Biblio

The exponential rise of online services has heightened awareness of safeguarding the various applications that cooperate with and provide Internet users. Users must present their credentials, such as user name and secret code, to the servers to be authorized. This sensitive data should be secured from being exploited due to numerous security breaches, resulting in criminal activity. It is vital to secure systems against numerous risks. This article offers a novel approach to protecting against brute force attacks. A solution is presented where the user obtains the keypad on each occurrence. Following the establishment of the keypad, the webserver produces an encrypted password for the user's Computer/device authentication. The encrypted password will be used for authentication; users must type the amended one-time password (OTP) every time they access the website. This research protects passwords using reformation-based encryption and decryption and optimal honey encryption (OH-E) and decryption.

The development of IoT has penetrated various sectors. The development of IoT devices continues to increase and is predicted to reach 75 billion by 2025. However, the development of IoT devices is not followed by security developments. Therefore, IoT devices can become gateways for cyber attacks, including brute force and sniffing attacks. Authentication mechanisms can be used to ward off attacks. However, the implementation of authentication mechanisms on IoT devices is challenging. IoT devices are dominated by constraint devices that have limited computing. Thus, conventional authentication mechanisms are not suitable for use. Two-factor authentication using RFID and fingerprint can be a solution in providing an authentication mechanism. Previous studies have proposed a two-factor authentication mechanism using RFID and fingerprint. However, previous research did not pay attention to message exchange security issues and did not provide mutual authentication. This research proposes a secure mutual authentication protocol using two-factor RFID and fingerprint using MQTT protocol. Two processes support the authentication process: the registration process and authentication. The proposed protocol is tested based on biometric security by measuring the false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) on the fingerprint, measuring brute force attacks, and measuring sniffing attacks. The test results obtained the most optimal FAR and FRR at the 80% threshold. Then the equal error rate (ERR) on FAR and FRR is around 59.5%. Then, testing brute force and sniffing attacks found that the proposed protocol is resistant to both attacks.

In recent decennium, hardware security has gained a lot of attention due to different types of attacks being launched, such as IP theft, reverse engineering, counterfeiting, etc. The critical testing infrastructure incorporated into ICs is very popular among attackers to mount side-channel attacks. The IEEE standard 1687 (IJTAG) is one such testing infrastructure that is the focus of attackers these days. To secure access to the IJTAG network, various techniques based on Locking SIB (LSIB) have been proposed. One such very effective technique makes use of Security Linear Feedback Shift Register (SLFSR) along with LSIB. The SLFSR obfuscates the scan chain information from the attacker and hence makes the brute-force attack against LSIB ineffective.In this work, it is shown that the SLFSR based Locking SIB is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. A power analysis attack along with known-plaintext attack is used to determine the IJTAG network structure. First, the known-plaintext attack is used to retrieve the SLFSR design information. This information is further used along with power analysis attack to determine the exact length of the scan chain which in turn breaks the whole security scheme. Further, a countermeasure is proposed to prevent the aforementioned hybrid attack.

In this work, we discuss data breaches based on the “2012 SocialArks data breach” case study. Data leakage refers to the security violations of unauthorized individuals copying, transmitting, viewing, stealing, or using sensitive, protected, or confidential data. Data leakage is becoming more and more serious, for those traditional information security protection methods like anti-virus software, intrusion detection, and firewalls have been becoming more and more challenging to deal with independently. Nevertheless, fortunately, new IT technologies are rapidly changing and challenging traditional security laws and provide new opportunities to develop the information security market. The SocialArks data breach was caused by a misconfiguration of ElasticSearch Database owned by SocialArks, owned by “Tencent.” The attack methodology is classic, and five common Elasticsearch mistakes discussed the possibilities of those leakages. The defense solution focuses on how to optimize the Elasticsearch server. Furthermore, the ElasticSearch database’s open-source identity also causes many ethical problems, which means that anyone can download and install it for free, and they can install it almost anywhere. Some companies download it and install it on their internal servers, while others download and install it in the cloud (on any provider they want). There are also cloud service companies that provide hosted versions of Elasticsearch, which means they host and manage Elasticsearch clusters for their customers, such as Company Tencent.

