Biblio

Today's global network is filled with attackers both live and automated seeking to identify and compromise vulnerable devices, with initial scanning and attack activity occurring within minutes or even seconds of being connected to the Internet. To better understand these events, honeypots can be deployed to monitor and log activity by simulating actual Internet facing services such as SSH, Telnet, HTTP, or FTP, and malicious activity can be logged as attempts are made to compromise them. In this study six multi-service honeypots are deployed in locations around the globe to collect and catalog traffic over a period of several months between March and December, 2020. Analysis is performed on various characteristics including source and destination IP addresses and port numbers, usernames and passwords utilized, commands executed, and types of files downloaded. In addition, Cowrie log data is restructured to observe individual attacker sessions, study command sequences, and monitor tunneling activity. This data is then correlated across honeypots to compare attack and traffic patterns with the goal of learning more about the tactics being employed. By gathering data gathered from geographically separate zones over a long period of time a greater understanding can be developed regarding attacker intent and methodology, can aid in the development of effective approaches to identifying malicious behavior and attack sources, and can serve as a cyber-threat intelligence feed.

In recent years, blockchain-based cryptocurren-cies have attracted much attention. Attacks targeting cryptocurrencies and related services directly profit an attacker if successful. Related studies have reported attacks targeting configuration-vulnerable nodes in Ethereum using a method called honeypots to observe malicious user attacks. They have analyzed 380 million observed requests and showed that attacks had to that point taken at least 4193 Ether. However, long-term observations using honeypots are difficult because the cost of maintaining honeypots is high. In this study, we analyze the behavior of malicious users using our honeypot system. More precisely, we clarify the pre-investigation that a malicious user performs before attacks. We show that the cost of maintaining a honeypot can be reduced. For example, honeypots need to belong in Ethereum's P2P network but not to the mainnet. Further, if they belong to the testnet, the cost of storage space can be reduced.

Honeypots are widely used to increase the security of systems and networks, but they only observe the activities that are done against them. A honeypot will not be able to detect an exploit in another system unless it interacts directly with it. In addition to the weakness caused by the normal behavior of honeypots, our research shows that honeypots may succumb to back door attacks. To prove this claim, a backdoor attack is performed on the popular Honeypot system. Experimental results show that the Kfsensor Honeypot is bypassed using a backdoor attack, and network protection is disabled even with the Honeypot enabled.

Adaptive honeypots are being widely proposed as a more powerful alternative to the traditional honeypot model. Just as with typical honeypots, however, one of the most important concerns of an adaptive honeypot is environment deception in order to make sure an adversary cannot fingerprint the honeypot. The threat of fingerprinting hints at a greater underlying concern, however; this being that honeypots are only effective because an adversary does not know that the environment on which they are operating is a honeypot. What has not been widely discussed in the context of adaptive honeypots is that they actually have an inherently increased level of susceptibility to this threat. Honeypots not only bear increased risks when an adversary knows they are a honeypot rather than a native system, but they are only effective as adaptable entities if one does not know that the honeypot environment they are operating on is adaptive as wekk. Thus, if adaptive honeypots become commonplace - or, instead, if attackers even have an inkling that an adaptive honeypot may exist on any given network, a new attack which could develop is a “blind confusion attack”; a form of connection which simply makes an assumption all environments are adaptive honeypots, and instead of attempting to perform a malicious strike on a given entity, opts to perform non-malicious behavior in specified and/or random patterns to confuse an adaptive network's learning.

IoT honeypots that mimic the behavior of IoT devices for threat analysis are becoming increasingly important. Existing honeypot systems use devices with a specific version of firmware installed to monitor cyber attacks. However, honeypots frequently receive requests targeting devices and firmware that are different from themselves. When honeypots return an error response to such a request, the attack is terminated, and the monitoring fails.To solve this problem, we introduce FirmPot, a framework that automatically generates intelligent-interaction honeypots using firmware. This framework has a firmware emulator optimized for honeypot generation and learns the behavior of embedded applications by using machine learning. The generated honeypots continue to interact with attackers by a mechanism that returns the best from the emulated responses to the attack request instead of an error response.We experimented on embedded web applications of wireless routers based on the open-source OpenWrt. As a result, our framework generated honeypots that mimicked the embedded web applications of eight vendors and ten different CPU architectures. Furthermore, our approach to the interaction improved the session length with attackers compared to existing ones.

