Biblio

Middlebox is primarily used in Software-Defined Network (SDN) to enhance operational performance, policy compliance, and security operations. Therefore, security of the middlebox itself is essential because incorrect use of the middlebox can cause severe cybersecurity problems for SDN. Existing attacks against middleboxes in SDN (for instance, middleboxbypass attack) use methods such as cloned tags from the previous packets to justify that the middlebox has processed the injected packet. Flowcloak as the latest solution to defeat such an attack creates a defence using a tag by computing the hash of certain parts of the packet header. However, the security mechanisms proposed to mitigate these attacks are compromise-able since all parts of the packet header can be imitated, leaving the middleboxes insecure. To demonstrate our claim, we introduce a novel attack against SDN middleboxes by hijacking TCP/IP headers. The attack uses crafted TCP/IP headers to receive the tags and signatures and successfully bypasses the middleboxes.

Modern vehicles equipped with a large number of electronic components, sensors, actuators, and extensive connectivity, are the classical example of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Communication as an integral part of the CPS has enabled and offered many value-added services for vehicular networks. The communication mechanism helps to share contents with all vehicular network nodes and the surrounding environment, e.g., vehicles, traffic lights, and smart road signs, to efficiently take informed and smart decisions. Thus, it opens the doors to many security threats and vulnerabilities. Traditional TCP/IP-based communication paradigm focuses on securing the communication channel instead of the contents that travel through the network. Nevertheless, for content-centered application, content security is more important than communication channel security. To this end, named data networking (NDN) is one of the future Internet architectures that puts the contents at the center of communication and offers embedded content security. In this paper, we first identify the cyberattacks and security challenges faced by the vehicular CPS (VCPS). Next, we propose the NDN-based cyber-resilient, the layered and modular architecture for VCPS. The architecture includes the NDN's forwarding daemon, threat aversion, detection, and resilience components. A detailed discussion about the functionality of each component is also presented. Furthermore, we discuss the future challenges faced by the integration of NDN with VCPS to realize NDN-based VCPS.

Large enterprises offer thousands of micro-services applications to support their daily business activities by using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These applications generate huge amounts of traffic via millions of API calls every day, which is difficult to analyze for detecting any potential abnormal behaviour and application outage. This phenomenon makes Machine Learning (ML) a natural choice to leverage and analyze the API traffic and obtain intelligent predictions. This paper proposes an ML-based technique to detect and classify API traffic based on specific features like bandwidth and number of requests per token. We employ a Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a binary classifier to classify the abnormal API traffic using its linear kernel. Due to the scarcity of the API dataset, we created a synthetic dataset inspired by the real-world API dataset. Then we used the Gaussian distribution outlier detection technique to create a training labeled dataset simulating real-world API logs data which we used to train the SVM classifier. Furthermore, to find a trade-off between accuracy and false positives, we aim at finding the optimal value of the error term (C) of the classifier. The proposed anomaly detection method can be used in a plug and play manner, and fits into the existing micro-service architecture with little adjustments in order to provide accurate results in a fast and reliable way. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an F1-score of 0.964 in detecting anomalies in API traffic with a 7.3% of false positives rate.

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing number of resource-constrained interconnected smart devices, there is a noticeable increase in the number of cyber security crimes. In the face of the possible attacks on IoT networks such as network intrusion, denial of service, spoofing and so on, there is a need to develop efficient methods to locate vulnerabilities and mitigate attacks in IoT networks. Without loss of generality, we consider only intrusion-related threats to IoT. A honeypot is a system used to understand the potential dynamic threats and act as a proactive measure to detect any intrusion into the network. It is used as a trap for intruders to control unauthorized access to the network by analyzing malicious traffic. However, a sophisticated attacker can detect the presence of a honeypot and abort the intrusion mission. Therefore it is essential for honeypots to be undetectable. In this paper, we study and analyze possible techniques for SSH and telnet honeypot detection. Moreover, we propose a new methodology for probabilistic estimation of honeypot detection and an automated software implemented this methodology.

Vehicular Named Data Network (VNDN) uses NDN as an underlying communication paradigm to realize intelligent transportation system applications. Content communication is the essence of NDN, which is primarily carried out through content naming, forwarding, intrinsic content security, and most importantly the in-network caching. In vehicular networks, vehicles on the road communicate with other vehicles and/or infrastructure network elements to provide passengers a reliable, efficient, and infotainment-rich commute experience. Recently, different aspects of NDN have been investigated in vehicular networks and in vehicular social networks (VSN); however, in this paper, we investigate the in-network caching, realized in NDN through the content store (CS) data structure. As the stale contents in CS do not just occupy cache space, but also decrease the overall performance of NDN-driven VANET and VSN applications, therefore the size of CS and the content lifetime in CS are primary issues in VNDN communications. To solve these issues, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-metric CS management mechanism through cache replacement (M2CRP). We consider the content popularity, relevance, freshness, and distance of a node to devise a set of algorithms for selection of the content to be replaced in CS in the case of replacement requirement. Simulation results show that our multi-metric strategy outperforms the existing cache replacement mechanisms in terms of Hit Ratio.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising candidate for future internet architecture. It is one of the implementations of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures where the focus is on the data rather than the owner of the data. While the data security is assured by definition, these networks are susceptible of various Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, mainly Interest Flooding Attacks (IFA). IFAs overwhelm an NDN router with a huge amount of interests (Data requests). Various solutions have been proposed in the literature to mitigate IFAs; however; these solutions do not make a difference between intentional and unintentional misbehavior due to the network congestion. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion-aware IFA detection and mitigation solution. We performed extensive simulations and the results clearly depict the efficiency of our proposal in detecting truly occurring IFA attacks.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary idea to realize software-driven network with the separation of control and data planes. In essence, SDN addresses the problems faced by the traditional network architecture; however, it may as well expose the network to new attacks. Among other attacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are hard to contain in such software-based networks. Existing DDoS mitigation techniques either lack in performance or jeopardize the accuracy of the attack detection. To fill the voids, we propose in this paper a machine learning-based DDoS mitigation technique for SDN. First, we create a model for DDoS detection in SDN using NSL-KDD dataset and then after training the model on this dataset, we use real DDoS attacks to assess our proposed model. Obtained results show that the proposed technique equates favorably to the current techniques with increased performance and accuracy.