Biblio

Nowadays is becoming trivial to have multiple virtual machines working in parallel on hardware platforms with high processing power. This appropriate cost effective approach can be found at Internet Service Providers, in cloud service providers’ environments, in research and development lab testing environment (for example Universities’ student’s lab), in virtual application for security evaluation and in many other places. In the aforementioned cases, it is often necessary to start and/or stop virtual machines on the fly. In cloud service providers all the creation / tear down actions are triggered by a customer request and cannot be postponed or delayed for later evaluation. When a new virtual machine is created, it is imperative to assign unique IP addresses to all network interfaces and also domain name system DNS records that contain text based data, IP addresses, etc. Even worse, if a virtual machine has to be stopped or torn down, the critical network resources such as IP addresses and DNS records have to be carefully controlled in order to avoid IP addresses conflicts and name resolution problems between an old virtual machine and a newly created virtual machine. This paper proposes a provisioning mechanism to avoid both DNS records and IP addresses conflicts due to human misconfiguration, problems that can cause networking operation service disruptions.

Distributed denial of service attacks are still one of the greatest threats for computer systems and networks. We propose an intelligent moving target solution against DDOS flooding attacks. Our solution will use a fast-flux approach combined with moving target techniques to increase attack cost and complexity by bringing dynamics and randomization in network address space. It continually increases attack costs and makes it harder and almost infeasible for botnets to launch an attack. Along with performing selective proxy server replication and shuffling clients among this proxy, our solution can successfully separate and isolate attackers from benign clients and mitigate large-scale and complex flooding attacks. Our approach effectively stops both network and application-layer attacks at a minimum cost. However, while we try to make prevalent attack launches difficult and expensive for Bot Masters, this approach is good enough to combat zero-day attacks, too. Using DNS capabilities to change IP addresses frequently along with the proxy servers included in the proposed architecture, it is possible to hide the original server address from the attacker and invalidate the data attackers gathered during the reconnaissance phase of attack and make them repeat this step over and over. Our simulations demonstrate that we can mitigate large-scale attacks with minimum possible cost and overhead.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) generate a high volume of alerts that security analysts do not have the resources to explore fully. Modelling attacks, especially the coordinated campaigns of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), in a visually-interpretable way is a useful approach for network security. Graph models combine multiple alerts and are well suited for visualization and interpretation, increasing security effectiveness. In this paper, we use feature embeddings, learned from network event logs, and community detection to construct and segment alert graphs of related alerts and networks hosts. We posit that such graphs can aid security analysts in investigating alerts and may capture multiple aspects of an APT attack. The eventual goal of this approach is to construct interpretable attack graphs and extract causality information to identify coordinated attacks.

In open network environments, since there is no centralized authority to monitor misbehaving entities, malicious entities can easily cause the degradation of the service quality. Trust has become an important factor to ensure network security, which can help entities to distinguish good partners from bad ones. In this paper, trust in open network environment is regarded as a self-organizing system, using self-organization principle of human social trust propagation, a genetic trust evaluation method with self-optimization and family attributes is proposed. In this method, factors of trust evaluation include time, IP, behavior feedback and intuitive trust. Data structure of access record table and trust record table are designed to store the relationship between ancestor nodes and descendant nodes. A genetic trust search algorithm is designed by simulating the biological evolution process. Based on trust information of the current node's ancestors, heuristics generate randomly chromosome populations, whose structure includes time, IP address, behavior feedback and intuitive trust. Then crossover and mutation strategy is used to make the population evolutionary searching. According to the genetic searching termination condition, the optimal trust chromosome in the population is selected, and trust value of the chromosome is computed, which is the node's genetic trust evaluation result. The simulation result shows that the genetic trust evaluation method is effective, and trust evaluation process of the current node can be regarded as the process of searching for optimal trust results from the ancestor nodes' information. With increasing of ancestor nodes' genetic trust information, the trust evaluation result from genetic algorithm searching is more accurate, which can effectively solve the joint fraud problem.

At present, the network architecture is based on the TCP/IP protocol and node communications are achieved by the IP address and identifier of the node. The IP address in the network remains basically unchanged, so it is more likely to be attacked by network intruder. To this end, it is important to make periodic dynamic hopping in a specific address space possible, so that an intruder fails to obtain the internal network address and grid topological structure in real time and to continue to perform infiltration by the building of a new address space layout randomization system on the basis of SDN from the perspective of an attacker.

