Biblio

Todays analyzing web weaknesses and vulnerabilities in order to find security attacks has become more urgent. In case there is a communication contrary to the system security policies, a covert channel has been created. The attacker can easily disclosure information from the victim's system with just one public access permission. Covert timing channels, unlike covert storage channels, do not have memory storage and they draw less attention. Different methods have been proposed for their identification, which generally benefit from the shape of traffic and the channel's regularity. In this article, an entropy-based detection method is designed and implemented. The attacker can adjust the amount of channel entropy by controlling measures such as changing the channel's level or creating noise on the channel to protect from the analyst's detection. As a result, the entropy threshold is not always constant for detection. By comparing the entropy from different levels of the channel and the analyst, we conclude that the analyst must investigate traffic at all possible levels.

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are prone to many security attacks. One such attack is the blackhole attack. This work proposes a simple and effective application layer based intrusion detection scheme in a MANET to detect blackholes. The proposed algorithm utilizes mobile agents (MA) and wtracert (modified version of Traceroute for MANET) to detect multiple black holes in a DSR protocol based MANET. Use of MAs ensure that no modifications need to be carried out in the underlying routing algorithms or other lower layers. Simulation results show successful detection of single and multiple blackhole nodes, using the proposed detection mechanism, across varying mobility speeds of the nodes.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are a set of mobile wireless nodes that can communicate without the need for an infrastructure. Features of MANETs have made them vulnerable to many security attacks including wormhole attack. In the past few years, different methods have been introduced for detecting, mitigating, and preventing wormhole attacks in MANETs. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized scheme based on statistical metrics for detecting wormholes that employs “number of new neighbors” along with “number of neighbors” for each node as its parameters. The proposed scheme has considerably low detection delay and does not create any traffic overhead for routing protocols which include neighbor discovery mechanism. Also, it possesses reasonable processing power and memory usage. Our simulation results using NS3 simulator show that the proposed scheme performs well in terms of detection accuracy, false positive rate and mean detection delay.

Dynamic Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (D-FRI) offers a dynamic rule base for fuzzy systems which is especially useful for systems with changing requirements and limited prior knowledge. This suggests a possible application of D-FRI in the area of network security due to the volatility of the traffic. A honeypot is a valuable tool in the field of network security for baiting attackers and collecting their information. However, typically designed with fewer resources they are not considered as a primary security tool for use in network security. Consequently, such honeypots can be vulnerable to many security attacks. One such attack is a spoofing attack which can cause severe damage to the honeypot, making it inefficient. This paper presents a vigilant dynamic honeypot based on the D-FRI approach for use in predicting and alerting of spoofing attacks on the honeypot. First, it proposes a technique for spoofing attack identification based on the analysis of simulated attack data. Then, the paper employs the identification technique to develop a D-FRI based vigilant dynamic honeypot, allowing the honeypot to predict and alert that a spoofing attack is taking place in the absence of matching rules. The resulting system is capable of learning and maintaining a dynamic rule base for more accurate identification of potential spoofing attacks with respect to the changing traffic conditions of the network.

The proliferation of Bluetooth mobile device communications into all aspects of modern society raises security questions by both academicians and practitioners. This environment prompted an investigation into the real-world use of Bluetooth protocols along with an analysis of documented security attacks. The experiment discussed in this paper collected data for one week in a local coffee shop. The data collection took about an hour each day and identified 478 distinct devices. The contribution of this research is two-fold. First, it provides insight into real-world Bluetooth protocols that are being utilized by the general public. Second, it provides foundational research that is necessary for future Bluetooth penetration testing research.

Real-time crowdsourced maps, such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic, congestion, accidents, and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based Sybil devices that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user populations while avoiding detection. To defend against Sybil devices, we propose a new approach based on co-location edges, authenticated records that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over time, co-location edges combine to form large proximity graphs that attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using large-scale simulations, and how they can be used to dramatically reduce the impact of the attacks. We have informed Waze/Google team of our research findings. Currently, we are in active collaboration with Waze team to improve the security and privacy of their system.

