. Possible alternatives to the SSL/TLS protocol

SSL/TLS is one of the widely used cryptographic protocol in everyday Internet. These protocols are designed to provide communication security over the Internet by encrypting the network traffic between the communication end points. Recently there have been many attacks against the SSL/TLS protocol, such as BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS), CRIME, LUCKY 13 etc., which target various weakness at different phases of SSL/TLS connection establishments. The goal of this work is to study different possible alternatives to the SSL/TLS protocol, their current state of development and analyse security threats in comparison to the SSL/TLS protocol.

Note: It is also possible to work on SSL/TLS for resource constrained devices.

References:

1. Two new attacks on SSL decrypt authentication cookies
2. Datagram Transport Layer Security
3. Google QUIC
4. CurveCP: Usable security for the Internet

Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar / Mohit Sethi

Topic by Tuomas Aura

15. Living under total surveillance

Criminals have, for many years, tried to infect computers with stealth malware, mainly to turn the computers into bots under their command and to steal user credentials for criminal purposes. After the discovery of Stuxnet, the creation of exploits and malware has become a legitimate commercial business supported by major states and taught in universities. Thus, it is increasingly difficult to be sure that a computer is clean of key loggers and other spy mechanisms. Moreover, the shift towards cloud services and online storage obviously exposes user data to surveillance, at least by advertisers and spy agencies. Recently, it was revealed that spy agencies like NSA are able to inject backdoors into most popular software products, enabling them to break cryptographic protection of Internet communication. Thus, the end-user computers, online services and network connections are all vulnerable to unwanted access. The goal of this seminar project is to create an overall picture of how an individual person, a business or a small country can best protect itself against the risks of surveillance.

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

Tutor: Tuomas Aura

Topics by Markku Antikainen

16. Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin (Topic A)

Bitcoin is an anonymous electronic currency that is independent of national banks and, in fact, has no single issuer. Instead, its security is based on distributed bookkeeping in a P2P network. A limited number of coins is issued over time as rewards for solving brute-force computing puzzles. The current value of Bitcoin money supply is about one billion dollars, and coins can be exchanged for other currencies.

The goal of this seminar project is to analyze anonymity and privacy properties of Bitcoin as well as the proposed improvements for Bitcoin privacy.

References:

1. an Miers et al., "Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin", in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2013
2. Elli Androulaki et al., "Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin", IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2012
3. Fergal Reid et al., "An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System", ISBN: 978-1-4614-4138-0, pages 197-223, 2013
4. Simon Barber et al., "Bitter to Better - How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency", ISBN: 978-3-642-32945-6, pages 399-414, 2012

Tutor: Markku Antikainen

17. Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin (Topic B)

Bitcoin is an anonymous electronic currency that is independent of national banks and, in fact, has no single issuer. Instead, its security is based on distributed bookkeeping in a P2P network. A limited number of coins is issued over time as rewards for solving brute-force computing puzzles. The current value of Bitcoin money supply is about one billion dollars, and coins can be exchanged for other currencies.

Although Bitcoin is the most used cryptocurrency, also several other similar protocols have been proposed for various purposes. The goal of this seminar project is to perform an analysis of major Bitcoin variants and protocols that utilize Bitcoin's block-chain.

References:

1. Jeremy Clark et al., "CommitCoin: Carbon dating commitments with bitcoin", in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Springer, pages 390--398, 2012
2. Namecoin
3. Sunny King, Scott Nadal, "PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake"

Tutor: Markku Antikainen

18. Context-aware security: Estimating device proximity with ambient audio

Context-aware security means utilizing supplemental information to improve security decisions. A typical example is to require two-factor authentication when a service is accessed outside business hours. Another example is to use information on the proximity of two devices when making security decisions. The devices can estimate their proximity, for example, by measuring the ambient radio or audio signals of their environment.

The goal of this work is to investigate methods how the proximity of two devices can be estimated with ambient audio recorded by the devices. The work requires basic understanding of digital signal processing methods.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Markku Antikainen

Topics by Yan Zheng

19. Cryptographic Tools for Building Verifiable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers a new way of services by re-arranging various resources over the Internet. It enables its customers to offload the computation of some functions to the cloud in order to release local computation burden. Verifiable cloud computing ensures this offloaded computation to distrusted cloud service providers, while maintaining verifiable results. The other parties can evaluate the function and return the result with a proof that the computation of the function was carried out correctly. Thus, verifiable cloud computing makes outsourcing computation to distrusted parties safety.

Verifiability here means that cloud customers can be assured that (a) their computations indeed physically conducted as they were charged for and (b) that this computation was correct and justified based on an agreed policy.

Requirements: I hope the candidate can survey the existing Cryptographic Tools for Building Verifiable Cloud Computing, summarize and classify them through a comparison.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Yan Zheng

20. Privacy Preserving Data Mining

RESERVED

Data mining is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems. But how to preserve the raw data owner's privacy, how to preserve the data processer's privacy, how to preserve the mining output's privacy are practical issues that should be solved in many applications, such as Internet of Things services. Privacy-preserving data mining aims to solve these concrete issues.

