Biblio

Distributed Denial of Service attacks against high-profile targets have become more frequent in recent years. In response to such massive attacks, several architectures have adopted proxies to introduce layers of indirection between end users and target services and reduce the impact of a DDoS attack by migrating users to new proxies and shuffling clients across proxies so as to isolate malicious clients. However, the reactive nature of these solutions presents weaknesses that we leveraged to develop a new attack - the proxy harvesting attack - which enables malicious clients to collect information about a large number of proxies before launching a DDoS attack. We show that current solutions are vulnerable to this attack, and propose a moving target defense technique consisting in periodically and proactively replacing one or more proxies and remapping clients to proxies. Our primary goal is to disrupt the attacker's reconnaissance effort. Additionally, to mitigate ongoing attacks, we propose a new client-to-proxy assignment strategy to isolate compromised clients, thereby reducing the impact of attacks. We validate our approach both theoretically and through simulation, and show that the proposed solution can effectively limit the number of proxies an attacker can discover and isolate malicious clients.

The anonymizing network Tor is examined as one method of anonymizing port scanning tools and avoiding identification and retaliation. Performing anonymized port scans through Tor is possible using Nmap, but parallelization of the scanning processes is required to accelerate the scan rate.

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex as designers integrate different functionalities into a single application for execution on heterogeneous hardware platforms. In this work we propose a system-level security approach in order to provide isolation of tasks without the need to trust a central authority at run-time. We discuss security requirements that can be found in complex embedded systems that use heterogeneous execution platforms, and by regulating memory access we create mechanisms that allow safe use of shared IP with direct memory access, as well as shared libraries. We also present a prototype Isolation Unit that checks memory transactions and allows for dynamic configuration of permissions.

Named Data Networking (NDN), a clean-slate data oriented Internet architecture targeting on replacing IP, brings many potential benefits for content distribution. Real deployment of NDN is crucial to verify this new architecture and promote academic research, but work in this field is at an early stage. Due to the fundamental design paradigm difference between NDN and IP, Deploying NDN as IP overlay causes high overhead and inefficient transmission, typically in streaming applications. Aiming at achieving efficient NDN streaming distribution, this paper proposes a transitional architecture of NDN/IP hybrid network dubbed Centaur, which embodies both NDN's smartness, scalability and IP's transmission efficiency and deployment feasibility. In Centaur, the upper NDN module acts as the smart head while the lower IP module functions as the powerful feet. The head is intelligent in content retrieval and self-control, while the IP feet are able to transport large amount of media data faster than that if NDN directly overlaying on IP. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, we implement a real streaming prototype in ndnSIM and compare it with both NDN-Hippo and P2P under various experiment scenarios. The result shows that Centaur can achieve better load balance with lower overhead, which is close to the performance that ideal NDN can achieve. All of these validate that our proposal is a promising choice for the incremental and compatible deployment of NDN.

The Internet routing ecosystem is facing substantial scalability challenges on the data plane. Various “clean slate” architectures for representing forwarding tables (FIBs), such as IPv6, introduce additional constraints on efficient implementations from both lookup time and memory footprint perspectives due to significant classification width. In this work, we propose an abstraction layer able to represent IPv6 FIBs on existing IP and even MPLS infrastructure. Feasibility of the proposed representations is confirmed by an extensive simulation study on real IPv6 forwarding tables, including low-level experimental performance evaluation.

Named-Data Networking (NDN) is the most prominent proposal for a clean-slate proposal of Future Internet. Nevertheless, NDN routing schemes present scalability concerns due to the required number of stored routes and of control messages. In this work, we present a controller-based routing protocol using a formal method to unambiguously specify, and validate to prove its correctness. Our proposal codes signaling information on content names, avoiding control message overhead, and reduces router memory requirements, storing only the routes for simultaneously consumed prefixes. Additionally, the protocol installs a new route on all routers in a path with a single route request to the controller, avoiding replication of routing information and automating router provisioning. As a result, we provide a protocol proposal description using the Specification and Description Language and we validate the protocol, proving that CRoS behavior is free of dead or live locks. Furthermore, the protocol validation guarantees that the scheme ensures a valid working path from consumer to producer, even if it does not assure the shortest path.

