Sumita Mishra

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Papers by Sumita Mishra

Quantifying the Costs of Data Breaches

IFIP advances in information and communication technology, 2019

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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Targeted Discreditation Attack against Trust Management in Connected Vehicles

ICC 2021 - IEEE International Conference on Communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems in the U.S. rely on IEEE 1609.2 security protocols... more Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems in the U.S. rely on IEEE 1609.2 security protocols for message authentication using digital signatures. A key requirement for trust management in such systems is the ability to detect misbehaving vehicles, e.g., when vehicles are repeatedly forging signatures. However, this creates a new attack surface where receivers cannot determine whether the causes of signature verification failures are indeed malicious attacks. In this paper, we present our novel, open-source, USRP-based testbed and utilize it to demonstrate how a stealthy reactive jammer can exploit this vulnerability. Our novel, targeted attack is highly efficient (even given the short validity period for vehicle pseudonyms) and difficult to detect. Our experimental results show that our attack can successfully discredit a victim in prominent misbehavior detection schemes with just two minutes of jamming. Finally, we discuss the capabilities and extensibility of our testbed as well as the challenges of potential attack mitigation techniques.

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Advanced Forensics Labs to Meet Computer Forensics Challenges Due to Technological Advancements

1 Abstract – Computer forensics is a continually evolving field, filled with challenges when exis... more 1 Abstract – Computer forensics is a continually evolving field, filled with challenges when existing hardware and software technologies progress and new devices and technologies are added to the mix. It is important for forensics investigators responsible for acquiring, preserving and analyzing digital evidence, to be aware of the challenges facing the forensics field and to apply latest technologies in forensics investigation. This paper discusses the challenges to the traditional forensics procedures and technologies due to evolving hardware and software. The authors present the latest forensics technologies and procedures as well as research ideas to address the challenges, especially in mobile device forensics, Solid State Drive (SSD) evidence recovery and analysis, and Windows memory forensics. Corresponding labs are designed and presented to assist computer forensic students and practitioners in getting acquainted with and practicing the new knowledge and tools.

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Protecting Infrastructure Data via Enhanced Access Control, Blockchain and Differential Privacy

Critical Infrastructure Protection XII, 2018

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Board 162: Assessing the Modular-based Digital Forensics Game for Entry Level Students

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Pan has been actively involved in the IT security area, especially in security audits and compute... more Pan has been actively involved in the IT security area, especially in security audits and computer forensics. Her current research interests include game-based digital forensics and memory-based malware detection using machine learning. She has published over 45 papers and presentations in research conferences and journals. She received grants from NSF, US Air Force Research Lab, and RIT. Dr. Pan teaches graduate courses in digital forensics and security audits.

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A Multidisciplinary Predictive Model for Managing Critical Infrastructure Disruptions

Critical Infrastructure Protection X, 2016

When communities are subjected to disruptive events, their response structure is composed of two ... more When communities are subjected to disruptive events, their response structure is composed of two interconnected systems: (i) a formal professional system that includes emergency services and auxiliary services professionals; and (ii) an ad hoc system formed by community members when the professional response is delayed or is inadequate. The community system typically persists until the professional system is able to take over completely. As the role of the community as responder is not well understood, community systems are often underutilized or even discouraged; this reduces the overall response efficacy. Improved understanding of the interplay between these systems could help ensure an effective overall response to disruptions. This chapter describes an integrated, multidisciplinary model of the interactions between the two systems during disruptive events and their influence on capacity and recovery. The model studies how the systems influence and enable community resilience in the context of three Department of Homeland Security defined sectors: emergency services, information technology and communications. The methodology combines agent-based modeling with cellular automata and illustrates the interplay between and among the people and systems that make up a community, the role of the community as responder and the impact of varying community resources and response capabilities. The model is designed to be transferable to a variety of disaster types and a hierarchy of jurisdictions (local, regional, state, national and international).

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Regional response to large-scale emergency events: Building on historical data

International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, 2015

A widespread emergency event in the United States triggers the activation of a regional emergency... more A widespread emergency event in the United States triggers the activation of a regional emergency operations center that manages a coordinated response to the disaster. Historically, the time-critical decisions made by emergency managers in the face of incomplete information and inadequate historical emergency event data have been guided primarily by their experience. The learning curve for emergency managers, especially novice managers, is steep, and is exacerbated by the complexity and scope of emergency events. This paper proposes a methodology designed to provide emergency managers with locality-specific information and resource allocation recommendations for large-scale event response, creating the foundation for a decision support system that draws on emergency event data. This work is the first to use locally-specific data for an emergency management decision support system. Two major allocation scenarios that influence the number of resources allocated to an event are considered and solutions are suggested to address them. Although the methodology is developed for a mid-sized region, it is generalizable to any region.

