George Grispos

George Grispos, Frank Tursi, Raymond Choo et al.

The introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems into personal homes and businesses prompts the idea that such ecosystems contain residual data, which can be used as digital evidence in court proceedings. However, the forensic examination of IoT ecosystems introduces a number of investigative problems for the digital forensics community. One of these problems is the limited availability of practical processes and techniques to guide the preservation and analysis of residual data from these ecosystems. Focusing on a detailed case study of the iHealth Smart Scale ecosystem, we present an empirical demonstration of practical techniques to recover residual data from different evidence sources within a smart scale ecosystem. We also document the artifacts that can be recovered from a smart scale ecosystem, which could inform a digital (forensic) investigation. The findings in this research provides a foundation for future studies regarding the development of processes and techniques suitable for extracting and examining residual data from IoT ecosystems.

George Grispos, Talon Flynn, William Glisson et al.

As smartphones and smartphone applications are widely used in a healthcare context (e.g., remote healthcare), these devices and applications may need to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. In other words, adequate safeguards to protect the user's sensitive information (e.g., personally identifiable information and/or medical history) are required to be enforced on such devices and applications. In this study, we forensically focus on the potential of recovering residual data from Android medical applications, with the objective of providing an initial risk assessment of such applications. Our findings (e.g., documentation of the artifacts) also contribute to a better understanding of the types and location of evidential artifacts that can, potentially, be recovered from these applications in a digital forensic investigation.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Peter Cooper

The integration of medical devices in everyday life prompts the idea that these devices will increasingly have evidential value in civil and criminal proceedings. However, the investigation of these devices presents new challenges for the digital forensics community. Previous research has shown that mobile devices provide investigators with a wealth of information. Hence, mobile devices that are used within medical environments potentially provide an avenue for investigating and analyzing digital evidence from such devices. The research contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an empirical analysis of the viability of using information from smartphone applications developed to complement a medical device, as digital evidence. Second, it includes documentation on the artifacts that are potentially useful in a digital forensics investigation of smartphone applications that interact with medical devices.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

An increasing number of cybersecurity incidents prompts organizations to explore alternative security solutions, such as threat intelligence programs. For such programs to succeed, data needs to be collected, validated, and recorded in relevant datastores. One potential source supplying these datastores is an organization's security incident response team. However, researchers have argued that these teams focus more on eradication and recovery and less on providing feedback to enhance organizational security. This prompts the idea that data collected during security incident investigations may be of insufficient quality for threat intelligence analysis. While previous discussions focus on data quality issues from threat intelligence sharing perspectives, minimal research examines the data generated during incident response investigations. This paper presents the results of a case study identifying data quality challenges in a Fortune 500 organization's incident response team. Furthermore, the paper provides the foundation for future research regarding data quality concerns in security incident response.

William Ledbetter, William Bradley Glisson, Todd McDonald et al.

The proliferation of Bluetooth mobile device communications into all aspects of modern society raises security questions by both academicians and practitioners. This environment prompted an investigation into the real-world use of Bluetooth protocols along with an analysis of documented security attacks. The experiment discussed in this paper collected data for one week in a local coffee shop. The data collection took about an hour each day and identified 478 distinct devices. The contribution of this research is two-fold. First, it provides insight into real-world Bluetooth protocols that are being utilized by the general public. Second, it provides foundational research that is necessary for future Bluetooth penetration testing research.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

The synthesis of technology and the medical industry has partly contributed to the increasing interest in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS). While these systems provide benefits to patients and professionals, they also introduce new attack vectors for malicious actors (e.g. financially-and/or criminally-motivated actors). A successful breach involving a MCPS can impact patient data and system availability. The complexity and operating requirements of a MCPS complicates digital investigations. Coupling this information with the potentially vast amounts of information that a MCPS produces and/or has access to is generating discussions on, not only, how to compromise these systems but, more importantly, how to investigate these systems. The paper proposes the integration of forensics principles and concepts into the design and development of a MCPS to strengthen an organization's investigative posture. The framework sets the foundation for future research in the refinement of specific solutions for MCPS investigations.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, David Bourrie et al.

Reports and press releases highlight that security incidents continue to plague organizations. While researchers and practitioners' alike endeavor to identify and implement realistic security solutions to prevent incidents from occurring, the ability to initially identify a security incident is paramount when researching a security incident lifecycle. Hence, this research investigates the ability of employees in a Global Fortune 500 financial organization, through internal electronic surveys, to recognize and report security incidents to pursue a more holistic security posture. The research contribution is an initial insight into security incident perceptions by employees in the financial sector as well as serving as an initial guide for future security incident recognition and reporting initiatives.

George Grispos, Jesus Garcia-Galan, Liliana Pasquale et al.

As security incidents continue to impact organisations, there is a growing demand for systems to be 'forensic ready'- to maximise the potential use of evidence whilst minimising the costs of an investigation. Researchers have supported organisational forensic readiness efforts by proposing the use of policies and processes, aligning systems with forensics objectives and training employees. However, recent work has also proposed an alternative strategy for implementing forensic readiness called forensic-by-design. This is an approach that involves integrating requirements for forensics into relevant phases of the systems development lifecycle with the aim of engineering forensic-ready systems. While this alternative forensic readiness strategy has been discussed in the literature, no previous research has examined the extent to which organisations actually use this approach for implementing forensic readiness. Hence, we investigate the extent to which organisations consider requirements for forensics during systems development. We first assessed existing research to identify the various perspectives of implementing forensic readiness, and then undertook an online survey to investigate the consideration of requirements for forensics during systems development lifecycles. Our findings provide an initial assessment of the extent to which requirements for forensics are considered within organisations. We then use our findings, coupled with the literature, to identify a number of research challenges regarding the engineering of forensic-ready systems.

