Biblio

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.

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.

In Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE), two parties need to communicate to each other by sharing their secret key (cipher text) over an unsecure communication channel. An adversary or cryptanalyst can easily get their secret keys but cannot get the information (plaintext). Brute force is one the common tools used to obtain the secret key, but when the key is too large (etc. 1024 bits and 2048 bits) this tool is no longer suitable. Thus timing attacks have become more attractive in the new cryptographic era where networked embedded systems security present several vulnerabilities such as lower processing power and high deployment scale. Experiments on timing attacks are useful in helping cryptographers make security schemes more resistant. In this work, we timed the computations of the Discrete Log Hard Problem of the Diffie Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) protocol implemented on an embedded system network and analyzed the timing patterns of 1024-bit and 2048-bit keys that was obtained during the attacks. We have chosen to implement the protocol on the Raspberry-pi board over U-BOOT Bare Metal and we used the GMP bignum library to compute numbers greater than 64 bits on the embedded system.

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.

An information system is only as secure as its weakest point. In many information systems that remains to be the human factor, despite continuous attempts to educate the users about the importance of password security and enforcing password creation policies on them. Furthermore, not only do the average users' password creation and management habits remain more or less the same, but the password cracking tools, and more importantly, the computer hardware, keep improving as well. In this study, we performed a broad targeted attack combining several well-established cracking techniques, such as brute-force, dictionary, and hybrid attacks, on the passwords used by the students of a Slovenian university to access the online grading system. Our goal was to demonstrate how easy it is to crack most of the user-created passwords using simple and predictable patterns. To identify differences between them, we performed an analysis of the cracked and uncracked passwords and measured their strength. The results have shown that even a single low to mid-range modern GPU can crack over 95% of passwords in just few days, while a more dedicated system can crack all but the strongest 0.5% of them.

Modern security protocols may involve humans in order to compare or copy short strings between different devices. Multi-factor authentication protocols, such as Google 2-factor or 3D-secure are typical examples of such protocols. However, such short strings may be subject to brute force attacks. In this paper we propose a symbolic model which includes attacker capabilities for both guessing short strings, and producing collisions when short strings result from an application of weak hash functions. We propose a new decision procedure for analysing (a bounded number of sessions of) protocols that rely on short strings. The procedure has been integrated in the AKISS tool and tested on protocols from the ISO/IEC 9798-6:2010 standard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the fundamental methods for eavesdroppers to achieve a plaintext from a cryptogram is the brute force attack where possible candidates of decryption keys are exhaustively applied to the decryption algorithm. Here the only reason why the eavesdroppers believe to find the common-key and to achieve the plaintext is that the output of the decryption algorithm is contextually acceptable. According to this fact, this paper proposes a novel common-key cryptosystem where fake plaintexts which are also contextually acceptable are mixed into a cryptogram with the legal plaintext. If an eavesdropper applies a fake common-key to the decryption algorithm, it outputs the fake plaintexts which the eavesdroppers might believe legal. This paper also proposes concrete encryption/decryption algorithm which can be combined with any conventional common-key cryptosystem. Results of simulation experiments show the proposed method reduces probability for eavesdroppers to get legal plaintexts.

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%.

Traditional address scanning attacks mainly rely on the naive 'brute forcing' approach, where the entire IPv4 address space is exhaustively searched by enumerating different possibilities. However, such an approach is inefficient for IPv6 due to its vast subnet size (i.e., 264). As a result, it is widely assumed that address scanning attacks are less feasible in IPv6 networks. In this paper, we evaluate new IPv6 reconnaissance techniques in real IPv6 networks and expose how to leverage the Domain Name System (DNS) for IPv6 network reconnaissance. We collected IPv6 addresses from 5 regions and 100,000 domains by exploiting DNS reverse zone and DNSSEC records. We propose a DNS Guard (DNSG) to efficiently detect DNS reconnaissance attacks in IPv6 networks. DNSG is a plug and play component that could be added to the existing infrastructure. We implement DNSG using Bro and Suricata. Our results demonstrate that DNSG could effectively block DNS reconnaissance attacks.

Wireless communications have encountered a considerable improvement and have integrated human life through various applications, mainly by the widespread of mobile ad hoc and sensor networks. A fundamental characteristic of wireless communications are in their broadcast nature, which allows accessibility of information without placing restrictions on a user's location. However, accessibility also makes wireless communications vulnerable to eavesdropping. To enhance the security of network communication, we propose a separate key generation server which is responsible for key generation using complex random algorithm. The key will remain in database in encrypted format. To prevent brute force attack, we propose various group key generation algorithms in which every group will have separate group key to verify group member's identity. The group key will be verified with the session information before decryption, so that our system will prevent attack if any attacker knows the group key. To increase the security of the system, we propose three level encryption securities: Client side encryption using AES, Server side encryption using AES, and Artificial noise generation and addition. By using this our system is free from brute force attack as we are using three level message security and complex Random key generation algorithms.