A significant segment of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the resource constrained Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). The communication protocol used in LLNs is 6LOWPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network) which makes use of RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol over Low power and Lossy network) as its routing protocol. In recent times, several security breaches in IoT networks occurred by targeting routers to instigate various DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Hence, routing security has become an important problem in securing the IoT environment. Though RPL meets all the routing requirements of LLNs, it is important to perform a holistic security assessment of RPL as it is susceptible to many security attacks. An important attribute of RPL is its rank property. The rank property defines the placement of sensor nodes in the RPL DODAG (Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graphs) based on an Objective Function. Examples of Objective Functions include Expected Transmission Count, Packet Delivery Rate etc. Rank property assists in routing path optimization, reducing control overhead and maintaining a loop free topology through rank based data path validation. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerabilities of the rank property of RPL by constructing an Attack Graph. For the construction of the Attack Graph we analyzed all the possible threats associated with rank property. Through our investigation we found that violation of protocols related to rank property results in several RPL attacks causing topological sub-optimization, topological isolation, resource consumption and traffic disruption. Routing security essentially comprises mechanisms to ensure correct implementation of the routing protocol. In this paper, we also present some observations which can be used to devise mechanisms to prevent the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the rank property.

Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are probabilistic models that can be used for forecasting time series data. It has seen success in various domains like finance [1-5], bioinformatics [6-8], healthcare [9-11], agriculture [12-14], artificial intelligence[15-17]. However, the use of HMM in cyber security found to date is numbered. We believe the properties of HMM being predictive, probabilistic, and its ability to model different naturally occurring states form a good basis to model cyber security data. It is hence the motivation of this work to provide the initial results of our attempts to predict security attacks using HMM. A large network datasets representing cyber security attacks have been used in this work to establish an expert system. The characteristics of attacker's IP addresses can be extracted from our integrated datasets to generate statistical data. The cyber security expert provides the weight of each attribute and forms a scoring system by annotating the log history. We applied HMM to distinguish between a cyber security attack, unsure and no attack by first breaking the data into 3 cluster using Fuzzy K mean (FKM), then manually label a small data (Analyst Intuition) and finally use HMM state-based approach. By doing so, our results are very encouraging as compare to finding anomaly in a cyber security log, which generally results in creating huge amount of false detection.

The inherent characteristics of Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) such as dynamic topology, limited bandwidth, limited power supply, infrastructure less network make themselves attractive for a wide spectrum of applications and vulnerable to security attacks. Sinkhole attack is the most disruptive routing layer attack. Sinkhole nodes attract all the traffic towards them to setup further active attacks such as Black hole, Gray hole and wormhole attacks. Sinkhole nodes need to be isolated from the MANET as early as possible. In this paper, an effective mechanism is proposed to prevent and detect sinkhole and wormhole attacks in MANET. The proposed work detects and punishes the attacker nodes using different techniques such as node collusion technique, which classifies a node as an attacker node only with the agreement with the neighboring nodes. When the node suspects the existence of attacker or sinkhole node in the path, it joins together with neighboring nodes to determine the sinkhole node. In the prevention of routing attacks, the proposed system introduces a route reserve method; new routes learnt are updated in the routing table of the node only after ensuring that the route does not contain the attacker nodes. The proposed system effectively modifies Ad hoc on demand Distance Vector (AODV) with the ability to detect and prevent the sinkhole and wormhole attack, so the modified protocol is named as Attack Aware Alert (A3AODV). The experiments are carried out in NS2 simulator, and the result shows the efficiency in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing overhead.

A MANET is a group of wireless mobile nodes which cooperate in forwarding packets over a wireless links. Due to the lack of an infrastructure and open nature of MANET, security has become an essential and challenging issue. The mobile nature and selfishness of malicious node is a critical issue in causing the security problem. The MANETs are more defenseless to the security attacks; some of them are black hole and gray hole attacks. One of its key challenges is to find black hole attack. In this paper, researchers propose a secure AODV protocol (SAODV) for detection and removal of black hole and gray hole attacks in MANTEs. The proposed method is simulated using NS-2 and it seems that the proposed methodology is more secure than the existing one.

