Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE190100046
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$387,000.00
Summary
Fortifying our digital economy: advanced automated vulnerability discovery. This project aims to enable security researchers to detect critical vulnerabilities in large software systems with maximal efficiency, cost-effectively, and with known statistical accuracy. The aim is to develop advanced high-performance fuzzers that effectively thwart malware attacks, ransomware epidemics, and cyber terrorism by exposing security flaws before they can commence. The project will employ a well-established ....Fortifying our digital economy: advanced automated vulnerability discovery. This project aims to enable security researchers to detect critical vulnerabilities in large software systems with maximal efficiency, cost-effectively, and with known statistical accuracy. The aim is to develop advanced high-performance fuzzers that effectively thwart malware attacks, ransomware epidemics, and cyber terrorism by exposing security flaws before they can commence. The project will employ a well-established statistical framework utilised in ecology research to provide fundamental insights to boosting the efficiency of software vulnerability discovery, and on the trade-off between investing more resources and gaining better cyber security guarantees. As our reliance on new technologies is ever growing, this project equips Australia to curb cyber crime cost-effectively.Read moreRead less
Preventing sensitive data exfiltration from insiders . Confidential data such as military secrets or intellectual property must never be disclosed outside the organisation; formally protecting data exfiltration from insider attacks is a major challenge. This project aims to develop a pattern matching based systematic methodology for data exfiltration in database systems. We will devise highly accurate detection tools and secure provenance techniques that can effectively protect against insider a ....Preventing sensitive data exfiltration from insiders . Confidential data such as military secrets or intellectual property must never be disclosed outside the organisation; formally protecting data exfiltration from insider attacks is a major challenge. This project aims to develop a pattern matching based systematic methodology for data exfiltration in database systems. We will devise highly accurate detection tools and secure provenance techniques that can effectively protect against insider attacks. The outcomes of the project will incorporate new security constraints and policies raised by emerging technologies to enable better protection of sensitive information. Read moreRead less
Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This pr ....Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This project aims to develop a continuous authentication approach based on user behaviour - typical interactions plus biometrics (for example, keystroke dynamics) - combined with a risk adaptive assessment of the resources being accessed, resulting in re-authentication requests in the event of a suspected compromise.Read moreRead less
Privacy-aware Smart Access Control for Internet-of-Things on Blockchain. This project aims to address privacy and trust issues in Internet-of-Things (IoT) access control mechanism of smart critical infrastructure. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the area of IoT access control by leveraging privacy-preserving techniques, blockchain, and machine learning. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced capability to build improved techniques for privacy aware tamperproof IoT a ....Privacy-aware Smart Access Control for Internet-of-Things on Blockchain. This project aims to address privacy and trust issues in Internet-of-Things (IoT) access control mechanism of smart critical infrastructure. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the area of IoT access control by leveraging privacy-preserving techniques, blockchain, and machine learning. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced capability to build improved techniques for privacy aware tamperproof IoT access control with machine learning based anomaly detection. This should provide significant benefits, such as preventing cyber threats on security and privacy of IoT and improving trust in IoT-enabled smart critical infrastructure of Australia.Read moreRead less
An active approach to detect and defend against peer-to-peer botnets. The aim of this project is to develop an effective defence system to help organisations detect and defend against the peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets. If this research is accomplished successfully, it will be a big step forward in defeating this new but devastating malicious software widely utilised by Internet criminals and terrorists. The capability of a nation to defend against the P2P botnet attacks on its information infrastru ....An active approach to detect and defend against peer-to-peer botnets. The aim of this project is to develop an effective defence system to help organisations detect and defend against the peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets. If this research is accomplished successfully, it will be a big step forward in defeating this new but devastating malicious software widely utilised by Internet criminals and terrorists. The capability of a nation to defend against the P2P botnet attacks on its information infrastructure is central to the control of such attacks and hence to a nation's long-term survival and prosperity. The outcomes of this project can be directly used in Australian research communities and adopted by industry and government agencies.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200100166
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$424,709.00
Summary
Enabling Energy Self-Sufficient and Secure Internet of Things. This project aims to develop novel resource management and transmission techniques to enable an energy self-sufficient and secure Internet of Things by utilising energy harvesting technology and robust physical-layer security approach. This project expects to generate new knowledge to address current challenges around energy self-sufficiency and data confidentiality protection capabilities. Expected outcomes include efficient algorit ....Enabling Energy Self-Sufficient and Secure Internet of Things. This project aims to develop novel resource management and transmission techniques to enable an energy self-sufficient and secure Internet of Things by utilising energy harvesting technology and robust physical-layer security approach. This project expects to generate new knowledge to address current challenges around energy self-sufficiency and data confidentiality protection capabilities. Expected outcomes include efficient algorithms and prototypes for long-lasting Internet of Things systems. This should provide significant benefits, including the improved self-sustainability and security critical to realising the Internet of Things’ potential to contribute to enhanced health service delivery and factory automation for Industry 4.0.Read moreRead less
A fast and effective automated insider threat detection and prediction system. Threats from insiders directly compromises the security, privacy and integrity of Australian e-commerce, large databases and communication channels. This project will provide an essential step in combating this criminal activity by developing methods to detect such threats and secure the public's information against exposure and identity theft.
Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while pres ....Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while preserving the data privacy. These tools should provide significant benefits to the privacy of cloud users, as well as financial and reputation benefits to the IT industry, by significantly reducing the likelihood of massive user data privacy breaches in the event of a cyber-hacking attack on the cloud server.Read moreRead less
Encrypted, Distributed, and Queryable Data Store: Framework and Realisation. This project aims to design an encrypted, distributed, and queryable data store. Distributed data stores are used for a broad spectrum of applications. While creating unprecedented opportunities, long-standing data security and privacy concerns are yet to be tackled. This project expects to propose a new architecture for encrypted data stores, and devise practical query processing functions over encrypted and distribute ....Encrypted, Distributed, and Queryable Data Store: Framework and Realisation. This project aims to design an encrypted, distributed, and queryable data store. Distributed data stores are used for a broad spectrum of applications. While creating unprecedented opportunities, long-standing data security and privacy concerns are yet to be tackled. This project expects to propose a new architecture for encrypted data stores, and devise practical query processing functions over encrypted and distributed data records. The intended outcome should bring users confidence for the secure adoption of cloud data storage services and significantly benefit enterprises that demand guaranteed protection on their proprietary data.Read moreRead less
Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a unive ....Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a universal data structure, which unfortunately makes it hard to separate trusted code from untrusted user-provided data. This project intends to develop novel program analysis tools and string constraint solvers, and employ these tools to support sophisticated automated reasoning about string manipulating software.Read moreRead less