The consensus-based frequency control relying on a communication system is used to restore the frequency deviations introduced by the primary droop control in an islanded AC microgrid, a typical cyber-physical power system(CPPS). This paper firstly studies the performance of the CPPS under two types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS ) attacks, finds that the intelligent attacks may cause more damage than the brute force attacks, and analyzes some potential defense strategies of the CPPS from two points of view. Some simulation results are also given to show the performance of both the physical and cyber system of the CPPS under different operation conditions.

Recently, a mechanism that randomly shuffles the data sent and allows securing the communication without the need to encrypt all the information has been proposed. This proposal is ideal for IoT systems with low computational capacity. In this work, we analyze the strength of this proposal from a brute-force attack approach to obtain the original message without knowledge of the applied disordering. It is demonstrated that for a set of 10x10 16-bit data, the processing time and the required memory are unfeasible with current technology. Therefore, it is safe.

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.

In the era of Internet usage growth, storage services are widely used where users' can store their data, while hackers techniques pose massive threats to users' data security. The proposed system introduces multiple layers of security where data confidentiality, integrity and availability are achieved using honey encryption, hashed random passwords as well as detecting intruders and preventing them. The used techniques can ensure security against brute force and denial of service attacks. Our proposed methodology proofs the efficiency for storing and retrieving data using honey words and password hashing with less execution time and more security features achieved compared with other systems. Other systems depend on user password leading to easily predict it, we avoid this approach by making the password given to the user is randomly generated which make it unpredictable and hard to break. Moreover, we created a simple user interface to interact with users to take their inputs and store them along with the given password in true database, if an adversary detected, he will be processed as a normal user but with fake information taken from another database called false database, after that, the admin will be notified about this illegitimate access by providing the IP address. This approach will make the admin have continuous detection and ensure availability and confidentiality. Our execution time is efficient as the encryption process takes 244 ms and decryption 229 ms.

A brute force is a Hacking methodology used to decrypt login passwords, keys and credentials. Hacks that exploit vulnerabilities in packages are rare, whereas Brute Force attacks aim to be the simplest, cheapest, and most straightforward approach to access a website. Using Splunk to analyse massive amounts of data could be very beneficial. The application enables to capture, search, and analyse log information in real-time. By analysing logs as well as many different sources of system information, security events can be uncovered. A log file, which details the events that have occurred in the environment of the application and the server on which they run, is a valuable piece of information. Identifying the attacks against these systems is possible by analysing and correlating this information. Massive amounts of ambiguous and amorphous information can be analysed with its superior resolution. The paper includes instructions on setting up a Splunk server and routing information there from multiple sources. Practical search examples and pre-built add-on applications are provided. Splunk is a powerful tool that allows users to explore big data with greater ease. Seizure can be tracked in near real-time and can be searched through logs. A short amount of time can be spent on analysing big data using map-reduce technology. Briefly, it helps to analyse unstructured log data to better understand how the applications operate. With Splunk, client can detect patterns in the data through a powerful query language. It is easy to set up alerts and warnings based on the queries, which will help alert client about an ongoing (suspected) activity and generate a notification in real-time.

Due to improving computational capacity of supercomputers, transmitting encrypted packets via one single network path is vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The versatile attackers secretly eavesdrop all the packets, classify packets into different streams, performs an exhaustive search for the decryption key, and extract sensitive personal information from the streams. However, new Internet Protocol (IP) brings great opportunities and challenges for preventing eavesdropping attacks. In this paper, we propose a Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) based Network Immune Scheme (P4NIS) against the eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, P4NIS is equipped with three lines of defense to improve the network immunity. The first line is promiscuous forwarding by splitting all the traffic packets in different network paths disorderly. Complementally, the second line encrypts transmission port fields of the packets using diverse encryption algorithms. The encryption could distribute traffic packets from one stream into different streams, and disturb eavesdroppers to classify them correctly. Besides, P4NIS inherits the advantages from the existing encryption-based countermeasures which is the third line of defense. Using a paradigm of programmable data planes-P4, we implement P4NIS and evaluate its performances. Experimental results show that P4NIS can increase difficulties of eavesdropping significantly, and increase transmission throughput by 31.7% compared with state-of-the-art mechanisms.

