Biblio

As information and communication technologies evolve every day, so does the use of technology in our daily lives. Along with our increasing dependence on digital information assets, security vulnerabilities are becoming more and more apparent. Passwords are a critical component of secure access to digital systems and applications. They not only prevent unauthorized access to these systems, but also distinguish the users of such systems. Research on password predictability often relies on surveys or leaked data. Therefore, there is a gap in the literature for studies that consider real data in this regard. This study investigates the password security awareness of 161 computer engineering students enrolled in a Linux-based undergraduate course at Ataturk University. The study is conducted in two phases, and in the first phase, 12 dictionaries containing also real student data are formed. In the second phase of the study, a dictionary-based brute-force attack is utilized by means of a serial and parallel version of a Bash script to crack the students’ passwords. In this respect, the /etc/shadow file of the Linux system is used as a basis to compare the hashed versions of the guessed passwords. As a result, the passwords of 23 students, accounting for 14% of the entire student group, were cracked. We believe that this is an unacceptably high prediction rate for such a group with high digital literacy. Therefore, due to this important finding of the study, we took immediate action and shared the results of the study with the instructor responsible for administering the information security course that is included in our curriculum and offered in one of the following semesters.

Risk-based authentication (RBA) extends authentication mechanisms to make them more robust against account takeover attacks, such as those using stolen passwords. RBA is recommended by NIST and NCSC to strengthen password-based authentication, and is already used by major online services. Also, users consider RBA to be more usable than two-factor authentication and just as secure. However, users currently obtain RBA’s high security and usability benefits at the cost of exposing potentially sensitive personal data (e.g., IP address or browser information). This conflicts with user privacy and requires to consider user rights regarding the processing of personal data. We outline potential privacy challenges regarding different attacker models and propose improvements to balance privacy in RBA systems. To estimate the properties of the privacy-preserving RBA enhancements in practical environments, we evaluated a subset of them with long-term data from 780 users of a real-world online service. Our results show the potential to increase privacy in RBA solutions. However, it is limited to certain parameters that should guide RBA design to protect privacy. We outline research directions that need to be considered to achieve a widespread adoption of privacy preserving RBA with high user acceptance.

The majority of systems rely on user authentication on passwords, but passwords have so many weaknesses and widespread use that easily raise significant security concerns, regardless of their encrypted form. Users hold the same password for different accounts, administrators never check password files for flaws that might lead to a successful cracking, and the lack of a tight security policy regarding regular password replacement are a few problems that need to be addressed. The proposed research work aims at enhancing this security mechanism, prevent penetrations, password theft, and attempted break-ins towards securing computing systems. The selected solution approach is two-folded; it implements a two-factor authentication scheme to prevent unauthorized access, accompanied by Honeyword principles to detect corrupted or stolen tokens. Both can be integrated into any platform or web application with the use of QR codes and a mobile phone.

Phishing, ransomware and cryptojacking are the main threats to cyber security in recent years. We consider the stages of phishing attacks, examples of such attacks, specifically, attacks using ransomware, malicious PDF files, and banking trojans. The article describes the specifics of phishing emails. Advices on phishing protection are given.

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.

Most common user authentication methods use some form of password or a combination of passwords. However, encryption schemes are generally not directly compatible with user passwords and thus, Password-Based Key Derivation Functions (PBKDFs) are used to convert user passwords into cryptographic keys. In this paper, we analyze the theoretical security of PBKDF2 and present two vulnerabilities, γ-collision and δ-collision. Using AES-128 as our exemplar, we show that due to γ-collision, text encrypted with one user password can be decrypted with γ 1 different passwords. We also provide a proof that finding− a collision in the derived key for AES-128 requires δ lesser calls to PBKDF2 than the known Birthday attack. Due to this, it is possible to break password-based AES-128 in O(264) calls, which is equivalent to brute-forcing DES.

With the explosive growth of IoT applications, billions of things are now connected via edge devices and a colossal volume of data is sent over the internet. Providing security to the user data becomes crucial. The rise in zero-day attacks are a challenge in IoT scenarios. With the large scale of IoT application detection and mitigation of such attacks by the network administrators is cumbersome. The edge device Raspberry pi is remotely logged using Secure Shell (SSH) protocol in 90% of the IoT applications. The case study of SSH brute force attack on the edge device Raspberry pi is demonstrated with experimentation in the IoT networking scenario using Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The IP crawlers available on the internet are used by the attacker to obtain the IP address of the edge device. The proposed system continuously monitors traffic, analysis the log of attack patterns, detects and mitigates SSH brute attack. An attack hijacks and wastes the system resources depriving the authorized users of the resources. With the proposed IDS, we observe 25% CPU conservation, 40% power conservation and 10% memory conservation in resource utilization, as the IDS, mitigates the attack and releases the resources blocked by the attacker.