The ever rising attacks on IT infrastructure, especially on networks has become the cause of anxiety for the IT professionals and the people venturing in the cyber-world. There are numerous instances wherein the vulnerabilities in the network has been exploited by the attackers leading to huge financial loss. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of the most indirect security attack on computer networks. Many active computer bots or zombies start flooding the servers with requests, but due to its distributed nature throughout the Internet, it cannot simply be terminated at server side. Once the DDoS attack initiates, it causes huge overhead to the servers in terms of its processing capability and service delivery. Though, the study and analysis of request packets may help in distinguishing the legitimate users from among the malicious attackers but such detection becomes non-viable due to continuous flooding of packets on servers and eventually leads to denial of service to the authorized users. In the present research, we propose traffic flow and flow count variable based prevention mechanism with the difference in homogeneity. Its simplicity and practical approach facilitates the detection of DDoS attack at the early stage which helps in prevention of the attack and the subsequent damage. Further, simulation result based on different instances of time has been shown on T-value including generation of simple and harmonic homogeneity for observing the real time request difference and gaps.

Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a research hotspot in the field of network security. Moving Target Network Defense (MTND) is the implementation of MTD at network level. Numerous related works have been proposed in the field of MTND. In this paper, we focus on the scope and area of MTND, systematically present the recent representative progress from four aspects, including IP address and port mutation, route mutation, fingerprint mutation and multiple mutation, and put forward the future development directions. Several new perspectives and elucidations on MTND are rendered.

Recently, cellular operators have started migrating to IPv6 in response to the increasing demand for IP addresses. With the introduction of IPv6, cellular middleboxes, such as firewalls for preventing malicious traffic from the Internet and stateful NAT64 boxes for providing backward compatibility with legacy IPv4 services, have become crucial to maintain stability of cellular networks. This paper presents security problems of the currently deployed IPv6 middleboxes of five major operators. To this end, we first investigate several key features of the current IPv6 deployment that can harm the safety of a cellular network as well as its customers. These features combined with the currently deployed IPv6 middlebox allow an adversary to launch six different attacks. First, firewalls in IPv6 cellular networks fail to block incoming packets properly. Thus, an adversary could fingerprint cellular devices with scanning, and further, she could launch denial-of-service or over-billing attacks. Second, vulnerabilities in the stateful NAT64 box, a middlebox that maps an IPv6 address to an IPv4 address (and vice versa), allow an adversary to launch three different attacks: 1) NAT overflow attack that allows an adversary to overflow the NAT resources, 2) NAT wiping attack that removes active NAT mappings by exploiting the lack of TCP sequence number verification of firewalls, and 3) NAT bricking attack that targets services adopting IP-based blacklisting by preventing the shared external IPv4 address from accessing the service. We confirmed the feasibility of these attacks with an empirical analysis. We also propose effective countermeasures for each attack.

Law enforcement employs an investigative approach based on marked money bills to track illegal drug dealers. In this paper we discuss research that aims at providing law enforcement with the cyber counterpart of that approach in order to track perpetrators that operate botnets. We have devised a novel steganographic approach that generates a watermark hidden within a honey token, i.e. A decoy Word document. The covert bits that comprise the watermark are carried via secret interpretation of object properties in the honey token. The encoding and decoding of object properties into covert bits follow a scheme based on bijective functions generated via a chaotic logistic map. The watermark is retrievable via a secret cryptographic key, which is generated and held by law enforcement. The honey token is leaked to a botmaster via a honey net. In the paper, we elaborate on possible means by which law enforcement can track the leaked honey token to the IP address of a botmaster's machine.

The future Internet has been a hot topic during the past decade and many approaches towards this future Internet, ranging from incremental evolution to complete clean slate ones, have been proposed. One of the proposition, LISP, advocates for the separation of the identifier and the locator roles of IP addresses to reduce BGP churn and BGP table size. Up to now, however, most studies concerning LISP have been theoretical and, in fact, little is known about the actual LISP deployment performance. In this paper, we fill this gap through measurement campaigns carried out on the LISP Beta Network. More precisely, we evaluate the performance of the two key components of the infrastructure: the control plane (i.e., the mapping system) and the interworking mechanism (i.e., communication between LISP and non-LISP sites). Our measurements highlight that performance offered by the LISP interworking infrastructure is strongly dependent on BGP routing policies. If we exclude misconfigured nodes, the mapping system typically provides reliable performance and relatively low median mapping resolution delays. Although the bias is not very important, control plane performance favors USA sites as a result of its larger LISP user base but also because European infrastructure appears to be less reliable.
 

Eduroam is a secure WLAN roaming service between academic and research institutions around the globe. It allows users from participating institutions secure Internet access at any other participating visited institution using their home credentials. The authentication credentials are verified by the home institution, while authorization is done by the visited institution. The user receives an IP address in the range of the visited institution, and accesses the Internet through the firewall and proxy servers of the visited institution. However, access granted to services that authorize via an IP address of the visited institution may include access to services that are not allowed at the home institution, due to legal agreements. This paper looks at typical legal agreements with service providers and explores the risks and countermeasures that need to be considered when using eduroam.