Biblio

Structured Query Language Injection (SQLi) is a client-side application vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious SQL queries with harmful intents, including stealing sensitive information, bypassing authentication, and even executing illegal operations to cause more catastrophic damage to users on the web application. According to OWASP, the top 10 harmful attacks against web applications are SQL Injection attacks. Moreover, based on data reports from the UK's National Fraud Authority, SQL Injection is responsible for 97% of data exposures. Therefore, in order to prevent the SQL Injection attack, detection SQLi system is essential. The contribution of this research is securing web applications by developing a browser extension for Google Chrome using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which is a unique kind of RNN algorithm capable of learning long-term dependencies like SQL Injection attacks. The results of the model will be deployed in static analysis in a browser extension, and the LSTM algorithm will learn to identify the URL that has to be injected into Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) as a sample-tested web application. Experimental results show that the proposed SQLi detection model based on the LSTM algorithm achieves an accuracy rate of 99.97%, which means that a reliable client-side can effectively detect whether the URL being accessed contains a SQLi attack or not.

Aiming at the current troubles encountered by enterprise employees in their daily work when operating business systems due to web compatibility issues, a dual-core secure browser is designed and developed in the paper based on summarizing the current development status of multi-core browsers, key difficulties and challenges in the field. Based on the Chromium open-source project, the design of a dual-core browser auto-adaptation method is carried out. Firstly, dual-core encapsulation technology is implemented, followed by a study of the core auto-adaptation algorithm, and then a core cookie sharing function is developed based on Hook technology. In addition, the security of the browser is reinforced by designing a cookie manager, adding behavior monitoring functions, and unified platform control to enhance confidentiality and security, providing a safe and secure interface for employees' work and ubiquitous IoT access. While taking security into account, the browser realizes the need for a single browser compatible with all business system web pages of the enterprise, enhancing the operating experience of the client. Finally, the possible future research directions in this field are summarized and prospected.

In this cyber era, the number of cybercrime problems grows significantly, impacting network communication security. Some factors have been identified, such as malware. It is a malicious code attack that is harmful. On the other hand, a botnet can exploit malware to threaten whole computer networks. Therefore, it needs to be handled appropriately. Several botnet activity detection models have been developed using a classification approach in previous studies. However, it has not been analyzed about selecting features to be used in the learning process of the classification algorithm. In fact, the number and selection of features implemented can affect the detection accuracy of the classification algorithm. This paper proposes an analysis technique for determining the number and selection of features developed based on previous research. It aims to obtain the analysis of using features. The experiment has been conducted using several classification algorithms, namely Decision tree, k-NN, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The results show that taking a certain number of features increases the detection accuracy. Compared with previous studies, the results obtained show that the average detection accuracy of 98.34% using four features has the highest value from the previous study, 97.46% using 11 features. These results indicate that the selection of the correct number and features affects the performance of the botnet detection model.

The botnet is a serious network security threat that can cause servers crash, so how to detect the behavior of Botnet has already become an important part of the research of network security. DNS(Domain Name System) request is the first step for most of the mainframe computers controlled by Botnet to communicate with the C&C(command; control) server. The detection of DNS request domain names is an important way for mainframe computers controlled by Botnet. However, the detection method based on fixed rules is hard to take effect for botnet based on DGA(Domain Generation Algorithm) because malicious domain names keep evolving and derive many different generation methods. Contrasted with the traditional methods, the method based on machine learning is a better way to detect it by learning and modeling the DGA. This paper presents a method based on the Naive Bayes model, the XGBoost model, the SVM(Support Vector Machine) model, and the MLP(Multi-Layer Perceptron) model, and tests it with real data sets collected from DGA, Alexa, and Secrepo. The experimental results show the precision score, the recall score, and the F1 score for each model.

HTTP flood DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks send illegitimate HTTP requests to the targeted site or server. These kinds of attacks corrupt the networks with the help of massive attacking nodes thus blocking incoming traffic. Computer network connected devices are the major source to distributed denial of service attacks (or) botnet attacks. The computer manufacturers rapidly increase the network devices as per the requirement increases in the different environmental needs. Generally the manufacturers cannot ship computer network products with high level security. Those network products require additional security to prevent the DDoS attacks. The present technology is filled with 4G that will impact DDoS attacks. The million DDoS attacks had experienced in every year by companies or individuals. DDoS attack in a network would lead to loss of assets, data and other resources. Purchasing the new equipment and repair of the DDoS attacked network is financially becomes high in the value. The prevention mechanisms like CAPTCHA are now outdated to the bots and which are solved easily by the advanced bots. In the proposed work a secured botnet prevention mechanism provides network security by prevent and mitigate the http flooding based DDoS attack and allow genuine incoming traffic to the application or server in a network environment with the help of integrating invisible challenge and Resource Request Rate algorithms to the application. It offers double security layer to handle malicious bots to prevent and mitigate.

