Biblio

Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.

HTTPS is gaining widespread popularity for secure transactions. Most popular sites have made default choice as HTTPS. This development of encrypted traffic has brought in new challenges in the areas of network security monitoring and analysis. This paper makes a survey through various study done in the area on novel approaches for identification and investigating HTTPS traffic and its effect on network security monitoring. This work makes a complete analysis and evaluation of HTTPS protocol-is it ensuring security or are we entering in a vicious cycle of finding weaknesses and tryingto fill the gaps in Network security Monitoring. There are couple of vacuums that exist along with encrypted data, namely firewalls, IDS becoming blind to data being exchanged, enhancing vulnerabilities by making it tough to implement security policy and probability of malicious activities hidingin the ciphered traffic. Most of the current techniques namely DPI to port based to IP address to DNS to SNI filtering is prone to be ineffective in front of HTTPS traffic. The emphasis is upon the new ways to explore the expanding HTTPS volume with security breaches to cover new challenges related to Network Security Monitoring. Data collected from couple of up to date research and their conclusion hasbeen discussed to provide a brief overview so as to provide the reader with an in-depth understanding of the research progress in thisarea.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm which provides the flexibility of programming the network interface as per the need and demand of the user. Software Defined Network (SDN) is independent of vendor specific hardware or protocols and offers the easy extensions in the networking. A customized network as per on user demand facilitates communication control via a single entity i.e. SDN controller. Due to this SDN Controller has become more vulnerable to SDN security attacks and more specifically a single point of failure. It is worth noticing that vulnerabilities were identified because of customized applications which are semi-independent of underlying network infrastructure. No doubt, SDN has provided numerous benefits like breaking vendor lock-ins, reducing overhead cost, easy innovations, increasing programmability among devices, introducing new features and so on. But security of SDN cannot be neglected and it has become a major topic of debate. The communication channel used in SDN is OpenFlow which has made TLS implementation an optional approach in SDN. TLS adoption is important and still vulnerable. This paper focuses on making SDN OpenFlow communication more secure by following extended TLS support and defensive algorithm.

With the unprecedented prevalence of mobile network applications, cryptographic protocols, such as the Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), are widely used in mobile network applications for communication security. The proven methods for encrypted video stream classification or encrypted protocol detection are unsuitable for the SSL/TLS traffic. Consequently, application-level traffic classification based networking and security services are facing severe challenges in effectiveness. Existing encrypted traffic classification methods exhibit unsatisfying accuracy for applications with similar state characteristics. In this paper, we propose a multiple-attribute-based encrypted traffic classification system named Multi-Attribute Associated Fingerprints (MAAF). We develop MAAF based on the two key insights that the DNS traces generated during the application runtime contain classification guidance information and that the handshake certificates in the encrypted flows can provide classification clues. Apart from the exploitation of key insights, MAAF employs the context of the encrypted traffic to overcome the attribute-lacking problem during the classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that MAAF achieves 98.69% accuracy on the real-world traceset that consists of 16 applications, supports the early prediction, and is robust to the scale of the training traceset. Besides, MAAF is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

The Java platform and its third-party libraries provide useful features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing them can cost developers time and effort, as well as introduce security vulnerabilities in software. We conducted an empirical study on StackOverflow posts, aiming to understand developers' concerns on Java secure coding, their programming obstacles, and insecure coding practices. We observed a wide adoption of the authentication and authorization features provided by Spring Security - a third-party framework designed to secure enterprise applications. We found that programming challenges are usually related to APIs or libraries, including the complicated cross-language data handling of cryptography APIs, and the complex Java-based or XML-based approaches to configure Spring Security. In addition, we reported multiple security vulnerabilities in the suggested code of accepted answers on the StackOverflow forum. The vulnerabilities included disabling the default protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, breaking SSL/TLS security through bypassing certificate validation, and using insecure cryptographic hash functions. Our findings reveal the insufficiency of secure coding assistance and documentation, as well as the huge gap between security theory and coding practices.

Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) offers software applications a shielded execution environment, dubbed enclave, to protect their confidentiality and integrity from malicious operating systems. As processors with this extended feature become commercially available, many new software applications are developed to enrich to the SGX-enabled ecosystem. One important primitive for these applications is a secure communication channel between the enclave and a remote trusted party. The SSL/TLS protocol, which is the de facto standard for protecting transport-layer network communications, has been broadly regarded a natural choice for such purposes. However, in this paper, we show that the marriage between SGX and SSL may not be smooth sailing. Particularly, we consider a category of side-channel attacks against SSL/TLS implementations in secure enclaves, which we call the control-flow inference attacks. In these attacks, the malicious operating system kernel may perform a powerful man-in-the-kernel attack to collect execution traces of the enclave programs at the page level, the cacheline level, or the branch level, while positioning itself in the middle of the two communicating parties. At the center of our work is a differential analysis framework, dubbed Stacco, to dynamically analyze the SSL/TLS implementations and detect vulnerabilities-discernible execution traces-that can be exploited as decryption oracles. Surprisingly, in spite of the prevailing constant-time programming paradigm adopted by many cryptographic libraries, we found exploitable vulnerabilities in the latest versions of all the SSL/TLS libraries we have examined. To validate the detected vulnerabilities, we developed a man-in-the-kernel adversary to demonstrate Bleichenbacher attacks against the latest OpenSSL library running in the SGX enclave (with the help of Graphene) and completely broke the PreMasterSecret encrypted by a 4096-bit RSA public key with only 57286 queries. We also conducted CBC padding oracle attacks against the latest GnuTLS running in Graphene-SGX and an open-source SGX implementation of mbedTLS (i.e., mbedTLS-SGX) that runs directly inside the enclave, and showed that it only needs 48388 and 25717 queries, respectively, to break one block of AES ciphertext. Empirical evaluation suggests these man-in-the-kernel attacks can be completed within 1 or 2 hours. Our results reveal the insufficient understanding of side-channel security in SGX settings, and our study will provoke discussions on the secure implementation and adoption of SSL/TLS in secure enclaves.

Compression is desirable for network applications as it saves bandwidth. Differently, when data is compressed before being encrypted, the amount of compression leaks information about the amount of redundancy in the plaintext. This side channel has led to the “Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext (BREACH)” attack on web traffic protected by the TLS protocol. The general guidance to prevent this attack is to disable HTTP compression, preserving confidentiality but sacrificing bandwidth. As a more sophisticated countermeasure, fixed-dictionary compression was introduced in 2015 enabling compression while protecting high-value secrets, such as cookies, from attacks. The fixed-dictionary compression method is a cryptographically sound countermeasure against the BREACH attack, since it is proven secure in a suitable security model. In this project, we integrate the fixed-dictionary compression method as a countermeasure for BREACH attack, for real-world client-server setting. Further, we measure the performance of the fixed-dictionary compression algorithm against the DEFLATE compression algorithm. The results evident that, it is possible to save some amount of bandwidth, with reasonable compression/decompression time compared to DEFLATE operations. The countermeasure is easy to implement and deploy, hence, this would be a possible direction to mitigate the BREACH attack efficiently, rather than stripping off the HTTP compression entirely.