Biblio

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attack that compromised the bandwidth of the whole network by choking down all the available network resources which are publically available, thus makes access to that resource unavailable. The DDoS attack is more vulnerable than a normal DoS attack because here the sources of attack origin are more than one, so users cannot even estimate how to detect and where to take actions so that attacks can be dissolved. This paper proposed a unique approach for DDoS detection using the shortest path algorithm. This Paper suggests that the remedy that must be taken in order to counter-affect the DDoS attack in a smart home network.

This work aims to formulate an effective scheme which can detect and mitigate of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in Software Defined Networks. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are one of the most destructive attacks in the internet. Whenever you heard of a website being hacked, it would have probably been a victim of a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is aimed at disrupting the normal operation of a system by making service and resources unavailable to legitimate users by overloading the system with excessive superfluous traffic from distributed source. These distributed set of compromised hosts that performs the attack are referred as Botnet. Software Defined Networking being an emerging technology, offers a solution to reduce network management complexity. It separates the Control plane and the data plane. This decoupling provides centralized control of the network with programmability and flexibility. This work harness this programming ability and centralized control of SDN to obtain the randomness of the network flow data. This statistical approach utilizes the source IP in the network and various attributes of TCP flags and calculates entropy from them. The proposed technique can detect volume based and application based DDoS attacks like TCP SYN flood, Ping flood and Slow HTTP attacks. The methodology is evaluated through emulation using Mininet and Detection and mitigation strategies are implemented in POX controller. The experimental results show the proposed method have improved performance evaluation parameters including the Attack detection time, Delay to serve a legitimate request in the presence of attacker and overall CPU utilization.

In the coming future, Software-defined networking (SDN) will become a technology more responsive, fully automated, and highly secure. SDN is a way to manage networks by separate the control plane from the forwarding plane, by using software to manage network functions through a centralized control point. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the most popular malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network. The problem of the paper is the DDoS attack inside the SDN environment and how could use SDN specifications through the advantage of Open vSwitch programmability feature to stop the attack. This paper presents DDoS attack detection and mitigation in the SDN data-plane by applying a written SDN application in python language, based on the malicious traffic abnormal behavior to reduce the interference with normal traffic. The evaluation results reveal detection and mitigation time between 100 to 150 sec. The work also sheds light on the programming relevance with the open daylight controller over an abstracted view of the network infrastructure.

When using deep learning for DDoS attack detection, there is a general degradation in detection performance due to small sample size. This paper proposes a small-sample DDoS attack detection method based on deep transfer learning. First, deep learning techniques are used to train several neural networks that can be used for transfer in DDoS attacks with sufficient samples. Then we design a transferability metric to compare the transfer performance of different networks. With this metric, the network with the best transfer performance can be selected among the four networks. Then for a small sample of DDoS attacks, this paper demonstrates that the deep learning detection technique brings deterioration in performance, with the detection performance dropping from 99.28% to 67%. Finally, we end up with a 20.8% improvement in detection performance by deep transfer of the 8LANN network in the target domain. The experiment shows that the detection method based on deep transfer learning proposed in this paper can well improve the performance deterioration of deep learning techniques for small sample DDoS attack detection.

Recently, as the threat of Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks exploiting IoT devices has spread, source-side Denial-of-Service attack detection methods are being studied in order to quickly detect attacks and find their locations. Moreover, to mitigate the limitation of local view of source-side detection, a collaborative attack detection technique is required to share detection results on each source-side network. In this paper, a new collaborative source-side DDoS attack detection method is proposed for detecting DDoS attacks on multiple networks more correctly, by considering the detecting performance on different time zone. The results of individual attack detection on each network are weighted based on detection rate and false positive rate corresponding to the time zone of each network. By gathering the weighted detection results, the proposed method determines whether a DDoS attack happens. Through extensive evaluation with real network traffic data, it is confirmed that the proposed method reduces false positive rate by 35% while maintaining high detection rate.