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Code red: A nuclear nightmare-navigating ransomware response at an Eastern European power plant

Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases

Over the past decade, the number and scale of ransomware attacks has grown. These attacks have st... more Over the past decade, the number and scale of ransomware attacks has grown. These attacks have stretched across multiple industries globally and caused billions of dollars of damages. Recent attacks have disrupted critical infrastructure and have served as prelude to war. Studies have shown that there is a lack of awareness among industry practitioners surrounding appropriate responses to ransomware. This failure during a career-defining moment is largely due to the gap between cyber security academic knowledge and industry practice. We therefore provide a learning resource for ransomware response education that is academically adequate, practically viable, and ultimately illustrates a process for proper employment of technology. This case, exposes students to technical requirements for a ransomware response and explores ransomware best practices. Discussion questions and a wargaming-style purple team exercise for individuals or groups extend the opportunity for delivering additiona...

SM-DIV: A Smart Metering Distributed privacy framework with Integrity Verification

A Distributed Privacy-Preserving Integrity Verification Framework for the Smart Grid

Game-based forensics course for first year students

Identifying and attracting talented students to digital forensics programs is a crucial first ste... more Identifying and attracting talented students to digital forensics programs is a crucial first step to developing professionals in this relatively young field. To respond to these challenges, we propose to develop a fun, entertaining, and yet educational forensicscourse suitable for first year students in college, in an effort to identify and attract students to a forensics program. This paper focuses on the design and development of a gamebased forensics course using the game-based learning (GBL) approach building the game in a real computing environment that has direct access to actual forensics tools from a forensics machine and the evidence from a suspect machine. Interactive visualizations will be used to help students to understand the intangible and inaccessible abstract concepts such as deleted/hidden/encrypted/over-written digital evidence.

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A distributed approach to privacy-preservation and integrity assurance of smart metering data

Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems

Smart grid service providers collect metering data at frequent intervals for providing grid and b... more Smart grid service providers collect metering data at frequent intervals for providing grid and billing functionalities. Studies have shown that access to the granular metering data can lead to breaches in customers' privacy. Several aggregation-based privacypreserving frameworks for smart metering data have been proposed in the literature. However, these frameworks have either a high computational overhead on resource-constrained smart meters and/or are prone to single points of compromise due to centralized designs. Distributed frameworks with outsourced aggregation can provide the desired functionalities while keeping the framework lightweight for the smart meters. However, these distributed frameworks assume an honest-but-curious adversary, which is not a realistic assumption for outsourced aggregation. This work-in-progress paper proposes a distributed aggregation-based privacy-preserving metering data collection framework under a malicious adversarial model (dishonest majority of aggregators). This framework is capable of verifying the integrity of the spatio-temporal metering data while ensuring customers' privacy. The performance analysis of the proposed framework demonstrates that it outperforms a closely related existing framework with similar customer privacy and integrity verification goals. Our results on the computational overhead on smart meters, end-to-end delay, scalability, and resilience against threats to privacy and integrity are presented in this paper. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Privacy-preserving protocols.

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Divide & Conquer: A Privacy Safeguarding Framework for the Smart Grid

ICC 2021 - IEEE International Conference on Communications

Smart grid requires granular smart metering data collection at frequent time intervals. However, ... more Smart grid requires granular smart metering data collection at frequent time intervals. However, this introduces unique risks to consumer privacy. To address this challenge, several privacy-preserving data collection frameworks have been proposed. Data aggregation-based frameworks show promise in terms of privacy preservation. However, the related frameworks in the literature either have a high computational overhead on the smart meters or rely on architectures that may lead to single points of compromise. Also, most studies focus on solving the privacy problem and do not consider the integration of accurate billing in the framework. In this paper, we study a multiple aggregator based distributed privacy-preserving framework to address these challenges. The aggregators carry out the bulk of the computational load, thus making the framework lightweight for the smart meters. Our proposed framework and two other related schemes are deployed in an embedded environment for assessing the computational overhead on the smart meters due to temporal aggregation. The schemes are also studied via simulation to assess their end-to-end delay for spatial aggregation and scalability, and it is shown that our scheme outperforms the other two schemes. In addition, we analyze the resilience of our scheme against passive threats to privacy. A qualitative analysis of our scheme against other aggregation-based schemes in the literature is also presented in this paper.

Formalizing anonymity-delay tradeoffs in smart grid networks

2016 IEEE Smart Energy Grid Engineering (SEGE), 2016

Privacy concerns about smart metering have proven to be a significant roadblock to adoption of th... more Privacy concerns about smart metering have proven to be a significant roadblock to adoption of the smart grid. In the smart grid, electricity usage data are collected in near real time, exposing users to attacks that reveal their habits, location, and preferences. Other research in this area has demonstrated the possibility of using pseudonyms to decouple low-frequency billing data from high-frequency grid maintenance data. Such schemes must provide a way to authenticate the pseudonym as belonging to a real customer, to defend against the submission of false data. However, this authentication process exposes the system to timing attacks that can correlate the authentication of a particular customer with the appearance of a new pseudonym on the network. These timing attacks have been addressed informally in the literature with techniques such as adding a random delay to transmission. The anonymity thus provided is not quantified or guaranteed, and can be subverted with active attacks via the service provider. This paper introduces a method for defeating timing attacks based on the theory of mix networks. The use of a mix formalizes a method of randomizing the order in which authentication attempts are serviced. The mix design is described in detail and it is shown that this method is more resistant to attack and allows for an explicit tradeoff between anonymity and delay.

