AES inspired hex symbol scheme for anti-forensic artifacts

Dissertant

Abu Asbah, Sumayyah Muhammad

Thesis advisor

al-Siwadi, Hamzah Husayn

Comitee Members

al-Majali, Sufyan Sami
al-Mubayyidin, Wisam Abd al-Rahman Muhammad

University

Princess Sumaya University for Technology

Faculty

King Hussein Faculty for Computing Sciences

University Country

Jordan

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2016

English Abstract

The technology of mobile phones has become one of the most common and important technologies that started as a critical tool needed for mere communication and then evolved to a key reservoirs of personal information and smart applications.

With this increased level of complications, increase dangers and increased levels of countermeasures have emerged.

One of the countermeasures is Mobile Forensics, a field that aims at collecting and analysing digital evidence to resolve mobile issues.

However, technologies such as Anti-Forensics have arisen as counter-countermeasures.

The widely used tools for anti-forensics tools are encryption and steganography.

Cryptography techniques converts plaintext into ciphertext while Steganography techniques hide data into other multimedia files which can only be discovered by the parties informed of the secret keys for both.

These schemes introduce a higher level of complexity that would protect against attacks but at the same time create an obstacle for forensic investigations.

This thesis introduces a new anti-forensics approach for ciphering data in the hex symbols file.

The proposed cryptographic scheme implements an algorithm that embeds and encrypts the secret data content as hex symbols into any hex file.

It is design to have quite complicated secret key, and uses multi-level encryption processes such that the resulting file will be unfathomable without the use of special keys yielding a high level of attacking and deciphering difficulty.

Furthermore if this scheme is implemented for embedding into a carrier file, it can produce extremely secure communication.

The resulting file is viewed using WinHex.

The carrier file can be exchanged amongst various computers and smart phones.

In this thesis, experiments were conducted using the proposed algorithm on smart phones devices which also are connected to computers.

A comparison is done for showing the advantage of the proposed scheme as compare with other hiding approaches for some criterion such as character frequency, capacity, use as evidence, and robustness.

Determining the key space of the proposed AES inspired hex symbols cryptographic scheme (AIS) for Brute force attack has shown remarkable improvement over other systems.

Main Subjects

Information Technology and Computer Science

No. of Pages

90

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-720835