Biblio

Passwords are generally used to keep unauthorized users out of the system. Password hacking has become more common as the number of internet users has extended, causing a slew of issues. These problems include stealing the confidential information of a company or a country by adversaries which harm the economy or the security of the organization. Hackers often use password hacking for criminal activities. It is indispensable to protect passwords from hackers. There are many hacking methods such as credential stuffing, social engineering, traffic interception, and password spraying for hacking the passwords. So, in order to control hacking, there are hashing algorithms that are mostly used to hash passwords making password cracking more difficult. In this proposed work, different hashing algorithms such as SHA-1, MD-5, Salted MD-5, SHA-256, and SHA-512 have been used. And the MySQL database is used to store the hash values of passwords that are generated using various hash functions. It is proven that SHA is better than MD-5 and Salted MD-5. Whereas in the SHA family, SHA-512 and SHA-256 have their own benefits. Four new hashing functions have been proposed using the combination of existing algorithms like SHA-256, and SHA-512 namely SHA-256\_with\_SHA-256, SHA-256\_ With\_SHA-512,SHA-512\_With\_SHA-512,and SHA-512\_ With\_SHA-256. They provide strong hash value for passwords by which the security of passwords increases, and hacking can be controlled to an extent.

The student's fault is not the only cause of dropping out of school. Often, cases of dropping out of school are only associated with too general problems. However, sensitive issues that can be detrimental to certain parties in this regard, such as the institution's reputation, are usually not made public. To overcome this, an in-depth analysis of these cases is needed for proper handling. Many risks are associated with creating a single repository for this sensitive information. Therefore, some encryption is required to ensure data is not leaked. However, encryption at rest and in transit is insufficient as data leakage is a considerable risk during processing. In addition, there is also a risk of abuse of authority by insiders so that no single entity is allowed to have access to all data. Homomorphic encryption presents a viable solution to this challenge. Data may be aggregated under the security provided by Homomorphic Encryption. This method makes the data available for computation without being decrypted first and without paying the risk of having a single repository.

The development of cloud apps enables people to exchange resources, goods, and expertise online with other clients. The material is more vulnerable to numerous security dangers from outsiders due to the fact that millions of users exchange data through the same system. How to maintain the security of this data is now the main concern. The current data protection system functions best when it places a greater priority on safeguarding data maintained in online storage than it does on cybersecurity during transportation. The data becomes open to intrusion attacks while being transferred. Additionally, the present craze states that an outside auditor may view data as it is being transmitted. Additionally, by allowing the hacker to assume a third-person identity while obtaining the information, this makes the data more susceptible to exploitation. The proposed system focuses on using encryption to safeguard information flow since cybersecurity is seen as a major issue. The approach also takes into account the fourth auditing issue, which is that under the recommended manner, the inspector is not allowed to see the user information. Tests have shown that the recommended technique improves security overall by making it harder for hackers to decode the supplied data.

Data security has become the most important issue in every institution or company. With the existence of hackers, intruders, and third parties on the cloud, securing data has become more challenging. This paper uses a hybrid encryption method that is based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). ECC is used as a lightweight encryption algorithm that can provide a good level of security. Besides, FHE is used to enable data computation on the encrypted data in the cloud. In this paper, the concept of unique values is combined with the hybrid encryption method. Using the concept of unique values contributes to decreasing the encryption and decryption time obviously. To evaluate the performance of the combined encryption method, the provided results are compared with the ones in the encryption method without using the concept of unique values. Experiments show that the combined encryption method can reduce the encryption time up to 43% and the decryption time up to 56%.

Topic modeling algorithms from the natural language processing (NLP) discipline have been used for various applications. For instance, topic modeling for the product recommendation systems in the e-commerce systems. In this paper, we briefly reviewed topic modeling applications and then described our proposed idea of utilizing topic modeling approaches for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) applications. We improved the previous work by implementing BERTopic and Top2Vec approaches, enabling users to select their preferred pre-trained text/sentence embedding model, and supporting various languages. We implemented our proposed idea as the new topic modeling module for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Maryam: Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) framework. We also described our experiment results using a leaked hacker forum dataset (nulled.io) to attract more researchers and open-source communities to participate in the Maryam project of OWASP Foundation.

