近年来，内部人员威胁和攻击在发生频率以及给企业业务造成的成本方面均不断上升。恶意内部人员对端到端加密即时通讯应用（WhatsApp、Telegram、VPN）的使用，使数据泄露事件呈指数级增长。印度证券交易委员会（Securities and Exchange Board of India，SEBI）调查了有关此类数据泄露事件的报告，并报告约有12家公司的收益数据和财务信息通过WhatsApp消息被泄露。近期调查表明，60%的数据泄露主要由恶意内部人员威胁造成。尤其是在国防环境中，内部人员造成的信息泄露将危及国家安全。由于端到端加密，在内部人员威胁检测环境中，网络嗅探和基于主机的活动监测将无法发挥作用。内存取证能够访问通过端到端加密环境发送或接收的消息，但会彻底侵犯用户隐私。在本研究中，我们提出了一种检测组织内部人员数据泄露的新型解决方案。我们的方法捕获内部人员设备的RAM，并在维护用户隐私的同时，分析其中是否存在来自主机系统的敏感信息泄露。研究使用深度学习模型结合上下文识别敏感数据泄露。所提想法的可行性和有效性已通过一个军事用例得到证明。不过，所提出的架构只需进行少量修改即可用于多种用例。
英文摘要：
In recent years, insider threats and attacks have been increasing in terms of frequency and cost to the corporate business. The utilization of end-to-end encrypted instant messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram, VPN) by malicious insiders raised data breach incidents exponentially. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) investigated reports on such data leak incidents and reported about twelve companies where earnings data and financial information were leaked using WhatsApp messages. Recent surveys indicate that 60% of data breaches are primarily caused by malicious insider threats. Especially, in the case of the defense environment, information leaks by insiders will jeopardize the countrys national security. Sniffing of network and host-based activities will not work in an insider threat detection environment due to end-to-end encryption. Memory forensics allows access to the messages sent or received over an end-to-end encrypted environment but with a total compromise of the users privacy. In this research, we present a novel solution to detect data leakages by insiders in an organization. Our approach captures the RAM of the insiders device and analyses it for sensitive information leaks from a host system while maintaining the users privacy. Sensitive data leaks are identified with context using a deep learning model. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed idea have been demonstrated with the help of a military use case. The proposed architecture can however be used across various use cases with minor modifications.
With the advance of technology, Criminal Justice agencies are being confronted with an increased need to investigate crimes perpetuated partially or entirely over the Internet. These types of crime are known as cybercrimes. In order to conceal illegal online activity, criminals often use private browsing features or browsers designed to provide total browsing privacy. The use of private browsing is a common challenge faced in for example child exploitation investigations, which usually originate on the Internet. Although private browsing features are not designed specifically for criminal acti…
Owing to a number of reasons, the deployment of encryption solutions are beginning to be ubiquitous at both organizational and individual levels. The most emphasized reason is the necessity to ensure confidentiality of privileged information. Unfortunately, it is also popular as cyber-criminals' escape route from the grasp of digital forensic investigations. The direct encryption of data or indirect encryption of storage devices, more often than not, prevents access to such information contained therein. This consequently leaves the forensics investigation team, and subsequently the prosecutio…
Organised crime, as well as individual criminals, is benefiting from the protection of private browsers provide to those who would carry out illegal activity, such as money laundering, drug trafficking, the online exchange of child-abuse material, etc. The protection afforded to users of the Epic Privacy Browser illustrates these benefits. This browser is currently in use in approximately 180 countries worldwide. This paper outlines the location and type of evidence available through live and post-mortem state analyses of the Epic Privacy Browser. This study identifies the manner in which the …
This paper proposes to study the impact of image selective encryption on both forensics and privacy preserving mechanisms. The proposed selective encryption scheme works independently on each bitplane by encrypting the s most significant bits of each pixel. We show that this mechanism can be used to increase privacy by mitigating image recognition tasks. In order to guarantee a trade-off between forensics analysis and privacy, the signal of interest used for forensics purposes is extracted from the 8--s least significant bits of the protected image. We show on the CASIA2 database that good tam…
Volatile memory dump and its analysis is an essential part of digital forensics. Among a number of various software and hardware approaches for memory dumping there are authors who point out that some of these approaches are not resilient to various anti-forensic techniques, and others that require a reboot or are highly platform dependent. New resilient tools have certain disadvantages such as low speed or vulnerability to rootkits which directly manipulate kernel structures e.g. page tables. A new memory forensic system - Malware Analysis System for Hidden Knotty Anomalies (MASHKA) is descri…
Digital investigations of stealthy attacks on Android devices pose particular challenges to incident responders. Whereas consequential late detection demands accurate and comprehensive forensic timelines to reconstruct all malicious activities, reduced forensic footprints with minimal malware involvement, such as when Living-Off-the-Land (LOtL) tactics are adopted, leave investigators little evidence to work with. Volatile memory forensics can be an effective approach since app execution of any form is always bound to leave a trail of evidence in memory, even if perhaps ephemeral. Just-in-Time…
Today is the era of Internet of Things (IoT), millions of machines such as cars, smoke detectors, watches, glasses, webcams, etc. are being connected to the Internet. The number of machines that possess the ability of remote access to monitor and collect data is continuously increasing. This development makes, on one hand, the human life more comfort- able, convenient, but it also raises on other hand issues on security and privacy. However, this development also raises challenges for the digital investigator when IoT devices involve in criminal scenes. Indeed, current research in the literatu…
Since modern anti-virus software mainly depends on a signature-based static analysis, they are not suitable for coping with the rapid increase in malware variants. Moreover, even worse, many vulnerabilities of operating systems enable attackers to evade such protection mechanisms. We, therefore, developed a thin and lightweight live-forensic hypervisor to create an additional protection layer under a conventional protection layer of operating systems with supporting ransomware detection using dynamic behavioral features. The developed live-forensic hypervisor collects low-level memory access p…
