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Cybercriminals use domain generation algorithms (DGAs) to prevent their servers from being potentially blacklisted or shut down. Existing reverse engineering techniques for DGA detection is labor intensive, extremely time-consuming, prone to human errors, and have significant limitations. Hence, an automated real-time technique with a high detection rate is warranted in such applications. In this article, we present a novel technique to detect randomly generated domain names and domain name system (DNS) homograph attacks without the need for any reverse engineering or using nonexistent domain (NXDomain) inspection using deep learning. We provide an extensive evaluation of our model over four large, real-world, publicly available datasets. We further investigate the robustness of our model against three different adversarial attacks: DeepDGA, CharBot, and MaskDGA. Our evaluation demonstrates that our method is effectively able to identify DNS homograph attacks and DGAs and also is resilient to common evading cyberattacks. Promising results show that our approach provides a more effective detection rate with an accuracy of 0.99. Additionally, the performance of our model is compared against the most popular deep learning architectures. Our findings highlight the essential need for more robust detection models to counter adversarial learning.

Since the nineties, the Man-in-The-Middle (MITM) attack has been one of the most effective strategies adopted for compromising information security in network environments. In this paper, we focus our attention on ARP cache poisoning, which is one of the most well-known and more adopted techniques for performing MITM attacks in Ethernet local area networks. More precisely, we will prove that, in network environments with at least one malicious host in the absence of cryptography, an ARP cache poisoning attack cannot be avoided. Subsequently, we advance ArpON, an efficient and effective solution to counteract ARP cache poisoning, and we use a model-checker for verifying its safety property. Our main finding, in accordance with the above impossibility result, is that the only event that compromises the safety of ArpON is a cache poisoning that nevertheless is removed by ArpON itself after a very short period, thus making it practically infeasible to perpetrate an ARP cache poisoning attack on network hosts where ArpON is installed.

In Named Data Networking, cache pollution, cache poisoning and interest flooding are three popular types of attacks that can drastically degrade the network performance. However, previous methods for mitigating these attacks are not sufficiently effective or efficient. Also, they cannot simultaneously handle the three attacks, or the case that core routers or edge routers are compromised. To handle these problems, we propose an effective and lightweight countermeasure scheme. It consists of token-based router monitoring policy (TRM), hierarchical consensus-based trust management (HCT), and popularity-based probabilistic caching and caching replacement policy (PPC). In TRM, each edge router monitors and evaluates each data requester's probability of launching the cache pollution attack and each data provider's probability of launching the cache poisoning attack, and accordingly assigns, rewards and penalizes tokens to them to control their data request and data provision activities. Thus, the interest flooding attack can also be mitigated by limiting the consumption of tokens. In HCT, each core router manages its directly connected edge routers using TRM, and the core routers trust each other through adopting the concept of consensus in Blockchain. Thus, the edge and core routers executing monitoring and evaluation are trustable. PPC uses probabilistic caching and caching replacement based on the popularity of received content to further mitigate the attacks and reduce caching and data verification overhead. Results from simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme has better performance, in terms of interest satisfaction ratio and average end-to-end delay than current mechanisms.

Network caching in named data networks (NDN) is essential for improving the potentialities of the conventional IP networking. The concept of network caching is necessary for achieving optimal bandwidth utilization and location independent data access during multipath data dissemination. However, network caching in NDN makes it highly vulnerable to security breaches such as access content packets violation, flooding or malicious injection of packets and content cache poisoning. In this paper, a dynamic forest of random subsets-based one-time signature-based capability enhancing security architecture (DFORS-CSA) is proposed for attaining distributed data authentication. This DFORS-CSA security architecture leverages the potential in exploring the access privileges of the packets disseminated in the network. It includes the capability through which the routes can perform authentication of packets forwarded in NDN. It supports a significant verification strategy through which the routers can ensure the packet timeliness for resolving the problems that get introduced through unsolicited packets exchanged during flooding-based denial of service attacks. The simulation experiments of the proposed DFORS-CSA is conducted using the open source CCNs platform and Planetlab simulator. The results of the proposed DFORS-CSA confirmed its predominance in minimizing overall delay and time incurred in the bit vector generation by 16.74 and 15.63%, excellent to the baseline approaches. The results of the proposed DFORS-CSA also conformed a mean improvement in the precision rate by 10.21%, true positive rate by 8.94% and F-measure by 7.62% with decreased false positive rate of 8.56%, during the process of detecting content cache poisoning attack.

