Biblio
Phishing attacks have reached record volumes in recent years. Simultaneously, modern phishing websites are growing in sophistication by employing diverse cloaking techniques to avoid detection by security infrastructure. In this paper, we present PhishFarm: a scalable framework for methodically testing the resilience of anti-phishing entities and browser blacklists to attackers' evasion efforts. We use PhishFarm to deploy 2,380 live phishing sites (on new, unique, and previously-unseen .com domains) each using one of six different HTTP request filters based on real phishing kits. We reported subsets of these sites to 10 distinct anti-phishing entities and measured both the occurrence and timeliness of native blacklisting in major web browsers to gauge the effectiveness of protection ultimately extended to victim users and organizations. Our experiments revealed shortcomings in current infrastructure, which allows some phishing sites to go unnoticed by the security community while remaining accessible to victims. We found that simple cloaking techniques representative of real-world attacks- including those based on geolocation, device type, or JavaScript- were effective in reducing the likelihood of blacklisting by over 55% on average. We also discovered that blacklisting did not function as intended in popular mobile browsers (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox), which left users of these browsers particularly vulnerable to phishing attacks. Following disclosure of our findings, anti-phishing entities are now better able to detect and mitigate several cloaking techniques (including those that target mobile users), and blacklisting has also become more consistent between desktop and mobile platforms- but work remains to be done by anti-phishing entities to ensure users are adequately protected. Our PhishFarm framework is designed for continuous monitoring of the ecosystem and can be extended to test future state-of-the-art evasion techniques used by malicious websites.
This paper presents a multilayer protection approach to guard programs against Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks. Upper layers validate most of a program's control flow at a low computational cost; thus, not compromising runtime. Lower layers provide strong enforcement guarantees to handle more suspicious flows; thus, enhancing security. Our multilayer system combines techniques already described in the literature with verifications that we introduce in this paper. We argue that modern versions of x86 processors already provide the microarchitectural units necessary to implement our technique. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our multilayer protection on a extensive suite of benchmarks, which includes: SPEC CPU2006; the three most popular web browsers; 209 benchmarks distributed with LLVM and four well-known systems shown to be vulnerable to ROP exploits. Our experiments indicate that we can protect programs with almost no overhead in practice, allying the good performance of lightweight security techniques with the high dependability of heavyweight approaches.
This article presents introduction to HTTP Security Headers - new security topic in communication over Internet. It is emphasized that HTTPS protocol and SSL/TLS certificates alone do not offer sufficient level of security for communication among people and devices. In the world of web applications and Internet of Things (IoT), it is vital to bring communication security at higher level, what could be realised via few simple steps. HTTP Response Headers used for different purposes in the past are now the effective way how to propagate security policies from servers to clients (from web servers to web browsers). First improvement is enforcing HTTPS protocol for communication everywhere it is possible and promote this protocol as first and only option for secure connection over the Internet. It is emphasized that HTTP protocol for communication is not suitable anymore.
Interface-confinement is a common mechanism that secures untrusted code by executing it inside a sandbox. The sandbox limits (confines) the code's interaction with key system resources to a restricted set of interfaces. This practice is seen in web browsers, hypervisors, and other security-critical systems. Motivated by these systems, we present a program logic, called System M, for modeling and proving safety properties of systems that execute adversary-supplied code via interface-confinement. In addition to using computation types to specify effects of computations, System M includes a novel invariant type to specify the properties of interface-confined code. The interpretation of invariant type includes terms whose effects satisfy an invariant. We construct a step-indexed model built over traces and prove the soundness of System M relative to the model. System M is the first program logic that allows proofs of safety for programs that execute adversary-supplied code without forcing the adversarial code to be available for deep static analysis. System M can be used to model and verify protocols as well as system designs. We demonstrate the reasoning principles of System M by verifying the state integrity property of the design of Memoir, a previously proposed trusted computing system.
Due to the frequent usage of online web applications for various day-to-day activities, web applications are becoming most suitable target for attackers. Cross-Site Scripting also known as XSS attack, one of the most prominent defacing web based attack which can lead to compromise of whole browser rather than just the actual web application, from which attack has originated. Securing web applications using server side solutions is not profitable as developers are not necessarily security aware. Therefore, browser vendors have tried to evolve client side filters to defend against these attacks. This paper shows that even the foremost prevailing XSS filters deployed by latest versions of most widely used web browsers do not provide appropriate defense. We evaluate three browsers - Internet Explorer 11, Google Chrome 32, and Mozilla Firefox 27 for reflected XSS attack against different type of vulnerabilities. We find that none of above is completely able to defend against all possible type of reflected XSS vulnerabilities. Further, we evaluate Firefox after installing an add-on named XSS-Me, which is widely used for testing the reflected XSS vulnerabilities. Experimental results show that this client side solution can shield against greater percentage of vulnerabilities than other browsers. It is witnessed to be more propitious if this add-on is integrated inside the browser instead being enforced as an extension.
A web service is a web-based application connected via the internet connectivity. The common web-based applications are deployed using web browsers and web servers. However, the security of Web Service is a major concern issues since it is not widely studied and integrated in the design stage of Web Service standard. They are add-on modules rather a well-defined solutions in standards. So, various web services security solutions have been defined in order to protect interaction over a network. Remote attestation is an authentication technique proposed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) which enables the verification of the trusted environment of platforms and assuring the information is accurate. To incorporate this method in web services framework in order to guarantee the trustworthiness and security of web-based applications, a new framework called TrustWeb is proposed. The TrustWeb framework integrates the remote attestation into SSL/TLS protocol to provide integrity information of the involved endpoint platforms. The framework enhances TLS protocol with mutual attestation mechanism which can help to address the weaknesses of transferring sensitive computations, and a practical way to solve the remote trust issue at the client-server environment. In this paper, we describe the work of designing and building a framework prototype in which attestation mechanism is integrated into the Mozilla Firefox browser and Apache web server. We also present framework solution to show improvement in the efficiency level.