Channel state information (CSI) has been recently shown to be useful in performing security attacks in public WiFi environments. By analyzing how CSI is affected by the finger motions, CSI-based attacks can effectively reconstruct text-based passwords and locking patterns. This paper presents WiGuard, a novel system to protect sensitive on-screen gestures in a public place. Our approach carefully exploits the WiFi channel interference to introduce noise into the attacker's CSI measurement to reduce the success rate of the attack. Our approach automatically detects when a CSI-based attack happens. We evaluate our approach by applying it to protect text-based passwords and pattern locks on mobile devices. Experimental results show that our approach is able to reduce the success rate of CSI attacks from 92% to 42% for text-based passwords and from 82% to 22% for pattern lock.

Successful deployment of Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) requires self-organising, self-configuring, security, and mobility support. However, these characteristics can be exploited to perform security attacks against the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). In this paper, we address the lack of strong identity and security mechanisms in RPL. We first demonstrate by simulation the impact of Sybil-Mobile attack, namely SybM, on RPL with respect to control overhead, packet delivery and energy consumption. Then, we introduce a new Intrusion Detection System (IDS) scheme for RPL, named Trust-based IDS (T-IDS). T-IDS is a distributed, cooperative and hierarchical trust-based IDS, which can detect novel intrusions by comparing network behavior deviations. In T-IDS, each node is considered as monitoring node and collaborates with his peers to detect intrusions and report them to a 6LoWPAN Border Router (6BR). In our solution, we introduced a new timer and minor extensions to RPL messages format to deal with mobility, identity and multicast issues. In addition, each node is equipped with a Trusted Platform Module co-processor to handle identification and off-load security related computation and storage.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are taking more attention from both the academia and the automotive industry due to a rapid development of wireless communication technologies. And with this development, vehicles called connected cars are increasingly being equipped with more sensors, processors, storages, and communication devices as they start to provide both infotainment and safety services through V2X communication. Such increase of vehicles is also related to the rise of security attacks and potential security threats. In a vehicular environment, security is one of the most important issues and it must be addressed before VANETs can be widely deployed. Conventional VANETs have some unique characteristics such as high mobility, dynamic topology, and a short connection time. Since an attacker can launch any unexpected attacks, it is difficult to predict these attacks in advance. To handle this problem, we propose collaborative security attack detection mechanism in a software-defined vehicular networks that uses multi-class support vector machine (SVM) to detect various types of attacks dynamically. We compare our security mechanism to existing distributed approach and present simulation results. The results demonstrate that the proposed security mechanism can effectively identify the types of attacks and achieve a good performance regarding high precision, recall, and accuracy.

Security breaches and attacks are becoming a more critical and, simultaneously, a challenging problems for many firms in networked supply chains. A game theory-based model is developed to investigate how interdependent feature of information security risk influence the optimal strategy of firms to invest in information security. The equilibrium levels of information security investment under non-cooperative game condition are compared with socially optimal solutions. The results show that the infectious risks often induce firms to invest inefficiently whereas trust risks lead to overinvest in information security. We also find that firm's investment may not necessarily monotonous changes with infectious risks and trust risks in a centralized case. Furthermore, relative to the socially efficient level, firms facing infectious risks may invest excessively depending on whether trust risks is large enough.

To establish a secure connection between a mobile user and a remote server, this paper presents a session key agreement scheme through remote mutual authentication protocol by using mobile application software(MAS). We analyzed the security of our protocol informally, which confirms that the protocol is secure against all the relevant security attacks including off-line identity-password guessing attacks, user-server impersonation attacks, and insider attack. In addition, the widely accepted simulator tool AVISPA simulates the proposed protocol and confirms that the protocol is SAFE under the OFMC and CL-AtSe back-ends. Our protocol not only provide strong security against the relevant attacks, but it also achieves proper mutual authentication, user anonymity, known key secrecy and efficient password change operation. The performance comparison is also performed, which ensures that the protocol is efficient in terms of computation and communication costs.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are being considered as most adequate for deployment in the Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) domain of the smart grid infrastructure because their features such as self-organizing, scalability and cost-efficiency complement the NAN requirements. To enhance the security of the WMNs, the key refreshment strategy for the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) or the Efficient Mesh Security Association (EMSA) protocols is an efficient way to make the network more resilient against the cyber-attacks. However, a security vulnerability is discovered in the EMSA protocol when using the key refreshment strategy. The first message of the Mesh Key Holder Security Handshake (MKHSH) can be forged and replayed back in the next cycles of the key refreshment leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this paper, a simple one-way hash function based scheme is proposed to prevent the unprotected message from being replayed together with an enhancement to the key refreshment scheme to improve the resilience of the MKHSH. The Protocol Composition Logic (PCL) is used to verify the logical correctness of the proposed scheme, while the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) is used to evaluate the security functionality against the malicious attacks.