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their wide-scale deployment have remarkably attracted hackers to exploit weakly-configured and vulnerable devices, allowing them to form large IoT botnets and launch unprecedented attacks. Modeling the behavior of IoT botnets leads to a better understanding of their spreading mechanisms and the state of the network at different levels of the attack. In this paper, we propose a generic model to capture the behavior of IoT botnets. The proposed model uses Markov Chains to study the botnet behavior. Discrete Event System Specifications environment is used to simulate the proposed model.

The botnet-based network assault are one of the most serious security threats overlay the Internet this day. Although significant progress has been made in this region of research in recent years, it is still an ongoing and challenging topic to virtually direction the threat of botnets due to their continuous evolution, increasing complexity and stealth, and the difficulties in detection and defense caused by the limitations of network and system architectures. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient botnet detection method, and the results of the detection method are validated with the CTU-13 dataset.

This paper dives into the growing world of IoT botnets that have taken the world by storm in the past five years. Though alone an IP camera cannot produce enough traffic to be considered a DDoS. But a botnet that has over 150,000 connected IP cameras can generate as much as 1 Tbps in traffic. Botnets catch many by surprise because their attacks and infections may not be as apparent as a DDoS, some other cases include using these cameras and printers for extracting information or quietly mine cryptocurrency at the IoT device owner's expense. Here we analyze damages on IoT hacking and define botnet architecture. An overview of Mirai botnet and cryptojacking provided to better understand the IoT botnets.

The spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in our homes, healthcare, industries etc. are more easily infiltrated than desktop computers have resulted in a surge in botnet attacks based on IoT devices, which may jeopardize the IoT security. Hence, there is a need to detect these attacks and mitigate the damage. Existing systems rely on supervised learning-based intrusion detection methods, which require a large labelled data set to achieve high accuracy. Botnets are onerous to detect because of stealthy command & control protocols and large amount of network traffic and hence obtaining a large labelled data set is also difficult. Due to unlabeled Network traffic, the supervised classification techniques may not be used directly to sort out the botnet that is responsible for the attack. To overcome this limitation, a semi-supervised Deep Learning (DL) approach is proposed which uses Semi-supervised GAN (SGAN) for IoT botnet detection on N-BaIoT dataset which contains "Bashlite" and "Mirai" attacks along with their sub attacks. The results have been compared with the state-of-the-art supervised solutions and found efficient in terms of better accuracy which is 99.89% in binary classification and 59% in multi classification on larger dataset, faster and reliable model for IoT Botnet detection.

A botnet is a new type of attack method developed and integrated on the basis of traditional malicious code such as network worms and backdoor tools, and it is extremely threatening. This course combines deep learning and neural network methods in machine learning methods to detect and classify the existence of botnets. This sample does not rely on any prior features, the final multi-class classification accuracy rate is higher than 98.7%, the effect is significant.

The internet has developed and transformed the world dramatically in recent years, which has resulted in several cyberattacks. Cybersecurity is one of society’s most serious challenge, costing millions of dollars every year. The research presented here will look into this area, focusing on malware that can establish botnets, and in particular, detecting connections made by infected workstations connecting with the attacker’s machine. In recent years, the frequency of network security incidents has risen dramatically. Botnets have previously been widely used by attackers to carry out a variety of malicious activities, such as compromising machines to monitor their activities by installing a keylogger or sniffing traffic, launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, stealing the identity of the machine or credentials, and even exfiltrating data from the user’s computer. Botnet detection is still a work in progress because no one approach exists that can detect a botnet’s whole ecosystem. A detailed analysis of a botnet, discuss numerous parameter’s result of detection methods related to botnet attacks, as well as existing work of botnet identification in field of machine learning are discuss here. This paper focuses on the comparative analysis of various classifier based on design of botnet detection technique which are able to detect P2P botnet using machine learning classifier.