Mobile edge caching is a promising technology for the next-generation mobile networks to effectively offer service environment and cloud-storage capabilities at the edge of networks. By exploiting the storage and computing resources at the network edge, mobile edge caching can significantly reduce service latency, decrease network load, and improve user experience. On the other hand, edge caching is subject to a number of threats regarding privacy violation and security breach. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of mobile edge caching, and address the key problems regarding why, where, what, and how to cache. Then, we examine the potential cyber threats, including cache poisoning attacks, cache pollution attacks, cache side-channel attacks, and cache deception attacks, which result in huge concerns about privacy, security, and trust in content placement, content delivery, and content usage for mobile users, respectively. After that, we propose a service-oriented and location-based efficient key distribution protocol (SOLEK) as an example in response to efficient and secure content delivery in mobile edge caching. Finally, we discuss the potential techniques for privacy-preserving content placement, efficient and secure content delivery, and trustful content usage, which are expected to draw more attention and efforts into secure edge caching., This article has been accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine

The Domain Name System (DNS) plays a crucial role in the Internet. However, it is vulnerable to many attacks such as the cache poisoning attack and DDoS attack. Though some countermeasures have been proposed, they still have some limitations. In this paper, we propose B-DNS, a blockchain-based domain name system, which can provide a secure and efficient DNS service. B-DNS fills up two shortcomings of current blockchain-based DNS, namely computation-heavy Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol and inefficient query, by building a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol and an index of domains. We propose a novel way to quantitatively compare the security of B-DNS and legacy DNS in terms of attack success rate, attack cost, and attack surface. Our experiments show that the probability of a successful attack on B-DNS is 1% of a successful attack on legacy DNS, the attack cost goes up a million times in B-DNS, and the attack surface of B-DNS is far smaller than that of legacy DNS. The query performance evaluation of B-DNS shows that B-DNS can achieve similar or even less query latency than state-of-the-art commercial DNS implementations.

Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical service for enterprise operations, and is often made openly accessible across firewalls. Malicious actors use this fact to attack organizational DNS servers, or use them as reflectors to attack other victims. Further, attackers can operate with little resources, can hide behind open recursive resolvers, and can amplify their attack volume manifold. The rising frequency and effectiveness of DNS-based DDoS attacks make this a growing concern for organizations. Solutions available today, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, use combinations of black-lists of malicious sources and thresholds on DNS traffic volumes to detect and defend against volumetric attacks, which are not robust to attack sources that morph their identity or adapt their rates to evade detection. We propose a method for detecting distributed DNS attacks that uses a hierarchical graph structure to track DNS traffic at three levels of host, subnet, and autonomous system (AS), combined with machine learning that identifies anomalous behaviors at various levels of the hierarchy. Our method can detect distributed attacks even with low rates and stealthy patterns. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We analyze real DNS traffic over a week (nearly 400M packets) from the edges of two large enterprise networks to highlight various types of incoming DNS queries and the behavior of malicious entities generating query scans and floods; (2) We develop a hierarchical graph structure to monitor DNS activity, identify key attributes, and train/tune/evaluate anomaly detection models for various levels of the hierarchy, yielding more than 99% accuracy at each level; and (3) We apply our scheme to a month’s worth of DNS data from the two enterprises and compare the results against blacklists and firewall logs to demonstrate its ability in detecting distributed attacks that might be missed by legacy methods while maintaining a decent real-time performance.

When DNS was created, nobody expected that it would have become the base for the digital economy and a prime target for cybercriminals. And nobody expected that one main asset of the digital economy would have been users’ browsing habits, putting at risk their privacy. The DNS was designed and implemented according to speed, scalability, and reliability criteria, whereas security and privacy did not fit in the objectives. Although the first attacks were already conceived about thirty years ago, the DNS infrastructure - with a bunch of improvements but its original design - continues to play a pivotal role in enabling access to services, data and devices. And, despite the fairly widespread adoption of DNSSEC security extensions in recent years, DNS attacks are becoming more and more frequent, sophisticated and dangerous. They are global, varied, dynamic and can circumvent traditional security systems such as next-generation firewalls and data loss prevention systems. A revisitation of DNS assumptions has been proposed in very different ways, reflecting diverse point of views in terms of Internet governance and user freedom, and a great effort is in place by standardization bodies, industry consortia and academic research to converge toward an updated design and implementation. The present work overviews the most promising proposals, trying to shed some insight on the future of DNS.

