Biblio

In a number of information security scenarios, human beings can be better than technical security measures at detecting threats. This is particularly the case when a threat is based on deception of the user rather than exploitation of a specific technical flaw, as is the case of spear-phishing, application spoofing, multimedia masquerading and other semantic social engineering attacks. Here, we put the concept of the human-as-a-security-sensor to the test with a first case study on a small number of participants subjected to different attacks in a controlled laboratory environment and provided with a mechanism to report these attacks if they spot them. A key challenge is to estimate the reliability of each report, which we address with a machine learning approach. For comparison, we evaluate the ability of known technical security countermeasures in detecting the same threats. This initial proof of concept study shows that the concept is viable.

Phishing is a major concern on the Internet today and many users are falling victim because of criminal's deceitful tactics. Blacklisting is still the most common defence users have against such phishing websites, but is failing to cope with the increasing number. In recent years, researchers have devised modern ways of detecting such websites using machine learning. One such method is to create machine learnt models of URL features to classify whether URLs are phishing. However, there are varying opinions on what the best approach is for features and algorithms. In this paper, the objective is to evaluate the performance of the Random Forest algorithm using a lexical only dataset. The performance is benchmarked against other machine learning algorithms and additionally against those reported in the literature. Initial results from experiments indicate that the Random Forest algorithm performs the best yielding an 86.9% accuracy.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks became a major network threat in recent years. Among APT attack techniques, sending a phishing email with malicious documents attached is considered one of the most effective ones. Although many users have the impression that documents are harmless, a malicious document may in fact contain shellcode to attack victims. To cope with the problem, we design and implement a malicious document detector called Forensor to differentiate malicious documents. Forensor integrates several open-source tools and methods. It first introspects file format to retrieve objects inside the documents, and then automatically decrypts simple encryption methods, e.g., XOR, rot and shift, commonly used in malware to discover potential shellcode. The emulator is used to verify the presence of shellcode. If shellcode is discovered, the file is considered malicious. The experiment used 9,000 benign files and more than 10,000 malware samples from a well-known sample sharing website. The result shows no false negative and only 2 false positives.

The prevalence and effectiveness of phishing attacks, despite the presence of a vast array of technical defences, are due largely to the fact that attackers are ruthlessly targeting what is often referred to as the weakest link in the system - the human. This paper reports the results of an investigation into how end users behave when faced with phishing websites and how this behaviour exposes them to attack. Specifically, the paper presents a proof of concept computer model for simulating human behaviour with respect to phishing website detection based on the ACT-R cognitive architecture, and draws conclusions as to the applicability of this architecture to human behaviour modelling within a phishing detection scenario. Following the development of a high-level conceptual model of the phishing website detection process, the study draws upon ACT-R to model and simulate the cognitive processes involved in judging the validity of a representative webpage based primarily around the characteristics of the HTTPS padlock security indicator. The study concludes that despite the low-level nature of the architecture and its very basic user interface support, ACT-R possesses strong capabilities which map well onto the phishing use case, and that further work to more fully represent the range of human security knowledge and behaviours in an ACT-R model could lead to improved insights into how best to combine technical and human defences to reduce the risk to end users from phishing attacks.

Phishing emails have affected users seriously due to the enormous increasing in numbers and exquisite camouflage. Users spend much more effort on distinguishing the email properties, therefore current phishing email detection system demands more creativity and consideration in filtering for users. The proposed research tries to adopt creative computing in detecting phishing emails for users through a combination of computing techniques and social engineering concepts. In order to achieve the proposed target, the fraud type is summarised in social engineering criteria through literature review; a semantic web database is established to extract and store information; a fuzzy logic control algorithm is constructed to allocate email categories. The proposed approach will help users to distinguish the categories of emails, furthermore, to give advice based on different categories allocation. For the purpose of illustrating the approach, a case study will be presented to simulate a phishing email receiving scenario.