Along with the development of the Windows operating system, browser applications to surf the internet are also growing rapidly. The most widely used browsers today are Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Both browsers have a username and password management feature that makes users login to a website easily, but saving usernames and passwords in the browser is quite dangerous because the stored data can be hacked using brute force attacks or read through a program. One way to get a username and password in the browser is to use a program that can read Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox login data from the computer's internal storage and then show those data. In this study, an attack will be carried out by implementing Rubber Ducky using BadUSB to run the ChromePass and PasswordFox program and the PowerShell script using the Arduino Pro Micro Leonardo device as a USB Password Stealer. The results obtained from this study are the username and password on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox successfully obtained when the USB is connected to the target device, the average time of the attack is 14 seconds then sending it to the author's email.

There are various Lightweight Block Ciphers (LBC) nowadays that exist to meet the demand on security requirements of the current trend in computing world, the application in the resource-constrained devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. One way to evaluate these LBCs is to conduct a performance analysis. Performance evaluation parameters seek appropriate value such as encryption time, security level, scalability, and flexibility. Like SIMECK block cipher whose algorithm design was anchored with the SIMON and SPECK block ciphers were efficient in security and performance, there is a need to revisit its design. This paper aims to present a comparative study on the performance analysis of the enhanced round function of the SIMECK Family block cipher. The enhanced ARX structure of the round function on the three variants shows an efficient performance over the original algorithm in different simulations using the following methods of measurement; avalanche effect, runtime performance, and brute-force attack. Its recommended that the enhanced round function of the SIMECK family be evaluated by different security measurements and attacks.

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) can help administrators of a server in detecting attacks by analyzing packet data traffic on the network in real-time. If an attack occurs, an alert to the administrator is provided by NIDS so that the attack can be known and responded immediately. On the other hand, the alerts cannot be monitored by administrators all the time. Therefore, a system that automatically sends notifications to administrators in real-time by utilizing social media platforms is needed. This paper provides an analysis of the notification system built using Snort as NIDS with WhatsApp and Telegram as a notification platform. There are three types of attacks that are simulated and must be detected by Snort, which are Ping of Death attacks, SYN flood attacks, and SSH brute force attacks. The results obtained indicate that the system successfully provided notification in the form of attack time, IP source of the attack, source of attack port and type of attack in real-time.

Man in the middle Attack (MIMA) problem of Diffie-Hellman key exchange (D-H) protocol, has led to introduce the Hash Diffie-Hellman key exchange (H-D-H) protocol. Which was cracked by applying the brute force attack (BFA) results of hash function. For this paper, a system will be suggested that focusses on an improved key exchange (D-H) protocol, and distributed transform encoder (DTE). That system utilized for enhanced (D-H) protocol algorithm when (D-H) is applied for generating the keys used for encrypting data of long messages. Hash256, with two secret keys and one public key are used for D-H protocol improvements. Finally, DTE where applied, this cryptosystem led to increase the efficiency of data transfer security with strengthening the shared secret key code. Also, it has removed the important problems such as MITM and BFA, as compared to the previous work.

Password Guessing Attacks, for instance, Brute Force and word reference ambushes on online records are directly wide spread. Guarding the ambushes and giving the accommodating login the genuine customers together is a problematic endeavour. The present structures are lacking to give both the security and solace together. Phishing is a digital assault that targets credulous online clients fooling into uncovering delicate data, for example, username, secret key, standardized savings number or charge card number and so forth. Assailants fool the Internet clients by concealing site page as a dependable or real page to recover individual data. Password Guessing Attacks Resistance Protocol (PGARP) limits the full-scale number of logins attempts from darken remote hosts to as low as a single undertaking for each username, genuine customers all around (e.g., when tries are created utilizing known, occasionally used machines) can make a couple failed login tries before being tried with an ATT. A specific most distant point will be made to oblige the number of failed attempts with the ATT in order to keep the attacks. After the failed login attempt with ATT limit accomplished, an admonition will be sent to the customer concerning the failed login tries have accomplished the best measurement. This admonition will caution the customer and the customer will be urged to change the mystery expression and security question.