The concept of network caching is determined to be the potential requirement of named data networks (NDN) for enhancing the capabilities of the traditional IP networking. It is responsible for location independent data accesses and optimal bandwidth utilization in multi-path data dissemination. However, the network caching process in NDN introduces security challenges such as content cache poisoning, malicious injection or flooding of the packets and violation in accessing content packets. In this paper, an Improved Merkle Hash Tree-based one-time signature scheme for capability-enhanced security enforcing architecture (IMHT-OTSS-CSEA) is proposed for provisioning data authenticity in a distributed manner for leveraging the capabilities to inform the access privileges of the packets during the process of data dissemination. It is proposed for permitting the routers to verify the forwarded packets’ authenticity in NDN. It is capable in handling the issues that emerge from unsolicited packets during a flooding-based denial of service attacks by supporting the indispensable verification process in routers that confirms the timeliness of packets. The simulation experiments conducted using the open source CCNs platform and Planetlab confirmed a significant mean reduction in delay of 14.61%, superior to the benchmarked schemes. It is identified to minimize the delay incurred in generating bit vectors by a average margin of 13.06%, excellent to the baseline approaches. It also confirmed a mean increase in the true positive rate of 5.42%, a mean increase in the precision rate of 6.04%, decrease in false positive rate of 6.82% and increase in F-measure of 5.62% compared to the baseline approaches in the context of detecting content cache pollution attack respectively.

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a translation between readable domain names and IP addresses. The DNS is a key infrastructure component of the Internet and a prime target for a variety of attacks. One of the most significant threat to the DNS's wellbeing is a DNS poisoning attack, in which the DNS responses are maliciously replaced, or poisoned, by an attacker. To identify this kind of attack, we start by an analysis of different kinds of response times. We present an analysis of typical and atypical response times, while differentiating between the different levels of DNS servers' response times, from root servers down to internal caching servers. We successfully identify empirical DNS poisoning attacks based on a novel method for DNS response timing analysis. We then present a system we developed to validate our technique that does not require any changes to the DNS protocol or any existing network equipment. Our validation system tested data from different architectures including LAN and cloud environments and real data from an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Our method and system differ from most other DNS poisoning detection methods and achieved high detection rates exceeding 99%. These findings suggest that when used in conjunction with other methods, they can considerably enhance the accuracy of these methods.

This paper presents a study of attack planessurfaces and possible ways of conducting various attacks on decentralized systems based on Blockchain technology. To accomplish the task, the effectiveness of the attack is studied relative to the plane of its application, namely, relatively: cryptographic designs of Blockchain technology, distributed architecture of systems based on Blockchain technology, Blockchain application context. Several attacks have been identified for each of these planes, including malicious mining strategies, coordinated peer behavior, 51% attacks, domain name attacks (DNS), distributed denial of service attacks, delayed consensus achieving, Blockchain branching, orphaned and obsolete blocks, digital wallet thefts and privacy attacks.An attack by malicious mining allows an attacker to increase rewards by intentionally keeping his blocks closed in order to obtain a longer version of the Blockchain register than the current main version of the register. A 51% attack occurs when a single attacker, a group of nodes, or a mining pool (a combination of miners) in a network reaches most of the total processing power of mining in the system and gets the ability to manipulate the functionality of the Blockchain system. In the plane of DNS attacks, an attacker can potentially isolate peers of the Blockchain system, distribute fake blocks with fraudulent transactions among new nodes, and invalidate transactions. Manifestations of DDoS attacks can vary, depending on the nature of the functionality of the Blockchain application, the features of its network architecture and the behavior of peer nodes. Measures to counter attacks on peer-to-peer peer-to-peer architecture are considered.

DNS is one of the fundamental and ancient protocols on the Internet that supports many network applications and services. Unfortunately, DNS was designed without security in mind and is subject to a variety of serious attacks, one of which is the well-known DNS cache poisoning attack. Over the decades of evolution, it has proven extraordinarily challenging to retrofit strong security features into it. To date, only weaker versions of defenses based on the principle of randomization have been widely deployed, e.g., the randomization of UDP ephemeral port number, making it hard for an off-path attacker to guess the secret. However, as it has been shown recently, such randomness is subject to clever network side channel attacks, which can effectively derandomize the ephemeral port number. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of the previously overlooked attack surface, and are able to uncover even stronger side channels that have existed for over a decade in Linux kernels. The side channels affect not only Linux but also a wide range of DNS software running on top of it, including BIND, Unbound and dnsmasq. We also find about 38% of open resolvers (by frontend IPs) and 14% (by backend IPs) are vulnerable including the popular DNS services such as OpenDNS and Quad9. We have extensively validated the attack experimentally under realistic configuration and network conditions and showed that it works reliably and fast.