NAND flash memory-based IoT device can potentially still leave behind original personal data in an invalid area even if the data has been deleted. In this paper, we raise the forensic issue of original data remaining in unmanaged blocks caused by NAND flash memory and introduce methods for secure deletion of such data in the invalid area. We also propose a verification technique for secure deletion that is performed based on cell count information, which refers to the difference in bits between personal data and data stored in the block. The pass/fail of the verification technique according to…
DNA fingerprinting is a cornerstone for human identification in forensics, where the sequence of highly polymorphic short tandem repeats (STRs) from an individual is compared against a DNA database. This presents significant privacy risks to individuals with DNA profiles in the database due to hacking by malicious attackers who may access the data and misuse it for secondary purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel cryptographic framework for jointly encrypting DNA-based fingerprints (STRs) with other biometric data, for example, facial images, such that the STRs and biometrics information …
Internet of Things is revolutionizing the current era with its vast usage in number of fields such as medicine, automation, home security, smart cities, etc. As these IoT devices' uses are increasing, the threat to its security and to its application protocols are also increasing. Traffic passing over these protocol if intercepted, could reveal sensitive information and result in taking control of the entire IoT network. Scope of this paper is limited to MQTT protocol. MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) is a light weight protocol used for communication between IoT devices. There are multiple broker…
ALIAS ROBOTICS（艾利亚斯机器人技术公司）；JOANNEUM RESEARCH（约翰内姆研究所）
The increasing impact of robotics on industry and on society will unavoidably lead to the involvement of robots in incidents and mishaps. In such cases, forensic analyses are key techniques to provide useful evidence on what happened, and try to prevent future incidents. This article discusses volatile memory forensics for the Robot Operating System (ROS). The authors start by providing a general overview of forensic techniques in robotics and then present a robotics-specific Volatility plugin named linux_rosnode, packaged within the ros_volatility project and aimed to extract evidence from ro…
Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that do not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is the forensic analysis for traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrume…
Assessing the Forensic Viability of Android Memory Analysis Across Production Builds: A Cross-Version Study of Security Hardening and Structure Preservation
Memory was captured from a system infected by ransomware and its contents was examined using live forensic tools, with the intent of identifying the symmetric encryption keys being used. NotPetya, Bad Rabbit and Phobos hybrid ransomware samples were tested during the investigation. If keys were discovered, the following two steps were also performed. Firstly, a timeline was manually created by combining data from multiple sources to illustrate the ransomware's behaviour as well as showing when the encryption keys were present in memory and how long they remained there. Secondly, an attempt was…
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications (apps) provide convenient and low cost means for users to communicate and share information with each other in real-time. Day by day, the popularity of such apps is increasing, and people produce and share a huge amount of data, including their personal and sensitive information. This might lead to several privacy issues, such as revealing user contacts, private messages or personal photos. Therefore, having an up-to-date forensic understanding of these apps is necessary. This chapter presents analysis of forensically valuable remnants of three …
Fingerprint recognition is often a game-changing step in establishing evidence against criminals. However, we are increasingly finding that criminals deliberately alter their fingerprints in a variety of ways to make it difficult for technicians and automatic sensors to recognize their fingerprints, making it tedious for investigators to establish strong evidence against them in a forensic procedure. In this sense, deep learning comes out as a prime candidate to assist in the recognition of damaged fingerprints. In particular, convolution algorithms. In this paper, we focus on the recognition …
With professional and home Internet users becoming increasingly concerned with data protection and privacy, the privacy afforded by popular cloud file synchronisation services, such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, is coming under scrutiny in the press. A number of these services have recently been reported as sharing information with governmental security agencies without warrants. BitTorrent Sync is seen as an alternative by many and has gathered over two million users by December 2013 (doubling since the previous month). The service is completely decentralised, offers much of the same…
The increasing prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made it inevitable that their pertinence to digital forensic investigations will increase into the foreseeable future. These devices produced by various vendors often posses limited standard interfaces for communication, such as USB ports or WiFi/Bluetooth wireless interfaces. Meanwhile, with an increasing mainstream focus on the security and privacy of user data, built-in encryption is becoming commonplace in consumer-level computing devices, and IoT devices are no exception. Under these circumstances, a significant challenge i…
This paper focuses on conducting forensic data analysis of 2 widely used IMs applications on Android phones WhatsApp and Viber. The tests and analysis were performed with the aim of determining what data and information can be found on the devices internal memory for instant messengers eg chat messaging logs and history send & received image or video files etc. The experiments and results show that heavy amount of potential evidences and valuable data can be found on Android phones by forensic investigators.
