Risk Assessment, Certificate-Based Authentication And Anti-Spamming Guidelines For Southern Cross University

Task 1: Critical Components of the Southern Cross University’s Information System

This assignment will enlighten on the risk assessment of Southern Cross University. The common risks faced by the university in maintaining the information systems is discussed in the assignment. To manage risks, the university is using a password based authentication system so that the access to the university’s information system can be restricted and controlled. However, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy is posing great threats to the university. The following paragraphs will deal with risk assessment of the BYOD policy to the university’s information system, the advantages of Certificate based authentication over password-based authentication followed by providing a guideline for anti-spamming.

The critical information assets of Southern Cross University are software tools, Data governance, Master data governance and financial policies. The software tools are required to protect the data assets of the university by facilitating data governance. The university has adopted various data governance software tools and technology to keep the data confidential.

The potential threats that arises from Bring your own device policy to information assets of universities are as follows:

• The personal devices like smart phones laptops and tablets that are brought inside the campus of the university are connected to the network of the university through LANs or VLANs. If the devices contain viruses in it, then the viruses would contaminate the network and the internal campus resources of Southern Cross University would be infected.
• According to BYOD policy, regular monitoring of personal devices are not done by the university and therefore, some students might intentionally introduce malicious codes to the network that would result in breakdown of the network. Software tools is one of the critical information assets that is used by the university. Introduction of malware might crash the software that would lead to shutdown of the whole information system of the university.
• The staffs of the university are given responsibility of protecting data as per BYOD policy. However, staffs of Southern Cross University might not be efficient in checking all the devices and registering each of them in the university’s record. Therefore, threats prevail in the attack of the information assets.

Potential vulnerabilities of each assets against the identified threats: As discussed the critical information assets that are used by Southern Cross University are Software tools, Data governance, Master data governance and financial policies. The vulnerabilities of each assets are as follows:

• Vulnerability to data governance: The data that are stored in the information systems of the university are vulnerable to attack by malicious codes introduced in the network of the university.
• Vulnerability to master data governance: The master data are also vulnerable to attack by the malwares. This might lead to data theft. The data of the students studying in Southern Cross University would be lost that would result in great trouble while retrieving them.
• Vulnerability to financial data and policy: Data of financial transactions between the student and the university that are stored can be tampered. Several fake data can be added and real data can be deleted. These actions goes against the financial policies of the university.
• Vulnerability to software tools: The viruses that enters the network of the university makes the internal campus resources vulnerable to virus attacks.

In certificate-based authentication, digital certificate is used to identify a user, machine or device. Before providing access to the user, device or machine to the resources, networks and application it checks if the user is registered through certificates to access the network (Ahmavaar Palanigounder and Qualcomm, 2017). The certificates of the users are used to logon to windows, access emails and intranets as well as accessing the databases of the enterprise. Only approved users, devices and machines would be allowed to access the networks and databases.

The machines and devices are also authenticated by using digital certificates. The on-location or in- field machines should be identified and communicated to the back-end services (Hummen et al., 2013). The personal devices like smart phones, laptops and tablets should be identified before access is allowed to Wi-Fi networks. Mutual certificate-based authentication between various servers of the enterprise is enabled (Xue et al., 2013).   

Certificate-based authentication is better than password-based authentication due to some differences between them. The differences between them are as follows:

• The security provided by certificate-based authentication is much more than password-based application. This is because the users create passwords themselves that can be easily identified (Farash and Attari, 2016). Whereas, certificate-based authentication uses asymmetric cryptography. A certification authority with unique information for each individual issues certificates. Therefore, it cannot be guessed and provides better security to users.
• Passwords are mostly simple consisting of strings, numbers and special characters whereas, certificates are complex consisting of detailed information of the user (Turkanovic and Holbl, 2013). Therefore, passwords of the user can be guessed easily however, it is not possible in case of certificates.
• Certificate-based authentication allows separation of roles that is not allowed by password-based applications.
• Certificate-based authentication is expensive than that of password-based authentication.

Some features of certificate-based authentication are mentioned below:

• No additional hardware needed: Unlike authentication methods such as biometrics and OTP tokens, certificate-based authentication does not require additional hardware (He and Wang, 2015). The certificates are stored in a machine that reduces pain of distributing and replacing tokens.
• User-friendly: The use of certificates for validating users easy for the end-users. This is because after certificates are used, no such additional information about the users are there that can be used.
• Mutual Authentication: Another advantage of certificate-based authentication is that it allows mutual authentication between users or user to machine or machine to machine.
• Existing access control policies can be leveraged: Existing group’s policy and permissions can be leveraged to control the access of users and machines.