This paper proposes a new strategy, named resident strategy, for defending IoT networks from repeated infection of malicious botnets in the Botnet Defense System (BDS). The resident strategy aims to make a small-scale white-hat botnet resident in the network respond immediately to invading malicious botnets. The BDS controls the resident white-hat botnet with two parameters: upper and lower number of its bots. The lower limit prevents the white-hat botnet from disappearing, while the upper limit prevents it from filling up the network. The BDS with the strategy was modeled with agent-oriented Petri nets and was evaluated through the simulation. The result showed that the proposed strategy was able to deal with repeatedly invading malicious botnets with about half the scale of the conventional white-hat botnet.

Code optimization is an essential feature for compilers and almost all software products are released by compiler optimizations. Consequently, bugs in code optimization will inevitably cast significant impact on the correctness of software systems. Locating optimization bugs in compilers is challenging as compilers typically support a large amount of optimization configurations. Although prior studies have proposed to locate compiler bugs via generating witness test programs, they are still time-consuming and not effective enough. To address such limitations, we propose an automatic bug localization approach, ODFL, for locating compiler optimization bugs via differentiating finer-grained options in this study. Specifically, we first disable the fine-grained options that are enabled by default under the bug-triggering optimization levels independently to obtain bug-free and bug-related fine-grained options. We then configure several effective passing and failing optimization sequences based on such fine-grained options to obtain multiple failing and passing compiler coverage. Finally, such generated coverage information can be utilized via Spectrum-Based Fault Localization formulae to rank the suspicious compiler files. We run ODFL on 60 buggy GCC compilers from an existing benchmark. The experimental results show that ODFL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art compiler bug isolation approach RecBi in terms of all the evaluated metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of ODFL. In addition, ODFL is much more efficient than RecBi as it can save more than 88% of the time for locating bugs on average.

The prevalence of mobile devices (smartphones) along with the availability of high-speed internet access world-wide resulted in a wide variety of mobile applications that carry a large amount of confidential information. Although popular mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android constantly increase their defenses methods, data shows that the number of intrusions and attacks using mobile applications is rising continuously. Experts use techniques to detect malware before the malicious application gets installed, during the runtime or by the network traffic analysis. In this paper, we first present the information about different categories of mobile malware and threats; then, we classify the recent research methods on mobile malware traffic detection.

A recently emerged cellular network based One-Tap Authentication (OTAuth) scheme allows app users to quickly sign up or log in to their accounts conveniently: Mobile Network Operator (MNO) provided tokens instead of user passwords are used as identity credentials. After conducting a first in-depth security analysis, however, we have revealed several fundamental design flaws among popular OTAuth services, which allow an adversary to easily (1) perform unauthorized login and register new accounts as the victim, (2) illegally obtain identities of victims, and (3) interfere OTAuth services of legitimate apps. To further evaluate the impact of our identified issues, we propose a pipeline that integrates both static and dynamic analysis. We examined 1,025/894 Android/iOS apps, each app holding more than 100 million installations. We confirmed 396/398 Android/iOS apps are affected. Our research systematically reveals the threats against OTAuth services. Finally, we provide suggestions on how to mitigate these threats accordingly.

With the growth of mobile computing techniques, mobile gambling scams have seen a rampant increase in the recent past. In mobile gambling scams, miscreants deliver scamming messages via mobile instant messaging, host scam gambling platforms on mobile apps, and adopt mobile payment channels. To date, there is little quantitative knowledge about how this trending cybercrime operates, despite causing daily fraud losses estimated at more than \$\$\$522,262 USD. This paper presents the first empirical study based on ground-truth data of mobile gambling scams, associated with 1,461 scam incident reports and 1,487 gambling scam apps, spanning from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of this ground-truth data allows us to characterize the operational pipeline and full fraud kill chain of mobile gambling scams. In particular, we study the social engineering tricks used by scammers and reveal their effectiveness. Our work provides a systematic analysis of 1,068 confirmed Android and 419 iOS scam apps, including their development frameworks, declared permissions, compatibility, and backend network infrastructure. Perhaps surprisingly, our study unveils that public online app generators have been abused to develop gambling scam apps. Our analysis reveals several payment channels (ab)used by gambling scam app and uncovers a new type of money mule-based payment channel with the average daily gambling deposit of \$\$\$400,000 USD. Our findings enable a better understanding of the mobile gambling scam ecosystem, and suggest potential avenues to disrupt these scam activities.