Following the recent off-path attacks against PKI, Let's Encrypt deployed in 2020 domain validation from multiple vantage points to ensure security even against the stronger on-path MitM adversaries. The idea behind such distributed domain validation is that even if the adversary can hijack traffic of some vantage points, it will not be able to intercept traffic of all the vantage points to all the nameservers in a domain. In this work we show that two central design issues of the distributed domain validation of Let's Encrypt make it vulnerable to downgrade attacks: (1) the vantage points are selected from a small fixed set of vantage points, and (2) the way the vantage points select the nameservers in target domains can be manipulated by a remote adversary. We develop off-path methodologies, based on these observations, to launch downgrade attacks against Let's Encrypt. The downgrade attacks reduce the validation with 'multiple vantage points to multiple nameservers', to validation with 'multiple vantage points to a single attacker-selected nameserver'. Through experimental evaluations with Let's Encrypt and the 1M-Let's Encrypt-certified domains, we find that our off-path attacker can successfully launch downgrade attacks against more than 24.53% of the domains, rendering Let's Encrypt to use a single nameserver for validation with them. We then develop an automated off-path attack against the 'single-server'-domain validation for these 24.53% domains, to obtain fraudulent certificates for more than 107K domains, which constitute 10% of the 1M domains in our dataset. We also evaluate our attacks against other major CAs and compare the security and efforts needed to launch the attacks, to those needed to launch the attacks against Let's Encrypt. We provide recommendations for mitigations against our attacks.

In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic constructs, 2) the distributed architecture of the systems using Blockchain, and 3) the Blockchain application context. To each of those contributing factors, we outline several attacks, including selfish mining, the 51% attack, DNS attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, consensus delay (due to selfish behavior or distributed denial-of-service attacks), Blockchain forks, orphaned and stale blocks, block ingestion, wallet thefts, smart contract attacks, and privacy attacks. We also explore the causal relationships between these attacks to demonstrate how various attack vectors are connected to one another. A secondary contribution of this work is outlining effective defense measures taken by the Blockchain technology or proposed by researchers to mitigate the effects of these attacks and patch associated vulnerabilities.

The authors implement common attacks on a DNS server and demonstrate that DNSSEC is an effective solution to counter DNS security flaws. This research demonstrates how to counter the zone transfer attack via the generation of DNSSEC keys on the name servers which prevent attackers from obtaining a full zone transfer as its request for the transfer without the keys was denied by the primary server. This article also provides a detailed scenario of how DNSSEC can be used as a mechanism to protect against the attack if an attacker tried to perform Cache Poisoning. The authors ultimately show that a DNSSEC server will not accept responses from unauthorised entities and would only accept responses which are authenticated throughout the DNSSEC chain of trust.

Network utilization reached its maximum level due to the availability of high-end technologies in the least cost. This enabled the network users to share the sensitive information like account details, patient records, genomics details for biomedical research and defence details leading to cyber-war. Data are vulnerable at any level of communication. The link-layer Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is initiated for any data communication to take place among the hosts in a LAN. Because of the stateless nature of this protocol, it has been misused for illegitimate activities. These activities lead to the most devasting attacks like Denial of Service, Man-in-the-Middle, host impersonation, sniffing, and cache poisoning. Though various host-based and network-based intrusion detection/prevention techniques exist, they fail to provide a complete solution for this type of poisoning. This paper analyzes the existing defence systems against ARP attacks and proposes three different techniques for detecting and preventing the ARP attacks. The three techniques ensure security of traditional ARP and its impact in Medical computing where a single bit inversion could lead to wrong diagnosis.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a key part of the infrastructure of the Internet. Recent discussions have centered on the removal of the shared DNS resolver and the use of a local full-service resolver instead. From the viewpoint of the cache mechanism, these discussions involve removing the shared DNS cache from the Internet. Although the removal of unnecessary parts from a total system tends to simplify the system, such a large configuration change in the system would need to be be carefully analyzed before its actual deployment. This paper presents our analysis of the effect of a shared DNS resolver based on the campus network traffic. Our findings were as follows: 1) this removal can be expected to amplify the DNS traffic by about 3.3 times, 2) the amplification ratio on the root DNS is much higher (about 10.9 times), and 3) removal of all caching systems from the Internet is likely to amplify the DNS traffic by approximately 12.1 times. Thus, the above-mentioned shared DNS resolver removal should not be considered. Our data analysis also revealed: 4) an increase in the number of clients that do not have a local DNS cache and generate repeated queries at short intervals (less than 1 min). 5) Since the amount of traffic from such clients is not small (about 95.0% of total DNS traffic), the deployment of a local cache itself is feasible.