The extensive utilization of network by smart devices, computers and servers makes it vulnerable to malicious activities where intruders and attackers tends to violate system security policies and authenticity to slither essential information. Honeypots are designed to create a virtual trap against hackers. The trap is to attract intruders and gather information about attackers and attack features. Honeypots mimics as a computer application, billing systems, webpages and client server-based applications to understand attackers behavior by gathering attack features and common foot prints used by hackers to forge information. In this papers, authors analyse amazon web services honeypot (AWSH) data to determine geo-spatial distribution of targeted attacks originated from different locations. The categorization of attacks is made on the basis of internet protocols and frequency of attack occurrences worldwide.

As a decoy for hackers, honeypots have been proved to be a very valuable tool for collecting real data. However, due to closed source and vendor-specific firmware, there are significant limitations in cost for researchers to design an easy-to-use and high-interaction honeypot for industrial control systems (ICSs). To solve this problem, it’s necessary to find a cost-effective solution. In this paper, we propose a novel honeypot architecture termed HoneyVP to support a semi-virtual and semi-physical honeypot design and implementation to enable high cost performance. Specially, we first analyze cyber-attacks on ICS devices in view of different interaction levels. Then, in order to deal with these attacks, our HoneyVP architecture clearly defines three basic independent and cooperative components, namely, the virtual component, the physical component, and the coordinator. Finally, a local-remote cooperative ICS honeypot system is implemented to validate its feasibility and effectiveness. Our experimental results show the advantages of using the proposed architecture compared with the previous honeypot solutions. HoneyVP provides a cost-effective solution for ICS security researchers, making ICS honeypots more attractive and making it possible to capture physical interactions.

Throughout the years, honeypots have been very useful in tracking down attackers and preventing different types of cyber attacks on a very large scale. It's been almost 3 decades since the discover of honeypots and still more than 80% of the companies rely on this system because of intrusion detection features and low false positive rate. But with time, the attackers tend to start discovering loopholes in the system. Hence it is very important to be up to date with the technology when it comes to protecting a computing device from the emerging cyber attacks. Timely advancements in the security model provided by the honeypots helps in a more efficient use of the resource and also leads to better innovations in that field. The following paper reviews different methods of honeypot network and also gives an insight about the problems that those techniques can face along with their solution. Further it also gives the detail about the most preferred solution among all of the listed techniques in the paper.

New technologies from day to day are submitted with many vulnerabilities that can make data exploitation. Nowadays, IoT is a target for Cybercrime attacks as it is one of the popular platforms in the century. This research address the IoT security problem by carried a medium-interaction honeypot. Honeypot is one of the solutions that can be done because it is a system feed for the introduction of attacks and fraudulent devices. This research has created a medium interaction honeypot using Cowrie, which is used to maintain the Internet of Things device from malware attacks or even attack patterns and collect information about the attacker's machine. From the result analysis, the honeypot can record all trials and attack activities, with CPU loads averagely below 6,3%.

Generally, the defense measures taken against new cyber-attack methods are insufficient for cybersecurity risk management. Contrary to classical attack methods, the existence of undiscovered attack types called’ zero-day attacks’ can invalidate the actions taken. It is possible with honeypot systems to implement new security measures by recording the attacker’s behavior. The purpose of the honeypot is to learn about the methods and tools used by the attacker or malicious activity. In particular, it allows us to discover zero-day attack types and develop new defense methods for them. Attackers have made protocols such as SSH (Secure Shell) and Telnet, which are widely used for remote access to devices, primary targets. In this study, SSHTelnet honeypot was established using Cowrie software. Attackers attempted to connect, and attackers record their activity after providing access. These collected attacker log records and files uploaded to the system are published on Github to other researchers1. We shared the observations and analysis results of attacks on SSH and Telnet protocols with honeypot.