The 2021 T-Mobile breach conducted by John Erin Binns resulted in the theft of 54 million customers' personal data. The attacker gained entry into T-Mobile's systems through an unprotected router and used brute force techniques to access the sensitive information stored on the internal servers. The data stolen included names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, birthdays, driver's license numbers, ID information, IMEIs, and IMSIs. We analyze the data breach and how it opens the door to identity theft and many other forms of hacking such as SIM Hijacking. SIM Hijacking is a form of hacking in which bad actors can take control of a victim's phone number allowing them means to bypass additional safety measures currently in place to prevent fraud. This paper thoroughly reviews the attack methodology, impact, and attempts to provide an understanding of important measures and possible defense solutions against future attacks. We also detail other social engineering attacks that can be incurred from releasing the leaked data.

Software supply chain attacks occur during the processes of producing software is compromised, resulting in vulnerabilities that target downstream customers. While the number of successful exploits is limited, the impact of these attacks is significant. Despite increased awareness and research into software supply chain attacks, there is limited information available on mitigating or architecting for these risks, and existing information is focused on singular and independent elements of the supply chain. In this paper, we extensively review software supply chain security using software development tools and infrastructure. We investigate the path that attackers find is least resistant followed by adapting and finding the next best way to complete an attack. We also provide a thorough discussion on how common software supply chain attacks can be prevented, preventing malicious hackers from gaining access to an organization's development tools and infrastructure including the development environment. We considered various SSC attacks on stolen code-sign certificates by malicious attackers and prevented unnoticed malware from passing by security scanners. We are aiming to extend our research to contribute to preventing software supply chain attacks by proposing novel techniques and frameworks.

In this modern era, web security is often required to beware from fraudulent activities. There are several hackers try to build a program that can interact with web pages automatically and try to breach the data or make several junk entries due to that web servers get hanged. To stop the junk entries; CAPTCHA is a solution through which bots can be identified and denied the machine based program to intervene with. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In the progression of CAPTCHA; there are several methods available such as distorted text, picture recognition, math solving and gaming based CAPTCHA. Game based turing test is very much popular now a day but there are several methods through which game can be cracked because game is not intellectual. So, there is a required of intrinsic CAPTCHA. The proposed system is based on Intrinsic Decision based Situation Reaction Challenge. The proposed system is able to better classify the humans and bots by its intrinsic problem. It has been considered as human is more capable to deal with the real life problems and machine is bit poor to understand the situation or how the problem can be solved. So, proposed system challenges with simple situations which is easier for human but almost impossible for bots. Human is required to use his common sense only and problem can be solved with few seconds.

The internet has grown increasingly important in everyone's everyday lives due to the availability of numerous web services such as email, cloud storage, video streaming, music streaming, and search engines. On the other hand, attacks by computer programmes such as bots are a common hazard to these internet services. Captcha is a computer program that helps a server-side company determine whether or not a real user is requesting access. Captcha is a security feature that prevents unauthorised access to a user's account by protecting restricted areas from automated programmes, bots, or hackers. Many websites utilise Captcha to prevent spam and other hazardous assaults when visitors log in. However, in recent years, the complexity of Captcha solving has become difficult for humans too, making it less user friendly. To solve this, we propose creating a Captcha that is both simple and engaging for people while also robust enough to protect sensitive data from bots and hackers on the internet. The suggested captcha scheme employs animated artifacts, rotation, and variable fonts as resistance techniques. The proposed captcha technique proves successful against OCR bots with less than 15% accuracy while being easier to solve for human users with more than 98% accuracy.

