Biblio

Recognizing the need for proactive analysis of cyber adversary behavior, this paper presents a new event-driven simulation model and implementation to reveal the efforts needed by attackers who have various entry points into a network. Unlike previous models which focus on the impact of attackers' actions on the defender's infrastructure, this work focuses on the attackers' strategies and actions. By operating on a request-response session level, our model provides an abstraction of how the network infrastructure reacts to access credentials the adversary might have obtained through a variety of strategies. We present the current capabilities of the simulator by showing three variants of Bronze Butler APT on a network with different user access levels.

Vehicles are becoming increasingly connected to the outside world. We can connect our devices to the vehicle's infotainment system and internet is being added as a functionality. Therefore, security is a major concern as the attack surface has become much larger than before. Consequently, attackers are creating malware that can infect vehicles and perform life-threatening activities. For example, a malware can compromise vehicle ECUs and cause unexpected consequences. Hence, ensuring the security of connected vehicle software and networks is extremely important to gain consumer confidence and foster the growth of this emerging market. In this paper, we propose a characterization of vehicle malware and a security architecture to protect vehicle from these malware. The architecture uses multiple computational platforms and makes use of the virtualization technique to limit the attack surface. There is a real-time operating system to control critical vehicle functionalities and multiple other operating systems for non-critical functionalities (infotainment, telematics, etc.). The security architecture also describes groups of components for the operating systems to prevent malicious activities and perform policing (monitor, detect, and control). We believe this work will help automakers guard their systems against malware and provide a clear guideline for future research.

Phishing is a criminal offense which involves theft of user's sensitive data. The phishing websites target individuals, organizations, the cloud storage hosting sites and government websites. Currently, hardware based approaches for anti-phishing is widely used but due to the cost and operational factors software based approaches are preferred. The existing phishing detection approaches fails to provide solution to problem like zero-day phishing website attacks. To overcome these issues and precisely detect phishing occurrence a three phase attack detection named as Web Crawler based Phishing Attack Detector(WC-PAD) has been proposed. It takes the web traffics, web content and Uniform Resource Locator(URL) as input features, based on these features classification of phishing and non phishing websites are done. The experimental analysis of the proposed WC-PAD is done with datasets collected from real phishing cases. From the experimental results, it is found that the proposed WC-PAD gives 98.9% accuracy in both phishing and zero-day phishing attack detection.

Recommender systems try to predict the preferences of users for specific items. These systems suffer from profile injection attacks, where the attackers have some prior knowledge of the system ratings and their goal is to promote or demote a particular item introducing abnormal (anomalous) ratings. The detection of both cases is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a framework to spot anomalous rating profiles (outliers), where the outliers hurriedly create a profile that injects into the system either random ratings or specific ratings, without any prior knowledge of the existing ratings. The proposed detection method is based on the unpredictable behavior of the outliers in a validation set, on the user-item rating matrix and on the similarity between users. The proposed system is totally unsupervised, and in the last step it uses the k-means clustering method automatically spotting the spurious profiles. For the cases where labeling sample data is available, a random forest classifier is trained to show how supervised methods outperforms unsupervised ones. Experimental results on the MovieLens 100k and the MovieLens 1M datasets demonstrate the high performance of the proposed schemata.

Smartphones have evolved over the years from simple devices to communicate with each other to fully functional portable computers although with comparatively less computational power but inholding multiple applications within. With the smartphone revolution, the value of personal data has increased. As technological complexities increase, so do the vulnerabilities in the system. Smartphones are the latest target for attacks. Android being an open source platform and also the most widely used smartphone OS draws the attention of many malware writers to exploit the vulnerabilities of it. Attackers try to take advantage of these vulnerabilities and fool the user and misuse their data. Malwares have come a long way from simple worms to sophisticated DDOS using Botnets, the latest trends in computer malware tend to go in the distributed direction, to evade the multiple anti-virus apps developed to counter generic viruses and Trojans. However, the recent trend in android system is to have a combination of applications which acts as malware. The applications are benign individually but when grouped, these may result into a malicious activity. This paper proposes a new category of distributed malware in android system, how it can be used to evade the current security, and how it can be detected with the help of graph matching algorithm.

Security has always been a major issue in cloud. Data sources are the most valuable and vulnerable information which is aimed by attackers to steal. If data is lost, then the privacy and security of every cloud user are compromised. Even though a cloud network is secured externally, the threat of an internal attacker exists. Internal attackers compromise a vulnerable user node and get access to a system. They are connected to the cloud network internally and launch attacks pretending to be trusted users. Machine learning approaches are widely used for cloud security issues. The existing machine learning based security approaches classify a node as a misbehaving node based on short-term behavioral data. These systems do not differentiate whether a misbehaving node is a malicious node or a broken node. To address this problem, this paper proposes an Improvised Long Short-Term Memory (ILSTM) model which learns the behavior of a user and automatically trains itself and stores the behavioral data. The model can easily classify the user behavior as normal or abnormal. The proposed ILSTM not only identifies an anomaly node but also finds whether a misbehaving node is a broken node or a new user node or a compromised node using the calculated trust factor. The proposed model not only detects the attack accurately but also reduces the false alarm in the cloud network.