IoT devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo provide great convenience to our lives. Many of these IoT devices collect data including Personal Identifiable Information such as names, phone numbers, and addresses and thus IoT security is important. However, conducting security analysis on IoT devices is challenging due to the variety, the volume of the devices, and the special skills required for hardware and software analysis. In this research, we create and demonstrate a dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure for capturing network traffic from IoT devices. The network traffic is automatically mirrored to a server for live traffic monitoring and offline data analysis. Using the dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure, we conduct extensive security analysis on network traffic from Google Home and Amazon Echo. Our testing results indicate that Google Home enforces tighter security controls than Amazon Echo while both Google and Amazon devices provide the desired security level to protect user data in general. The dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure presented in the paper can be utilized to conduct similar security analysis on any IoT devices.

Due to the network topology high dynamic changes, the number of ground users and the impact of uneven traffic, the load difference between SDN-based satellite network controllers varies widely, which will cause network performance such as network delay and throughput to drop dramatically. Aiming at the above problems, a multi-controller optimized deployment strategy of satellite network based on SDN was proposed. First, the controller's load state is divided into four types: overload state, high load state, normal state, and idle state; second, when a controller in the network is idle, the switch under its jurisdiction is migrated to the adjacent low load controller and turn off the controller to reduce waste of resources. When the controller is in a high-load state and an overload state, consider both the controller and the switch, and migrate the high-load switch to the adjacent low-load controller. Balance the load between controllers, improve network performance, and improve network performance and network security. Simulation results show that the method has an average throughput improvement of 2.7% and a delay reduction of 3.1% compared with MCDALB and SDCLB methods.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new type of network architecture solution, and its innovation lies in decoupling traditional network system into a control plane, a data plane, and an application plane. It logically implements centralized control and management of the network, and SDN is considered to represent the development trend of the network in the future. However, SDN still faces many security challenges. Currently, the number of insecure devices is huge. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the major network security threats.This paper focuses on the detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in SDN. Firstly, we explore a solution to detect DDoS using Renyi entropy, and we use exponentially weighted moving average algorithm to set a dynamic threshold to adapt to changes of the network. Second, to mitigate this threat, we analyze the historical behavior of each source IP address and score it to determine the malicious source IP address, and use OpenFlow protocol to block attack source.The experimental results show that the scheme studied in this paper can effectively detect and mitigate DDoS attacks.

Research on the design of data center infrastructure is increasing, both from academia and industry, due to the rapid development of cloud-based applications such as search engines, social networks, and large-scale computing. On a large scale, data centers can consist of hundreds to thousands of servers that require systems with high-performance requirements and low downtime. To meet the network's needs in a dynamic data center, infrastructure of applications and services are growing. It takes a process of designing a network topology so that it can guarantee availability and security. One way to surmount this is by implementing the zero trust security model based on micro-segmentation. Zero trust is a security idea based on the principle of "never trust, always verify" in which no concepts of trust and untrust in network traffic. The zero trust security model implemented network traffic in the form of untrust. Micro-segmentation is a way to achieve zero trust by dividing a network into smaller logical segments to restrict the traffic. In this research, data center network performance based on software-defined networking with zero trust security model using micro-segmentation has been evaluated using a testbed simulation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure by measuring the round trip time, jitter, and packet loss during experiments. Performance evaluation results show that micro-segmentation adds an average round trip time of 4 μs and jitter of 11 μs without packet loss so that the security can be improved without significantly affecting network performance on the data center.

We study the problem of designing a dynamic mechanism for security management in an interconnected multi-agent system with N strategic agents and one coordinator. The system is modeled as a network of N vertices. Each agent resides in one of the vertices of the network and has a privately known security state that describes its safety level at each time. The evolution of an agent's security state depends on its own state, the states of its neighbors in the network and on actions taken by a network coordinator. Each agent's utility at time instant t depends on its own state, the states of its neighbors in the network and on actions taken by a network coordinator. The objective of the network coordinator is to take security actions in order to maximize the long-term expected social surplus. Since agents are strategic and their security states are private information, the coordinator needs to incentivize agents to reveal their information. This results in a dynamic mechanism design problem for the coordinator. We leverage the inter-temporal correlations between the agents' security states to identify sufficient conditions under which an incentive compatible expected social surplus maximizing mechanism can be constructed. We then identify two special cases of our formulation and describe how the desired mechanism is constructed in these cases.