Unsolicited messages are regarded as spams. Commercial electronic messages that are unsolicited cannot be sent. The electronic messages should contain information of the organization or individual who is authorized for sending the message (Kigerl, 2015). Otherwise, the message will be marked as spam. The various forms of spam that are email spams, web search engine spam, online classified ads spam, UseNet newsgroup spam, social spam, mobile apps spam and so on.

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send spams (unsolicited messages). Repeated messages sent to a site is also referred to as spamming. The characteristics of spamming are explained in the following paragraphs:

• Spamming asks for sensitive information
• Uses scare tactics
• Asks for money in advance
• Seems too good to be true

• Email spam: It is also known as unsolicited bulk email or junk mail (Idris et al., 2015). Huge number of messages are sent that are unwanted and it consists of large quantity of commercial contents.
• Instant messaging spam: Instant messaging spams uses instant messaging systems to that leads to shut down of the network (Youn and Cho, 2015).
• Social networking spam: Spam links are sent to account holders in social media like Facebook and Twitter (Cao and Caverlee, 2015). Once the user opens the link, all data of the user is collected by unauthorized access.

Spam is a growing problem in today’s world and needs a solution. Therefore, the following guidelines will help to reduce spam risks:

• Developing strong technical measures.
• Effective and strong legislation should be followed.
• Best anti-spam practices should be adopted (Rothwell et al., 2015).
• By spreading awareness for spams
• The internet service providers (ISPs) should use latest anti-spam technology to filter spams from transferring in a network (Phokeer and Aina, 2016).

Conclusion:

From the above discussions, it can be concluded that Southern Cross University’s information system is facing threats from malwares, viruses and spam that might occur from ‘bring your own device’ policy. However, if certificate-based authentication is used in the university, then unauthorized access to the network can be controlled. Spams are bulk messages that are sent through either emails or social media. However, anti-spam guidelines will help to reduce the threats.

Reference:

Cao, C. and Caverlee, J., 2015, March. Detecting spam urls in social media via behavioral analysis. In European Conference on Information Retrieval (pp. 703-714). Springer, Cham.

Farash, M.S. and Attari, M.A., 2016. An anonymous and untraceable password?based authentication scheme for session initiation protocol using smart cards. International Journal of Communication Systems, 29(13), pp.1956-1967.

He, D. and Wang, D., 2015. Robust biometrics-based authentication scheme for multiserver environment. IEEE Systems Journal, 9(3), pp.816-823.

Hummen, R., Ziegeldorf, J.H., Shafagh, H., Raza, S. and Wehrle, K., 2013, April. Towards viable certificate-based authentication for the internet of things. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Hot topics on wireless network security and privacy (pp. 37-42). ACM.

Idris, I., Selamat, A., Nguyen, N.T., Omatu, S., Krejcar, O., Kuca, K. and Penhaker, M., 2015. A combined negative selection algorithm–particle swarm optimization for an email spam detection system. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 39, pp.33-44.

Kigerl, A.C., 2015. Evaluation of the CAN SPAM ACT: Testing deterrence and other influences of e-mail spammer legal compliance over time. Social Science Computer Review, 33(4), pp.440-458.

Phokeer, A. and Aina, A., 2016, May. A survey of anti-spam mechanisms and their usage from a Regional Internet Registry’s perspective. In IST-Africa Week Conference, 2016 (pp. 1-11). IEEE.

Rothwell, S., Elshenawy, A., Carter, S., Braga, D., Romani, F., Kennewick, M. and Kennewick, B., 2015. Controlling quality and handling fraud in large scale crowdsourcing speech data collections. In Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association.

Turkanovic, M. and Holbl, M., 2013. An improved dynamic password-based user authentication scheme for hierarchical wireless sensor networks. Elektronika ir Elektrotechnika, 19(6), pp.109-116.

Wu, S., Chen, K. and Zhu, Y., 2013. Enhancements of a three-party password-based authenticated key exchange protocol. Int. Arab J. Inf. Technol., 10(3), pp.215-221.

Xue, K., Ma, C., Hong, P. and Ding, R., 2013. A temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 36(1), pp.316-323.

Youn, S. and Cho, H.C., 2015. Improved spam filter via handling of text embedded image e-mail. Journal of Electrical Engineering & Technology, 10(1), pp.401-407.