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Security Research Group

Research

Research

 

The research in Digital Forensics covers topics such as Malware, Steganography, Cloud Forensics and Covert communications in network traffic. Strengths in these areas are evidenced by the following publications:

  • Sheridan, S. and Keane, A. (2017). Improving the stealthiness of dns-based covert communication. European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, pages 433–441. Academic Conferences International Limited.
  • Sheridan, S. and Keane, A. (2016). Detection of dns-based covert channel beacon signals. Journal of Information Warfare, 14(4):100–114.
  • Thethi N. and Keane A. (2014) Digital Forensics Investigations in the Cloud. 4th IEEE International Advanced Computing Conference - IACC 2014.
  • O'Shaughnessy, S. and Breitinger, F. (2021). Malware family classification via efficient Huffman features. Digital Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS) USA, July 2021
  • O'Shaughnessy, S. (2019). Image-based Malware Classification: A Space Filling Curve Approach. Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) 2019. DOI:10.1109/VizSec48167.2019.9161583.
  • Shiel, I. and O'Shaughnessy, S. (2019). Improving file-level fuzzy hashes for malware variant classification. Journal of Digital Investigation, vol. 28, pages S88-S94 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2019.01.018.

This theme reflects the activities of colleagues working on a diverse range of topics on the application of security to society and ranging from language aspects of cybersecurity to local models of crime prevention and community safety. In addition, researchers work on virtual learning environments and training in a variety of contexts that have application in the security space.

  • Bowden, M. and Pytlarz, A (2020). The Development of Rational Models of Crime Prevention: A Critique of the Situationist Commonsense in Rural Contexts, in Harkness, A. (ed) Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques. London: Routledge.
  • Bowden, M. (2019). The security field: Forming and expanding a Bourdieusian criminology.
  • Criminology & Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819839734 Pytlarz, A., & Bowden, M. (2019). “Crime-Talk”, Security and Fear in the Countryside: A
  • Preliminary Study of a Rural Irish Town and its Hinterland. International Journal of Rural Criminology, 4(2).
  • Bowden, M. (2017) Community Safety, Social Cohesion and Embedded Autonomy: A Case from South-West Dublin. Crime Prevention and Community Safety, 19(2): 1-16.
  • Power Aurelia (2019). A Linguistic Account of Public Textual Cyberbullying. In Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge: The Linguistic, Pragmatic, Ontological and Computational Dimensions, E. Diedrichsen and B.Nolan (Eds).
  • Cambridge Scholars Publishing, New Castle, UK.
  • Power Aurelia, Keane Anthony, Nolan Brian, and O’Neill Brian (2019). The Role of Previous Discourse in Identifying Public Textual Cyberbullying. Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research.
  • Power Aurelia (2019). Speech Acts in Public Textual Cyberbullying. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Meaning and Knowledge Representation 3-5 July, Granada, Spain.
  • Queiroz, A. L., Mckeever, S., & Keegan, B. (2019). Detecting Hacker Threats: Performance of Word and Sentence Embedding Models in Identifying Hacker Communications. In AICS (pp. 116-127).
  • Chen, H., McKeever, S., & Delany, S. J. (2019, July). The use of deep learning distributed representations in the identification of abusive text. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 13, pp. 125-133).
  • Power Aurelia, Keane Anthony, Nolan Brian, and O’Neill Brian (2018). Detecting Discourse- Independent Negated Forms of Public Textual Cyberbullying. Journal of Computer- Assisted Linguistic Research, 2, 1 – 20.
  • US Patent: Vaughan, De Looze (2016) Method and System for Measuring Communication Skills of Crew Members. US20160189562A1
  • Canadian Patent: Vaughan, De Looze (2016) Method and System for Measuring Communication Skills of Crew Members. CA2919762A
  • Collins, N., Vaughan, B., Cullen, C. - “ Motivation in Situated Immersive Games for Irish Language Learning, a DBR Approach” ECGBL 2020 14th European Conference on Game-Based Learning, 2020.
  • Collins, N., Vaughan, B., Cullen, C.,, "Designing Contextually: An Investigation of Design- Based Research to Promote Situated Irish Language Identity through Virtual Reality," 2020 6th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), San Luis Obispo, CA, USA, 2020.
  • Collins, N., Vaughan, B., Cullen, C., Gardiner, K, “GaeltechVR: Measuring the Impact of an Immersive Virtual Environment to Promote Situated Identity in Irish Language Learning” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 12(3). 2019