The Moving Target Defense (MTD) has been widely discussed in many communities to upgrade the network reliability, survivability, dependability , etc. However, utilizing MTD in privacy protection still needs more investigations. In this paper, we propose a smart collaborative distribution scheme to enhance the privacy based on MTD guidelines. A target application scenario is the Domain Name System (DNS) that is experiencing serious and complex privacy issues. The preliminary and potential risks are firstly analyzed based on DNS attack approaches, DNS server locations and the vulnerability of user privacy. Then, the details of our scheme are illustrated through port number assignment patterns, main procedures of dynamic port hopping and the implementation method. To quantitatively evaluate the performance, an analytical model was established from theoretical perspectives. The relationships between multiple parameters and overall system capacity are explored as well. The validation results demonstrate that the smart collaborative distribution is able to improve the privacy without affecting the basic DNS functionality.

DNS Water Torture (also known as Random Subdomain attack) has been gaining popularity since the severe impact of the 2016 Mirai attack on Dyn DNS servers, which caused a large number of sites to become unavailable. One existing solution is rate limiting, which is not effective in cases where the attack is highly distributed. A more robust solution is provided by DNSSEC, which enables a range of subdomains to be declared as non-existent following a single NXDOMAIN response. However, the deployment of DNSSEC has been limited and the resolver needs to explicitly support this feature. DNS resolver, meaning it does not require any resolver compatibility and can potentially react to the attack at an earlier stage and avoid much of the malicious traffic generated by the attack. We present WORD, a system for statistical detection of DNS Water Torture that is implemented directly in the data plane using the P4 language. WORD efficiently collects data about DNS requests and responses on a per-domain basis, and alerts the control plane if malicious traffic is detected. The solution we present succeeds in detecting the attack within the notably confined resources of the data plane, while reducing false positives by separately addressing domains which naturally have large amounts of subdomains (e.g. wordpress). In addition, our solution is easily expandable to further DNS related data plane processing, such as other types of DNS attacks, or collection of other DNS statistics in the data plane.

We perform the first analysis of methodologies for launching DNS cache poisoning: manipulation at the IP layer, hijack of the inter-domain routing and probing open ports via side channels. We evaluate these methodologies against DNS resolvers in the Internet and compare them with respect to effectiveness, applicability and stealth. Our study shows that DNS cache poisoning is a practical and pervasive threat. We then demonstrate cross-layer attacks that leverage DNS cache poisoning for attacking popular systems, ranging from security mechanisms, such as RPKI, to applications, such as VoIP. In addition to more traditional adversarial goals, most notably impersonation and Denial of Service, we show for the first time that DNS cache poisoning can even enable adversaries to bypass cryptographic defences: we demonstrate how DNS cache poisoning can facilitate BGP prefix hijacking of networks protected with RPKI even when all the other networks apply route origin validation to filter invalid BGP announcements. Our study shows that DNS plays a much more central role in the Internet security than previously assumed. We recommend mitigations for securing the applications and for preventing cache poisoning.

The research and operational communities believe that TCP provides protection against IP fragmentation attacks and recommend that servers avoid sending DNS responses over UDP but use TCP instead. In this work we show that IP fragmentation attacks also apply to servers that communicate over TCP. Our measurements indicate that in the 100K-top Alexa domains there are 393 additional domains whose nameservers can be forced to (source) fragment IP packets that contain TCP segments. In contrast, responses from these domains cannot be forced to fragment when sent over UDP. Our study not only shows that the recommendation to use TCP instead of UDP in order to avoid attacks that exploit fragmentation is risky, but it also unveils that the attack surface due to fragmentation is larger than was previously believed. We evaluate IP fragmentation-based DNS cache poisoning attacks against DNS responses over TCP.

