Biblio

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings - and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS. In this paper, we conduct the first black-box study measuring the extent of ReDoS vulnerabilities in live web services. We apply the Consistent Sanitization Assumption: that client-side sanitization logic, including regexes, is consistent with the sanitization logic on the server-side. We identify a service's regex-based input sanitization in its HTML forms or its API, find vulnerable regexes among these regexes, craft ReDoS probes, and pinpoint vulnerabilities. We analyzed the HTML forms of 1,000 services and the APIs of 475 services. Of these, 355 services publish regexes; 17 services publish unsafe regexes; and 6 services are vulnerable to ReDoS through their APIs (6 domains; 15 subdomains). Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services patched their web services as a result of our disclosure. Since these vulnerabilities were from API specifications, not HTML forms, we proposed a ReDoS defense for a popular API validation library, and our patch has been merged. To summarize: in client-visible sanitization logic, some web services advertise Re-DoS vulnerabilities in plain sight. Our results motivate short-term patches and long-term fundamental solutions. “Make measurable what cannot be measured.” -Galileo Galilei

Bitcoin P2P networking is especially vulnerable to networking threats because it is permissionless and does not have the security protections based on the trust in identities, which enables the attackers to manipulate the identities for Sybil and spoofing attacks. The Bitcoin node keeps track of its peer’s networking misbehaviors through ban scores. In this paper, we investigate the security problems of the ban-score mechanism and discover that the ban score is not only ineffective against the Bitcoin Message-based DoS (BM-DoS) attacks but also vulnerable to the Defamation attack as the network adversary can exploit the ban score to defame innocent peers. To defend against these threats, we design an anomaly detection approach that is effective, lightweight, and tailored to the networking threats exploiting Bitcoin’s ban-score mechanism. We prototype our threat discoveries against a real-world Bitcoin node connected to the Bitcoin Mainnet and conduct experiments based on the prototype implementation. The experimental results show that the attacks have devastating impacts on the targeted victim while being cost-effective on the attacker side. For example, an attacker can ban a peer in two milliseconds and reduce the victim’s mining rate by hundreds of thousands of hash computations per second. Furthermore, to counter the threats, we empirically validate our detection countermeasure’s effectiveness and performances against the BM-DoS and Defamation attacks.

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a system that could detect suspicious activity in a network. Two approaches are known for IDS, namely signature-based and anomaly-based. The anomaly-based detection method was chosen to detect suspicious and abnormal activity for the system that cannot be performed by the signature-based method. In this study, attack testing was carried out using three DoS tools, namely the LOIC, Torshammer, and Xerxes tools, with a test scenario using IDS and without IDS. From the test results that have been carried out, IDS has successfully detected the attacks that were sent, for the delivery of the most consecutive attack packages, namely Torshammer, Xerxes, and LOIC. In the detection of Torshammer attack tools on the target FTP Server, 9421 packages were obtained, for Xerxes tools as many as 10618 packages and LOIC tools as many as 6115 packages. Meanwhile, attacks on the target Web Server for Torshammer tools were 299 packages, for Xerxes tools as many as 530 packages, and for LOIC tools as many as 103 packages. The accuracy of the IDS performance results is 88.66%, the precision is 88.58% and the false positive rate is 63.17%.

Always-On Denial of Service (DoS) Trojans with power drain payload can be disastrous in systems where on-chip power resources are limited. These Trojans are designed so that they have no impact on system behavior and hence, harder to detect. A formal verification method is presented to detect sequential always-on DoS Trojans in pipelined circuits and pipelined microprocessors. Since the method is proof-based, it provides a 100% accurate classification of sequential Trojan components. Another benefit of the approach is that it does not require a reference model, which is one of the requirements of many Trojan detection techniques (often a bottleneck to practical application). The efficiency and scalability of the proposed method have been evaluated on 36 benchmark circuits. The most complex of these benchmarks has as many as 135,898 gates. Detection times are very efficient with a 100% rate of detection, i.e., all Trojan sequential elements were detected and all non-trojan sequential elements were classified as such.