Requirements: I hope the candidate can survey the existing literature on data mining technologies, analyze the operations needed in widely used methods and then go ahead to review the techniques for privacy preserving those methods. Discussion can be further extended to analyze whether and how the above three kinds of privacy can be preserved.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Yan Zheng

Topics by Sanna Suoranta

21. Secure authorization for services

Authorization of users have been suggested to be used instead of authenticating the users to services for many years ago, starting with authorization certificates or attribute certificates. Until now, the services wanted to authenticate their users, but now social network services such as Facebook and Google accounts are used by other services to authorizate the user to use the service. Often, the authorization of users is based on OAuth standard.

How does OAuth 2.0 work? What are its benefits compared to OpenID or SAML-based single sign-on systems? How about drawbacks? Can it be used to help achieve end-user privacy in services? What kind of sources of authorization are used in services? How can the services trust to authorization provider?

References:

1. D. Hardt. The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework. RFC 6749 (Proposed Standard),2012.
2. R. Boyd. Getting Started with OAuth 2.0. O'Reilly Media, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4493-1160-5 (printed), ISBN 978-1-4493-1159-9 (electrical).

Tutor: Sanna Suoranta

22. Citizen identities and strong identification

In Finland, there are three possible ways to strongly identify oneself to online services: Banks offer TUPAS authentication where online banking accounts are used, mobile certificate where mobile phone operator's SIM card are acting as trusted component for providing authentication, and Population register centre offers electronic identity card that has certificates for authentication.

What kind of citizen identification services other countries offer? How they work technically? In Estonia, citizens can even vote electronically. What is the technology that their solution is based on? In UK, post officies are becoming sources for electrical identities. Does it really works? In USA, some governmental services may accept OpenID based identification. How does this work and how common it is? How about Asian countries, e.g. Japan and South Korea?

References:

1. Act on Strong Electronic Identification and Electronic Signatures (617/2009)
2. Finnish Electrical Identity (FINeID)
3. Federation of Finnish Financial Services: Tupas Identification Service
4. Mobile ID

Tutor: Sanna Suoranta

Topic by Sanja Šćepanović

23. Digital Traces as sources of privacy vulnerability

Along with recent hype about Big Data and their analyzing, numerous researchers pose questions and warnings about privacy concerns that are a consequence of such analysis. In particular, it has already been shown that it is possible to reverse-engineer some of the anonymized datasets and identify individuals, or certain groups [1], [2], [3]. On the other hand, it becomes a part of our everyday jobs for a large population to use online services, or mobile services, that inevitably leave some digital traces. The student interested in this topic takes firstly a background research and after that a practical approach to investigate interplay between his own digital traces on different online services. Some of such services majority of us use everyday: Gmail service, Google search, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or other OSN sites. After an overview of the existing research and other materials about privacy concerns from leaving such digital traces, the student will with the help from the tutor design a proper qualitative experiment. In the experiment, the use of his own online accounts (which can be also special accounts created for the purpose of this course) in different contexts are analyzed, with a question: can digital traces left by one of the online services influence some of the other personal services and under which conditions?

References:

1. Narayanan, Arvind, and Vitaly Shmatikov. "Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets." Security and Privacy, 2008. SP 2008. IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2008.
2. Narayanan, Arvind, and Vitaly Shmatikov. "De-anonymizing social networks."Security and Privacy, 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2009.
3. De Mulder, Yoni, et al. "Identification via location-profiling in GSM networks."Proceedings of the 7th ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society. ACM, 2008.

Tutor: Sanja Šćepanović

Topic by Jukka Nurminen

24. Security problems with electric vehicles (EVs)

Electric vehicles (EVs) that can be charged from electricity network (plug-in hybrids or full EVs) are seen as an important future component of tomorrow’s transportation systems. Using energy generated with renewable production the use of EVs should help in reducing the traffic pollution and slowing down the climate change. There are potentially a number of security problems related to the EVs. In this work at least two different angles to EV security aspects could be taken.

1. Survey what are the key security problems that scientist see arising when the use of EVs become more commonplace. For instance, some proposal see a need to connect EVs to a centralized information system which would in an intelligent fashion schedule the changing times of the EVs. What are the implications of such systems for privacy and what kind of ways have been investigated to solve them.
2. Charging EVs on public charging points creates new issues about how to handle the payment in a safe way. Your work could survey what are the payment standards used in the public charging points. Alternatively charging could take place via community owned charging points e.g. in the parking place of an apartment house or a company. How can it be ensured that each community member is fairly using the joint resources? It would be especially interesting to look for minimum cost extensions to present electricity boxes in the parking lots and consider how to change them to handle charging for the used electricity.

This task can be tailored to focus on a single aspect of EV related security or it can survey a wider set of areas. Therefore it is also possible that multiple students work on their own topics under this general umbrella.

References:

1. Khurana, H.; Hadley, M.; Ning Lu; Frincke, D.A., "Smart-grid security issues," Security & Privacy, IEEE , vol.8, no.1, pp.81,85, Jan.-Feb. 2010
2. Simmhan, Y.; Kumbhare, A.G.; Baohua Cao; Prasanna, V., "An Analysis of Security and Privacy Issues in Smart Grid Software Architectures on Clouds," Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2011 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.582,589, 4-9 July 2011
3. C Paar, A Rupp, K Schramm, A Weimerskirch, Securing green cars: IT security in next-generation electric vehicle systems

Tutor: Jukka Nurminen