Information Centric Network (ICN) is upcoming next-generation internet. The ubiquitous caching is primary goal of ICN to reduce the content latency and increase the user satisfaction ratio in the network. Due to this pervasive caching, its prone to security attack namely Cache pollution Attack (CPA) and cache poisoning attack. From the profound literature survey, CPA attacks are more vulnerable than other security threats. In this paper, we propose the Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (FuCL) for CPA attack detection in ICN. Then we propose a novel Multi-Queue Management technique for uninterrupted service provisioning to user during the attack period. This hybrid approach utilize the best of Active Queue Management (AQM) for assigning service scheduling for each users. We are the first to leverage the Fuzzy decision making for content prioritization in the queue. Finally, we adopt the fuzzy based cache replacement algorithm to prevent the malicious content not being cached in CS. The experiments are carried over the ICN testbed and proves the proposed methodology detects the attack with better detection ratio and achieved the higher cache hit ratio compared to state-of-art solutions.

The research and operational community believe that TCP provides protection against IP fragmentation based attacks and recommend that servers avoid sending responses over UDP and use TCP instead. In this work we show for the first time that IP fragmentation attacks may also apply to communication over TCP. We perform a study of the nameservers in the 100K-top Alexa domains and find that 454 domains are vulnerable to IP fragmentation attacks. Of these domains, we find 366 additional domains that are vulnerable only to IP fragmentation attacks on communication with TCP. We also find that the servers vulnerable to TCP fragmentation can be forced to fragment packets to much smaller sizes (of less than 292 bytes) than servers vulnerable to UDP fragmentation (not below 548 bytes). This makes the impact of the attacks against servers vulnerable to fragmentation of TCP segments much more detrimental. Our study not only shows that the recommendation to use TCP and avoid UDP is risky but it also shows that the attack surface due to fragmentation is larger than was previously believed. We evaluate known IP fragmentation-based DNS cache poisoning attacks against DNS responses over TCP.

The proliferation of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technologies make them a lucrative target of attacks. While many attack vectors have been uncovered, one critical vector has not yet received attention: hijacking telephony via DNS cache poisoning. We demonstrate practical VoIP hijack attacks by manipulating DNS responses with a weak off-path attacker. We evaluate our attacks against popular telephony VoIP systems in the Internet and provide a live demo of the attack against Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol at https://sit4.me/M4.

In the era of cloud technology, all the emails sent from one person to another needs to be secure. Security attacks like email phishing, EBomb, DNS spoofing and so on have become a trend in this digital era. Among the said attacks, email phishing has been observed to be most common to be used by attackers to trap victims using fake email with embedded malwares, which is not made aware of non-cyber professionals. With the current pandemic that is Covid-19, which is storming the whole world and enforcing people all over to stay indoors, thus indirectly increasing the online digital footprints of all, so there’s an increase in SMB(Server message block) port all over the world which is leading attackers to find their victims easily by unique, dynamic and various other vulnerabilities which no standard virus, malware detection software which was before being provided by the IT companies to its employees and for general internet users; have proven to be not that effective. so we propose a different approach along with a tool kit that will work in identifying the embedded malware files and fake websites more dynamically and effectively.

During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts, trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to reduce risks when accessing their online services. This includes catering to secure identification of service, secure resolution of name to network service, and content security and privacy as a minimum base for trustworthy communication. In this paper, we take a first look at Alerting Authorities (AA) in the US and investigate security measures related to trustworthy and secure communication. We study the domain namespace structure, DNSSEC penetration, and web certificates. We introduce an integrative threat model to better understand whether and how the online presence and services of AAs are harmed. As an illustrative example, we investigate 1,388 Alerting Authorities. We observe partial heightened security relative to the global Internet trends, yet find cause for concern as about 78% of service providers fail to deploy measures of trustworthy service provision. Our analysis shows two major shortcomings. First, how the DNS ecosystem is leveraged: about 50% of organizations do not own their dedicated domain names and are dependent on others, 55% opt for unrestricted-use namespaces, which simplifies phishing, and less than 4% of unique AA domain names are secured by DNSSEC, which can lead to DNS poisoning and possibly to certificate misissuance. Second, how Web PKI certificates are utilized: 15% of all hosts provide none or invalid certificates, thus cannot cater to confidentiality and data integrity, 64% of the hosts provide domain validation certification that lack any identity information, and shared certificates have gained on popularity, which leads to fate-sharing and can be a cause for instability., 12 pages and 8 figures

Cyber-security for years has been a challenging topic for the research community and most of these attacks have been directed at one of the most critical Internet infrastructure, the domain name system (DNS). DNS attacks are usually catastrophic and often results in loss of sensitive information, hence this paper aims at proffering a solution to these type of attacks. In this paper, a two-stage classification process is proposed for mitigating DNS attacks. The proposed scheme employs long short-term memory in the first stage a convolutional neural network at the second stage. Simulation results show a good classification accuracy for both stages of the proposed scheme.