The Software Defined Network (SDN) provides higher programmable functionality for network configuration and management dynamically. Moreover, SDN introduces a centralized management approach by dividing the network into control and data planes. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning enabled intrusion detection and prevention system (DL-IDPS) to prevent secure shell (SSH) brute-force attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in SDN. The packet length in SDN switch has been collected as a sequence for deep learning models to identify anomalous and malicious packets. Four deep learning models, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Stacked Auto-encoder (SAE), are implemented and compared for the proposed DL-IDPS. The experimental results show that the proposed MLP based DL-IDPS has the highest accuracy which can achieve nearly 99% and 100% accuracy to prevent SSH Brute-force and DDoS attacks, respectively.

Brute-force login attempts are common for every host on the public Internet. While most of them can be discarded as low-threat attacks, targeted attack campaigns often use a dictionary-based brute-force attack to establish a foothold in the network. Therefore, it is important to characterize the attackers' behavior to prioritize defensive measures and react to new threats quickly. In this paper we present a set of metrics that can support threat hunters in characterizing brute-force login attempts. Based on connection metadata, timing information, and the attacker's dictionary these metrics can help to differentiate scans and to find common behavior across distinct IP addresses. We evaluated our novel metrics on a real-world data set of malicious login attempts collected by our honeypot Honeygrove. We highlight interesting metrics, show how clustering can be leveraged to reveal common behavior across IP addresses, and describe how selected metrics help to assess the threat level of attackers. Amongst others, we for example found strong indicators for collusion between ten otherwise unrelated IP addresses confirming that a clustering of the right metrics can help to reveal coordinated attacks.

We propose a high efficiency Early-Complete Brute Force Elimination method that speeds up the analysis flow of the Camouflage Integrated Circuit (IC). The proposed method is targeted for security qualification of the Camouflaged IC netlists in Intellectual Property (IP) protection. There are two main features in the proposed method. First, the proposed method features immediate elimination of the incorrect Camouflage gates combination for the rest of computation, concentrating the resources into other potential correct Camouflage gates combination. Second, the proposed method features early complete, i.e. revealing the correct Camouflage gates once all incorrect gates combination are eliminated, increasing the computation speed for the overall security analysis. Based on the Python programming platform, we implement the algorithm of the proposed method and test it for three circuits including ISCAS’89 benchmarks. From the simulation results, our proposed method, on average, features 71% lesser number of trials and 79% shorter run time as compared to the conventional method in revealing the correct Camouflage gates from the Camouflaged IC netlist.

Network traffic anomaly detection is of critical importance in cybersecurity due to the massive and rapid growth of sophisticated computer network attacks. Indeed, the more new Internet-related technologies are created, the more elaborate the attacks become. Among all the contemporary high-level attacks, dictionary-based brute-force attacks (BFA) present one of the most unsurmountable challenges. We need to develop effective methods to detect and mitigate such brute-force attacks in realtime. In this paper, we investigate SSH and FTP brute-force attack detection by using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning approach. Additionally, we made use of machine learning (ML) classifiers: J48, naive Bayes (NB), decision table (DT), random forest (RF) and k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN), for additional detection purposes. We used the well-known labelled dataset CICIDS2017. We evaluated the effectiveness of the LSTM and ML algorithms, and compared their performance. Our results show that the LSTM model outperforms the ML algorithms, with an accuracy of 99.88%.