The dynamically changing landscape of DDoS threats increases the demand for advanced security solutions. The rise of massive IoT botnets enables attackers to mount high-intensity short-duration ”volatile ephemeral” attack waves in quick succession. Therefore the standard human-in-the-loop security center paradigm is becoming obsolete. To battle the new breed of volatile DDoS threats, the intrusion detection system (IDS) needs to improve markedly, at least in reaction times and in automated response (mitigation). Designing such an IDS is a daunting task as network operators are traditionally reluctant to act - at any speed - on potentially false alarms. The primary challenge of a low reaction time detection system is maintaining a consistently low false alarm rate. This paper aims to show how a practical FPGA-based DDoS detection and mitigation system can successfully address this. Besides verifying the model and algorithms with real traffic ”in the wild”, we validate the low false alarm ratio. Accordingly, we describe a methodology for determining the false alarm ratio for each involved threat type, then we categorize the causes of false detection, and provide our measurement results. As shown here, our methods can effectively mitigate the volatile ephemeral DDoS attacks, and accordingly are usable both in human out-of-loop and on-the-loop next-generation security solutions.

As a vital component of variety cyber attacks, malicious domain detection becomes a hot topic for cyber security. Several recent techniques are proposed to identify malicious domains through analysis of DNS data because much of global information in DNS data which cannot be affected by the attackers. The attackers always recycle resources, so they frequently change the domain - IP resolutions and create new domains to avoid detection. Therefore, multiple malicious domains are hosted by the same IPs and multiple IPs also host same malicious domains in simultaneously, which create intrinsic association among them. Hence, using the labeled domains which can be traced back from queries history of all domains to verify and figure out the association of them all. Graphs seem the best candidate to represent for this relationship and there are many algorithms developed on graph with high performance. A graph-based interface can be developed and transformed to the graph mining task of inferring graph node's reputation scores using improvements of the belief propagation algorithm. Then higher reputation scores the nodes reveal, the more malicious probabilities they infer. For demonstration, this paper proposes a malicious domain detection technique and evaluates on a real-world dataset. The dataset is collected from DNS data servers which will be used for building a DNS graph. The proposed technique achieves high performance in accuracy rates over 98.3%, precision and recall rates as: 99.1%, 98.6%. Especially, with a small set of labeled domains (legitimate and malicious domains), the technique can discover a large set of potential malicious domains. The results indicate that the method is strongly effective in detecting malicious domains.

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) technology provides intercommunication between different nodes where no infrastructure is available for communication. MANET is attracting many researcher attentions as it is cost effective and easy for implementation. Main challenging aspect in MANET is its vulnerability. In MANET nodes are very much vulnerable to attacks along with its data as well as data flowing through these nodes. One of the main reasons of these vulnerabilities is its communication policy which makes nodes interdependent for interaction and data flow. This mutual trust between nodes is exploited by attackers through injecting malicious node or replicating any legitimate node in MANET. One of these attacks is blackhole attack. In this study, the behavior of blackhole attack is discussed and have proposed a lightweight solution for blackhole attack which uses inbuilt functions.

It is a well-known fact that nowadays access to sensitive information is being performed through the use of a three-tier-architecture. Web applications have become a handy interface between users and data. As database-driven web applications are being used more and more every day, web applications are being seen as a good target for attackers with the aim of accessing sensitive data. If an organization fails to deploy effective data protection systems, they might be open to various attacks. Governmental organizations, in particular, should think beyond traditional security policies in order to achieve proper data protection. It is, therefore, imperative to perform security testing and make sure that there are no holes in the system, before an attack happens. One of the most commonly used web application attacks is by insertion of an SQL query from the client side of the application. This attack is called SQL Injection. Since an SQL Injection vulnerability could possibly affect any website or web application that makes use of an SQL-based database, the vulnerability is one of the oldest, most prevalent and most dangerous of web application vulnerabilities. To overcome the SQL injection problems, there is a need to use different security systems. In this paper, we will use 3 different scenarios for testing security systems. Using Penetration testing technique, we will try to find out which is the best solution for protecting sensitive data within the government network of Kosovo.

Malicious emails pose substantial threats to businesses. Whether it is a malware attachment or a URL leading to malware, exploitation or phishing, attackers have been employing emails as an effective way to gain a foothold inside organizations of all kinds. To combat email threats, especially targeted attacks, traditional signature- and rule-based email filtering as well as advanced sandboxing technology both have their own weaknesses. In this paper, we propose a predictive analysis approach that learns the differences between legit and malicious emails through static analysis, creates a machine learning model and makes detection and prediction on unseen emails effectively and efficiently. By comparing three different machine learning algorithms, our preliminary evaluation reveals that a Random Forests model performs the best.

Security in mobile handsets of telecommunication standards such as GSM, Project 25 and TETRA is very important, especially when governments and military forces use handsets and telecommunication devices. Although telecommunication could be quite secure by using encryption, coding, tunneling and exclusive channel, attackers create new ways to bypass them without the knowledge of the legitimate user. In this paper we introduce a new, simple and economical circuit to warn the user in cases where the message is not encrypted because of manipulation by attackers or accidental damage. This circuit not only consumes very low power but also is created to sustain telecommunication devices in aspect of security and using friendly. Warning to user causes the best practices of telecommunication devices without wasting time and energy for fault detection.