We present the forensic analysis of the artifacts generated on Android smartphones by ChatSecure, a secure Instant Messaging application that provides strong encryption for transmitted and locally-stored data to ensure the privacy of its users. We show that ChatSecure stores local copies of both exchanged messages and files into two distinct, AES-256 encrypted databases, and we devise a technique able to decrypt them when the secret passphrase, chosen by the user as the initial step of the encryption process, is known. Furthermore, we show how this passphrase can be identified and extracted fr…
In recent years, cloud computing has become popular as a cost-effective and efficient computing paradigm. Unfortunately, today's cloud computing architectures are not designed for security and forensics. To date, very little research has been done to develop the theory and practice of cloud forensics. Many factors complicate forensic investigations in a cloud environment. First, the storage system is no longer local. Therefore, even with a subpoena, law enforcement agents cannot confiscate the suspect's computer and get access to the suspect's files. Second, each cloud server contains files fr…
University of Passau（帕绍大学）；Reykjavík University（雷克雅未克大学）
Digital forensics is the process of extracting, preserving, and documenting evidence in digital devices. A commonly used method in digital forensics is to extract data from the main memory of a digital device. However, the main challenge is identifying the important data to be extracted. Several pieces of crucial information reside in the main memory, like usernames, passwords, and cryptographic keys such as SSH session keys. In this paper, we propose SmartKex, a machine-learning assisted method to extract session keys from heap memory snapshots of an OpenSSH process. In addition, we release a…
Photo Response Non-Uniformity(PRNU) noise has proven to be very effective tool in camera based forensics. It helps to match a photo to the device that clicked it. In today's scenario, where millions and millions of images are uploaded every hour, it is very easy to compute this unique PRNU pattern from a couple of shared images on social profiles. This endangers the privacy of the camera owner and becomes a cause of major concern for the privacy-aware society. We propose SSS-PRNU scheme that facilitates the forensic investigators to carry out their crime investigation without breaching the pri…
Voice assistants have become quite popular lately while in parallel they are an important part of smarthome systems. Through their voice assistants, users can perform various tasks, control other devices and enjoy third party services. The assistants are part of a wider ecosystem. Their function relies on the users voice commands, received through original voice assistant devices or companion applications for smartphones and tablets, which are then sent through the internet to the vendor cloud services and are translated into commands. These commands are then transferred to other applications …
Digital forensic evidence acquisition speed is traditionally limited by two main factors: the read speed of the storage device being investigated, i.e., the read speed of the disk, memory, remote storage, mobile device, etc.), and the write speed of the system used for storing the acquired data. Digital forensic investigators can somewhat mitigate the latter issue through the use of high-speed storage options, such as networked RAID storage, in the controlled environment of the forensic laboratory. However, traditionally, little can be done to improve the acquisition speed past its physical re…
This paper provides a detailed explanation of the steps taken to extract and repair a Google Home's internal data. Starting with reverse engineering the hardware of a commercial off-the-shelf Google Home, internal data is then extracted by desoldering and dumping the flash memory. As error correction is performed by the CPU using an undisclosed method, a new alternative method is shown to repair a corrupted SquashFS filesystem, under the assumption of a single or double bitflip per gzip-compressed fragment. Finally, a new method to handle multiple possible repairs using three-valued logic is p…
Intel(R) Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) is a hardware-based technology for ensuring security of sensitive data from disclosure or modification that enables user-level applications to allocate protected areas of memory called enclaves. Such memory areas are cryptographically protected even from code running with higher privilege levels. This memory protection can be used to develop secure and dependable applications, but the technology has some limitations: ($i$) the code of an enclave is visible at load time, ($ii$) libraries used by the code must be statically linked, and ($iii$) the protect…
Genome sequencing technology has advanced at a rapid pace and it is now possible to generate highly-detailed genotypes inexpensively. The collection and analysis of such data has the potential to support various applications, including personalized medical services. While the benefits of the genomics revolution are trumpeted by the biomedical community, the increased availability of such data has major implications for personal privacy; notably because the genome has certain essential features, which include (but are not limited to) (i) an association with traits and certain diseases, (ii) ide…
We firstly suggest privacy protection cache policy applying the duty to delete personal information on a hybrid main memory system. This cache policy includes generating random data and overwriting the random data into the personal information. Proposed cache policy is more economical and effective regarding perfect deletion of data.