The risk from DNS poisoning, tunneling and hijacking has gone up exponentially. Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and associated or alternative technologies like DNS over TLS, also known as DOT, and DNS over HTTP/s, also known as DOH can provide the needed security hardening and protection, but present both implementation challenges and some security issues. Security solutions should be more straightforward. CISOs must also make the case to have NTP and DNS security services be part of the security stack.

The Domain Name System (DNS) has been frequently abused for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and cache poisoning because it relies on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Since UDP is connection-less, it is trivial for an attacker to spoof the source of a DNS query or response. DNS Cookies, a protocol standardized in 2016, add pseudo-random values to DNS packets to provide identity management and prevent spoofing attacks. In this paper, we present the first study measuring the deployment of DNS Cookies in nearly all aspects of the DNS architecture. We also provide an analysis of the current benefits of DNS Cookies and the next steps for stricter deployment. Our findings show that cookie use is limited to less than 30% of servers and 10% of recursive clients. We also find several configuration issues that could lead to substantial problems if cookies were strictly required. Overall, DNS Cookies provide limited benefit in a majority of situations, and, given current deployment, do not prevent DDoS or cache poisoning attacks.

Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers should consider blockchain vulnerabilities and eliminate them before the deployment of the system. In this paper, we demonstrate a statistical model checking approach for the verification of blockchain systems on three real-world attack scenarios. We build and verify models of DNS attack, double-spending with memory pool flooding, and consensus delay scenario. After that, we analyze experimental results and propose solutions to avoid these kinds of attacks., Comment: In Proceedings SCSS 2021, arXiv:2109.02501

In this paper, we shed new light on the DNS amplification ecosystem, by studying complementary data sources, bolstered by orthogonal methodologies. First, we introduce a passive attack detection method for the Internet core, i.e., at Internet eXchange Points (IXPs). Surprisingly, IXPs and honeypots observe mostly disjoint sets of attacks: 96% of IXP-inferred attacks were invisible to a sizable honeypot platform. Second, we assess the effectiveness of observed DNS attacks by studying IXP traces jointly with diverse data from independent measurement infrastructures. We find that attackers efficiently detect new reflectors and purposefully rotate between them. At the same time, we reveal that attackers are a small step away from bringing about significantly higher amplification factors (14x). Third, we identify and fingerprint a major attack entity by studying patterns in attack traces. We show that this entity dominates the DNS amplification ecosystem by carrying out 59% of the attacks, and provide an in-depth analysis of its behavior over time. Finally, our results reveal that operators of various .gov names do not adhere to DNSSEC key rollover best practices, which exacerbates amplification potential. We can verifiably connect this operational behavior to misuses and attacker decision-making., Comment: Proc. of ACM IMC'21, camera-ready

Evil Twin Wi-Fi attack is an attack on the 802.11 IEEE standard. The attack poses a threat to wireless connections. Evil Twin Wi-Fi attack is one of the attacks which has been there for a long time. Once the Evil Twin Wi-Fi attack is performed this acts as a gateway to many other attacks such as DNS spoofing, SSL Strip, IP Spoofing, and many more attacks. Thus, preventing the attack is essential for privacy and data security. This paper will be going through in detail how the attack is performed and different measures to prevent the attack. The proposed algorithm sniffs for fake AP using the whitelist in all the channels, once an unauthorized AP is detected the user has an option to de-authenticate any user in the unauthorized network in case any clients do connect to it by accident also the algorithm will be checking if any de-authentication frame is being sent to any of the AP to know which of the AP is being compromised. The efficiency of proposed approach is verified by simulating and mitigating the evil-twin attack.

Network with the internet has grown-up very faster compared with any other technology around the world. From the beginning of the Internet, the Domain name system (DNS) is an integral and important part of it. The primary task of DNS is to redirect the users at correct computers, applications, and files by mapping IP and domain name. Due to certain security flaws of DNS, it is always a major attack target for attackers like DNSbased malware, DNS-amplification, false-positive triggering, DNS tunneling, etc. DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) are recently developed and deployed by Google and Cloudflare to prevent these types of attacks. DoT and DoH are the standard protocols which mainly designed for privacy and security by encrypting the DNS traffic between users and DNS resolver servers. This paper uses various machine learning classifiers such as (i) Naive Bayes (NB), ii) Logistic Regression (LR), iii) Random Forest (RF), (iv) K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and (v) Gradient Boosting (GB) to detect the malicious activity at DNS level in the DoH environment. The experiments are conducted on a benchmark MoH dataset (CIRA-CIC-DoHBrw-2020). Several features are used to develop a robust model. The experimental outcome confirmed that the RF and GB classifiers are better choices for the said problem. Since, majority of the malicious activity detected by the developed model, it can be said that the ML-based algorithms are a better option for the prevention of DNS attacks on DoH traffic.