Jesús García-Galán, Liliana Pasquale, George Grispos et al.

Mission critical software is often required to comply with multiple regulations, standards or policies. Recent paradigms, such as cloud computing, also require software to operate in heterogeneous, highly distributed, and changing environments. In these environments, compliance requirements can vary at runtime and traditional compliance management techniques, which are normally applied at design time, may no longer be sufficient. In this paper, we motivate the need for adaptive compliance by illustrating possible compliance concerns determined by runtime variability. We further motivate our work by means of a cloud computing scenario, and present two main contributions. First, we propose and justify a process to support adaptive compliance that ex- tends the traditional compliance management lifecycle with the activities of the Monitor-Analyse-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loop, and enacts adaptation through re-configuration. Second, we explore the literature on software compliance and classify existing work in terms of the activities and concerns of adaptive compliance. In this way, we determine how the literature can support our proposal and what are the open research challenges that need to be addressed in order to fully support adaptive compliance.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

Industrial reports indicate that security incidents continue to inflict large financial losses on organizations. Researchers and industrial analysts contend that there are fundamental problems with existing security incident response process solutions. This paper presents the Security Incident Response Criteria (SIRC) which can be applied to a variety of security incident response approaches. The criteria are derived from empirical data based on in-depth interviews conducted within a Global Fortune 500 organization and supporting literature. The research contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the criteria presented in this paper can be used to evaluate existing security incident response solutions and second, as a guide, to support future security incident response improvement initiatives.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

There is a growing demand for cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Syncplicity and SugarSync. These public cloud storage services can store gigabytes of corporate and personal data in remote data centres around the world, which can then be synchronized to multiple devices. This creates an environment which is potentially conducive to security incidents, data breaches and other malicious activities. The forensic investigation of public cloud environments presents a number of new challenges for the digital forensics community. However, it is anticipated that end-devices such as smartphones, will retain data from these cloud storage services. This research investigates how forensic tools that are currently available to practitioners can be used to provide a practical solution for the problems related to investigating cloud storage environments. The research contribution is threefold. First, the findings from this research support the idea that end-devices which have been used to access cloud storage services can be used to provide a partial view of the evidence stored in the cloud service. Second, the research provides a comparison of the number of files which can be recovered from different versions of cloud storage applications. In doing so, it also supports the idea that amalgamating the files recovered from more than one device can result in the recovery of a more complete dataset. Third, the chapter contributes to the documentation and evidentiary discussion of the artefacts created from specific cloud storage applications and different versions of these applications on iOS and Android smartphones.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, J. Harold Pardue et al.

As the distinction between personal and organizational device usage continues to blur, the combination of applications that interact increases the need to investigate potential security issues. Although security and forensic researchers have been able to recover a variety of artifacts, empirical research has not examined a suite of application artifacts from the perspective of high-level pattern identification. This research presents a preliminary investigation into the idea that residual artifacts generated by cloud-based synchronized applications can be used to identify broad user behavior patterns. To accomplish this, the researchers conducted a single-case, pretest-posttest, quasi experiment using a smartphone device and a suite of Google mobile applications. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it provides a proof of concept of the extent to which residual data from cloud-based synchronized applications can be used to broadly identify user behavior patterns from device data patterns. Second, it highlights the need for security controls to prevent and manage information flow between BYOD mobile devices and cloud synchronization services. Keywords: Residual Data, Cloud, Apps, Digital Forensics, BYOD

George Grispos, Tim Storer, William Bradley Glisson

Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

In today's globally networked environment, information security incidents can inflict staggering financial losses on organizations. Industry reports indicate that fundamental problems exist with the application of current linear plan-driven security incident response approaches being applied in many organizations. Researchers argue that traditional approaches value containment and eradication over incident learning. While previous security incident response research focused on best practice development, linear plan-driven approaches and the technical aspects of security incident response, very little research investigates the integration of agile principles and practices into the security incident response process. This paper proposes that the integration of disciplined agile principles and practices into the security incident response process is a practical solution to strengthening an organization's security incident response posture.

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

Cloud computing is quickly becoming pervasive in today's globally integrated networks. The cloud offers organizations opportunities to potentially deploy software and data solutions that are accessible through numerous mechanisms, in a multitude of settings, at a reduced cost with increased reliability and scalability. The increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous nature of the cloud creates an environment that is potentially conducive to security risks. While previous discussions have focused on security and privacy issues in the cloud from the end-users perspective, minimal empirical research has been conducted from the perspective of a corporate environment case study. This paper presents the results of an initial case study identifying real-world information security documentation issues for a Global Fortune 500 organization, should the organization decide to implement cloud computing services in the future. The paper demonstrates the importance of auditing policies, standards and guidelines applicable to cloud computing environments along with highlighting potential corporate concerns. The results from this case study has revealed that from the 1123 'relevant' statements found in the organization's security documentation, 175 statements were considered to be 'inadequate' for cloud computing. Furthermore, the paper provides a foundation for future analysis and research regarding implementation concerns for corporate cloud computing applications and services

George Grispos, William Bradley Glisson, Tim Storer

Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box and SugarSync have been embraced by both individuals and organizations. This creates an environment that is potentially conducive to security breaches and malicious activities. The investigation of these cloud environments presents new challenges for the digital forensics community. It is anticipated that smartphone devices will retain data from these storage services. Hence, this research presents a preliminary investigation into the residual artifacts created on an iOS and Android device that has accessed a cloud storage service. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an initial assessment on the extent to which cloud storage data is stored on these client-side devices. This view acts as a proxy for data stored in the cloud. Secondly, it provides documentation on the artifacts that could be useful in a digital forensics investigation of cloud services.