As more and more visible light communication (VLC) and visible light sensing (VLS) systems are mounted on today’s light fixtures, how to guarantee the authenticity of the visible light (VL) signal in these systems becomes an urgent problem. This is because almost all of today’s light fixtures are unprotected and can be openly accessed by almost anyone, and hence are subject to tampering and substitution attacks. In this paper, by exploiting the intrinsic linear superposition characteristics of visible light, we propose VL-Watchdog, a scalable and always-on signal-level spoofing detection framework that is applicable to both VLC and VLS systems. VL-Watchdog is based on redundant orthogonal encoding of the transmitted visible light, and can be implemented as a small hardware add-on to an existing VL system. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was validated through extensive numerical evaluations against a comprehensive set of factors.

Security is a key component of the network. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a refined form of traditional network management system. It is a new encouraging approach to design-build and manage networks. SDN decouples control plane (software-based router) and data plane (software-based switch), hence it is programmable. Consequently, it facilitates implementation of security based applications for the prevention of DOS attacks. Various solutions have been proposed by researches for handling of DOS attacks in SDN. However, these solutions are very limited in scope, complex, time consuming and change resistant. In this article, we have proposed a novel model driven framework i.e. MDAP (Model Based DOS Attacks Prevention) Framework. Particularly, a meta model is proposed. As tool support, a tree editor and a Sirius based graphical modeling tool with drag drop palette have been developed in Oboe designer community edition. The tool support allows modeling and visualization of simple and complex network topology scenarios. A Model to Text transformation engine has also been made part of framework that generates java code for the Floodlight SDN controller from the modeled scenario. The validity of proposed framework has been demonstrated via case study. The results prove that the proposed framework can effectively handle DOS attacks in SDN with simplicity as per the true essence of MDSE and can be reliably used for the automation of security based applications in order to deny DOS attacks in SDN.

Memory Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are easy-to-launch, hard to detect, and significantly impact their targets. In memory DoS, the attacker targets the memory of his Virtual Machine (VM) and, due to hardware isolation issues, the attack affects the co-resident VMs. Theoretically, we can deploy VM migration as Moving Target Defense (MTD) against memory DoS. However, the current literature lacks empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis. Moreover, there is a need to evaluate how the VM migration timing impacts the potential MTD protection. This practical experience report presents an experiment on VM migration-based MTD against memory DoS. We evaluate the impact of memory DoS attacks in the context of two applications running in co-hosted VMs: machine learning and OLTP. The results highlight that the memory DoS attacks lead to more than 70% reduction in the applications' performance. Nevertheless, timely VM migrations can significantly mitigate the attack effects in both considered applications.

Nowadays, the Network on Chip (NoC) is widely adopted by multi-core System on Chip (SoC) to meet its communication needs. With the gradual popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT), the application of NoC is increasing. Due to its distribution characteristics on the chip, NoC has gradually become the focus of potential security attacks. Denial of service (DoS) is a typical attack and it is caused by malicious intellectual property (IP) core with unnecessary data packets causing communication congestion and performance degradation. In this article, we propose a novel approach to detect DoS attacks on-line based on random forest algorithm, and detect the router where the attack enters the sensitive communication path. This method targets malicious third-party vendors to implant a DoS Hardware Trojan into the NoC. The data set is generated based on the behavior of multi-core routers triggered by normal and Hardware Trojans. The detection accuracy of the proposed scheme is in the range of 93% to 94%.

This paper introduces a technique that enhances the capabilities of an intrusion detection system (IDS) in a wireless body area network (WBAN). This technique involves adopting two known machine-learning algorithms: artificial neural network (ANN) and the J48 form of decision trees. The enhanced technique reduces the security threats to a WBAN, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. It is essential to manage noise, which might affect the data gathered by the sensors. In this paper, noise in data is measured because it can affect the accuracy of the machine learning algorithms and demonstrate the level of noise at which the machine-learning model can be trusted. The results show that J48 is the best model when there is no noise, with an accuracy reaching 99.66%, as compared to the ANN algorithm. However, with noisy datasets, ANN shows more tolerance to noise.

Microgrids' dependency on communication links exposes the control systems to cyber attack threats. In this work, instead of designing reactive defense approaches, a proacitve moving target defense mechanism is proposed for securing microgrid secondary frequency control from denial of service (DoS) attack. The sensor data is transmitted by following a Markov process, not in a deterministic way. This uncertainty will increase the difficulty for attacker's decision making and thus significantly reduce the attack space. As the system parameters are constantly changing, a gain scheduling based secondary frequency controller is designed to sustain the system performance. Case studies of a microgrid with four inverter-based DGs show the proposed moving target mechanism can enhance the resiliency of the microgrid control systems against DoS attacks.