Flush-based cache attacks like Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush are highly precise and effective. Most of the flush-based attacks provide high accuracy in controlled and isolated environments where attacker and victim share OS pages. However, we observe that these attacks are prone to low accuracy on a noisy multi-core system with co-running applications. Two root causes for the varying accuracy of flush-based attacks are: (i) the dynamic nature of core frequencies that fluctuate depending on the system load, and (ii) the relative placement of victim and attacker threads in the processor, like same or different physical cores. These dynamic factors critically affect the execution latency of key instructions like clflush and mov, rendering the pre-attack calibration step ineffective.We propose DABANGG, a set of novel refinements to make flush-based attacks resilient to system noise by making them aware of frequency and thread placement. First, we introduce pre-attack calibration that is aware of instruction latency variation. Second, we use low-cost attack-time optimizations like fine-grained busy waiting and periodic feedback about the latency thresholds to improve the effectiveness of the attack. Finally, we provide victim-specific parameters that significantly improve the attack accuracy. We evaluate DABANGG-enabled Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush attacks against the standard attacks in side-channel and covert-channel experiments with varying levels of compute, memory, and IO-intensive system noise. In all scenarios, DABANGG+Flush+Reload and DABANGG+Flush+Flush outperform the standard attacks in stealth and accuracy.

We have proposed a new Smart Meter Application (SMA) Framework. This application registers consumers at utility provider (Electricity), takes the meter reading for electricity and makes billing. The proposed application might offer higher level of flexibility and security, time saving and trustworthiness between consumers and authority offices. It’s expected that the application will be developed by Flutter to support Android and iOS Mobile Operating Systems.

Driven by the progress of data and compute-intensive methods in various scientific domains, there is an in-creasing demand from researchers working with highly sensitive data to have access to the necessary computational resources to be able to adapt those methods in their respective fields. To satisfy the computing needs of those researchers cost-effectively, it is an open quest to integrate reliable security measures on existing High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. The fundamental problem with securely working with sensitive data is, that HPC systems are shared systems that are typically trimmed for the highest performance - not for high security. For instance, there are commonly no additional virtualization techniques employed, thus, users typically have access to the host operating system. Since new vulnerabilities are being continuously discovered, solely relying on the traditional Unix permissions is not secure enough. In this paper, we discuss a generic and secure workflow that can be implemented on typical HPC systems allowing users to transfer, store and analyze sensitive data. In our experiments, we see an advantage in the asynchronous execution of IO requests, while reaching 80 % of the ideal performance.

We use mobile apps on a daily basis and there is an app for everything. We trust these applications with our most personal data. It is therefore important that these apps are as secure and well usable as possible. So far most studies on the maintenance and security of mobile applications have been done on Android applications. We do, however, not know how well these results translate to iOS.This research project aims to close this gap by analysing iOS applications with regards to maintainability and security. Regarding maintainability, we analyse code smells in iOS applications, the evolution of code smells in iOS applications and compare code smell distributions in iOS and Android applications. Regarding security, we analyse the evolution of the third-party library dependency network for the iOS ecosystem. Additionally, we analyse how publicly reported vulnerabilities spread in the library dependency network.Regarding maintainability, we found that the distributions of code smells in iOS and Android applications differ. Code smells in iOS applications tend to correspond to smaller classes, such as Lazy Class. Regarding security, we found that the library dependency network of the iOS ecosystem is not growing as fast as in some other ecosystems. There are less dependencies on average than for example in the npm ecosystem and, therefore, vulnerabilities do not spread as far.

With the rapid development of information science and technology, the role of the Internet in daily life is becoming more and more important, but while bringing speed and convenience to the experience, network security issues are endless, and fighting cybercrime will be an eternal topic. In recent years, new types of cyberattacks have made defense and analysis difficult. For example, the memory of network attacks makes some key array evidence only temporarily exist in physical memory, which puts forward higher requirements for attack detection. The traditional memory forensic analysis method for persistent data is no longer suitable for a new type of network attack analysis. The continuous development of memory forensics gives people hope. This paper proposes a network attack detection model based on memory forensic analysis to detect whether the system is under attack. Through experimental analysis, this model can effectively detect network attacks with low overhead and easy deployment, providing a new idea for network attack detection.