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A distributed privacy preserving framework for the Smart Grid

2020 IEEE Power & Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT), 2020

Smart grid is envisioned to be deployed on cyberinfrastructure, which makes it vulnerable to cybe... more Smart grid is envisioned to be deployed on cyberinfrastructure, which makes it vulnerable to cyberattacks. Studies have shown that by accessing the metering data, behavioral patterns of the customers can be derived by analysis. Therefore, to protect the privacy of the customers, it is important to develop privacy-preserving protocols and frameworks. Various studies in the smart grid domain address the privacy issue, but the techniques either have a high computational overhead or they are dependent on a single dedicated aggregator, making them prone to single points of failure. In this paper, a framework based on Shamir's secret sharing is proposed to address the above-mentioned issues. The framework is designed to prevent dedicated aggregators and the electrical utility from linking the aggregated reading to a specific smart meter. The security of the proposed framework is analyzed with respect to different attack scenarios.

A cyber-resilient privacy framework for the smart grid with dynamic billing capabilities

2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm)

The desired features for the smart grid include dynamic billing capabilities along with consumer ... more The desired features for the smart grid include dynamic billing capabilities along with consumer privacy protection. Existing aggregation-based privacy frameworks have limitations such as centralized designs prone to single points of failure and/or a high computational overload on the smart meters due to in-network aggregation or complex algorithmic operations. Additionally, these existing schemes do not consider how dynamic billing can be implemented while consumer privacy is preserved. In this paper, a cyber-resilient framework that enables dynamic billing while focusing on consumer privacy preservation is proposed. The distributed design provides a framework for spatio-temporal aggregation and keeps the process lightweight for the smart meters. The comparative analysis of our proposed work with existing work shows a significant improvement in terms of the spatial aggregation overhead, overhead on smart meters and scalability. The paper also discusses the resilience of our framework against privacy attacks.

Insider Threats and Access Control in e-Health Systems

A technological issue in improving healthcare while lowering costs is the rapid and reliable shar... more A technological issue in improving healthcare while lowering costs is the rapid and reliable sharing of patient and other medical information across e-Health systems. Such sharing must be done securely and meet the privacy guarantees imposed by applicable laws and regulations; for instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States requires the use of appropriate access control mechanisms to protect healthcare information. Despite such legal requirements, currently implemented access control models in e-Health systems are often inadequate as demonstrated by the large and increasing numbers of successful attacks on healthcare systems. In particular, current access control models do not provide sufficient protection for healthcare systems from attacks by insiders, i.e., authorized personnel. This paper examines insider threats and presents an approach to protect healthcare information from unauthorized or improper use, disclosure, alteration,...

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Gamifying Course Modules for Entry Level Students

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2017

The growing shortage of skilled professionals in cybersecurity and forensics has increased global... more The growing shortage of skilled professionals in cybersecurity and forensics has increased global demand for information systems professionals. To identify and attract more students to cybersecurity and forensics programs, the authors developed a game engine along with a sequence of entertaining, engaging, and educational games, suitable for forensics and cybersecurity courses. This paper focuses on the design and development of a modular educational game framework composed of a game engine and a GUI-based game creator. Following narrative and storylines of the game via interactive dialogs and visualized abstract concepts, students are motivated and engaged to obtain the necessary knowledge. Students will also develop their problem solving skills by using real tools and technologies while playing the game. The GUI-based game creator allows educators to create and develop new educational games by only focusing on game content. CCS Concepts • Applied Computing➝Education➝Interactive learning environments • Professional topics➝Computing Education.

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A modular approach to teaching critical infrastructure protection concepts to engineering, technology and computing students

2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2016

The United States Department of Homeland Security has identified 16 critical infrastructure secto... more The United States Department of Homeland Security has identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors that employ computing, technology and engineering students. However, most undergraduate curricula in these disciplines do not incorporate the fundamentals of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) into their curricula in a meaningful way. This paper describes the design, development, and usage of a modular curricular framework for integrating CIP into undergraduate programs via self-contained interdisciplinary course modules; a course module is a distinct curricular unit such as a lab or teaching component for use by an instructor in existing courses without requiring any course or program modifications. The framework is designed for use in multiple disciplines, and the modules are designed for presentation at different levels of the undergraduate experience, with subsequent modules built on those presented earlier. In addition, the paper discusses assessment results obtained from the validation of the framework and modules over the past three years that covered 345 students at the community college and university levels.

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Board # 133 : Gamifying Cybersecurity Course Content for Entry Level Students

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

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Sumita Mishra

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