Enterprise networks are increasingly moving towards Software Defined Networking, which is becoming a major trend in the networking arena. With the increased popularity of SDN, there is a greater need for security measures for protecting the enterprise networks. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an integrated security architecture for SDN based enterprise networks. The integrated security architecture uses a policy-based approach to coordinate different security mechanisms to detect and counteract a range of security attacks in the SDN. A distinguishing characteristic of the proposed architecture is its ability to deal with dynamic changes in the security attacks as well as changes in trust associated with the network devices in the infrastructure. The adaptability of the proposed architecture to dynamic changes is achieved by having feedback between the various security components/mechanisms in the architecture and managing them using a dynamic policy framework. The paper describes the prototype implementation of the proposed architecture and presents security and performance analysis for different attack scenarios. We believe that the proposed integrated security architecture provides a significant step towards achieving a secure SDN for enterprises.

Most of the authentication protocols assume the existence of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) in the form of a Certificate Authority or as an authentication server. The main objective of this research is to present an autonomous solution where users could store their credentials, without depending on TTPs. For this, the use of an autonomous network is imperative, where users could use their uniqueness in order to identify themselves. We propose the framework “Three Blockchains Identity Management with Elliptic Curve Cryptography (3BI-ECC)”. Our proposed framework is a decentralize identity management system where users' identities are self-generated.

This paper presents an overhead analysis of the use of digital signature mechanisms in the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for three classes of constrained-device. Because the resources provided by constrained-devices are very limited, the purpose of this overhead analysis is to help find out the advantages and disadvantages of each class of constrained-devices after a security mechanism has been applied, namely by applying a digital signature mechanism. The objective of using this digital signature mechanism is for providing integrity, that if the payload sent and received in its destination is still original and not changed during the transmission process. The overhead analysis aspects performed are including analyzing decryption time, signature verification performance, message delivery time, memory and flash usage in the three classes of constrained-device. Based on the overhead analysis result, it can be seen that for decryption time and signature verification performance, the Class-2 device is the fastest one. For message delivery time, the smallest time needed for receiving the payload is Class-l device. For memory usage, the Class-2 device is providing the biggest available memory and flash.

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.

In 2018, several malware campaigns targeted and succeed to infect millions of low-cost routers (malwares e.g., VPN-Filter, Navidade, and SonarDNS). These routers were used, then, for all sort of cybercrimes: from DDoS attacks to ransomware. MikroTik routers are a peculiar example of low-cost routers. These routers are used to provide both last mile access to home users and are used in core network infrastructure. Half of the core routers used in one of the biggest Internet exchanges in the world are MikroTik devices. The problem is that vulnerable firmwares (RouterOS) used in homeusers houses are also used in core networks. In this paper, we are the first to quantify the problem that infecting MikroTik devices would pose to the Internet. Based on more than 4 TB of data, we reveal more than 4 million MikroTik devices in the world. Then, we propose an easy-to-deploy MikroTik honeypot and collect more than 17 millions packets, in 45 days, from sensors deployed in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Netherlands, and the United States. Finally, we use the collected data from our honeypots to automatically classify and assess attacks tailored to MikroTik devices. All our source-codes and analysis are publicly available. We believe that our honeypots and our findings in this paper foster security improvements in MikroTik devices worldwide.

