Biblio

Over the years cybercriminals have misused the Domain Name System (DNS) - a critical component of the Internet - to gain profit. Despite this persisting trend, little empirical information about the security of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and of the overall 'health' of the DNS ecosystem exists. In this paper, we present security metrics for this ecosystem and measure the operational values of such metrics using three representative phishing and malware datasets. We benchmark entire TLDs against the rest of the market. We explicitly distinguish these metrics from the idea of measuring security performance, because the measured values are driven by multiple factors, not just by the performance of the particular market player. We consider two types of security metrics: occurrence of abuse and persistence of abuse. In conjunction, they provide a good understanding of the overall health of a TLD. We demonstrate that attackers abuse a variety of free services with good reputation, affecting not only the reputation of those services, but of entire TLDs. We find that, when normalized by size, old TLDs like .com host more bad content than new generic TLDs. We propose a statistical regression model to analyze how the different properties of TLD intermediaries relate to abuse counts. We find that next to TLD size, abuse is positively associated with domain pricing (i.e. registries who provide free domain registrations witness more abuse). Last but not least, we observe a negative relation between the DNSSEC deployment rate and the count of phishing domains.

Trusted routing is a hot spot in network security. Lots of efforts have been made on trusted routing validation for Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP), e.g., using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to enhance the security of protocols, or routing monitoring systems. However, the former is limited by further deployment in the practical Internet, the latter depends on a complete, accurate, and fresh knowledge base-this is still a big challenge (Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are not willing to leak their routing policies). In this paper, inspired by the idea of centrally controlling in Software Defined Network (SDN), we propose a CENtrally Trusted Routing vAlidation framework, named CENTRA, which can automated collect routing information, centrally detect anomaly and deliver secure routing policy. We implement the proposed framework using NETCONF as the communication protocol and YANG as the data model. The experimental results reveal that CENTRA can detect and block anomalous routing in real time. Comparing to existing secure routing mechanism, CENTRA improves the detection efficiency and real-time significantly.

The online portion of modern life is growing at an astonishing rate, with the consequence that more of the user's critical information is stored online. This poses an immediate threat to privacy and security of the user's data. This work will cover the increasing dangers and security risks of adware, adware injection, and malware injection. These programs increase in direct proportion to the number of users on the Internet. Each of these programs presents an imminent threat to a user's privacy and sensitive information, anytime they utilize the Internet. We will discuss how current ad blockers are not the actual solution to these threats, but rather a premise to our work. Current ad blocking tools can be discovered by the web servers which often requires suppression of the ad blocking tool. Suppressing the tool creates vulnerabilities in a user's system, but even when the tool is active their system is still susceptible to peril. It is possible, even when an ad blocking tool is functioning, for it to allow adware content through. Our solution to the contemporary threats is our tool, MalFire.

Cloud computing is a revolution in IT technology that provides scalable, virtualized on-demand resources to the end users with greater flexibility, less maintenance and reduced infrastructure cost. These resources are supervised by different management organizations and provided over Internet using known networking protocols, standards and formats. The underlying technologies and legacy protocols contain bugs and vulnerabilities that can open doors for intrusion by the attackers. Attacks as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) are ones of the most frequent that inflict serious damage and affect the cloud performance. In a DDoS attack, the attacker usually uses innocent compromised computers (called zombies) by taking advantages of known or unknown bugs and vulnerabilities to send a large number of packets from these already-captured zombies to a server. This may occupy a major portion of network bandwidth of the victim cloud infrastructures or consume much of the servers time. Thus, in this work, we designed a DDoS detection system based on the C.4.5 algorithm to mitigate the DDoS threat. This algorithm, coupled with signature detection techniques, generates a decision tree to perform automatic, effective detection of signatures attacks for DDoS flooding attacks. To validate our system, we selected other machine learning techniques and compared the obtained results.

The majority of available wearable computing devices require communication with Internet servers for data analysis and storage, and rely on a paired smartphone to enable secure communication. However, many wearables are equipped with WiFi network interfaces, enabling direct communication with the Internet. Secure communication protocols could then run on these wearables themselves, yet it is not clear if they can be efficiently supported.,,,,In this paper, we show that wearables are ready for direct and secure Internet communication by means of experiments with both controlled local web servers and Internet servers. We observe that the overall energy consumption and communication delay can be reduced with direct Internet connection via WiFi from wearables compared to using smartphones as relays via Bluetooth. We also show that the additional HTTPS cost caused by TLS handshake and encryption is closely related to the number of parallel connections, and has the same relative impact on wearables and smartphones.

Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) was introduced as an elegant concept for secure data exchange due to its simplified key management by specifically addressing the asymmetric key distribution problems in multi-user scenarios. In the context of ad-hoc network connections that are of particular importance in the emerging Internet of Things, the simple key discovery procedures as provided by IBE are very beneficial in many situations. In this work we demonstrate for the first time that IBE has become practical even for a range of embedded devices that are populated with low-cost ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers or reconfigurable hardware components. More precisely, we adopt the IBE scheme proposed by Ducas et al. at ASIACRYPT 2014 based on the RLWE problem for which we provide implementation results for two security levels on the aforementioned embedded platforms. We give evidence that the implementations of the basic scheme are efficient, as for a security level of 80 bits it requires 103 ms and 36 ms for encryption and decryption, respectively, on the smallest ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller.

Cloud computing has emerged as a compelling vision for managing data and delivering query answering capability over the internet. This new way of computing also poses a real risk of disclosing confidential information to the cloud. Searchable encryption addresses this issue by allowing the cloud to compute the answer to a query based on the cipher texts of data and queries. Thanks to its inner product preservation property, the asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption (ASPE) has been adopted and enhanced in a growing number of works toperform a variety of queries and tasks in the cloud computingsetting. However, the security property of ASPE and its enhancedschemes has not been studied carefully. In this paper, we show acomplete disclosure of ASPE and several previously unknownsecurity risks of its enhanced schemes. Meanwhile, efficientalgorithms are proposed to learn the plaintext of data and queriesencrypted by these schemes with little or no knowledge beyondthe ciphertexts. We demonstrate these risks on real data sets.

Data security has become an issue of increasing importance, especially for Web applications and distributed databases. One solution is using cryptographic algorithms whose improvement has become a constant concern. The increasing complexity of these algorithms involves higher execution times, leading to an application performance decrease. This paper presents a comparison of execution times for three algorithms using asymmetric keys, depending on the size of the encryption/decryption keys: RSA, ElGamal, and ECIES. For this algorithms comparison, a benchmark using Java APIs and an application for testing them on a test database was created.

Cyber anonymity tools have attracted wide attention in resisting network traffic censorship and surveillance, and have played a crucial role for open communications over the Internet. The Onion Routing (Tor) is considered the prevailing technique for circumventing the traffic surveillance and providing cyber anonymity. Tor operates by tunneling a traffic through a series of relays, making such traffic to appear as if it originated from the last relay in the traffic path, rather than from the original user. However, Tor faced some obstructions in carrying out its goal effectively, such as insufficient performance and limited capacity. This paper presents a cyber anonymity technique based on software-defined networking; named SOR, which builds onion-routed tunnels across multiple anonymity service providers. SOR architecture enables any cloud tenants to participate in the anonymity service via software-defined networking. Our proposed architecture leverages the large capacity and robust connectivity of the commercial cloud networks to elevate the performance of the cyber anonymity service.

Deep web, a hidden and encrypted network that crawls beneath the surface web today has become a social hub for various criminals who carry out their crime through the cyber space and all the crime is being conducted and hosted on the Deep Web. This research paper is an effort to bring forth various techniques and ways in which an internet user can be safe online and protect his privacy through anonymity. Understanding how user's data and private information is phished and what are the risks of sharing personal information on social media.

Because the Internet makes human lives easier, many devices are connected to the Internet daily. The private data of individuals and large companies, including health-related data, user bank accounts, and military and manufacturing data, are increasingly accessible via the Internet. Because almost all data is now accessible through the Internet, protecting these valuable assets has become a major concern. The goal of cyber security is to protect such assets from unauthorized use. Attackers use automated tools and manual techniques to penetrate systems by exploiting existing vulnerabilities and software bugs. To provide good enough security; attack methodologies, vulnerability concepts and defence strategies should be thoroughly investigated. The main purpose of this study is to show that the patches released for existing vulnerabilities at the operating system (OS) level and in software programs does not completely prevent cyber-attack. Instead, producing specific patches for each company and fixing software bugs by being aware of the software running on each specific system can provide a better result. This study also demonstrates that firewalls, antivirus software, Windows Defender and other prevention techniques are not sufficient to prevent attacks. Instead, this study examines different aspects of penetration testing to determine vulnerable applications and hosts using the Nmap and Metasploit frameworks. For a test case, a virtualized system is used that includes different versions of Windows and Linux OS.

Due to the increasing threat of network attacks, Firewall has become crucial elements in network security, and have been widely deployed in most businesses and institutions for securing private networks. The function of a firewall is to examine each packet that passes through it and decide whether to letting them pass or halting them based on preconfigured rules and policies, so firewall now is the first defense line against cyber attacks. However most of people doesn't know how firewall works, and the most users of windows operating system doesn't know how to use the windows embedded firewall. This paper explains how firewall works, firewalls types, and all you need to know about firewall policies, then presents a novel application (QudsWall) developed by authors that manages windows embedded firewall and make it easy to use.

