Biblio
SDN is a new network architecture for control and data forwarding logic separation, able to provide a high degree of openness and programmability, with many advantages not available by traditional networks. But there are still some problems unsolved, for example, it is easy to cause the controller to be attacked due to the lack of verifying the source of the packet, and the limited range of match fields cannot meet the requirement of the precise control of network services etc. Aiming at the above problems, this paper proposes a SDN network security control forwarding mechanism based on cipher identification, when packets flow into and out of the network, the forwarding device must verify their source to ensure the user's non-repudiation and the authenticity of packets. Besides administrators control the data forwarding based on cipher identification, able to form network management and control capabilities based on human, material, business flow, and provide a new method and means for the future of Internet security.
In cloud storage systems, users can upload their data along with associated tags (authentication information) to cloud storage servers. To ensure the availability and integrity of the outsourced data, provable data possession (PDP) schemes convince verifiers (users or third parties) that the outsourced data stored in the cloud storage server is correct and unchanged. Recently, several PDP schemes with designated verifier (DV-PDP) were proposed to provide the flexibility of arbitrary designated verifier. A designated verifier (private verifier) is trustable and designated by a user to check the integrity of the outsourced data. However, these DV-PDP schemes are either inefficient or insecure under some circumstances. In this paper, we propose the first non-repudiable PDP scheme with designated verifier (DV-NRPDP) to address the non-repudiation issue and resolve possible disputations between users and cloud storage servers. We define the system model, framework and adversary model of DV-NRPDP schemes. Afterward, a concrete DV-NRPDP scheme is presented. Based on the computing discrete logarithm assumption, we formally prove that the proposed DV-NRPDP scheme is secure against several forgery attacks in the random oracle model. Comparisons with the previously proposed schemes are given to demonstrate the advantages of our scheme.
In this paper, a distributed architecture for the implementation of smart city has been proposed to facilitate various smart features like solid waste management, efficient urban mobility and public transport, smart parking, robust IT connectivity, safety and security of citizens and a roadmap for achieving it. How massive volume of IoT data can be analyzed and a layered architecture of IoT is explained. Why data integration is important for analyzing and processing of data collected by the different smart devices like sensors, actuators and RFIDs is discussed. The wireless sensor network can be used to sense the data from various locations but there has to be more to it than stuffing sensors everywhere for everything. Why only the sensor is not sufficient for data collection and how human beings can be used to collect data is explained. There is some communication protocols between the volunteers engaged in collecting data to restrict the sharing of data and ensure that the target area is covered with minimum numbers of volunteers. Every volunteer should cover some predefined area to collect data. Then the proposed architecture model is having one central server to store all data in a centralized server. The data processing and the processing of query being made by the user is taking place in centralized server.
NEtwork MObility (NEMO) has gained recently a lot of attention from a number of standardization and researches committees. Although NEMO-Basic Support Protocol (NEMO-BSP) seems to be suitable in the context of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), it has several shortcomings, such as packets loss and lack of security, since it is a host-based mobility scheme. Therefore, in order to improve handoff performance and solve these limitations, schemes adapting Proxy MIPv6 for NEMO have been appeared. But the majorities did not deal with the case of the handover of the Visiting Mobile Nodes (VMN) located below the Mobile Router (MR). Thus, this paper proposes a Visiting Mobile Node Authentication Protocol for Proxy MIPv6-Based NEtwork MObility which ensures strong authentication between entities. To evaluate the security performance of our proposition, we have used the AVISPA/SPAN software which guarantees that our proposed protocol is a safe scheme.
SDN networks rely mainly on a set of software defined modules, running on generic hardware platforms, and managed by a central SDN controller. The tight coupling and lack of isolation between the controller and the underlying host limit the controller resilience against host-based attacks and failures. That controller is a single point of failure and a target for attackers. ``Linux-containers'' is a successful thin virtualization technique that enables encapsulated, host-isolated execution-environments for running applications. In this paper we present PAFR, a controller sandboxing mechanism based on Linux-containers. PAFR enables controller/host isolation, plug-and-play operation, failure-and-attack-resilient execution, and fast recovery. PAFR employs and manages live remote checkpointing and migration between different hosts to evade failures and attacks. Experiments and simulations show that the frequent employment of PAFR's live-migration minimizes the chance of successful attack/failure with limited to no impact on network performance.