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.

Password data in a system usually stored in hash. Various human-caused negligence and system vulnerability can make those data fall in the hand of those who isn't entitled to or even those who have malicious purpose. Attacks which could be done on the hashed password data using GPGPU-based machine are for example: brute-force, dictionary, mask-attack, and word-list. This research explains about effectivity of brute-force and dictionary attack which done on SHA-l hashed password using GPGPU-based machine. Result is showing that brute-force effectively crack more password which has lower set of character, with over 11% of 7 or less characters passwords vs mere 3 % in the dictionary attack counterpart. Whereas dictionary attack is more effective on cracking password which has unsecure character pattern with 5,053 passwords vs 491 on best brute-force attack scenario. Usage of combined attack method (brute-force + dictionary) gives more balanced approach in terms of cracking whether the password is long or secure patterned string.

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.

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.

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.

A parallel brute force attack on RC4 algorithm based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with an efficient style has been presented. The main idea of this design is to use number of forecast keying methods to reduce the overall clock pulses required depended to key searching operation by utilizes on-chip BRAMs (block RAMs) of FPGA for maximizing the total number of key searching unit with taking into account the highest clock rate. Depending on scheme, 32 key searching units and main controller will be used in one Xilinx XC3S1600E-4 FPGA device, all these units working in parallel and each unit will be searching in a specific range of keys, by comparing the current result with the well-known cipher text if its match the found flag signal will change from 0 to 1 and the main controller will receive this signal and stop the searching operation. This scheme operating at 128-MHz clock frequency and gives us key searching speed of 7.7 × 106 keys/sec. Testing all possible keys (40-bits length), requires only around 39.5h.

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.

Consider the problem of guessing a random vector X by submitting queries (guesses) of the form "Is X equal to x?" until an affirmative answer is obtained. A key figure of merit is the number of queries required until the right vector is guessed, termed the guesswork. The goal is to devise a guessing strategy which minimizes a certain guesswork moment. We study a universal, decentralized scenario where the guesser does not know the distribution of X, and is not allowed to prepare a list of words to be guessed in advance, or to remember its past guesses. Such a scenario is useful, for example, if bots within a Botnet carry out a brute-force attack to guess a password or decrypt a message, yet cannot coordinate the guesses or even know how many bots actually participate in the attack. We devise universal decentralized guessing strategies, first, for memoryless sources, and then generalize them to finite-state sources. For both, we derive the guessing exponent and prove its asymptotic optimality by deriving a matching converse. The strategies are based on randomized guessing using a universal distribution. We also extend the results to guessing with side information (SI). Finally, we design simple algorithms for sampling from the universal distributions.

In the era of digitization, data security is a vital role in message transmission and all systems that deal with users require stronger encryption techniques that against brute force attack. Honey encryption (HE) algorithm is a user data protection algorithm that can deceive the attackers from unauthorized access to user, database and websites. The main part of conventional HE is distribution transforming encoder (DTE). However, the current DTE process using cumulative distribution function (CDF) has the weakness in message space limitation because CDF cannot solve the probability theory in more than four messages. So, we propose a new method in DTE process using discrete distribution function in order to solve message space limitation problem. In our proposed honeywords generation method, the current weakness of existing honeywords generation method such as storage overhead problem can be solved. In this paper, we also describe the case studies calculation of DTE in order to prove that new DTE process has no message space limitation and mathematical model using discrete distribution function for DTE process facilitates the distribution probability theory.

Cloud computing has become a widely used computing paradigm providing on-demand computing and storage capabilities based on pay-as-you-go model. Recently, many organizations, especially in the field of big data, have been adopting the cloud model to perform data analytics through leasing powerful Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can be attractive targets to attackers as well as untrusted cloud providers who aim to get unauthorized access to the business critical-data. The obvious security solution is to perform data analytics on encrypted data through the use of cryptographic keys as that of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, it is very easy to obtain AES cryptographic keys from the VM's Random Access Memory (RAM). In this paper, we present a novel key-scattering (KS) approach to protect the cryptographic keys while encrypting/decrypting data. Our solution is highly portable and interoperable. Thus, it could be integrated within today's existing cloud architecture without the need for further modifications. The feasibility of the approach has been proven by implementing a functioning prototype. The evaluation results show that our approach is substantially more resilient to brute force attacks and key extraction tools than the standard AES algorithm, with acceptable execution time.