In the last decade, numerous fake websites have been developed on the World Wide Web to mimic trusted websites, with the aim of stealing financial assets from users and organizations. This form of online attack is called phishing, and it has cost the online community and the various stakeholders hundreds of million Dollars. Therefore, effective counter measures that can accurately detect phishing are needed. Machine learning (ML) is a popular tool for data analysis and recently has shown promising results in combating phishing when contrasted with classic anti-phishing approaches, including awareness workshops, visualization and legal solutions. This article investigates ML techniques applicability to detect phishing attacks and describes their pros and cons. In particular, different types of ML techniques have been investigated to reveal the suitable options that can serve as anti-phishing tools. More importantly, we experimentally compare large numbers of ML techniques on real phishing datasets and with respect to different metrics. The purpose of the comparison is to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of ML predictive models and to show their actual performance when it comes to phishing attacks. The experimental results show that Covering approach models are more appropriate as anti-phishing solutions, especially for novice users, because of their simple yet effective knowledge bases in addition to their good phishing detection rate.

Genetic Algorithms are group of mathematical models in computational science by exciting evolution in AI techniques nowadays. These algorithms preserve critical information by applying data structure with simple chromosome recombination operators by encoding solution to a specific problem. Genetic algorithms they are optimizer, in which range of problems applied to it are quite broad. Genetic Algorithms with its global search includes basic principles like selection, crossover and mutation. Data structures, algorithms and human brain inspiration are found for classification of data and for learning which works using Neural Networks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) it is a field, where so many tasks performed naturally by a human. When AI conventional methods are used in a computer it was proved as a complicated task. Applying Neural Networks techniques will create an internal structure of rules by which a program can learn by examples, to classify different inputs than mining techniques. This paper proposes a phishing websites classifier using improved polynomial neural networks in genetic algorithm.

To address increasing problems caused by cyber attacks, we leverage Software Defined networks and Network Function Virtualisation governed by a SARNET-agent to enable autonomous response and attack mitigation. A Secure Autonomous Response Network (SARNET) uses a control loop to constantly assess the security state of the network by means of observables. Using a prototype we introduce the metrics impact and effectiveness and show how they can be used to compare and evaluate countermeasures. These metrics become building blocks for self learning SARNET which exhibit true autonomous response.

Cloud computing is a remarkable model for permitting on-demand network access to an elastic collection of configurable adaptive resources and features including storage, software, infrastructure, and platform. However, there are major concerns about security-related issues. A very critical security function is user authentication using passwords. Although many flaws have been discovered in password-based authentication, it remains the most convenient approach that people continue to utilize. Several schemes have been proposed to strengthen its effectiveness such as salted hashes, one-time password (OTP), single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). This study proposes a new authentication mechanism by combining user's password and modified characters of CAPTCHA to generate a passkey. The modification of the CAPTCHA depends on a secret agreed upon between the cloud provider and the user to employ different characters for some characters in the CAPTCHA. This scheme prevents various attacks including short-password attack, dictionary attack, keylogger, phishing, and social engineering. Moreover, it can resolve the issue of password guessing and the use of a single password for different cloud providers.

Summary form only given. Strong light-matter coupling has been recently successfully explored in the GHz and THz [1] range with on-chip platforms. New and intriguing quantum optical phenomena have been predicted in the ultrastrong coupling regime [2], when the coupling strength Ω becomes comparable to the unperturbed frequency of the system ω. We recently proposed a new experimental platform where we couple the inter-Landau level transition of an high-mobility 2DEG to the highly subwavelength photonic mode of an LC meta-atom [3] showing very large Ω/ωc = 0.87. Our system benefits from the collective enhancement of the light-matter coupling which comes from the scaling of the coupling Ω ∝ √n, were n is the number of optically active electrons. In our previous experiments [3] and in literature [4] this number varies from 104-103 electrons per meta-atom. We now engineer a new cavity, resonant at 290 GHz, with an extremely reduced effective mode surface Seff = 4 × 10-14 m2 (FE simulations, CST), yielding large field enhancements above 1500 and allowing to enter the few (\textbackslashtextless;100) electron regime. It consist of a complementary metasurface with two very sharp metallic tips separated by a 60 nm gap (Fig.1(a, b)) on top of a single triangular quantum well. THz-TDS transmission experiments as a function of the applied magnetic field reveal strong anticrossing of the cavity mode with linear cyclotron dispersion. Measurements for arrays of only 12 cavities are reported in Fig.1(c). On the top horizontal axis we report the number of electrons occupying the topmost Landau level as a function of the magnetic field. At the anticrossing field of B=0.73 T we measure approximately 60 electrons ultra strongly coupled (Ω/ω- \textbackslashtextbar\textbackslashtextbar