The rapid development of cloud computing has resulted in the emergence of numerous web services on the Internet. Selecting a suitable cloud service is becoming a major problem for users especially non-professionals. Quality of Service (QoS) is considered to be the criterion for judging web services. There are several Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based QoS prediction methods proposed in recent years. QoS values among different users may vary largely due to the network and geographical location. Moreover, QoS data provided by untrusted users will definitely affect the prediction accuracy. However, most existing methods seldom take both facts into consideration. In this paper, we present a trust-aware and location-based approach for web service QoS prediction. A trust value for each user is evaluated before the similarity calculation and the location is taken into account in similar neighbors selecting. A series of experiments are performed based on a realworld QoS dataset including 339 service users and 5,825 services. The experimental analysis shows that the accuracy of our method is much higher than other CF-based methods.

Caching query results is an efficient technique for Web search engines. A state-of-the-art approach named Static-Dynamic Cache (SDC) is widely used in practice. Replacement policy is the key factor on the performance of cache system, and has been widely studied such as LIRS, ARC, CLOCK, SKLRU and RANDOM in different research areas. In this paper, we discussed replacement policies for static-dynamic cache and conducted the experiments on real large scale query logs from two famous commercial Web search engine companies. The experimental results show that ARC replacement policy could work well with static-dynamic cache, especially for large scale query results cache.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular information platforms on the Internet. The user access pattern to Wikipedia pages depends on their relevance in the current worldwide social discourse. We use publically available statistics about the top-1000 most popular pages on each day to estimate the efficiency of caches for support of the platform. While the data volumes are moderate, the main goal of Wikipedia caches is to reduce access times for page views and edits. We study the impact of most popular pages on the achievable cache hit rate in comparison to Zipf request distributions and we include daily dynamics in popularity.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are some of the most persistent threats on the Internet today. The evolution of DDoS attacks calls for an in-depth analysis of those attacks. A better understanding of the attackers' behavior can provide insights to unveil patterns and strategies utilized by attackers. The prior art on the attackers' behavior analysis often falls in two aspects: it assumes that adversaries are static, and makes certain simplifying assumptions on their behavior, which often are not supported by real attack data. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach to designing and validating three DDoS attack models from temporal (e.g., attack magnitudes), spatial (e.g., attacker origin), and spatiotemporal (e.g., attack inter-launching time) perspectives. We design these models based on the analysis of traces consisting of more than 50,000 verified DDoS attacks from industrial mitigation operations. Each model is also validated by testing its effectiveness in accurately predicting future DDoS attacks. Comparisons against simple intuitive models further show that our models can more accurately capture the essential features of DDoS attacks.

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel concept of a large scale ecosystem of wireless actuators and computing technologies. ICN technologies are getting popular in the development of various applications to bring day-to-day comfort and ease in human life. The e-healthcare monitoring services is a subset of ICN services which has been utilized to monitor patient's health condition in a smart and ubiquitous way. However, there are several challenges and attacks on ICN. In this paper we have discussed ICN attacks and ICN based healthcare scenario. We have proposed a novel ICN stack for healthcare scenario for securing biomedical data communication instead of communication networks. However, the biomedical data communication between patient and Doctor requires reliable and secure networks for the global access.

The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), which is a promising technology to promote the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), has been proposed to connect millions of IP-based sensing devices over the open Internet. To support the mobility of these resource constrained sensing nodes, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed as the standard. Although the standard has specified some issues of security and mobility in 6LoWPANs, the issues of supporting secure group handovers have not been addressed much by the current existing solutions. In this paper, to reduce the handover latency and signaling cost, an efficient and secure group mobility scheme is designed to support seamless handovers for a group of resource constrained 6LoWPAN devices. With the consideration of the devices holding limited energy capacities, only simple hash and symmetric encryption method is used. The security analysis and the performance evaluation results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN group handover scheme could not only enhance the security functionalities but also support fast authentication for handovers.

The Internet of Things leads to the inter-connectivity of a wide range of devices. This heterogeneity of hardware and software poses significant challenges to security. Constrained IoT devices often do not have enough resources to carry the overhead of an intrusion protection system or complex security protocols. A typical initial step in network security is a network scan in order to find vulnerable nodes. In the context of IoT, the initiator of the scan can be particularly interested in finding constrained devices, assuming that they are easier targets. In IoT networks hosting devices of various types, performing a scan with a high discovery rate can be a challenging task, since low-power networks such as IEEE 802.15.4 are easily overloaded. In this paper, we propose an approach to increase the efficiency of network scans by combining them with active network measurements. The measurements allow the scanner to differentiate IoT nodes by the used network technology. We show that the knowledge gained from this differentiation can be used to control the scan strategy in order to reduce probe losses.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is extensively used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its ability to transmit IPv6 packet with low bandwidth and limited resources. 6LoWPAN has several operations in each layer. Most existing security challenges are focused on the network layer, which is represented by its routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL). RPL components include WSN nodes that have constrained resources. Therefore, the exposure of RPL to various attacks may lead to network damage. A sinkhole attack is a routing attack that could affect the network topology. This paper aims to investigate the existing detection mechanisms used in detecting sinkhole attack on RPL-based networks. This work categorizes and presents each mechanism according to certain aspects. Then, their advantages and drawbacks with regard to resource consumption and false positive rate are discussed and compared.