Scalability is one of the effective features of the Software Defined Network (SDN) that allows several devices to communicate with each other. In SDN scalable networks, the number of hosts keeps increasing as per networks need. This increment makes network administrators take a straightforward action to ensure these hosts' authenticity in the network. To address this issue, we proposed a technique to authenticate SDN hosts before permitting them to establish communication with the SDN controller. In this technique, we used the Kerberos authentication protocol to ensure the authenticity of the hosts. Kerberos verifies the hosts' credentials using a centralized server contains all hosts IDs and passwords. This technique eases the secure communication between the hosts and controller and allows the hosts to safely get network rules and policies. The proposed technique ensures the immunity of the network against network attacks.

SMS (Short Message Service)-based authentication is widely used as a simple and secure multi-factor authentication, where OTP (One Time Password) is sent to user’s mobile phone via SMS. However, SMS authentication is vulnerable to Password Reset Man in the Middle Attack (PRMitM). In this attack, the attacker makes a victim perform password reset OTP for sign-up verification OTP. If the victim enters OTP to a malicious man-in-the-middle site, the attacker can overtake the victim’s account.We find new smartphone useful functions may increase PR-MitM attack risks. SMS push notification informs us an arrival of message by showing only beginning of the message. Hence, those who received SMS OTP do not notice the cautionary notes and the name of the sender that are supposed to show below the code, which may lead to be compromised. Auto-fill function, which allow us to input authentication code with one touch, is also vulnerable for the same reason.In this study, we conduct a user study to investigate the effect of new smartphone functions incurring PRMitM attack.

In the growth of financial industries, the electronic payments system is a newest topic, which is to be replaced in the near future by electronic or online transaction. With the advancement of the technology, there is a strong need to build and enforce safe authentication schemes to protect user sensitive information against security threats. Protection is becoming increasingly important for companies today, and so the need for authentication is more essential than before. In single-factor authentication, there are many security problems such as password schemes. Additionally, invaders will try various ways of stealing passwords including, dictionary attacks, brute force attack, password divination, shoulder surfing, etc. This paper provides a multi-authentication system for electronic payments to address the problem. The proposed technique here combines password, biometric and OTP verification for a more reliable user authentication using a multi-factor authentication. The proposed system has three phases, namely: registration phase, an authentication phase, and transaction phase. Our proposed approach has been found to boost security efficacy for various forms of assault and authentication layers dependent on password based attacks.

We explore a new type of malicious script attacks: the persistent parasite attack. Persistent parasites are stealthy scripts, which persist for a long time in the browser's cache. We show to infect the caches of victims with parasite scripts via TCP injection. Once the cache is infected, we implement methodologies for propagation of the parasites to other popular domains on the victim client as well as to other caches on the network. We show how to design the parasites so that they stay long time in the victim's cache not restricted to the duration of the user's visit to the web site. We develop covert channels for communication between the attacker and the parasites, which allows the attacker to control which scripts are executed and when, and to exfiltrate private information to the attacker, such as cookies and passwords. We then demonstrate how to leverage the parasites to perform sophisticated attacks, and evaluate the attacks against a range of applications and security mechanisms on popular browsers. Finally we provide recommendations for countermeasures.

Internet security is constantly at risk as a result of the fast developing and highly sophisticated exploitation methods. These attacks use numerous media to take advantage of the most vulnerable of Internet users. Phishing, spam calling, unsecure content and other means of intrusion threaten Internet users every day. In order to maintain the security and privacy of sensitive user data, the user must pay for services that include the storage and generation of secure passwords, monitoring internet traffic to discourage navigation to malicious websites, among other services. Some people do not have the money to purchase privacy protection services and others find convoluted euphemisms baked into privacy policies quite confusing. In response to this problem, we developed an Internet security software package, Secure Suite, which we provide as open source and hence free of charge. Users can easily deploy and manage Secure Suite. It is composed of a password manager, a malicious URL detection service, dubbed MalURLNet, a URL extender, data visualization tools, a browser extension to interact with the web app, and utility tools to maintain data integrity. MalURLNet is one of the main components of Secure Suite. It utilizes deep learning and other open-source software to mitigate security threats by identifying malicious URLs. We exhaustively tested our proposed MalURLNet service. Our studies show that MalURLNet outperforms four other well-known URL classifiers in terms of accuracy, loss, precision, recall, and F1-Score.