The introduction of automation in cyber-physical systems (CPS) has raised major safety and security concerns. One attack vector is the sensing unit whose measurements can be manipulated by an adversary through attacks such as denial of service and delay injection. To secure an autonomous CPS from such attacks, we use a challenge response authentication (CRA) technique for detection of attack in active sensors data and estimate safe measurements using the recursive least square algorithm. For demonstrating effectiveness of our proposed approach, a car-follower model is considered where the follower vehicle's radar sensor measurements are manipulated in an attempt to cause a collision.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are spread everywhere throughout the world and are ordinarily used to gather physical data from the encompassing scene. WSN play a focal part in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision. WSN is rising as a noticeable component in the middleware connecting together the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT). But the integration of WSN to WoT brings new challenges that cannot be solved in a satisfactory way with traditional layer of security. This paper examined the security issue of integration between WSN and WoT, aiming to shed light on how the WSN and WoT security issue are understood and applied, both in academia and industries. This paper introduces security perfective of integration WSN to WoT which offers capabilities to identify and connect worldwide physical objects into a unified system. As a part of the integration, serious concerns are raised over access of personal information pertaining to device (smart thing) and individual privacy. The motivation of this paper is to summarizes the security threats of the integration and suggestion to mitigate the threat.

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.

The survey of related work in the very specialized field of information security (IS) ensurance for the Internet of Things (IoT) allowed us to work out a taxonomy of typical attacks against the IoT elements (with special attention to the IoT device protection). The key directions of countering these attacks were defined on this basis. According to the modern demand for the IoT big IS-related data processing, the application of Security Intelligence approach is proposed. The main direction of the future research, namely the IoT operational resilience, is indicated.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) represent a fundamental link between information technology (IT) systems and the devices that control industrial production and maintain critical infrastructure services that support our modern world. Increasingly, the interconnections among CPS and IT systems have created exploitable security vulnerabilities due to a number of factors, including a legacy of weak information security applications on CPS and the tendency of CPS operators to prioritize operational availability at the expense of integrity and confidentiality. As a result, CPS are subject to a number of threats from cyber attackers and cyber-physical attackers, including denial of service and even attacks against the integrity of the data in the system. The effects of these attacks extend beyond mere loss of data or the inability to access information system services. Attacks against CPS can cause physical damage in the real world. This paper reviews the challenges of providing information assurance services for CPS that operate critical infrastructure systems and industrial control systems. These methods are thorough measures to close integrity and confidentiality gaps in CPS and processes to highlight the security risks that remain. This paper also outlines approaches to reduce the overhead and complexity for security methods, as well as examine novel approaches, including covert communications channels, to increase CPS security.

Most of the social media platforms generate a massive amount of raw data that is slow-paced. On the other hand, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol, which has been extensively used by hacker community to discuss and share their knowledge, facilitates fast-paced and real-time text communications. Previous studies of malicious IRC behavior analysis were mostly either offline or batch processing. This results in a long response time for data collection, pre-processing, and threat detection. However, since the threats can use the latest vulnerabilities to exploit systems (e.g. zero-day attack) and which can spread fast using IRC channels. Current IRC channel monitoring techniques cannot provide the required fast detection and alerting. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to overcome this limitation by providing real-time and autonomic threat detection in IRC channels. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach using as an example the shadow brokers' leak exploit (the exploit leveraged by WannaCry ransomware attack) that was captured and detected by our framework.