In order to solve the problem that the ordinary intrusion detection model cannot effectively identify the increasingly complex, continuous, multi-source and organized network attacks, this paper proposes an Internet of Things attack group identification model to identify the planned and organized attack groups. The model takes the common attack source IP, target IP, time stamp and target port as the characteristics of the attack log data to establish the identification benchmark of the attack gang behavior. The model also combines the spectral clustering algorithm to cluster different attackers with similar attack behaviors, and carries out the specific image analysis of the attack gang. In this paper, an experimental detection was carried out based on real IoT honey pot attack log data. The spectral clustering was compared with Kmeans, DBSCAN and other clustering algorithms. The experimental results shows that the contour coefficient of spectral clustering was significantly higher than that of other clustering algorithms. The recognition model based on spectral clustering proposed in this paper has a better effect, which can effectively identify the attack groups and mine the attack preferences of the groups.

Internet is the most widely used technology in the current era of information technology and it is embedded in daily life activities. Due to its extensive use in everyday life, it has many applications such as social media (Face book, WhatsApp, messenger etc.,) and other online applications such as online businesses, e-counseling, advertisement on websites, e-banking, e-hunting websites, e-doctor appointment and e-doctor opinion. The above mentioned applications of internet technology makes things very easy and accessible for human being in limited time, however, this technology is vulnerable to various security threats. A vital and severe threat associated with this technology or a particular application is “Phishing attack” which is used by attacker to usurp the network security. Phishing attacks includes fake E-mails, fake websites, fake applications which are used to steal their credentials or usurp their security. In this paper, a detailed overview of various phishing attacks, specifically their background knowledge, and solutions proposed in literature to address these issues using various techniques such as anti-phishing, honey pots and firewalls etc. Moreover, installation of intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion detection and prevention system (IPS) in the networks to allow the authentic traffic in an operational network. In this work, we have conducted end use awareness campaign to educate and train the employs in order to minimize the occurrence probability of these attacks. The result analysis observed for this survey was quite excellent by means of its effectiveness to address the aforementioned issues.

The Internet has changed business, education, healthcare, banking etc. and it is the main part of technological evolution. Internet provides us a connecting world to perform our day to day life activities easily. Internet is designed in such a way that it can uniquely identify machine, not a person, on the network hence there is need to design a system that can perform entity identification on the Internet. Currently on Internet, service providers provide identity of a user with user name and password and store this information on a centralized server. These servers become honey pot for hackers to steal user’s personal identity information and service provider can utilize user identity information using data mining, artificial intelligence for economic benefits. Aim of Self sovereign identity system is to provide decentralized, user centric identity system which is controlled by identity owner that can be developed along with distributed ledger technology i.e. blockchain. In this paper, we intend to make an exhaustive study on different blockchain based self sovereign identity implementations (such as Sovrin, Uport, EverID, LifeID, Sora, SelfKey) along with its architectural components and discuss about use case of self sovereign identity.

In 2018, several malware campaigns targeted and succeed to infect millions of low-cost routers (malwares e.g., VPN-Filter, Navidade, and SonarDNS). These routers were used, then, for all sort of cybercrimes: from DDoS attacks to ransomware. MikroTik routers are a peculiar example of low-cost routers. These routers are used to provide both last mile access to home users and are used in core network infrastructure. Half of the core routers used in one of the biggest Internet exchanges in the world are MikroTik devices. The problem is that vulnerable firmwares (RouterOS) used in homeusers houses are also used in core networks. In this paper, we are the first to quantify the problem that infecting MikroTik devices would pose to the Internet. Based on more than 4 TB of data, we reveal more than 4 million MikroTik devices in the world. Then, we propose an easy-to-deploy MikroTik honeypot and collect more than 17 millions packets, in 45 days, from sensors deployed in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Netherlands, and the United States. Finally, we use the collected data from our honeypots to automatically classify and assess attacks tailored to MikroTik devices. All our source-codes and analysis are publicly available. We believe that our honeypots and our findings in this paper foster security improvements in MikroTik devices worldwide.

