The security of cryptocurrency wallets is directly related to the security of personal assets. However, due to the design defects of mobile operating system and cryptocurrency wallets, security incidents of cryptocurrency wallets occur frequently, causing irreversible losses to users' assets or privacy. In this paper, we study the security risks of Android-based cryptocurrency wallets. We establish the adversary model, analyze the attack surface originated from the Android OS, and demonstrate several attack vectors by conducting experiments on multiple popular cryptocurrency wallets in Google Play Store. Finally, we present several security defense strategies in response to the security risks.
Omi Akter, Arnisha Akther, Md. Ashraf Uddin, Md. Manowarul Islam
With the advancement in digital forensics, digital forensics has been evolved in Cloud computing.A common process of digital forensics mainly includes five steps: defining problem scenario, collection of the related data, investigation of the crime scenes, analysis of evidences and case documentation.The conduction of digital forensics in cloud results in several challenges, security, and privacy issues.In this paper, several digital forensics approaches in the context of IoT and cloud have been presented.The review focused on zone-based approach for IoT digital forensics where the forensics process is divided into three zones.Digital forensics in cloud provides the facilities of large data storage, computational capabilities and identification of criminal activities required for investigating forensics.We have presented a brief study on several issues and challenges raised in each phase of Cloud forensics process.The solution approaches as well as advancement prospects of cloud forensics have been described in the light of Blockchain technology.These studies will broaden the way to new researchers for better understanding and devising new ideas for combating the challenges.
Cilj ovog završnog rada je egzaktno opisati izradu kriptovalute zasnovanu na tehnologiji blockchain. Za izradu kriptovalute korišten je izvorni kôd postojeće kriptovalute Litecoin te su kroz postupak izrade izmijenjeni određeni parametri u izvornom kôdu kao i dijelovi kôda kako bi se uspješno izradila nova kriptovaluta. U radu je opisan postupak izgradnje kriptovalute i opisane su tehnologije koje su pri tom korištene. Prilikom izgradnje korišten je operativni sustav Linux u virtualnom okruženju te su testirane sve funkcionalnosti neophodne za rad s kriptovalutom.
Among all ongoing attacks on mobile, those targeting blockchain-wallet applications raise pressing concerns due to the risks of potential monetary loss. These attacks mainly focus on the theft and forwarding of keys in executable files. The challenge is that these malicious code behaviors are not detectable with the usual detection methods. We propose in this article the implementation of an unpacking system to the intelligent block-chain applications: AutoD, based on the JNI layer deception-call in Android ART. This solution can successfully restore the decrypted Dex file during the execution of the reinforced blockchain applications. The core idea is to first transfer the Dex from memory to the sdcard completely according to the DexFile structure. Then through deception-calling on every method of every class, AutoD successfully repairs the function-extracting protection component in Dex. Experimental results show that AutoD offers full repair on the function-ex-tracting protection component, where most of the malicious code usually hides.
The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitization in financial services. In this context, laws and regulations cannot efficiently cope with a fast-moving industry such as finance, which translates in late adoption of measures and legal voids, providing a fruitful landscape for malicious actors. In parallel, blockchain technology and its promising features such as immutability, verifiability, and authentication, enhance the opportunities of financial forensics. In this paper, we focus on an embezzlement scheme and we provide a forensic-by-design methodology for its investigation. In addition, the feasibility and adaptability of our approach can be extended and embrace digital investigations on other types of schemes. We provide a functional implementation based on smart contracts and we integrate standardised forensic flows and chain of custody preservation mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the benefits and challenges of the symbiotic relationship between blockchain and financial investigations, along with future research directions.
Evidence is a tangible demonstrative artifact that proves a fact and shapes the investigation of various misconduct cases involving for instance corruption, misbehavior, or violation. It is imperative to maintain proper evidence management to guarantee the admissibility of an evidence in a court of law. Chain of custody forms the forensic link of evidence sequence of control, transfer, and analysis to preserve evidence's integrity and to prevent its contamination. Blockchain, a distributed tamper-resistant ledger can be leveraged to offer a decentralized secure digital evidence system. In this paper, we propose a secure chain of custody framework by utilizing the blockchain technology to store evidence metadata while the evidence is stored in a reliable storage medium. The framework is built on top of a private Ethereum blockchain to document every transmission from the moment the evidence is seized, thus ensuring that evidence can only be accessed or possessed by authorized parties. The framework is integrated with the digital evidence system where evidence is physically stored and locked using smart locks. To secure the sequence of evidence submission and retrieval, only an authorized party can possess the key to unlock the evidence. Our proposed framework offers a secure solution that maintains evidence integrity and admissibility among multiple stakeholders such as law enforcement agencies, lawyers, and forensic professionals. The research findings shed light on hidden opportunities for the efficient usage of blockchain in other realms beyond finance and cryptocurrencies.