Internet has been being becoming the most famous and biggest communication networks as social, industrial, and public infrastructure since Internet was invented at late 1960s. In a historical retrospect of Internet's evolution, the Internet architecture continues evolution repeatedly by going through various technical challenges, for instance, in early 1990s, Internet had encountered danger of scalability, after a short while it had been overcome and successfully evolved by applying emerging techniques such as CIDR, NAT, and IPv6. Especially this paper emphasizes scalability issues as technical challenges with forecasting that Internet of things era has come. Firstly, we describe the Identifier and locator separation scheme that can achieve dramatically architectural evolution in historical perspective. Additionally, it reviews various kinds of Identifier and locator separation scheme because recently the scheme can be the major design pillar towards future of Internet architecture such as both various clean-slated future Internet architectures and evolving Internet architectures. Lastly we show a result of analysis by analysis table for future of internet of everything where number of Internet connected devices will growth to more than 20 billion by 2020.

Server honey pots are computer systems that hide in a network capturing attack packets. As the name goes, server honey pots are installed in server machines running a set of services. Enterprises and government organisations deploy these honey pots to know the extent of attacks on their network. Since, most of the recent attacks are advanced persistent attacks there is much research work going on in building better peripheral security measures. In this paper, the authors have deployed several honey pots in a virtualized environment to gather traces of malicious activities. The network infrastructure is resilient and provides much information about hacker's activities. It is cost-effective and can be easily deployed in any organisation without specialized hardware.

Honey pots and honey nets are popular tools in the area of network security and network forensics. The deployment and usage of these tools are influenced by a number of technical and legal issues, which need to be carefully considered together. In this paper, we outline privacy issues of honey pots and honey nets with respect to technical aspects. The paper discusses the legal framework of privacy, legal ground to data processing, and data collection. The analysis of legal issues is based on EU law and is supported by discussions on privacy and related issues. This paper is one of the first papers which discuss in detail privacy issues of honey pots and honey nets in accordance with EU law.

In this paper we present an approach to implement security as a Virtualized Network Function (VNF) that is implemented within a Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI). We present a scalable, flexible, and seamless design for a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) system for network intrusion detection and prevention. We discuss how our design introduces significant reductions in both capital and operational expenses (CAPEX and OPEX). As proof of concept, we describe an implementation for a modular security solution that uses the SAVI SDI testbed to first detect and then block an attack or to re-direct it to a honey-pot for further analysis. We discuss our testing methodology and provide measurement results for the test cases where an application faces various security attacks.

This study focuses on the spatial context of hacking to networks of Honey-pots. We investigate the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of victimized computers and system trespassers. We've deployed research Honeypots on the computer networks of two academic institutions, collected information on successful brute force attacks (BFA) and system trespassing events (sessions), and used Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques, to depict and understand the correlation between spatial attributes (IP addresses) and hacking networks' topology. We mapped and explored hacking patterns and found that geography might set the behavior of the attackers as well as the topology of hacking networks. The contribution of this study stems from the fact that there are no prior studies of geographical influences on the topology of hacking networks and from the unique usage of SNA to investigate hacking activities. Looking ahead, our study can assist policymakers in forming effective policies in the field of cybercrime.

Intellectual Property (IP) verification is a crucial component of System-on-Chip (SoC) design in the modern IC design business model. Given a globalized supply chain and an increasing demand for IP reuse, IP theft has become a major concern for the IC industry. In this paper, we address the trust issues that arise between IP owners and IP users during the functional verification of an IP core. Our proposed scheme ensures the privacy of IP owners and users, by a) generating a privacy-preserving version of the IP, which is functionally equivalent to the original design, and b) employing homomorphically encrypted input vectors. This allows the functional verification to be securely outsourced to a third-party, or to be executed by either parties, while revealing the least possible information regarding the test vectors and the IP core. Experiments on both combinational and sequential benchmark circuits demonstrate up to three orders of magnitude IP verification slowdown, due to the computationally intensive fully homomorphic operations, for different security parameter sizes.