Secured data transmission between one to many authorized users is achieved through Broadcast Encryption (BE). In BE, the source transmits encrypted data to multiple registered users who already have their decrypting keys. The Untrustworthy users, known as Traitors, can give out their secret keys to a hacker to form a pirate decoding system to decrypt the original message on the sly. The process of detecting the traitors is known as Traitor Tracing in cryptography. This paper presents a new Black Box Tracing method that is fully collusion resistant and it is designated as Traitor Tracing in Broadcast Encryption using Vector Keys (TTBE-VK). The proposed method uses integer vectors in the finite field Zp as encryption/decryption/tracing keys, reducing the computational cost compared to the existing methods.

In today’s digital world, Mobile SMS (short message service) communication has almost become a part of every human life. Meanwhile each mobile user suffers from the harass of Spam SMS. These Spam SMS constitute veritable nuisance to mobile subscribers. Though hackers or spammers try to intrude in mobile computing devices, SMS support for mobile devices become more vulnerable as attacker tries to intrude into the system by sending unsolicited messages. An attacker can gain remote access over mobile devices. We propose a novel approach that can analyze message content and find features using the TF-IDF techniques to efficiently detect Spam Messages and Ham messages using different Machine Learning Classifiers. The Classifiers going to use in proposed work can be measured with the help of metrics such as Accuracy, Precision and Recall. In our proposed approach accuracy rate will be increased by using the Voting Classifier.

Phishing has become a prominent method of data theft among hackers, and it continues to develop. In recent years, many strategies have been developed to identify phishing website attempts using machine learning particularly. However, the algorithms and classification criteria that have been used are highly different from the real issues and need to be compared. This paper provides a detailed comparison and evaluation of the performance of several machine learning algorithms across multiple datasets. Two phishing website datasets were used for the experiments: the Phishing Websites Dataset from UCI (2016) and the Phishing Websites Dataset from Mendeley (2018). Because these datasets include different types of class labels, the comparison algorithms can be applied in a variety of situations. The tests showed that Random Forest was better than other classification methods, with an accuracy of 88.92% for the UCI dataset and 97.50% for the Mendeley dataset.

Phishing activity is undertaken by the hackers to compromise the computer networks and financial system. A compromised computer system or network provides data and or processing resources to the world of cybercrime. Cybercrimes are projected to cost the world \$6 trillion by 2021, in this context phishing is expected to continue being a growing challenge. Statistics around phishing growth over the last decade support this theory as phishing numbers enjoy almost an exponential growth over the period. Recent reports on the complexity of the phishing show that the fight against phishing URL as a means of building more resilient cyberspace is an evolving challenge. Compounding the problem is the lack of cyber security expertise to handle the expected rise in incidents. Previous research have proposed different methods including neural network, data mining technique, heuristic-based phishing detection technique, machine learning to detect phishing websites. However, recently phishers have started to use more sophisticated techniques to attack the internet users such as VoIP phishing, spear phishing etc. For these modern methods, the traditional ways of phishing detection provide low accuracy. Hence, the requirement arises for the application and development of modern tools and techniques to use as a countermeasure against such phishing attacks. Keeping in view the nature of recent phishing attacks, it is imperative to develop a state-of-the art anti-phishing tool which should be able to predict the phishing attacks before the occurrence of actual phishing incidents. We have designed such a tool that will work efficiently to detect the phishing websites so that a user can understand easily the risk of using of his personal and financial data.

The vehicle-to-grid (V2G) network has a clear advantage in terms of economic benefits, and it has grabbed the interest of powergrid and electric vehicle (EV) consumers. Many V2G techniques, at present, for example, use bilinear pairing to execute the authentication scheme, which results in significant computational costs. Furthermore, in the existing V2G techniques, the system master key is issued independently by the third parties, it is vulnerable to leaking if the third party is compromised by an attacker. This paper presents an efficient and secure anonymous authentication scheme for V2G networks to overcome this issue we use a lightweight authentication system for electric vehicles and smart grids. In the proposed technique, the keys are generated by the trusted authority after the successful registration of EVs in the trusted authority and the dispatching center. The suggested scheme not only enhances the verification performance of V2G networks and also protects against inbuilt hackers.