This paper addresses the need for standard communication protocols for IoT devices with limited power and computational capabilities. The world is rapidly changing with the proliferation and deployment of IoT devices. This will bring in new communication challenges as these devices are connected to Internet and need to communicate with each other in real time. The paper provides an overview of IoT system architecture and the forthcoming challenges it will bring. There is an urging need to establish standards for communication in the IoT world. With the recent development of new protocols like CoAP, 6LowPAN, IEEE 802.15.4 and Thread in different layers of OSI model, additional challenges also present themselves. Performance and data management is becoming more critical than ever before due to the complexity of connecting raging number of IoT devices. The performance of the systems dealing with IoT devices will require appropriate capacity planning the associated development of data centers. Finally, the paper also presents some reasonable approaches to address the above issues in the IoT world.

The veil of anonymity provided by smartphones with pre-paid SIM cards, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and distributed networks like Tor has drastically complicated the task of identifying users of social media during forensic investigations. In some cases, the text of a single posted message will be the only clue to an author's identity. How can we accurately predict who that author might be when the message may never exceed 140 characters on a service like Twitter? For the past 50 years, linguists, computer scientists, and scholars of the humanities have been jointly developing automated methods to identify authors based on the style of their writing. All authors possess peculiarities of habit that influence the form and content of their written works. These characteristics can often be quantified and measured using machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the methods of authorship attribution that can be applied to the problem of social media forensics. Furthermore, we examine emerging supervised learning-based methods that are effective for small sample sizes, and provide step-by-step explanations for several scalable approaches as instructional case studies for newcomers to the field. We argue that there is a significant need in forensics for new authorship attribution algorithms that can exploit context, can process multi-modal data, and are tolerant to incomplete knowledge of the space of all possible authors at training time.

Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) is the backbone of modern mobile communication. SIM can be used to store a number of user sensitive information such as user contacts, SMS, banking information (some banking applications store user credentials on the SIM) etc. Unfortunately, the current SIM model has a major weakness. When the mobile device is lost, an adversary can simply steal a user's SIM and use it. He/she can then extract the user's sensitive information stored on the SIM. Moreover, The adversary can then pose as the user and communicate with the contacts stored on the SIM. This opens up the avenue to a large number of social engineering techniques. Additionally, if the user has provided his/her number as a recovery option for some accounts, the adversary can get access to them. The current methodology to deal with a stolen SIM is to contact your particular service provider and report a theft. The service provider then blocks the services on your SIM, but the adversary still has access to the data which is stored on the SIM. Therefore, a secure scheme is required to ensure that only legal users are able to access and utilize their SIM.

The majority of business activity of our integrated and connected world takes place in networks based on cloud computing infrastructure that cross national, geographic and jurisdictional boundaries. Such an efficient entity interconnection is made possible through an emerging networking paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN) that intends to vastly simplify policy enforcement and network reconfiguration in a dynamic manner. However, despite the obvious advantages this novel networking paradigm introduces, its increased attack surface compared to traditional networking deployments proved to be a thorny issue that creates skepticism when safety-critical applications are considered. Especially when SDN is used to support Internet-of-Things (IoT)-related networking elements, additional security concerns rise, due to the elevated vulnerability of such deployments to specific types of attacks and the necessity of inter-cloud communication any IoT application would require. The overall number of connected nodes makes the efficient monitoring of all entities a real challenge, that must be tackled to prevent system degradation and service outage. This position paper provides an overview of common security issues of SDN when linked to IoT clouds, describes the design principals of the recently introduced Blockchain paradigm and advocates the reasons that render Blockchain as a significant security factor for solutions where SDN and IoT are involved.

Traditional information Security Risk Assessment algorithms are mainly used for evaluating small scale of information system, not suitable for massive information systems in Energy Internet. To solve the problem, this paper proposes an Information Security Risk Algorithm based on Dynamic Risk Propagation (ISRADRP). ISRADRP firstly divides information systems in the Energy Internet into different partitions according to their logical network location. Then, ISRADRP computes each partition's risk value without considering threat propagation effect via RM algorithm. Furthermore, ISRADRP calculates inside and outside propagation risk value for each partition according to Dependency Structure Matrix. Finally, the security bottleneck of systems will be identified and the overall risk value of information system will be obtained.