Cloud computing provides so many groundbreaking advantages over native computing servers like to improve capacity and decrease costs, but meanwhile, it carries many security issues also. In this paper, we find the feasible security attacks made about cloud computing, including Wrapping, Browser Malware-Injection and Flooding attacks, and also problems caused by accountability checking. We have also analyzed the honey pot attack and its procedural intrusion way into the system. This paper on overall deals with the most common security breaches in cloud computing and finally honey pot, in particular, to analyze its intrusion way. Our major scope is to do overall security, analyze in the cloud and then to take up with a particular attack to deal with granular level. Honey pot is the one such attack that is taken into account and its intrusion policies are analyzed. The specific honey pot algorithm is in the queue as the extension of this project in the future.

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks become the important security threat of the IoT. Characteristics of IoT, such as large quantities and simple function, which have easily caused the IoT devices or servers to be attacked and be turned into botnets for launching DDoS attacks. In this paper, we use software-defined networking (SDN) to develop moving target defense (MTD) architecture that increases uncertainty because of ever changing attack surface. In addition, we deploy SDN-based honeypots to mimic IoT devices, luring attackers and malwares. Finally, experimental results show that combination of MTD and SDN-based honeypots can effectively hide network asset from scanner and defend against DDoS attacks in IoT.

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing number of resource-constrained interconnected smart devices, there is a noticeable increase in the number of cyber security crimes. In the face of the possible attacks on IoT networks such as network intrusion, denial of service, spoofing and so on, there is a need to develop efficient methods to locate vulnerabilities and mitigate attacks in IoT networks. Without loss of generality, we consider only intrusion-related threats to IoT. A honeypot is a system used to understand the potential dynamic threats and act as a proactive measure to detect any intrusion into the network. It is used as a trap for intruders to control unauthorized access to the network by analyzing malicious traffic. However, a sophisticated attacker can detect the presence of a honeypot and abort the intrusion mission. Therefore it is essential for honeypots to be undetectable. In this paper, we study and analyze possible techniques for SSH and telnet honeypot detection. Moreover, we propose a new methodology for probabilistic estimation of honeypot detection and an automated software implemented this methodology.

With the tremendous growth of IoT botnet DDoS attacks in recent years, IoT security has now become one of the most concerned topics in the field of network security. A lot of security approaches have been proposed in the area, but they still lack in terms of dealing with newer emerging variants of IoT malware, known as Zero-Day Attacks. In this paper, we present a honeypot-based approach which uses machine learning techniques for malware detection. The IoT honeypot generated data is used as a dataset for the effective and dynamic training of a machine learning model. The approach can be taken as a productive outset towards combatting Zero-Day DDoS Attacks which now has emerged as an open challenge in defending IoT against DDoS Attacks.

A honeypot system is used to trapping hackers, track and analyze new hacking methods. However, it does not only take time for construction and deployment but also costs for maintenance because these systems are always online even when there is no attack. Since the main purpose of honeypot systems is to collect more and more attack trafc if possible, the limitation of system capacity is also a major problem. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Virtual Network Honeypot (DVNH) which leverages emerging technologies, Network Function Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking. DVNH redirects the attack to the honeypot system thereby protects the targeted system. Our experiments show that DVNH enables efficient resource usage and dynamic provision of the Honeypot system.

Honeypots have become an important tool for capturing attacks. Hybrid honeypots, including the front end and the back end, are widely used in research because of the scalability of the front end and the high interactivity of the back end. However, traditional hybrid honeypots have some problems that the flow control is difficult and topology simulation is not realistic. This paper proposes a new architecture based on SDN applied to the hybrid honeypot system for network topology simulation and attack traffic migration. Our system uses the good expansibility and controllability of the SDN controller to simulate a large and realistic network to attract attackers and redirect high-level attacks to a high-interaction honeypot for attack capture and further analysis. It improves the deficiencies in the network spoofing technology and flow control technology in the traditional honeynet. Finally, we set up the experimental environment on the mininet and verified the mechanism. The test results show that the system is more intelligent and the traffic migration is more stealthy.