This paper discusses research-based findings of applying metaheuristic optimization techniques and nature-inspired algorithms to detect and mitigate phishing attacks. The focus will be on the Firefly nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm optimized with Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. Existing research recommends the development and use of nature-inspired detection techniques to solve complex real-world problems. Existing research using nature-inspired heuristics appears to be promising in solving NP-hard problems such as the traveling salesperson problem. In the same classification of NP-hard, is that of cyber security existing research indicates that the security threats are complex, and that providing security is an NP-hard problem. This study is expanding the existing research with a hybrid optimization of nature-inspired metaheuristic with existing classifiers (random forest and SVM) for an improvement in results to include increased true positives and decreased false positives. The proposed study will present the importance of nature and natural processes in developing algorithms and systems with high precision and accuracy.

When we setup a computer network, we need to know if an attacker can get into the system. We need to do a series of test that shows the vulnerabilities of the network setup. These series of tests are commonly known Penetration Test. The need for penetration testing was not well known before. This paper highlights how penetration started and how it became as popular as it has today. The internet played a big part into the push to getting the idea of penetration testing started. The styles of penetration testing can vary from physical to network or virtual based testing which either can be a benefit to how a company becomes more secure. This paper presents the steps of penetration testing that a company or organization needs to carry out, to find out their own security flaws.

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging technology that is used to provide communication between vehicle users. VANET provides communication between one vehicle node to another vehicle node, vehicle to the roadside unit, vehicle to pedestrian, and even vehicle to rail users. Communication between nodes should be very secure and confidential, Since VANET communicates through wireless mode, a malicious node may enter inside the communication zone to hack, inject false messages, and interrupt the communication. A strong protocol is necessary to detect malicious nodes and authenticate the VANET user to protect them from malicious attacks. In this paper, a fuzzy-based trust authentication scheme is used to detect malicious nodes with the Mamdani fuzzy Inference system. The parameter estimation, rules have been framed using MATLAB Mamdani Fuzzy Inference system to select a genuine node for data transmission.

Zero-day attack is a critical network attack. The zero-day attack period (ZDAP) is the period from the release of malware/exploit until a patch becomes available. IDS/IPS cannot effectively block zero-day attacks because they use pattern-based signatures in general. This paper proposes a Prophetic Defender (PD) by which ZDAP can be minimized. Prior to actual attack, hackers scan networks to identify hosts with vulnerable ports. If this port scanning can be detected early, zero-day attacks will become detectable. PD architecture makes use of a honeypot-based pseudo server deployed to detect malicious port scans. A port-scanning honeypot was operated by us in 6 years from 2009 to 2015. By analyzing the 6-year port-scanning log data, we understand that PD is effective for detecting and blocking zero-day attacks. The block rate of the proposed architecture is 98.5%.

As Internet technology gradually matures, the network structure becomes more complex. Therefore, the attack methods of malicious attackers are more diverse and change faster. Fortunately, due to the substantial increase in computer computing power, machine learning is valued and widely used in various fields. It has also been applied to intrusion detection systems. This study found that due to the imperfect data ratio of the unbalanced flow dataset, the model will be overfitting and the misjudgment rate will increase. In response to this problem, this research proposes to use the Cuckoo system to induce malicious samples to generate malicious traffic, to solve the data proportion defect of the unbalanced traffic dataset.

With the advancement of network physical social system (npss), a large amount of data privacy has become the targets of hacker attacks. Due to the complex and changeable attack methods of hackers, network security threats are becoming increasingly severe. As an important type of active defense, honeypots use the npss as a carrier to ensure the security of npss. However, traditional honeynet structures are relatively fixed, and it is difficult to trap hackers in a targeted manner. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a recommendation method for LSTM prediction trap components based on attention mechanism. Its characteristic lies in the ability to predict hackers' attack interest, which increases the active trapping ability of honeynets. The experimental results show that the proposed prediction method can quickly and effectively predict the attacking behavior of hackers and promptly provide the trapping components that hackers are interested in.