In this theme, researchers are interested in digital and physical spaces in the ‘smart city’, on the impact of technology for work, life and creativity.

  • Fitzpatrick, Noel & Conor McGarrigle (2020) ‘Real Smart (Data City). ‘Le Colonialisme par les données’. In Le Nouveau Génie Urbain, sous la direction de Bernard Stiegler, FYP
  • editions. (English translation, forthcoming 2021).
  • Fitzpatrick, Noel, Alombert, Anne, Tron Colette, Loughran Glenn, Citton Yves, Bernard Stiegler, (2020), ‘Recherche Contributive et Sculpture Social de Soi’. In Bifurger : Il n’y a pas d’alternative. Sous la direction de Bernard Stiegler avec le collectif internation, Les Liens qui Libèrent, Paris. (English translation, forthcoming in 2021).
  • Fitzpatrick, Noel (2021), ‘Digital Hermeneutics: Will the Real Quantified Self Please Stand Up?’ in Interpreting Technology, edited by Mark Coeckelbergh, Alberto Romele, and Wessel Reijers. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (forthcoming 2021).
  • Fitzpatrick, Noel, (2021) ‘Mischevious Hermes : Digital Hermeneutics and Stiegler’s Therapeutics’ , in Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler, Routledge, New York, 2021.
  • Fitzpatrick, Noel, Sara Baranzoni, Paolo Vignola, editors Special Edition Journal Ethics and Politics, (July 2020). Vol. XXII, No. 2, 2020, review of Philosophy, Guayaquil Archipelago: Epistemological Steps towards a Real Smart City.
  • Fitzpatrick, Noel, Neill O’Dwyer, Micheal O’Hara editors (2021). Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler, Routledge, New York, 2021.

This theme reflects the activities of colleagues working in the broad and diverse area of network security, ranging from the development of attack countermeasures to the application of machine learning techniques for attack detection.

  • P. Phadke and C. Thorpe, “Analysis of an api driven application to detect smishing attacks,” in 20th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ECCWS). Academic Conferences and publishing limited, 2021.
  • J. Miglani and C. Thorpe, “Employing machine learning paradigms for detecting dns tunnelling,” in 20th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ECCWS). Academic Conferences and publishing limited, 2021.
  • C. Thorpe, J. Tobin and L. Murphy, "An ISO/IEC 7816-4 Application Layer Approach to Mitigate Relay Attacks on Near Field Communication," in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 190108-190117, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3031979.
  • D. Homan, I. Shiel, and C. Thorpe, “A new network model for cyber threat intelligence sharing using blockchain technology,” in 10th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS). IEEE, 2019, pp. 1–6.
  • A. J. A. de la Vega and C. Thorpe, “A performance study of the ethical hacking capabilities of single board computers,” in 18th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ECCWS). Academic Conferences and publishing limited, 2019, p. 142.
  • J. Tobin, C. Thorpe and L. Murphy, "An Approach to Mitigate Black Hole Attacks on Vehicular Wireless Networks," 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring), 2017, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/VTCSpring.2017.8108460.
  • Byrne, D. and Thorpe, C., 2017, June. Jigsaw: an investigation and countermeasure for ransomware attacks. In European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (pp. 656-665). Academic Conferences International Limited.
  • S. Duggan and C. Thorpe, “An analysis of how information security e- learning can be improved through gamification of real software issues,” in European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2017, pp. 666–672.
  • C. Martinez and C. Thorpe, “Analysis of spam: honeypot experiment,” in European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2017, pp. 692–701.