Every person using different online services is concerned with the security and privacy for protecting individual information from the intruders. Many authentication systems are available for the protection of individuals' data, and the password authentication system is one of them. Due to the increment of information sharing, internet popularization, electronic commerce transactions, and data transferring, both password security and authenticity have become an essential and necessary subject. But it is also mandatory to ensure the strength of the password. For that reason, all cyber experts recommend intricate password patterns. But most of the time, the users forget their passwords because of those complicated patterns. In this paper, we are proposing a unique algorithm that will generate a strong password, unlike other existing random password generators. This password will he based on the information, i.e. (some words and numbers) provided by the users so that they do not feel challenged to remember the password. We have tested our system through various experiments using synthetic input data. We also have checked our generator with four popular online password checkers to verify the strength of the produced passwords. Based on our experiments, the reliability of our generated passwords is entirely satisfactory. We also have examined that our generated passwords can defend against two password cracking attacks named the "Dictionary attack" and the "Brute Force attack". We have implemented our system in Python programming language. In the near future, we have a plan to extend our work by developing an online free to use user interface. The passwords generated by our system are not only user-friendly but also have achieved most of the qualities of being strong as well as non- crackable passwords.

Advances in technology have enabled tremendous progress in the development of a highly connected ecosystem of ubiquitous computing devices collectively called the Internet of Things (IoT). Ensuring the security of IoT devices is a high priority due to the sensitive nature of the collected data. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as critical hardware primitive for ensuring the security of IoT nodes. Malicious modeling of PUF architectures has proven to be difficult due to the inherently stochastic nature of PUF architectures. Extant approaches to malicious PUF modeling assume that a priori knowledge and physical access to the PUF architecture is available for malicious attack on the IoT node. However, many IoT networks make the underlying assumption that the PUF architecture is sufficiently tamper-proof, both physically and mathematically. In this work, we show that knowledge of the underlying PUF structure is not necessary to clone a PUF. We present a novel non-invasive, architecture independent, machine learning attack for strong PUF designs with a cloning accuracy of 93.5% and improvements of up to 48.31% over an alternative, two-stage brute force attack model. We also propose a machine-learning based countermeasure, discriminator, which can distinguish cloned PUF devices and authentic PUFs with an average accuracy of 96.01%. The proposed discriminator can be used for rapidly authenticating millions of IoT nodes remotely from the cloud server.

Cryptography is one of the important aspect of data and information security. The security strength of cryptographic algorithms rely on the secrecy and randomness of keys. In this study, bitwise operations, Fisher-Yates shuffling algorithm, and cipher text mapping are integrated in the proposed TRNG key generator for One-Time Pad cryptography. Frequency monobit, frequency within a block, and runs tests are performed to evaluate the key randomness. The proposed method is also evaluated in terms of avalanche effect and brute force attack. Tests results indicate that the proposed method generates more random keys and has a higher level of security compared with the usual OTP using PRNG and TRNGs that do not undergo a refining phase.

Authentication is a process that provides access control of any type of computing applications by inspecting the user's identification with the database of authorized users. Passwords play the vital role in authentication mechanism to ensure the privacy of the information and avert from the illicit access. Password based authentication mechanism suffers from many password attacks such as shoulder surfing, brute forcing and dictionary attacks that crack the password of authentication schema by the adversary. Key Stroke technique, Click Pattern technique, Graphichical Password technique and Authentication panel are the several authentication techniques used to resist the password attacks in the literature. This research study critically reviews the types of password attacks and proposes a matrix based secure authentication mechanism which includes three phases namely, User generation phase, Matrix generation phase and Authentication phase to resist the existing password attacks. The performance measure of the proposed method investigates the results in terms existing password attacks and shows the good resistance to password attacks in any type of computing applications.

Privacy-preserving data release is about disclosing information about useful data while retaining the privacy of sensitive data. Assuming that the sensitive data is threatened by a brute-force adversary, we define Guessing Leakage as a measure of privacy, based on the concept of guessing. After investigating the properties of this measure, we derive the optimal utility-privacy trade-off via a linear program with any f-information adopted as the utility measure, and show that the optimal utility is a concave and piece-wise linear function of the privacy-leakage budget.

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.