Bluetooth technologies have widespread applications in personal area networks, device-to-device communications and forming ad hoc networks. Studying Bluetooth devices security is a challenging task as they lack support for monitor mode available with other wireless networks (e.g. 802.11 WiFi). In addition, the frequency-hoping spread spectrum technique used in its operation necessitates special hardware and software to study its operation. This investigation examines methods for analyzing Bluetooth devices' security and presents a proof-of-concept DoS attack on the Link Manager Protocol (LMP) layer using the InternalBlue framework. Through this study, we demonstrate a method to study Bluetooth device security using existing tools without requiring specialized hardware. Consequently, the methods proposed in the paper can be used to study Bluetooth security in many applications.

Communication is an essential part of everyday life, both as a social interaction and collaboration to achieve goals. Wireless technology has effectively release the users to roam more freely to achieving collaboration and communication. The principle attraction of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are their set-up less and decentralized action. However, mobile ad hoc networks are seen as relatively easy targets for attackers. Security in mobile ad hoc network is provided by encrypting the data when exchanging messages and key management. Cryptography is therefore vital to ensure privacy of message and robustness against disruption. The proposed scheme public string based threshold cryptography (PSTC) describes the new scheme based on threshold cryptography that provides reasonably secure and robust cryptography scheme for mobile ad hoc networks. The scheme is implemented and simulated in ns-2. The scheme is based on trust value and analyze against Denial of Service attack as node found the attacker, the node reject all packet from that attacker. In proposed scheme whole network is compromised only when all nodes of network is compromised because threshold nodes only sharing public string not the master private key. The scheme provides confidentiality and integrity. The default threshold value selected is 2 according to time and space analysis.

Over the last decade, a technology called Internet of Things (IoT) has been evolving at a rapid pace. It enables the development of endless applications in view of availability of affordable components which provide smart ecosystems. The IoT devices are constrained devices which are connected to the internet and perform sensing tasks. Each device is identified by their unique address and also makes use of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) as one of the main web transfer protocols. It is an application layer protocol which does not maintain secure channels to transfer information. For authentication and end-to-end security, Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is one of the possible approaches to boost the security aspect of CoAP, in addition to which there are many suggested ways to protect the transmission of sensitive information. CoAP uses DTLS as a secure protocol and UDP as a transfer protocol. Therefore, the attacks on UDP or DTLS could be assigned as a CoAP attack. An attack on DTLS could possibly be launched in a single session and a strong authentication mechanism is needed. Man-In-The-Middle attack is one the peak security issues in CoAP as cited by Request For Comments(RFC) 7252, which encompasses attacks like Sniffing, Spoofing, Denial of Service (DoS), Hijacking, Cross-Protocol attacks and other attacks including Replay attacks and Relay attacks. In this work, a client-server architecture is setup, whose end devices communicate using CoAP. Also, a proxy system was installed across the client side to launch an active interception between the client and the server. The work will further be enhanced to provide solutions to mitigate these attacks.

This paper provides hardware-independent authentication named as Intelligent Authentication Scheme, which rectifies the design weaknesses that may be exploited by various security attacks. The Intelligent Authentication Scheme protects against various types of security attacks such as password-guessing attack, replay attack, streaming bots attack (denial of service), keylogger, screenlogger and phishing attack. Besides reducing the overall cost, it also balances both security and usability. It is a unique authentication scheme.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a distributed sensing paradigm that uses a variety of built-in sensors in smart mobile devices to enable ubiquitous acquisition of sensory data from surroundings. However, non-dedicated nature of MCS results in vulnerabilities in the presence of malicious participants to compromise the availability of the MCS components, particularly the servers and participants' devices. In this paper, we focus on Denial of Service attacks in MCS where malicious participants submit illegitimate task requests to the MCS platform to keep MCS servers busy while having sensing devices expend energy needlessly. After reviewing Artificial Intelligence-based security solutions for MCS systems, we focus on a typical location-based and energy-oriented DoS attack, and present a security solution that applies ensemble techniques in machine learning to identify illegitimate tasks and prevent personal devices from pointless energy consumption so as to improve the availability of the whole system. Through simulations, we show that ensemble techniques are capable of identifying illegitimate and legitimate tasks while gradient boosting appears to be a preferable solution with an AUC performance higher than 0.88 in the precision-recall curve. We also investigate the impact of environmental settings on the detection performance so as to provide a clearer understanding of the model. Our performance results show that MCS task legitimacy decisions with high F-scores are possible for both illegitimate and legitimate tasks.