Flooding attacks are well-known security threats that can lead to a denial of service (DoS) in computer networks. These attacks consist of an excessive traffic generation, by which an attacker aim to disrupt or interrupt some services in the network. The impact of flooding attacks is not just about some nodes, it can be also the whole network. Many routing protocols are vulnerable to these attacks, especially those using reactive mechanism of route discovery, like AODV. In this paper, we propose a statistical approach to defense against RREQ flooding attacks in MANETs. Our detection mechanism can be applied on AODV-based ad hoc networks. Simulation results prove that these attacks can be detected with a low rate of false alerts.

Botnets are emerging as the most serious cyber threat among different forms of malware. Today botnets have been facilitating to launch many cybercriminal activities like DDoS, click fraud, phishing attacks etc. The main purpose of botnet is to perform massive financial threat. Many large organizations, banks and social networks became the target of bot masters. Botnets can also be leased to motivate the cybercriminal activities. Recently several researches and many efforts have been carried out to detect bot, C&C channels and bot masters. Ultimately bot maters also strengthen their activities through sophisticated techniques. Many botnet detection techniques are based on payload analysis. Most of these techniques are inefficient for encrypted C&C channels. In this paper we explore different categories of botnet and propose a detection methodology to classify bot host from the normal host by analyzing traffic flow characteristics based on time intervals instead of payload inspection. Due to that it is possible to detect botnet activity even encrypted C&C channels are used.

Nowadays, with the rapid development of Internet, the use of Web is increasing and the Web applications have become a substantial part of people's daily life (e.g. E-Government, E-Health and E-Learning), as they permit to seamlessly access and manage information. The main security concern for e-business is Web application security. Web applications have many vulnerabilities such as Injection, Broken Authentication and Session Management, and Cross-site scripting (XSS). Subsequently, web applications have become targets of hackers, and a lot of cyber attack began to emerge in order to block the services of these Web applications (Denial of Service Attach). Developers are not aware of these vulnerabilities and have no enough time to secure their applications. Therefore, there is a significant need to study and improve attack detection for web applications through determining the most significant factors for detection. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any research that summarizes the influent factors of detection web attacks. In this paper, the author studies state-of-the-art techniques and research related to web attack detection: the author analyses and compares different methods of web attack detections and summarizes the most important factors for Web attack detection independent of the type of vulnerabilities. At the end, the author gives recommendation to build a framework for web application protection.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are an important defense tool against the sophisticated and ever-growing network attacks. These systems need to be evaluated against high quality datasets for correctly assessing their usefulness and comparing their performance. We present an Intrusion Detection Dataset Toolkit (ID2T) for the creation of labeled datasets containing user defined synthetic attacks. The architecture of the toolkit is provided for examination and the example of an injected attack, in real network traffic, is visualized and analyzed. We further discuss the ability of the toolkit of creating realistic synthetic attacks of high quality and low bias.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks is one of the major threats and among the hardest security problems in the Internet world. Of particular concern are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, whose impact can be proportionally severe. With little or no advance warning, an attacker can easily exhaust the computing resources of its victim within a short period of time. In this paper, we study the impact of a UDP flood attack on TCP throughput, round-trip time, and CPU utilization for a Web Server with the new generation of Linux platform, Linux Ubuntu 13. This paper also evaluates the impact of various defense mechanisms, including Access Control Lists (ACLs), Threshold Limit, Reverse Path Forwarding (IP Verify), and Network Load Balancing. Threshold Limit is found to be the most effective defense.

Cultivation of Smart Grid refurbish with brisk and ingenious. The delinquent breed and sow mutilate in massive. This state of affair coerces security as a sapling which incessantly is to be irrigated with Research and Analysis. The Cyber Security is endowed with resiliency to the SYN flooding induced Denial of Service attack in this work. The proposed secure web server algorithm embedded in the LPC1768 processor ensures the smart resources to be precluded from the attack.