With an aim of provisioning fast, reliable and low cost services to the users, the cloud-computing technology has progressed leaps and bounds. But, adjacent to its development is ever increasing ability of malicious users to compromise its security from outside as well as inside. The Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) techniques has gone a long way in detection of known and unknown attacks. The methods of detection of intrusion and deployment of NIDS in cloud environment are dependent on the type of services being rendered by the cloud. It is also important that the cloud administrator is able to determine the malicious intensions of the attackers and various methods of attack. In this paper, we carry out the integration of NIDS module and Honeypot Networks in Cloud environment with objective to mitigate the known and unknown attacks. We also propose method to generate and update signatures from information derived from the proposed integrated model. Using sandboxing environment, we perform dynamic malware analysis of binaries to derive conclusive evidence of malicious attacks.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm shift that changes the working principles of IP networks by separating the control logic from routers and switches, and logically centralizing it within a controller. In this architecture the control plane (controller) communicates with the data plane (switches) through a control channel using a standards-compliant protocol, that is, OpenFlow. While having a centralized controller creates an opportunity to monitor and program the entire network, as a side effect, it causes the control plane to become a single point of failure. Denial of service (DoS) attacks or even heavy control traffic conditions can easily become real threats to the proper functioning of the controller, which indirectly detriments the entire network. In this paper, we propose a solution to reduce the control traffic generated primarily during table-miss events. We utilize the buffer\_id feature of the OpenFlow protocol, which has been designed to identify individually buffered packets within a switch, reusing it to identify flows buffered as a series of packets during table-miss, which happens when there is no related rule in the switch flow tables that matches the received packet. Thus, we allow the OpenFlow switch to send only the first packet of a flow to the controller for a table-miss while buffering the rest of the packets in the switch memory until the controller responds or time out occurs. The test results show that OpenFlow traffic is significantly reduced when the proposed method is used.
Over the years cybercriminals have misused the Domain Name System (DNS) - a critical component of the Internet - to gain profit. Despite this persisting trend, little empirical information about the security of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and of the overall 'health' of the DNS ecosystem exists. In this paper, we present security metrics for this ecosystem and measure the operational values of such metrics using three representative phishing and malware datasets. We benchmark entire TLDs against the rest of the market. We explicitly distinguish these metrics from the idea of measuring security performance, because the measured values are driven by multiple factors, not just by the performance of the particular market player. We consider two types of security metrics: occurrence of abuse and persistence of abuse. In conjunction, they provide a good understanding of the overall health of a TLD. We demonstrate that attackers abuse a variety of free services with good reputation, affecting not only the reputation of those services, but of entire TLDs. We find that, when normalized by size, old TLDs like .com host more bad content than new generic TLDs. We propose a statistical regression model to analyze how the different properties of TLD intermediaries relate to abuse counts. We find that next to TLD size, abuse is positively associated with domain pricing (i.e. registries who provide free domain registrations witness more abuse). Last but not least, we observe a negative relation between the DNSSEC deployment rate and the count of phishing domains.
Over the years cybercriminals have misused the Domain Name System (DNS) - a critical component of the Internet - to gain profit. Despite this persisting trend, little empirical information about the security of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and of the overall 'health' of the DNS ecosystem exists. In this paper, we present security metrics for this ecosystem and measure the operational values of such metrics using three representative phishing and malware datasets. We benchmark entire TLDs against the rest of the market. We explicitly distinguish these metrics from the idea of measuring security performance, because the measured values are driven by multiple factors, not just by the performance of the particular market player. We consider two types of security metrics: occurrence of abuse and persistence of abuse. In conjunction, they provide a good understanding of the overall health of a TLD. We demonstrate that attackers abuse a variety of free services with good reputation, affecting not only the reputation of those services, but of entire TLDs. We find that, when normalized by size, old TLDs like .com host more bad content than new generic TLDs. We propose a statistical regression model to analyze how the different properties of TLD intermediaries relate to abuse counts. We find that next to TLD size, abuse is positively associated with domain pricing (i.e. registries who provide free domain registrations witness more abuse). Last but not least, we observe a negative relation between the DNSSEC deployment rate and the count of phishing domains.
Distributed attacks originating from botnet-infected machines (bots) such as large-scale malware propagation campaigns orchestrated via spam emails can quickly affect other network infrastructures. As these attacks are made successful only by the fact that hundreds of infected machines engage in them collectively, their damage can be avoided if machines infected with a common botnet can be detected early rather than after an attack is launched. Prior studies have suggested that outgoing bot attacks are often preceded by other ``tell-tale'' malicious behaviour, such as communication with botnet controllers (C&C servers) that command botnets to carry out attacks. We postulate that observing similar behaviour occuring in a synchronised manner across multiple machines is an early indicator of a widespread infection of a single botnet, leading potentially to a large-scale, distributed attack. Intuitively, if we can detect such synchronised behaviour early enough on a few machines in the network, we can quickly contain the threat before an attack does any serious damage. In this work we present a measurement-driven analysis to validate this intuition. We empirically analyse the various stages of malicious behaviour that are observed in real botnet traffic, and carry out the first systematic study of the network behaviour that typically precedes outgoing bot attacks and is synchronised across multiple infected machines. We then implement as a proof-of-concept a set of analysers that monitor synchronisation in botnet communication to generate early infection and attack alerts. We show that with this approach, we can quickly detect nearly 80% of real-world spamming and port scanning attacks, and even demonstrate a novel capability of preventing these attacks altogether by predicting them before they are launched.