Due to the popularity of Windows system, BitLocker is widely used as a built-in disk encryption tool. As a commercial application, the design of BitLocker has to consider a capability of disaster recovery, which helps a user to recover data stored on encrypted disk when a regular access is not available. In this case, it will inevitably lead to some security risks when using BitLocker. We have a deep exploration of BitLocker encryption mechanism in this paper. We present the decryption method of encrypted VMK in case of system partition encryption and non-system partition encryption, respectively. VMK is the core key in BitLocker, with which the encrypted partition or the entire disk can be further decrypted. As for security analysis on BitLocker, we firstly make a difficulty analysis of brute force cracking on BitLocker keys, and then we analyze a possible threat caused by key theft. Based on this, we propose a few countermeasures about BitLocker usage. Additionally, we give some suggestions about security enhancement of BitLocker encryption.

Today, everyone is highly dependent on the internet. Everyone performed online shopping and online activities such as online Bank, online booking, online recharge and more on internet. Phishing is a type of website threat and phishing is Illegally on the original website Information such as login id, password and information of credit card. This paper proposed an efficient machine learning based phishing detection technique. Overall, experimental results show that the proposed technique, when integrated with the Support vector machine classifier, has the best performance of accurately distinguishing 95.66% of phishing and appropriate websites using only 22.5% of the innovative functionality. The proposed technique exhibits optimistic results when benchmarking with a range of standard phishing datasets of the “University of California Irvine (UCI)” archive. Therefore, proposed technique is preferred and used for phishing detection based on machine learning.

The extensive use of the internet and web-based applications spot the multiserver authentication as a significant component. The users can get their services after authenticating with the service provider by using similar registration records. Various protocol schemes are developed for multiserver authentication, but the existing schemes are not secure and often lead towards various vulnerabilities and different security issues. Recently, Zhao et al. put forward a proposal for smart card and user's password-based authentication protocol for the multiserver environment and showed that their proposed protocol is efficient and secure against various security attacks. This paper points out that Zhao et al.'s authentication scheme is susceptive to traceability as well as anonymity attacks. Thus, it is not feasible for the multiserver environment. Furthermore, in their scheme, it is observed that a user while authenticating does not send any information with any mention of specific server identity. Therefore, this paper proposes an enhanced, efficient and secure user authentication scheme for use in any multiserver environment. The formal security analysis and verification of the protocol is performed using state-of-the-art tool “ProVerif” yielding that the proposed scheme provides higher levels of security.

Owing to the advancements in communication media and devices all over the globe, there has arisen a dire need for to limit the alarming number of attacks targeting these and to enhance their security. Multiple techniques have been incorporated in different researches and various protocols and schemes have been put forward to cater security issues of session initiation protocol (SIP). In 2008, Qiu et al. presented a proposal for SIP authentication which while effective than many existing schemes, was still found vulnerable to many security attacks. To overcome those issues, Zhang et al. proposed an authentication protocol. This paper presents the analysis of Zhang et al. authentication scheme and concludes that their proposed scheme is susceptible to user traceablity. It also presents an improved SIP authentication scheme that eliminates the possibility of traceability of user's activities. The proposed scheme is also verified by contemporary verification tool, ProVerif and it is found to be more secure, efficient and practical than many similar SIP authetication scheme.

To better protect users' privacy, various authentication mechanisms have been applied on smartphones. Android pattern lock has been widely used because it is easy to memorize, however, simple ones are more vulnerable to attack such as shoulder surfing attack. In this paper, we propose a security rating evaluation scheme based on pattern lock. In particular, an entropy function of a pattern lock can be calculated, which is decided by five kinds of attributes: size, length, angle, overlap and intersection for quantitative evaluation of pattern lock. And thus, the security rating thresholds will be determined by the distribution of entropy values. Finally, we design and develop an APP based on Android Studio, which is used to verify the effectiveness of our proposed security rating evaluation scheme.

Recently, phishing attacks have taking a new dimension with the addition of quick response code to phishing attacks vectors. Quick response code phishing attack is when an attacker lures its victims to voluntarily divulge personal information such as password, personal identification number, username and other information such as online banking details through the use of quick response code. This attack is on the rise as more and more people have adopted mobile phone usage not just for communication only but to perform transaction seamlessly. The ease of creation and use of quick response code has made it easily acceptable to both provider of goods and services and consumers. This attack is semantic as it exploits human vulnerabilities; as users can hardly know what is hidden in the quick response code before usage. This study reviewed various methodologies that earlier researcher have used to detect this semantic-based attack of phishing. The strength of each methodology, its weakness and general research gaps identified.