In cyberspace, availability of the resources is the key component of cyber security along with confidentiality and integrity. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has become one of the major threats to the availability of resources in computer networks. It is a challenging problem in the Internet. In this paper, we present a detailed study of DDoS attacks on the Internet specifically the attacks due to protocols vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP model, their countermeasures and various DDoS attack mechanisms. We thoroughly review DDoS attacks defense and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different proposed mechanisms.

Distributed Denial of Service (DoS) attacks is one of the major threats and among the hardest security problems in the Internet world. In this paper, we study the impact of a UDP flood attack on TCP throughputs, round-trip time, and CPU utilization on the latest version of Windows and Linux platforms, namely, Windows Server 2012 and Linux Ubuntu 13. This paper also evaluates several defense mechanisms including Access Control Lists (ACLs), Threshold Limit, Reverse Path Forwarding (IP Verify), and Network Load Balancing. Threshold Limit defense gave better results than the other solutions.

The explosive growth of IT infrastructures, cloud systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) have resulted in complex systems that are extremely difficult to secure and protect against cyberattacks that are growing exponentially in the complexity and also in the number. Overcoming the cybersecurity challenges require cybersecurity environments supporting the development of innovative cybersecurity algorithms and evaluation of the experiments. In this paper, we present the design, analysis, and evaluation of the Cybersecurity Lab as a Service (CLaaS) which offers virtual cybersecurity experiments as a cloud service that can be accessed from anywhere and from any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, smart mobile device, etc.) with Internet connectivity. We exploit cloud computing systems and virtualization technologies to provide isolated and virtual cybersecurity experiments for vulnerability exploitation, launching cyberattacks, how cyber resources and services can be hardened, etc. We also present our performance evaluation and effectiveness of CLaaS experiments used by students.

There has been a rampant surge in compromise of consumer grade small scale routers in the last couple of years. Attackers are able to manipulate the Domain Name Space (DNS) settings of these devices hence making them capable of initiating different man-in-the-middle attacks. By this study we aim to explore and comprehend the current state of these attacks. Focusing on the Indian Autonomous System Number (ASN) space, we performed scans over 3 months to successfully find vulnerable routers and extracted the DNS information from these vulnerable routers. In this paper we present the methodology followed for scanning, a detailed analysis report of the information we were able to collect and an insight into the current trends in the attack patterns. We conclude by proposing recommendations for mitigating these attacks.

Nowadays, a typical household owns multiple digital devices that can be connected to the Internet. Advertising companies always want to seamlessly reach consumers behind devices instead of the device itself. However, the identity of consumers becomes fragmented as they switch from one device to another. A naive attempt is to use deterministic features such as user name, telephone number and email address. However consumers might refrain from giving away their personal information because of privacy and security reasons. The challenge in ICDM2015 contest is to develop an accurate probabilistic model for predicting cross-device consumer identity without using the deterministic user information. In this paper we present an accurate and scalable cross-device solution using an ensemble of Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) and Random Forest. Our final solution ranks 9th both on the public and private LB with F0.5 score of 0.855.

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation's framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability - traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising direction for next-generation network design. Due to its clean-slate and highly flexible design, it is believed to be the foundational principle for designing network architectures and improving their flexibility, resilience, reliability, and security. As the technology matures, research in both industry and academia has designed a considerable number of tools to scale software-defined networks, in preparation for the wide deployment in wide-area networks. In this paper, we survey the mechanisms that can be used to address the scalability issues in software-defined wide-area networks. Starting from a successful distributed system, the Domain Name System, we discuss the essential elements to make a large scale network infrastructure scalable. Then, the existing technologies proposed in the literature are reviewed in three categories: scaling out/up the data plane and scaling the control plane. We conclude with possible research directions towards scaling software-defined wide-area networks.