Security at virtualization level has always been a major issue in cloud computing environment. A large number of virtual machines that are hosted on a single server by various customers/client may face serious security threats due to internal/external network attacks. In this work, we have examined and evaluated these threats and their impact on OpenStack private cloud. We have also discussed the most popular DOS (Denial-of-Service) attack on DHCP server on this private cloud platform and evaluated the vulnerabilities in an OpenStack networking component, Neutron, due to which this attack can be performed through rogue DHCP server. Finally, a solution, a game-theory based cloud architecture, that helps to detect and prevent DOS attacks in OpenStack has been proposed.
Wearable medical devices are playing more and more important roles in healthcare. Unlike the wired connection, the wireless connection between wearable devices and the remote servers are exceptionally vulnerable to malicious attacks, and poses threats to the safety and privacy of the patient health data. Therefore, wearable medical devices require the implementation of reliable measures to secure the wireless network communication. However, those devices usually have limited computational power that is not comparable with the desktop computer and thus, it is difficult to adopt the full-fledged security algorithm in software. In this study, we have developed an efficient authentication and encryption protocol for internetconnected wearable devices using the recognized standards of AES and SHA that can provide two-way authentication between wearable device and remote server and protection of patient privacy against various network threats. We have tested the feasibility of this protocol on the TI CC3200 Launchpad, an evaluation board of the CC3200, which is a Wi-Fi capable microcontroller designed for wearable devices and includes a hardware accelerated cryptography module for the implementation of the encryption algorithm. The microcontroller serves as the wearable device client and a Linux computer serves as the server. The embedded client software was written in ANSI C and the server software was written in Python.
Wearable devices for fitness tracking and health monitoring have gained considerable popularity and become one of the fastest growing smart devices market. More and more companies are offering integrated health and activity monitoring solutions for fitness trackers. Recently insurances are offering their customers better conditions for health and condition monitoring. However, the extensive sensitive information collected by tracking products and accessibility by third party service providers poses vital security and privacy challenges on the employed solutions. In this paper, we present our security analysis of a representative sample of current fitness tracking products on the market. In particular, we focus on malicious user setting that aims at injecting false data into the cloud-based services leading to erroneous data analytics. We show that none of these products can provide data integrity, authenticity and confidentiality.
To provide a comprehensive security analysis of modern networked systems, we need to take into account the combined effects of existing vulnerabilities and zero-day vulnerabilities. In addition to them, it is important to incorporate new vulnerabilities emerging from threats such as BYOD, USB file sharing. Consequently, there may be new dependencies between system components that could also create new attack paths, but previous work did not take into account those new attack paths in their security analysis (i.e., not all attack paths are taken into account). Thus, countermeasures may not be effective, especially against attacks exploiting the new attack paths. In this paper, we propose a Unified Vulnerability Risk Analysis Module (UV-RAM) to address the aforementioned problems by taking into account the combined effects of those vulnerabilities and capturing the new attack paths. The three main functionalities of UV-RAM are: (i) to discover new dependencies and new attack paths, (ii) to incorporate new vulnerabilities introduced and zero-day vulnerabilities into security analysis, and (iii) to formulate mitigation strategies for hardening the networked system. Our experimental results demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of UV-RAM.
Attack graph technique is a common tool for the evaluation of network security. However, attack graphs are generally too large and complex to be understood and interpreted by security administrators. This paper proposes an analysis framework for security attack graphs for a given IT infrastructure system. First, in order to facilitate the discovery of interconnectivities among vulnerabilities in a network, multi-host multi-stage vulnerability analysis (MulVAL) is employed to generate an attack graph for a given network topology. Then a novel algorithm is applied to refine the attack graph and generate a simplified graph called a transition graph. Next, a Markov model is used to project the future security posture of the system. Finally, the framework is evaluated by applying it on a typical IT network scenario with specific services, network configurations, and vulnerabilities.
as data size is growing up, cloud storage is becoming more familiar to store a significant amount of private information. Government and private organizations require transferring plenty of business files from one end to another. However, we will lose privacy if we exchange information without data encryption and communication mechanism security. To protect data from hacking, we can use Asymmetric encryption technique, but it has a key exchange problem. Although Asymmetric key encryption deals with the limitations of Symmetric key encryption it can only encrypt limited size of data which is not feasible for a large amount of data files. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to Pretty Good Privacy technique for encrypting large-size data, named as ``BigCrypt'' where both Symmetric and Asymmetric key encryption are used. Our goal is to achieve zero tolerance security on a significant amount of data encryption. We have experimentally evaluated our technique under three different platforms.
