Yanqiu Wu, Tehila Minkus, and Keith W. Ross We deploy GPS hacking in conjunction with location-based mobile apps to passively survey users in targeted geographical regions. Specifically, we investigate surveying students at different college campuses with Yik Yak, an anonymous mobile app that is popular on US college campuses. In addition to being campus-centric, Yik...
Author: Emerald Knox (Emerald Knox)
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Mind your SMSes: Mitigating social engineering in second factor authentication
Hossein Siadati, Toan Nguyen, Payas Gupta, Markus Jakobsson, and Nasir Memon SMS-based second factor authentication is a cornerstone for many service providers, ranging from email service providers and social networks to financial institutions and online marketplaces. Attackers have not been slow to capitalize on the vulnerabilities of this mechanism by using social engineering techniques to...
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Profiling cybersecurity competition participants: Self-efficacy, decision-making and interests predict effectiveness of competitions as a recruitment tool
Sciencedirect.com site creating problemsMasooda Bashir, Colin Wee, Nasir Memon, and Boyi Guo This paper presents the main results of a large-scale survey on cybersecurity competition participants in the past decade. 588 participants of the Cybersecurity Awareness Week (CSAW) competition were surveyed with measures of personality, interests, culture, decision-making and attachment styles in an exploratory study...
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DRAW-A-PIN: Authentication using finger-drawn PIN on touch devices
Toan Van Nguyen, Napa Sae-Bae, and Nasir Memon This paper presents Draw-A-PIN, a user authentication system on a device with a touch interface that supports the use of PINs. In the proposed system, the user is asked to draw her PIN on the touch screen instead of typing it on a keypad. Consequently, Draw-A-PIN could...
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Measuring the Fitness of Fitness Trackers
Chealsea G. Bender, Jason C. Hoffstot, Brian T. Combs, Sara Hooshangi, and Justin Cappos. Data collected by fitness trackers could play an important role in improving the health and well-being of the individuals who wear them. Many insurance companies even offer monetary rewards to participants who meet certain steps or calorie goals. However, in order...
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Malicious firmware detection with hardware performance counters
Xueyang Wang, Charalambos Konstantinou, Michail Maniatakos, Ramesh Karri, Serena Lee, Patricia Robison, Paul Stergiou, and Steve Kim Critical infrastructure components nowadays use microprocessor-based embedded control systems. It is often infeasible, however, to employ the same level of security measures used in general purpose computing systems, due to the stringent performance and resource constraints of embedded...
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Cybersecurity Experts Discuss the Perfect Storm – A Convergence of Internet of Things, Cloud, and Security
With the increasing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), concerns are growing about security, particularly hardware security, which is an integral part of the IoT framework. Security threats permeated the discussion at the eighth installment of NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Sloan Lecture Series on April 25, which brought together world-class academics and industry...
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It's time to assess the potential for terrorist use of cryptocurrencies
Bank derisking and irrational state by state licensing help create the conditions for criminals and terrorists to abuse cryptocurrency networks.
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Potential Security Flaw with Fingerprint ID on Cellphones (video)
A thumbprint may seem simpler and more secure than a passcode or password. But one of the nation’s top computer scientists says he has discovered a security flaw with the kind of fingerprint identification technology often used to lock cellphones. We traveled to New York University Tandon School of Engineering to interview engineering professor Nasir...
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The Trump Administration’s Early (Appropriate) Focus on Botnets
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order on Cybersecurity, concentrating as it does on things largely within the authority of the executive branch, is a reasonable early approach to a very complicated public policy challenge. Its three components focus on preparatory steps to harmonize and modernize the federal government’s information technology (IT), better protect critical infrastructure, and improve...