The number of prominent ransomware attacks has increased recently. In this research, we detect ransomware by analyzing network traffic by using machine learning algorithms and comparing their detection performances. We have developed multi-class classification models to detect families of ransomware by using the selected network traffic features, which focus on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Our experiment showed that decision trees performed best for classifying ransomware families with 99.83% accuracy, which is slightly better than the random forest algorithm with 99.61% accuracy. The experimental result without feature selection classified six ransomware families with high accuracy. On the other hand, classifiers with feature selection gave nearly the same result as those without feature selection. However, using feature selection gives the advantage of lower memory usage and reduced processing time, thereby increasing speed. We discovered the following ten important features for detecting ransomware: time delta, frame length, IP length, IP destination, IP source, TCP length, TCP sequence, TCP next sequence, TCP header length, and TCP initial round trip.

Botnets are used by hackers to conduct cyber attacks and pose a huge threat to Internet users. The key of botnets is the command and control (C&C) channels. Security researchers can keep track of a botnet by capturing and analyzing the communication traffic between C&C servers and bots. Hence, the botmaster is constantly seeking more covert C&C channels to stealthily control the botnet. This paper designs a new botnet dubbed mp-botnet wherein bots communicate with each other based on the Stratum mining pool protocol. The mp-botnet botnet completes information transmission according to the communication method of the Stratum protocol. The communication traffic in the botnet is disguised as the traffic between the mining pool and the miners in a Bitcoin network, thereby achieving better stealthiness and flexibility.

The extensive utilization of network by smart devices, computers and servers makes it vulnerable to malicious activities where intruders and attackers tends to violate system security policies and authenticity to slither essential information. Honeypots are designed to create a virtual trap against hackers. The trap is to attract intruders and gather information about attackers and attack features. Honeypots mimics as a computer application, billing systems, webpages and client server-based applications to understand attackers behavior by gathering attack features and common foot prints used by hackers to forge information. In this papers, authors analyse amazon web services honeypot (AWSH) data to determine geo-spatial distribution of targeted attacks originated from different locations. The categorization of attacks is made on the basis of internet protocols and frequency of attack occurrences worldwide.

As a decoy for hackers, honeypots have been proved to be a very valuable tool for collecting real data. However, due to closed source and vendor-specific firmware, there are significant limitations in cost for researchers to design an easy-to-use and high-interaction honeypot for industrial control systems (ICSs). To solve this problem, it’s necessary to find a cost-effective solution. In this paper, we propose a novel honeypot architecture termed HoneyVP to support a semi-virtual and semi-physical honeypot design and implementation to enable high cost performance. Specially, we first analyze cyber-attacks on ICS devices in view of different interaction levels. Then, in order to deal with these attacks, our HoneyVP architecture clearly defines three basic independent and cooperative components, namely, the virtual component, the physical component, and the coordinator. Finally, a local-remote cooperative ICS honeypot system is implemented to validate its feasibility and effectiveness. Our experimental results show the advantages of using the proposed architecture compared with the previous honeypot solutions. HoneyVP provides a cost-effective solution for ICS security researchers, making ICS honeypots more attractive and making it possible to capture physical interactions.

Mitigating cyber threats requires adequate understanding of the attacker characteristics in particular their patterns. Such knowledge is essential in addressing the defensive measures that mitigate the attack. If the attacker enters in the network system, the game tree model generates resources by to counter such threat. This is done by altering the parity in the next game tree iteration which yield an adequate response to counter it. If an attacker enters a network system, and a game tree models the resources he must interface with, then that game tree can be altered, by changing the parity on the next to last iteration. This paper analyzes the sequence of patterns based on incoming attacks. The detection of attacker’s pattern and subsequent changes in iterations to counter threat can be viewed as adequate resource or know how in cyber threat mitigations It was realized that changing the game tree of the hacker deprives the attacker of network resources and hence would represent a defensive measure against the attack; that is changing varying or understanding attacker paths, creates an effective defensive measure to protect the system against the incoming threats.. In this paper we analyze a unique combination of CFR and MCTS that attempts to detect the behavior of a hacker. Counterfactual Regret (CFR) is a game theory concept that helps identify patterns of attacks. The pattern recognition concept of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is used in harmony with CFR in order to enhance the detection of attacks.