The objective of the project is to structure a portable application for inspecting and putting away information through a distributed storage administration. The information is remotely put away in the cloud. In some distributed storage frameworks, the cloud record may contain some touchy data. Scrambling the entire shared record doesn't permit different clients to get to it. In the current framework the client needs to use the biometric information to guarantee the character of the client and afterward a marking key will be checked which is to ensure the personality and security of the client. The principle downside of utilizing the biometric information is that it can't be coordinated precisely because of the elements that influence the difference in biometric information. A reference id made is naturally changed over to the QR code and it is checked utilizing a scanner and the specific record is downloaded. This record whenever erased or lost in the customer's inward stockpiling it very well may be recovered again from the cloud.

The following topics are dealt with: authorisation; data privacy; mobile computing; security of data; cryptography; Internet of Things; message authentication; invasive software; Android (operating system); vectors.

Nowadays, smartphones are everywhere. They play an indispensable role in our lives and makes people convenient to communicate, pay, socialize, etc. However, they also bring a lot of security and privacy risks. Keystroke operations of numeric keypad are often required when users input password to perform mobile payment or input other privacy-sensitive information. Different keystrokes may cause different finger movements that will bring different interference to WiFi signal, which may be reflected by channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose WiPass, a password-keystroke recognition system for numerical keypad input on smartphones, which especially occurs frequently in mobile payment APPs. Based on only a public WiFi hotspot deployed in the victim payment scenario, WiPass would extracts and analyzes the CSI data generated by the password-keystroke operation of the smartphone user, and infers the user's payment password by comparing the CSI waveforms of different keystrokes. We implemented the WiPass system by using COTS WiFi AP devices and smartphones. The average keystroke segmentation accuracy was 80.45%, and the average keystroke recognition accuracy was 74.24%.

In the present scenario, security is the biggest concern in any domain of applications. The latest and widely used system for user authentication is a biometric system. This includes fingerprint recognition, retina recognition, and voice recognition. But these systems can be bypassed by masqueraders. To avoid this, a combination of these systems is used which becomes very costly. To overcome these two drawbacks keystroke dynamics were introduced in this field. Keystroke dynamics is a biometric authentication-based system on behavior, which is an automated method in which the identity of an individual is identified and confirmed based on the way and the rhythm of passwords typed on a keyboard by the individual. The work in this paper focuses on identifying the best algorithm for implementing an authentication system with the help of machine learning for user identification based on keystroke dynamics. Our proposed model which uses XGBoost gives a comparatively higher accuracy of 93.59% than the other algorithms for the dataset used.

In the digital payment system, the transactions and their data about clients are very sensitive, so the security and privacy of personal information of the client is a big concern. The confirmation towards security necessities prevents the data from a stolen and unauthorized person over the digital transactions, So the stronger authentication methods required, which must be based on cryptography. Initially, in the payment ecosystem, they were using the Kerberos protocol, but now different approaches such as Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP), Tokenization, Two-Factor Authentication(PIN, MPIN, OTP), etc. such protocols are being used in the payment system. This paper presents the use cases of different authentication protocols. Further, the use of these protocols in online payment systems to verify each individual are explained.

Spring security is tremendously popular among practitioners for its ease of use to secure enterprise applications. In this paper, we study the application framework misconfiguration vulnerabilities in the light of Spring security, which is relatively understudied in the existing literature. Towards that goal, we identify 6 types of security anti-patterns and 4 insecure vulnerable defaults by conducting a measurement-based approach on 28 Spring applications. Our analysis shows that security risks associated with the identified security anti-patterns and insecure defaults can leave the enterprise application vulnerable to a wide range of high-risk attacks. To prevent these high-risk attacks, we also provide recommendations for practitioners. Consequently, our study has contributed one update to the official Spring security documentation while other security issues identified in this study are being considered for future major releases by Spring security community.

In recent years, many devices in industrial control systems (ICS) equip Ethernet modules for more efficient communication and more fiexible deployment. Many communication protocols of those devices are based on internet protocol, which brings the above benefits but also makes it easier to access by anyone including attackers. In the case of using the factory default configurations, we wiiˆ demonstrate how to easily modify the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) program through the Integrated Development Environment provided by the manufacturer under the security protection of PLC not set properly and discuss the severity of it.