Robert Flowers to defend dissertation Feb 4

Faculty, students and the general public are invited as doctoral student Robert Henry Flowers defends his dissertation on Thursday (February 4) at 7:30 PM.The event will be held on campus in the Puente Library Conference Room and can also be accessed remotely via Capitol's distance learning platform.

Mr. Flowers' dissertation is titled Impact of CISCO and Linux Firewall Protections on Data Exfitration via IPV4 Network Steganography. Dr. Warren Lerner is the faculty advisor. Abstract below:

Osama bin Laden’s alleged use of steganographic techniques to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks and the use of file-based steganography by Russian spies in 2010 were relatively primitive as compared to the newest network steganography variants. State-of-the-art protocol, timing channel, and parity based network steganography methods are nearly undetectable. Further, scholars posited the latest security appliances and software provide insufficient protections against data exfiltration using network steganography. The experiments conducted within this study revealed the assertions made by network steganography scholars were correct. Those results confirmed the security appliance and software studied were unable to detect, prevent, or demonstrate a statistically significant difference in outbound covert channels with an alpha of 0.05. The Cohen’s D effect sizes for the Cisco ASA-5505 (-.025391) and the Linux IPTABLES firewall (-.024281) were far below the low range for effect size. Pearson’s correlation coefficients (0.013 and 0.012 respectively) indicated the absence of a negative correlation between the independent variable (firewall defensive posture) and the dependent variable (steganographic bits successfully exfiltrated).

For the remote session, follow this link: https://capitol.adobeconnect.com/_a1141159107/defense/