In response to the increasing awareness of the Ethernet-based threat surface of industrial control systems (ICS), both the research and commercial communities are responding with ICS-specific security solutions. Unfortunately, many of the properties of ICS environments that contribute to the extent of this threat surface (e.g. age of devices, inability or unwillingness to patch, criticality of the system) similarly prevent the proper testing and evaluation of these security solutions. Production environments are often too fragile to introduce unvetted technology and most organizations lack test environments that are sufficiently consistent with production to yield actionable results. Cost and space requirements prevent the creation of mirrored physical environments leading many to look towards simulation or virtualization. Examples in literature provide various approaches to building ICS test beds, though most of these suffer from a lack of realism due to contrived scenarios, synthetic data and other compromises. In this paper, we provide a design methodology for building highly realistic ICS test beds for validating cybersecurity defenses. We then apply that methodology to the design and building of a specific test bed and describe the results and experimental use cases.

The security problem of networked control systems (NCSs) suffering denial of service(DoS) attacks with incomplete information is investigated in this paper. Data transmission among different components in NCSs may be blocked due to DoS attacks. We use the concept of security level to describe the degree of security of different components in an NCS. Intrusion detection system (IDS) is used to monitor the invalid data generated by DoS attacks. At each time slot, the defender considers which component to monitor while the attacker considers which place for invasion. A one-shot game between attacker and defender is built and both the complete information case and the incomplete information case are considered. Furthermore, a repeated game model with updating beliefs is also established based on the Bayes' rule. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In order to cope with the network attack of industrial control system, this paper proposes a quantifiable attack-defense tree model. In order to reduce the influence of subjective factors on weight calculation and the probability of attack events, the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Attack-Defense Tree model are combined. First, the model provides a variety of security attributes for attack and defense leaf nodes. Secondly, combining the characteristics of leaf nodes, a fuzzy consistency matrix is constructed to calculate the security attribute weight of leaf nodes, and the probability of attack and defense leaf nodes. Then, the influence of defense node on attack behavior is analyzed. Finally, the network risk assessment of typical airport oil supply automatic control system has been undertaken as a case study using this attack-defense tree model. The result shows that this model can truly reflect the impact of defense measures on the attack behavior, and provide a reference for the network security scheme.

The security of Industrial Control system (ICS) of cybersecurity networks ensures that control equipment fails and that regular procedures are available at its control facilities and internal industrial network. For this reason, it is essential to improve the security of industrial control facility networks continuously. Since network security is threatening, industrial installations are irreparable and perhaps environmentally hazardous. In this study, the industrialized Early Intrusion Detection System (EIDS) was used to modify the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) method. The industrial EIDS was implemented using routers, IDS Snort, Industrial honeypot, and Iptables MikroTik. EIDS successfully simulated and implemented instructions written in IDS, Iptables router, and Honeypots. Accordingly, the attacker's information was displayed on the monitoring page, which had been designed for the ICS. The EIDS provides cybersecurity and industrial network systems against vulnerabilities and alerts industrial network security heads in the shortest possible time.

In recent years, persistent cyber adversaries have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade detection. Once adversaries have established a foothold within the target network, using seemingly-limited passive reconnaissance techniques, they can develop significant network reconnaissance capabilities. Cyber deception has been recognized as a critical capability to defend against such adversaries, but, without an accurate model of the adversary's reconnaissance behavior, current approaches are ineffective against advanced adversaries. To address this gap, we propose a novel model to capture how advanced, stealthy adversaries acquire knowledge about the target network and establish and expand their foothold within the system. This model quantifies the cost and reward, from the adversary's perspective, of compromising and maintaining control over target nodes. We evaluate our model through simulations in the CyberVAN testbed, and indicate how it can guide the development and deployment of future defensive capabilities, including high-interaction honeypots, so as to influence the behavior of adversaries and steer them away from critical resources.