This concerns issues related to issues such as co-operation between military and civil powers, with analysis and public communication of defence and security issues arising from conflicts globally, together with contemporary security policy.

  • Clonan, T., in Carroll, J., (Ed) 2022: Defend, Protect and Serve, Ireland’s Armed Forces in Time of Crisis, ‘Disconnect and Mis-Match – Ireland's Defence Strategy and Planning’ New York, Palgrave McMillan (in Press)
  • Clonan, T., ‘The Defence Forces: Reorganisation and Terror Threat’, Journal of Institute of Public Administration, Vol 60, No.4, 73-75
  • Clonan, T., 2013: Whistleblower, Soldier, Spy, A Journey into the Heart of the Global War on Terror, Dublin: Liberties Press
  • Clonan, T., 2012: Blood, Sweat and Tears, A Soldier’s Story of Love and Loss in Lebanon, Dublin: Liberties Press.
  • Clonan, T., 2011: ‘Gender Streaming in the Irish Defence Forces’, in Mulreany, M., & O’Brien, D., Lord of the Files: Working for the Government, An Anthology, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, pp 420-1.

This theme reflects the activities of colleagues working on a diverse range of topics in online privacy, from privacy preserving data publishing to privacy preserving cloud applications.

  • Alexandre Pujol, Liam Murphy, and Christina Thorpe. FedORAM: A federated oblivious RAM scheme. IEEE Access, 6:35283–35291, 2020
  • Alexandre Pujol, Damien Magoni, Liam Murphy, and Christina Thorpe. Spying on instant messaging servers: Potential privacy leaks through metadata. Transactions on Data Privacy, 12:175–206, 2019
  • Alexandre Pujol, Christina Thorpe, and Liam Murphy. Collecting metadata on an instant messaging server. In European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, pages 741–744. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2017
  • Alexandre Pujol and Christina Thorpe. Dog ORAM: A distributed and shared oblivious RAM model with server-side computation. In Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on, pages 624– 629. IEEE, 2015
  • Ayala-Rivera, V., McDonagh, P., Cerqueus, T., Murphy, L., & Thorpe, C. (2017). Enhancing the utility of anonymized data by improving the quality of generalization hierarchies.
  • Transactions on Data Privacy, 10(1), 27-59.
  • Ayala-Rivera, V., Murphy, L. & Thorpe, C. “Automatic Construction of Generalization Hierarchies for Publishing Anonymized Data.” 9th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management, Passau, Germany, October 2016.
  • Ayala-Rivera, V., Portillo-Dominguez, A., Murphy, L. & Thorpe, C.“COCOA: A Synthetic Data Generator for Testing Anonymization Techniques.” Privacy in Statistical Databases Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 2016.
  • Ayala-Rivera, V., Cerqueus, T., Murphy, L. & Thorpe, C. “Improving the Utility of Anonymized Datasets through Dynamic Evaluation of Generalization Hierarchies.” IEEE 17th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, July 2016.

In this space colleagues are interested in a variety of areas such as the security of data centres and the role of machine learning, predictive technologies and artificial intelligence.

  • Jin Xu and Mark Davis and Ruairí de Fréin. “LPC pole processing method for enhancing the identification of dominant spectral features.” IET Electronics Letters, to appear June 2021, doi:10.1049/ell2.12226.
  • Ruairí de Fréin. “Power-Weighted LPC Formant Estimation.” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs. 2020. doi: 10.1109/TCSII.2020.3040194.
  • Ruairí de Fréin and Scott Rickard. “Power-Weighted Divergences for Relative Attenuation and Delay Estimation.” in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 1612- 1616, Nov. 2016, doi: 10.1109/LSP.2016.2610481.
  • Ruairí de Fréin, “Source Separation Approach to Video Quality Prediction in Computer Networks.” in IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1333-1336, July 2016, doi: 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2563418