As information and communication technologies evolve every day, so does the use of technology in our daily lives. Along with our increasing dependence on digital information assets, security vulnerabilities are becoming more and more apparent. Passwords are a critical component of secure access to digital systems and applications. They not only prevent unauthorized access to these systems, but also distinguish the users of such systems. Research on password predictability often relies on surveys or leaked data. Therefore, there is a gap in the literature for studies that consider real data in this regard. This study investigates the password security awareness of 161 computer engineering students enrolled in a Linux-based undergraduate course at Ataturk University. The study is conducted in two phases, and in the first phase, 12 dictionaries containing also real student data are formed. In the second phase of the study, a dictionary-based brute-force attack is utilized by means of a serial and parallel version of a Bash script to crack the students’ passwords. In this respect, the /etc/shadow file of the Linux system is used as a basis to compare the hashed versions of the guessed passwords. As a result, the passwords of 23 students, accounting for 14% of the entire student group, were cracked. We believe that this is an unacceptably high prediction rate for such a group with high digital literacy. Therefore, due to this important finding of the study, we took immediate action and shared the results of the study with the instructor responsible for administering the information security course that is included in our curriculum and offered in one of the following semesters.

Android controls the majority of the global OS market. Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is a very complex system with many layers including the apps, the Application Framework, the middle-ware, the customized Linux kernel, and the trusted components. Although security is implemented in every layer, the Application Framework forms an important of the attack surface due to managing the user interface and permissions. Android security has evolved over the years. The security flaws that have been found in the Application Framework led to a redesign of Android permissions. Part of this evolution includes fixes to the vulnerabilities that are publicly released in the monthly Android security bulletins. In this study, we analyze the CVEs listed in the Android security bulletin within the last 6 years. We focus on the Android application framework and investigate several research questions relating to 1) the security relevant components, 2) the type and amount of testing information for the security patches, and 3) the adequacy of the tests designed to test these patches. Our findings indicate that Android security testing practices can be further improved by designing security bulletin update specific tests, and by improving code coverage of patched files.

Exploring the efficient vulnerability scanning and detection technology of various tools is one fundamental aim of network security. This network security technique ameliorates the tremendous number of IoT security challenges and the threats they face daily. However, among various tools, Shodan Eye scanning technology has proven to be very helpful for network administrators and security personnel to scan, detect and analyze vulnerable ports and traffic in organizations' networks. This work presents a simulated network scanning activity and manual vulnerability analysis of an internet-connected industrial equipment of two chosen industrial networks (Industry A and B) by running Shodan on a virtually hosted (Oracle Virtual Box)-Linux-based operating system (Kali Linux). The result shows that the shodan eye is a a promising tool for network security and efficient vulnerability research.

Nowadays, dynamic testing tools have significantly expedited the discovery of bugs in the Linux kernel. When unveiling kernel bugs, they automatically generate reports, specifying the errors the Linux encounters. The error in the report implies the possible exploitability of the corresponding kernel bug. As a result, many security analysts use the manifested error to infer a bug’s exploitability and thus prioritize their exploit development effort. However, using the error in the report, security researchers might underestimate a bug’s exploitability. The error exhibited in the report may depend upon how the bug is triggered. Through different paths or under different contexts, a bug may manifest various error behaviors implying very different exploitation potentials. This work proposes a new kernel fuzzing technique to explore all the possible error behaviors that a kernel bug might bring about. Unlike conventional kernel fuzzing techniques concentrating on kernel code coverage, our fuzzing technique is more directed towards the buggy code fragment. It introduces an object-driven kernel fuzzing technique to explore various contexts and paths to trigger the reported bug, making the bug manifest various error behaviors. With the newly demonstrated errors, security researchers could better infer a bug’s possible exploitability. To evaluate our proposed technique’s effectiveness, efficiency, and impact, we implement our fuzzing technique as a tool GREBE and apply it to 60 real-world Linux kernel bugs. On average, GREBE could manifest 2+ additional error behaviors for each of the kernel bugs. For 26 kernel bugs, GREBE discovers higher exploitation potential. We report to kernel vendors some of the bugs – the exploitability of which was wrongly assessed and the corresponding patch has not yet been carefully applied – resulting in their rapid patch adoption.