Adversarial models are well-established for cryptographic protocols, but distributed real-time protocols have requirements that these abstractions are not intended to cover. The IEEE/IEC 61850 standard for communication networks and systems for power utility automation in particular not only requires distributed processing, but in case of the generic object oriented substation events and sampled value (GOOSE/SV) protocols also hard real-time characteristics. This motivates the desire to include both quality of service (QoS) and explicit network topology in an adversary model based on a π-calculus process algebraic formalism based on earlier work. This allows reasoning over process states, placement of adversarial entities and communication behaviour. We demonstrate the use of our model for the simple case of a replay attack against the publish/subscribe GOOSE/SV subprotocol, showing bounds for non-detectability of such an attack.

Cyber risk assessments are an essential process for analyzing and prioritizing security issues. Unfortunately, many risk assessment methodologies are marred by human subjectivity, resulting in non-repeatable, inconsistent findings. The absence of repeatable and consistent results can lead to suboptimal decision making with respect to cyber risk reduction. There is a pressing need to reduce cyber risk assessment uncertainty by using tools that use well defined inputs, producing well defined results. This paper presents Automated Vulnerability and Risk Analysis (AVRA), an end-to-end process and tool for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities, designed for use in cyber risk assessments. The approach presented is more comprehensive than traditional vulnerability scans due to its analysis of an entire network, integrating both host and network information. AVRA automatically generates a detailed model of the network and its individual components, which is used to create an attack graph. Then, AVRA follows individual attack paths, automatically launching exploits to reach a particular objective. AVRA was successfully tested within a virtual environment to demonstrate practicality and usability. The presented approach and resulting system enhances the cyber risk assessment process through rigor, repeatability, and objectivity.

Privacy preservation is a challenging task with the huge amount of data that are available in social media. The data those are stored in the distributed environment or in cloud environment need to ensure confidentiality to data. In addition, representing the voluminous data is graph will be convenient to perform keyword search. The proposed work initially reads the data corresponding to social media and converts that into a graph. In order to prevent the data from the active attacks Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm is used to perform graph encryption. Later, search operation is done using two algorithms: kNK keyword search algorithm and top k nearest keyword search algorithm. The first scheme is used to fetch all the data corresponding to the keyword. The second scheme is used to fetch the nearest neighbor. This scheme increases the efficiency of the search process. Here shortest path algorithm is used to find the minimum distance. Now, based on the minimum value the results are produced. The proposed algorithm shows high performance for graph generation and searching and moderate performance for graph encryption.

In this article, the security problem in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks is studied from the perspectives of the designs of communication topology and distributed controller. To resist the DoS attacks, a new construction algorithm of the k-connected communication topology is developed based on the proposed necessary and sufficient criteria of the k-connected graph. Furthermore, combined with the k-connected topology, a distributed event-triggered controller is designed to guarantee the consensus of CPSs under mode-switching DoS (MSDoS) attacks. Different from the existing distributed control schemes, a new technology, that is, the extended Laplacian matrix method, is combined to design the distributed controller independent on the knowledge and the dwell time of DoS attack modes. Finally, the simulation example illustrates the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed construction algorithm and a distributed control scheme.

Securing cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires the identification of how interdependence among existing atomic vulnerabilities may be exploited by an adversary to stitch together an attack that can compromise the system. Therefore, accurate attack graphs play a significant role in systems security. A manual construction of the attack graphs is tedious and error-prone, this paper proposes a model-checking-based automated attack graph generator and visualizer (A2G2V). The proposed A2G2V algorithm uses existing model-checking tools, an architecture description tool, and our own code to generate an attack graph that enumerates the set of all possible sequences in which atomic-level vulnerabilities can be exploited to compromise system security. The architecture description tool captures a formal representation of the networked system, its atomic vulnerabilities, their pre-and post-conditions, and security property of interest. A model-checker is employed to automatically identify an attack sequence in the form of a counterexample. Our own code integrated with the model-checker parses the counterexamples, encodes those for specification relaxation, and iterates until all attack sequences are revealed. Finally, a visualization tool has also been incorporated with A2G2V to generate a graphical representation of the generated attack graph. The results are illustrated through application to computer as well as control (SCADA) networks.