Information or data is a very crucial resource. Hence securing the information becomes a critical task. Transfer and Communication mediums via which we send this information do not provide data security natively. Therefore, methods for data security have to be devised to protect the information from third party and unauthorized users. Information hiding strategies like steganography provide techniques for data encryption so that the unauthorized users cannot read it. This work is aimed at creating a novel method of Augmented Reality Steganography (ARSteg). ARSteg uses cloud for image and key storage that does not alter any attributes of an image such as size and colour scheme. Unlike, traditional algorithms such as Least Significant Bit (LSB) which changes the attributes of images, our approach uses well established encryption algorithm such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for encryption and decryption. This system is further secured by many alternative means such as honey potting, tracking and heuristic intrusion detection that ensure that the transmitted messages are completely secure and no intrusions are allowed. The intrusions are prevented by detecting them immediately and neutralizing them.

We present data from detailed observations of a “controlled in-the-wild” study of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system. During 10 days of demonstration at seven nonspecialized public events, 1563 people learned about the system in various social configurations. Observations of audience behavior revealed recurring behavioral patterns. From these observations a framework of interaction with BCI systems was deduced. It describes the phases of passing by an installation, viewing and reacting, passive and active interaction, group interactions, and follow-up actions. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the people who interacted with the system. The interviews revealed the barriers and several directions for further research on BCIs. Our findings can be useful for designing the BCIs foxr everyday adoption by a wide range of people.

Tele-radiology is a technology that helps in bringing the communication between the radiologist, patients and healthcare units situated at distant places. This involves exchange of medical centric data. The medical data may be stored as Electronic Health Records (EHR). These EHRs contain X-Rays, CT scans, MRI reports. Hundreds of scans across multiple radiology centers lead to medical big data (MBD). Healthcare Cloud can be used to handle MBD. Since lack of security to EHRs can cause havoc in medical IT, healthcare cloud must be secure. It should ensure secure sharing and storage of EHRs. This paper proposes the application of decoy technique to provide security to EHRs. The EHRs have the risk of internal attacks and external intrusion. This work addresses and handles internal attacks. It also involves study on honey-pots and intrusion detection techniques. Further it identifies the possibility of an intrusion and alerts the administrator. Also the details of intrusions are logged.

Security of VMs is now becoming a hot topic due to their outsourcing in cloud computing paradigm. All VMs present on the network are connected to each other, making exploited VMs danger to other VMs. and threats to organization. Rejuvenation of virtualization brought the emergence of hyper-visor based security services like VMI (Virtual machine introspection). As there is a greater chance for any intrusion detection system running on the same system, of being dis-abled by the malware or attacker. Monitoring of VMs using VMI, is one of the most researched and accepted technique, that is used to ensure computer systems security mostly in the paradigm of cloud computing. This thesis presents a work that is to integrate LibVMI with Volatility on a KVM, a Linux based hypervisor, to introspect memory of VMs. Both of these tools are used to monitor the state of live VMs. VMI capability of monitoring VMs is combined with the malware analysis and virtual honeypots to achieve the objective of this project. A testing environment is deployed, where a network of VMs is used to be introspected using Volatility plug-ins. Time execution of each plug-in executed on live VMs is calculated to observe the performance of Volatility plug-ins. All these VMs are deployed as Virtual Honeypots having honey-pots configured on them, which is used as a detection mechanism to trigger alerts when some malware attack the VMs. Using STIX (Structure Threat Information Expression), extracted IOCs are converted into the understandable, flexible, structured and shareable format.

Malware is one of the threats to information security that continues to increase. In 2014 nearly six million new malware was recorded. The highest number of malware is in Trojan Horse malware while in Adware malware is the most significantly increased malware. Security system devices such as antivirus, firewall, and IDS signature-based are considered to fail to detect malware. This happens because of the very fast spread of computer malware and the increasing number of signatures. Besides signature-based security systems it is difficult to identify new methods, viruses or worms used by attackers. One other alternative in detecting malware is to use honeypot with machine learning. Honeypot can be used as a trap for packages that are suspected while machine learning can detect malware by classifying classes. Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are used as classification algorithms. In this paper, we propose architectural design as a solution to detect malware. We presented the architectural proposal and explained the experimental method to be used.