Cloud computing has emerged as a compelling vision for managing data and delivering query answering capability over the internet. This new way of computing also poses a real risk of disclosing confidential information to the cloud. Searchable encryption addresses this issue by allowing the cloud to compute the answer to a query based on the cipher texts of data and queries. Thanks to its inner product preservation property, the asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption (ASPE) has been adopted and enhanced in a growing number of works toperform a variety of queries and tasks in the cloud computingsetting. However, the security property of ASPE and its enhancedschemes has not been studied carefully. In this paper, we show acomplete disclosure of ASPE and several previously unknownsecurity risks of its enhanced schemes. Meanwhile, efficientalgorithms are proposed to learn the plaintext of data and queriesencrypted by these schemes with little or no knowledge beyondthe ciphertexts. We demonstrate these risks on real data sets.
Honeypots are servers or systems built to mimic critical parts of a network, distracting attackers while logging their information to develop attack profiles. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a honeypot disguised as a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). We discuss the motivation for this work, design features of the honeypot, and experimental performance results under various traffic conditions. We also present analyses of both a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and a cross-site scripting (XSS) malware insertion attempt against this honeypot.
Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly important for our daily life. However, the localization information in the air is vulnerable to various attacks, which result in serious privacy concerns. To overcome this problem, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem with considering both the query probability and the practical dummy location region. A low complexity dummy location selection scheme is proposed. We first find several candidate dummy locations with similar query probabilities. Among these selected candidates, a cloaking area based algorithm is then offered to find K - 1 dummy locations to achieve K-anonymity. The intersected area between two dummy locations is also derived to assist to determine the total cloaking area. Security analysis verifies the effectiveness of our scheme against the passive and active adversaries. Compared with other methods, simulation results show that the proposed dummy location scheme can improve the privacy level and enlarge the cloaking area simultaneously.
Cyber anonymity tools have attracted wide attention in resisting network traffic censorship and surveillance, and have played a crucial role for open communications over the Internet. The Onion Routing (Tor) is considered the prevailing technique for circumventing the traffic surveillance and providing cyber anonymity. Tor operates by tunneling a traffic through a series of relays, making such traffic to appear as if it originated from the last relay in the traffic path, rather than from the original user. However, Tor faced some obstructions in carrying out its goal effectively, such as insufficient performance and limited capacity. This paper presents a cyber anonymity technique based on software-defined networking; named SOR, which builds onion-routed tunnels across multiple anonymity service providers. SOR architecture enables any cloud tenants to participate in the anonymity service via software-defined networking. Our proposed architecture leverages the large capacity and robust connectivity of the commercial cloud networks to elevate the performance of the cyber anonymity service.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular information platforms on the Internet. The user access pattern to Wikipedia pages depends on their relevance in the current worldwide social discourse. We use publically available statistics about the top-1000 most popular pages on each day to estimate the efficiency of caches for support of the platform. While the data volumes are moderate, the main goal of Wikipedia caches is to reduce access times for page views and edits. We study the impact of most popular pages on the achievable cache hit rate in comparison to Zipf request distributions and we include daily dynamics in popularity.
This paper proposes a method to detect two primary means of using the Domain Name System (DNS) for malicious purposes. We develop machine learning models to detect information exfiltration from compromised machines and the establishment of command & control (C&C) servers via tunneling. We validate our approach by experiments where we successfully detect a malware used in several recent Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks [1]. The novelty of our method is its robustness, simplicity, scalability, and ease of deployment in a production environment.
Advanced Persistent Threats are increasingly becoming one of the major concerns to many industries and organizations. Currently, there exists numerous articles and industrial reports describing various case studies of recent notable Advanced Persistent Threat attacks. However, these documents are expressed in natural language. This limits the efficient reusability of the threat intelligence information due to ambiguous nature of the natural language. In this article, we propose a model to formally represent Advanced Persistent Threats as multi-agent systems. Our model is inspired by the concepts of agent-oriented social modelling approaches, generally used for software security requirement analysis.