As the use of wireless technologies increases significantly due to ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness and the increase in bandwidth, there is a critical need to make the wireless communications secure, and resilient to attacks or faults (malicious or natural). Wireless communications are inherently prone to cyberattacks due to the open access to the medium. While current wireless protocols have addressed the privacy issues, they have failed to provide effective solutions against denial of service attacks, session hijacking and jamming attacks. In this paper, we present a resilient wireless communication architecture based on Moving Target Defense, and Software Defined Radios (SDRs). The approach achieves its resilient operations by randomly changing the runtime characteristics of the wireless communications channels between different wireless nodes to make it extremely difficult to succeed in launching attacks. The runtime characteristics that can be changed include packet size, network address, modulation type, and the operating frequency of the channel. In addition, the lifespan for each configuration will be random. To reduce the overhead in switching between two consecutive configurations, we use two radio channels that are selected at random from a finite set of potential channels, one will be designated as an active channel while the second acts as a standby channel. This will harden the wireless communications attacks because the attackers have no clue on what channels are currently being used to exploit existing vulnerability and launch an attack. The experimental results and evaluation show that our approach can tolerate a wide range of attacks (Jamming, DOS and session attacks) against wireless networks.

This research paper identifies security issues; especially energy based security attacks and enhances security of the system. It is very essential to consider Security of the system to be developed in the initial Phases of the software Cycle of Software Development (SDLC) as many billions of bucks are drained owing to security flaws in software caused due to improper or no security process. Security breaches that occur on software system are in umpteen numbers. Scientific Literature propose many solutions to overcome security issues, all security mechanisms are reactive in nature. In this paper new security solution is proposed that is proactive in nature especially for energy based denial of service attacks which is frequent in the recent past. Proposed solution is based on energy consumption by system known as energy points.

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution promises to make our lives easier by providing cheap and always connected smart embedded devices, which can interact on the Internet and create added values for human needs. But all that glitters is not gold. Indeed, the other side of the coin is that, from a security perspective, this IoT revolution represents a potential disaster. This plethora of IoT devices that flooded the market were very badly protected, thus an easy prey for several families of malwares that can enslave and incorporate them in very large botnets. This, eventually, brought back to the top Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, making them more powerful and easier to achieve than ever. This paper aims at provide an up-to-date picture of DDoS attacks in the specific subject of the IoT, studying how these attacks work and considering the most common families in the IoT context, in terms of their nature and evolution through the years. It also explores the additional offensive capabilities that this arsenal of IoT malwares has available, to mine the security of Internet users and systems. We think that this up-to-date picture will be a valuable reference to the scientific community in order to take a first crucial step to tackle this urgent security issue.

Botnets have long been used for malicious purposes with huge economic costs to the society. With the proliferation of cheap but non-secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices generating large amounts of data, the potential for damage from botnets has increased manifold. There are several approaches to detect bots or botnets, though many traditional techniques are becoming less effective as botnets with centralized command & control structure are being replaced by peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets which are harder to detect. Several algorithms have been proposed in literature that use graph analysis or machine learning techniques to detect the overlay structure of P2P networks in communication graphs. Many of these algorithms however, depend on the availability of a universal communication graph or a communication graph aggregated from several ISPs, which is not likely to be available in reality. In real world deployments, significant gaps in communication graphs are expected and any solution proposed should be able to work with partial information. In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of some community detection algorithms in detecting P2P botnets, especially with partial information. We show that the approach can work with only about half of the nodes reporting their communication graphs, with only small increase in detection errors.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets have become one of the major threats in network security for serving as the infrastructure that responsible for various of cyber-crimes. Though a few existing work claimed to detect traditional botnets effectively, the problem of detecting P2P botnets involves more challenges. In this paper, we present PeerHunter, a community behavior analysis based method, which is capable of detecting botnets that communicate via a P2P structure. PeerHunter starts from a P2P hosts detection component. Then, it uses mutual contacts as the main feature to cluster bots into communities. Finally, it uses community behavior analysis to detect potential botnet communities and further identify bot candidates. Through extensive experiments with real and simulated network traces, PeerHunter can achieve very high detection rate and low false positives.

