Biblio

FPGA implementation of MD5 hash algorithm is faster than its software counterpart, but a pre-image brute-force attack on MD5 hash still needs 2ˆ(128) iterations theoretically. This work attempts to improve the speed of the brute-force attack on the MD5 algorithm using hardware implementation. A full 64-stage pipelining is done for MD5 hash generation and three architectures are presented for guess password generation. A 32/34/26-instance parallelization of MD5 hash generator and password generator pair is done to search for a password that was hashed using the MD5 algorithm. Total performance of about 6G trials/second has been achieved using a single Virtex-7 FPGA device.

In recent years, cyber attacks have caused substantial financial losses and been able to stop fundamental public services. Among the serious attacks, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) has emerged as a big challenge to the cyber security hitting selected companies and organisations. The main objectives of APT are data exfiltration and intelligence appropriation. As part of the APT life cycle, an attacker creates a Point of Entry (PoE) to the target network. This is usually achieved by installing malware on the targeted machine to leave a back-door open for future access. A common technique employed to breach into the network, which involves the use of social engineering, is the spear phishing email. These phishing emails may contain disguised executable files. This paper presents the disguised executable file detection (DeFD) module, which aims at detecting disguised exe files transferred over the network connections. The detection is based on a comparison between the MIME type of the transferred file and the file name extension. This module was experimentally evaluated and the results show a successful detection of disguised executable files.