Autonomic networks and services are exposed to a large variety of security risks. The vulnerability management process plays a crucial role for ensuring their safe configurations and preventing security attacks. We focus in this survey on the assessment of vulnerabilities in autonomic environments. In particular, we analyze current methods and techniques contributing to the discovery, the description and the detection of these vulnerabilities. We also point out important challenges that should be faced in order to fully integrate this process into the autonomic management plane.
 

Commercial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be accessed through sensor web portals. However, associated security implications and threats to the 1) users/subscribers 2) investors and 3) third party operators regarding sensor web portals are not seen in completeness, rather the contemporary work handles them in parts. In this paper, we discuss different kind of security attacks and vulnerabilities at different layers to the users, investors including Wireless Sensor Network Service Providers (WSNSPs) and WSN itself in relation with the two well-known documents i.e., “Department of Homeland Security” (DHS) and “Department of Defense (DOD)”, as these are standard security documents till date. Further we propose a comprehensive cross layer security solution in the light of guidelines given in the aforementioned documents that is minimalist in implementation and achieves the purported security goals.
 

Mobile ad hoc networks have the features of open medium, dynamic topology, cooperative algorithms, lack of centralized monitoring etc. Due to these, mobile ad hoc networks are much vulnerable to security attacks when compared to wired networks. There are various routing protocols that have been developed to cope up with the limitations imposed by the ad hoc networks. But none of these routing schemes provide complete unlinkability and unobservability. In this paper we have done a survey about anonymous routing and secure communications in mobile ad hoc networks. Different routing protocols are analyzed based on public/private key pairs and cryptosystems, within that USOR can well protect user privacy against both inside and outside attackers. It is a combination of group signature scheme and ID based encryption scheme. These are run during the route discovery process. We implement USOR on ns2, and then its performance is compared with AODV.

Distributed mesh sensor networks provide cost-effective communications for deployment in various smart grid domains, such as home area networks (HAN), neighborhood area networks (NAN), and substation/plant-generation local area networks. This paper introduces a dynamically updating key distribution strategy to enhance mesh network security against cyber attack. The scheme has been applied to two security protocols known as simultaneous authentication of equals (SAE) and efficient mesh security association (EMSA). Since both protocols utilize 4-way handshaking, we propose a Merkle-tree based handshaking scheme, which is capable of improving the resiliency of the network in a situation where an intruder carries a denial of service attack. Finally, by developing a denial of service attack model, we can then evaluate the security of the proposed schemes against cyber attack, as well as network performance in terms of delay and overhead.

IT industry loses tens of billions of dollars annually from security attacks such as tampering and malicious reverse engineering. Code obfuscation techniques counter such attacks by transforming code into patterns that resist the attacks. None of the current code obfuscation techniques satisfy all the obfuscation effectiveness criteria such as resistance to reverse engineering attacks and state space increase. To address this, we introduce new code patterns that we call nontrivial code clones and propose a new obfuscation scheme that combines nontrivial clones with existing obfuscation techniques to satisfy all the effectiveness criteria. The nontrivial code clones need to be constructed manually, thus adding to the development cost. This cost can be limited by cloning only the code fragments that need protection and by reusing the clones across projects. This makes it worthwhile considering the security risks. In this paper, we present our scheme and illustrate it with a toy example.