Software defined networking promises network operators to dramatically simplify network management. It provides flexibility and innovation through network programmability. With SDN, network management moves from codifying functionality in terms of low-level device configuration to building software that facilitates network management and debugging[1]. SDN provides new techniques to solve long-standing problems in networking like routing by separating the complexity of state distribution from network specification. Despite all the hype surrounding SDNs, exploiting its full potential is demanding. Security is still the major issue and a striking challenge that reduces the growth of SDNs. Moreover the introduction of various architectural components and up cycling of novel entities of SDN poses new security issues and threats. SDN is considered as major target for digital threats and cyber-attacks[2] and have more devastating effects than simple networks. Initial SDN design doesn't considered security as its part; therefore, it must be raised on the agenda. This article discusses the security solutions proposed to secure SDNs. We categorize the security solutions in the article by presenting a thematic taxonomy based on SDN architectural layers/interfaces[3], security measures and goals, simulation framework. Moreover, the literature also points out the possible attacks[2] targeting different layers/interfaces of SDNs. For securing SDNs, the potential requirements and their key enablers are also identified and presented. Also, the articles sketch the design of secure and dependable SDNs. At last, we discuss open issues and challenges of SDN security that may be rated appropriate to be handled by professionals and researchers in the future.

Information security deals with a large number of subjects like spoofed message detection, audio processing, video surveillance and cyber-attack detections. However the biggest threat for the homeland security is cyber-attacks. Distributed Denial of Service attack is one among them. Interconnected systems such as database server, web server, cloud computing servers etc., are now under threads from network attackers. Denial of service is common attack in the internet which causes problem for both the user and the service providers. Distributed attack sources can be used to enlarge the attack in case of Distributed Denial of Service so that the effect of the attack will be high. Distributed Denial of Service attacks aims at exhausting the communication and computational power of the network by flooding the packets through the network and making malicious traffic in the network. In order to be an effective service the DDoS attack must be detected and mitigated quickly before the legitimate user access the attacker's target. The group of systems that is used to perform the DoS attack is known as the botnets. This paper introduces the overview of the state of art in DDoS attack detection strategies.

The Tor Network, a hidden part of the Internet, is becoming an ideal hosting ground for illegal activities and services, including large drug markets, financial frauds, espionage, child sexual abuse. Researchers and law enforcement rely on manual investigations, which are both time-consuming and ultimately inefficient. The first part of this paper explores illicit and criminal content identified by prominent researchers in the dark web. We previously developed a web crawler that automatically searched websites on the internet based on pre-defined keywords and followed the hyperlinks in order to create a map of the network. This crawler has demonstrated previous success in locating and extracting data on child exploitation images, videos, keywords and linkages on the public internet. However, as Tor functions differently at the TCP level, and uses socket connections, further technical challenges are faced when crawling Tor. Some of the other inherent challenges for advanced Tor crawling include scalability, content selection tradeoffs, and social obligation. We discuss these challenges and the measures taken to meet them. Our modified web crawler for Tor, termed the “Dark Crawler” has been able to access Tor while simultaneously accessing the public internet. We present initial findings regarding what extremist and terrorist contents are present in Tor and how this content is connected to each other in a mapped network that facilitates dark web crimes. Our results so far indicate the most popular websites in the dark web are acting as catalysts for dark web expansion by providing necessary knowledgebase, support and services to build Tor hidden services and onion websites.

Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptographic currency that has experienced proliferating popularity over the past few years, is the common denominator in a wide variety of cybercrime. We perform a measurement analysis of CryptoLocker, a family of ransomware that encrypts a victim's files until a ransom is paid, within the Bitcoin ecosystem from September 5, 2013 through January 31, 2014. Using information collected from online fora, such as reddit and BitcoinTalk, as an initial starting point, we generate a cluster of 968 Bitcoin addresses belonging to CryptoLocker. We provide a lower bound for CryptoLocker's economy in Bitcoin and identify 795 ransom payments totalling 1,128.40 BTC (\$310,472.38), but show that the proceeds could have been worth upwards of \$1.1 million at peak valuation. By analyzing ransom payment timestamps both longitudinally across CryptoLocker's operating period and transversely across times of day, we detect changes in distributions and form conjectures on CryptoLocker that corroborate information from previous efforts. Additionally, we construct a network topology to detail CryptoLocker's financial infrastructure and obtain auxiliary information on the CryptoLocker operation. Most notably, we find evidence that suggests connections to popular Bitcoin services, such as Bitcoin Fog and BTC-e, and subtle links to other cybercrimes surrounding Bitcoin, such as the Sheep Marketplace scam of 2013. We use our study to underscore the value of measurement analyses and threat intelligence in understanding the erratic cybercrime landscape.