Widespread use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) introduced many security threats due to the nature of such networks, particularly limited hardware resources and infrastructure less nature. Denial of Service attack is one of the most common types of attacks that face such type of networks. Building an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System to mitigate the effect of Denial of Service attack is not an easy task. This paper proposes the use of two machine learning techniques, namely decision trees and Support Vector Machines, to detect attack signature on a specialized dataset. The used dataset contains regular profiles and several Denial of Service attack scenarios in WSNs. The experimental results show that decision trees technique achieved better (higher) true positive rate and better (lower) false positive rate than Support Vector Machines, 99.86% vs 99.62%, and 0.05% vs. 0.09%, respectively.

SCADA systems are being constantly migrated to modern information and communication technologies (ICT) -based systems named cyber-physical systems. Unfortunately, this allows attackers to execute exploitation techniques into these architectures. In addition, ransomware insertion is nowadays the most popular attacking vector because it denies the availability of critical files and systems until attackers receive the demanded ransom. In this paper, it is analysed the risk impact of ransomware insertion into SCADA systems and it is suggested countermeasures addressed to the protection of SCADA systems and its components to reduce the impact of ransomware insertion.

Supervisory control and data acquisition system is an important part of the country's critical infrastructure, but its inherent network characteristics are vulnerable to attack by intruders. The vulnerability of supervisory control and data acquisition system was analyzed, combining common attacks such as information scanning, response injection, command injection and denial of service in industrial control systems, and proposed an intrusion detection model based on graphical features. The time series of message transmission were visualized, extracting the vertex coordinates and various graphic area features to constitute a new data set, and obtained classification model of intrusion detection through training. An intrusion detection experiment environment was built using tools such as MATLAB and power protocol testers. IEC 60870-5-104 protocol which is widely used in power systems had been taken as an example. The results of tests have good effectiveness.

Underpinning the operation of Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network [1] that facilitates the execution of transactions by end users, as well as the transaction confirmation process known as bitcoin mining. The security of this P2P network is vital for the currency to function and subversion of the underlying network can lead to attacks on bitcoin users including theft of bitcoins, manipulation of the mining process and denial of service (DoS). As part of this paper the network protocol and bitcoin core software are analysed, with three bitcoin message exchanges (the connection handshake, GETHEADERS/HEADERS and MEMPOOL/INV) found to be potentially vulnerable to spoofing and use in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Possible solutions to the identified weaknesses and vulnerabilities are evaluated, such as the introduction of random nonces into network messages exchanges.

Nowadays, most of the world's population has become much dependent on computers for banking, healthcare, shopping, and telecommunication. Security has now become a basic norm for computers and its resources since it has become inherently insecure. Security issues like Denial of Service attacks, TCP SYN Flooding attacks, Packet Dropping attacks and Distributed Denial of Service attacks are some of the methods by which unauthorized users make the resource unavailable to authorized users. There are several security mechanisms like Intrusion Detection System, Anomaly detection and Trust model by which we can be able to identify and counter the abuse of computer resources by unauthorized users. This paper presents a survey of several security mechanisms which have been implemented using Fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic is one of the rapidly developing technologies, which is used in a sophisticated control system. Fuzzy logic deals with the degree of truth rather than the Boolean logic, which carries the values of either true or false. So instead of providing only two values, we will be able to define intermediate values.

Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture is a new and novel way of network management mechanism. In SDN, switches do not process the incoming packets like conventional network computing environment. They match for the incoming packets in the forwarding tables and if there is none it will be sent to the controller for processing which is the operating system of the SDN. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a biggest threat to cyber security in SDN network. The attack will occur at the network layer or the application layer of the compromised systems that are connected to the network. In this paper a machine learning based intelligent method is proposed which can detect the incoming packets as infected or not. The different machine learning algorithms adopted for accomplishing the task are Naive Bayes, K-Nearest neighbor (KNN) and Support vector machine (SVM) to detect the anomalous behavior of the data traffic. These three algorithms are compared according to their performances and KNN is found to be the suitable one over other two. The performance measure is taken here is the detection rate of infected packets.