As digital currency wallets are gaining popularity, security incidents related to them are also increasing. They lead to the disclosure of users' private information and security threats of users' assets. This article analyzes the security risks of digital wallets in Android, which is the most popular mobile operating system. it first establishes the threat model and the security goals, and then analyzes the attack surface and attack vectors from the aspects of wallet apps and the Android system. Experiments are conducted on two realworld digital currency wallet apps, and the results reveal several serious security risks in these apps, which highlight the necessity and importance of developing secure cryptocurrency wallets.
The advancement in information technology has changed our life significantly. No doubt, the Internet, smartphones, and social media have connected people and society. It has contributed to various aspects of our daily life. However, there is also a dark side of cyberspace, that is, cybercrime. It is becoming a global threat and needs technological solutions to combat. Whenever there is a crime, there is a law to curb the crime. The role of digital forensics is to understand the ‘Who, What, Where and Why’ of the incident. Digital forensics is a scientific process to collect, analyze, and present the evidence in a court of law. As it is used to link the person with criminal activities, it is crucial that the entire process of investigation be trustworthy. Managing the digital evidence and maintaining the chain of custody and integrity of digital evidence are utmost important. This chapter discusses the applications of blockchain technology to address the challenging issues faced by the digital investigation process and forensic readiness. The chapter also discusses the legal issues and admissibility of blockchain-based evidence in a court of law.
Gulshan Kumar, Rahul Saha, G. Geetha, Mamoun Alazab
Real estate is a major influential business form in the present economic world. The demands of social life and comfort and ease of utility access have risen a boom of development in a real-estate business environment. With all its pros and cons and a variety of property forms, the fraudulent property is a serious issue in this environment, where illegal properties are shown as legal and transactions of amount are done accordingly; as a result, the stakeholders face huge losses and sometimes go bankrupt too. To avoid such fraudulence and for providing transparency for the property construction-buying-selling parameters, we have come up with a logical solution of real estate chain (RESCHAIN). RESCHAIN is a blockchain-based real estate ledger, which is to be distributed in nature and is publicly available. Therefore, anybody can access the required real estate property details by being a member of RESCHAIN, so that the acquisition of the real estate can be made officially legal and justified. Moreover, to be a member of RESCHAIN, we need to use cryptographic services for security requirements. As a result, confidentiality-integrity-availability triad is to be ensured for the inclusion in the required solution.
Outbreak of the Internet and technological dependence make the Cyber Technology Industry grow at a very fast pace. Cyber-security is the dire need of today which helps prevent or defend the systems from cyber-attacks. Distributed Ledger Technology like Blockchain with its various properties and advantages opens many opportunities for its use in the cyber-security domain and mitigating the associated risks. These technologies remove the need of any central trusted party or authority, which would facilitate recording and tracking of resources. This paper focuses on the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in the field of Cyber-security. It focuses on the discussion of new distributed ledger technology IOTA, its features and working. This paper also focuses on one of the uses of the IOTA Tangle technology, which provides a solution for securing logs of a system. As the logs of a system are the most important evidence in the investigation phase of Cyber-Forensics, thus preserving the logs securely and maintaining their integrity is mandatory. Later in this paper, the use of IOTA is demonstrated for securing the logs of a system.
Tyler Thomas, Mathew Piscitelli, Ilya Shavrov, Ibrahim Baggili
We present Memory FORESHADOW: Memory FOREnSics of HArDware cryptOcurrency Wallets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the primary account of cryptocurrency hardware wallet client memory forensics. Our exploratory analysis revealed forensically relevant data in memory including transaction history, extended public keys, passphrases, and unique device identifiers. Data extracted with FORESHADOW can be used to associate a hardware wallet with a computer and allow an observer to deanonymize all past and future transactions due to hierarchical deterministic wallet address derivation. Additionally, our novel visualization framework enabled us to measure both the persistence and integrity of artifacts produced by the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet clients. The framework can be generalized for use in future memory forensics work.