With the transition from IPv4 IPv6 protocol to improve network communications, there are concerns about devices and applications' security that must be dealt at the beginning of implementation or during its lifecycle. Automate the vulnerability assessment process reduces management overhead, enabling better management of risks and control of the vulnerabilities. Consequently, it reduces the effort needed for each test and it allows the increase of the frequency of application, improving time management to perform all the other complicated tasks necessary to support a secure network. There are several researchers involved in tests of vulnerability in IPv6 networks, exploiting addressing mechanisms, extension headers, fragmentation, tunnelling or dual-stack networks (using both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time). Most existing tools use the programming languages C, Java, and Python instead of a language designed specifically to create a suite of tests, which reduces maintainability and extensibility of the tests. This paper presents a solution for IPv6 vulnerabilities scan tests, based on attack simulations, combining passive analysis (observing the manifestation of behaviours of the system under test) and an active one (stimulating the system to become symptomatic). Also, it describes a prototype that simulates and detects denial-of-service attacks on the ICMPv6 Protocol from IPv6. Also, a detailed report is created with the identified vulnerability and the possible existing solutions to mitigate such a gap, thus assisting the process of vulnerability management.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks routinely disrupt access to critical services. Mitigation of these attacks often relies on planned over-provisioning or elastic provisioning of resources, and third-party monitoring, analysis, and scrubbing of network traffic. While volumetric attacks which saturate a victim's network are most common, non-volumetric, low and slow, DDoS attacks can achieve their goals without requiring high traffic volume by targeting vulnerable network protocols or protocol implementations. Non-volumetric attacks, unlike their noisy counterparts, require more sophisticated detection mechanisms, and typically have only post-facto and targeted protocol/application mitigations. In this paper, we introduce our work under the Adaptive Resource Management Enabling Deception (ARMED) effort, which is developing a network-level approach to automatically mitigate sophisticated DDoS attacks through deception-focused adaptive maneuvering. We describe the concept, implementation, and initial evaluation of the ARMED Network Actors (ANAs) that facilitate transparent interception, sensing, analysis, and mounting of adaptive responses that can disrupt the adversary's decision process.

This research was an experimental analysis of the Intrusion Detection Systems(IDS) with Honey Pot conducting through a study of using Honey Pot in tricking, delaying or deviating the intruder to attack new media broadcasting server for IPTV system. Denial of Service(DoS) over wire network and wireless network consisted of three types of attacks: TCP Flood, UDP Flood and ICMP Flood by Honey Pot, where the Honeyd would be used. In this simulation, a computer or a server in the network map needed to be secured by the inactivity firewalls or other security tools for the intrusion of the detection systems and Honey Pot. The network intrusion detection system used in this experiment was SNORT (www.snort.org) developed in the form of the Open Source operating system-Linux. The results showed that, from every experiment, the internal attacks had shown more threat than the external attacks. In addition, attacks occurred through LAN network posted 50% more disturb than attacks occurred on WIFI. Also, the external attacks through LAN posted 95% more attacks than through WIFI. However, the number of attacks presented by TCP, UDP and ICMP were insignificant. This result has supported the assumption that Honey Pot was able to help detecting the intrusion. In average, 16% of the attacks was detected by Honey Pot in every experiment.

Mobile Ad hoc Network has a wide range of applications in military and civilian domains. It is generally assumed that the nodes are trustworthy and cooperative in routing protocols of MANETs viz. AODV, DSR etc. This assumption makes wireless ad hoc network more prone to interception and manipulation which further open possibilities of various types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In order to mitigate the effect of malicious nodes, a reputation based secure routing protocol is proposed in this paper. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is organize the network with 25 nodes which are deployed in a 5×5 grid structure. Each normal node in the network has a specific prime number, which acts as Node identity. A Backbone Network (BBN) is deployed in a 5×5 grid structure. The proposed scheme uses legitimacy value table and reputation level table maintained by backbone network in the network. These tables are used to provide best path selection after avoiding malicious nodes during path discovery. Based on the values collected in their legitimacy table & reputation level table backbone nodes separate and avoid the malicious nodes while making path between source and destination.