Thomas K. Dasaklis, Fran Casino, Constantinos Patsakis
As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analyzing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional mandates, interoperability issues, the massive amount of evidence gathered (multimedia, text etc.) and multiple stakeholders involved (law enforcement agencies, security firms etc.) are just a few among the various challenges that hinder the adoption and implementation of sound digital forensics schemes. Blockchain technology has been recently proposed as a viable solution for developing robust digital forensics mechanisms. In this paper, we provide an overview and classification of the available blockchain-based digital forensic tools, and we further describe their main features. We also offer a thorough analysis of the various benefits and challenges of the symbiotic relationship between blockchain technology and the current digital forensics approaches, as proposed in the available literature. Based on the findings, we identify various research gaps, and we suggest future research directions that are expected to be of significant value both for academics and practitioners in the field of digital forensics.
Suat Mercan, Mumin Cebe, Ege Tekiner, Kemal Akkaya · 6 authors
IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incident and prove it in legal cases if there is a dispute with the involved parties. To address these issues, blockchain provides excellent opportunities since it can protect the integrity of the data thanks to its distributed structure. However, it comes with certain costs as storing huge amount of data in a public blockchain will come with significant transaction fees. In this paper, we propose a highly cost effective and reliable digital forensics framework by exploiting multiple inexpensive blockchain networks as a temporary storage before the data is committed to Ethereum. To reduce Ethereum costs,we utilize Merkle trees which hierarchically stores hashes of the collected event data from IoT devices. We evaluated the approach on popular blockchains such as EOS, Stellar, and Ethereum by presenting a cost and security analysis. The results indicate that we can achieve significant cost savings without compromising the integrity of the data.
With the development of technology, the preservation of digital evidence becomes increasingly important in case investigations. To maintain the authenticity of an evidence, its entire lifecycle has to be recorded. In addition, traditional database technologies are not able to maintain the integrity and authenticity of digital evidence. In order to achieve authentication and integrity, as well as confidentiality, of digital evidence, we propose a protocol for digital evidence chain of custody based on revocable ciphertextpolicy attribute-based encryption, BLS signature, and blockchain technology. In our protocol, attribute-based encryption is used to achieve fine-grained access control and BLS signature is used to verify digital evidence. Besides, we use blockchain technology to ensure the integrity and traceability of digital evidence. Analysis and experimental results show that the proposed protocol, which well balances the privacy and the traceability, guarantees the integrity and validity of evidence.
Wilfridus Bambang Triadi Handaya, Mohd Najwadi Yusoff, Aman Jantan
Abstract Cybercrime is the highest threat to every private company and government agency in the world. Using synergistic threats to attack provides many success alternatives that lead to the same goal, which is to take over the network and carry out illegal mining activities using CPU resources from the victim’s computer. One of the main motives for the success of this criminal business is its relatively low cost and high return of investment. Using the infection chain method in carrying out cryptocurrency mining malware attacks with fileless techniques involves loading malicious code into system memory. Monero (XMR) is by far the highest popular cryptocurrency among threat actor installing mining malware because it comes with full anonymity and resistance to an application-specific circuit mining (ASIC). This work proposes a better method for classifying conventional malware and cryptocurrency mining malware. On the other hand, grouping specific of suitable features extracted from the sources of EMBER dataset shown as malware and need to categorize as a cryptocurrency mining malware. The proposed approach is defining a better algorithm for enhancing accuracy and efficiency for cryptocurrency mining malware detection.
A cyber attack necessitates preventing the spread of damage by quickly responding to the incident. To investigate the situation accurately, we must collect, manage, and maintain log data on devices related to the system. We herein propose a distributed management method for logs using a blockchain scheme. The blockchain scheme has the following two features. One makes managed data tamper resistant. The other makes access to the same data possible with multiple terminals, thereby increasing access availability. A log management method that adapts these features can provide log data that are guaranteed to be complete when needed. This paper presents our evaluation of the feasibility of our method in a prototype.