DNS cookies is a recently standardised proposal of the IETF meant to protect DNS against off-path cache poisoning attacks. In contrast to other defences for DNS, DNS cookies is a lightweight mechanism, is easy to deploy and does not introduce overhead on the DNS servers. In this work we demonstrate off-path attacks allowing to circumvent the DNS cookies mechanism and impersonate legitimate Internet sources, exposing the DNS servers to cache poisoning and amplification reflection DoS attacks. We implement and evaluate the attacks, and provide recommendations for countermeasures.

A new Domain Name System (DNS) cache poisoning attack aiming at clients has emerged recently. It induced cloud users to visit fake web sites and thus reveal information such as account passwords. However, the design of current DNS defense architecture does not formally consider the protection of clients. Although the DNS traffic encryption technology can alleviate this new attack, its deployment is as slow as the new DNS architecture. Thus we propose a lightweight adaptive intelligent defense strategy, which only needs to be deployed on the client without any configuration support of DNS. Firstly, we model the attack and defense process as a static stochastic game with incomplete information under bounded rationality conditions. Secondly, to solve the problem caused by uncertain attack strategies and large quantities of game states, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with guaranteed monotonic improvement. Finally, through the prototype system experiment in Alibaba Cloud, the effectiveness of our method is proved against multiple attack modes with a success rate of 97.5% approximately.

In this paper, we report a series of flaws in the software stack that leads to a strong revival of DNS cache poisoning --- a classic attack which is mitigated in practice with simple and effective randomization-based defenses such as randomized source port. To successfully poison a DNS cache on a typical server, an off-path adversary would need to send an impractical number of $2^32 $ spoofed responses simultaneously guessing the correct source port (16-bit) and transaction ID (16-bit). Surprisingly, we discover weaknesses that allow an adversary to "divide and conquer'' the space by guessing the source port first and then the transaction ID (leading to only $2^16 +2^16 $ spoofed responses). Even worse, we demonstrate a number of ways an adversary can extend the attack window which drastically improves the odds of success. The attack affects all layers of caches in the DNS infrastructure, such as DNS forwarder and resolver caches, and a wide range of DNS software stacks, including the most popular BIND, Unbound, and dnsmasq, running on top of Linux and potentially other operating systems. The major condition for a victim being vulnerable is that an OS and its network is configured to allow ICMP error replies. From our measurement, we find over 34% of the open resolver population on the Internet are vulnerable (and in particular 85% of the popular DNS services including Google's 8.8.8.8). Furthermore, we comprehensively validate the proposed attack with positive results against a variety of server configurations and network conditions that can affect the success of the attack, in both controlled experiments and a production DNS resolver (with authorization).

With a novel content-based communication model that is designed for data sharing, Named Data Networking (NDN) borns with innate security by per package encryption and achieves better scalability and mobility. Security attacks in the current Internet, e.g., IP and/or DNS spoofing, can hardly hazard NDN since there is no address and the embedded security in the data packet. However, some new kinds of attacks (e.g., interest flooding attack and content poisoning attack) damage NDN if not investigated thoroughly. In NDN, there exists a variant of content poisoning attack (CPA) that the attack is launched by some compromised core routers and this kind of attack causes severe damage to the network. In this paper, this variant of CPA has named the mole content poisoning attack (MCPA), and a Kalman filter based light-weight mitigation scheme is proposed. Besides, random sampling is imposed on the data traffic and tunes the state parameters in the Kalman filter to achieve faster convergence in a router. Compared with the mitigation scheme by the probabilistically checking of signatures on the data traffic, the proposed light-weight mitigation scheme recovers interest satisfaction rates (ISRs) of consumers while introducing less computation overhead.

DNS is an essential protocol of the Internet. However, DNS also tends to be used as the target of attacks, such as DNS Amplification Attack and Open Resolver Scanning due to its protocol. To detect these attacks, we present a novel anomaly detection method for DNS attacks based on the prediction values of DNS using LSTM(Long Short-Term Memory). Through the experiment, we compared the prediction accuracy of the sequential prediction method for short-term prediction and the batch prediction method for long-term prediction. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic threshold method that can be set automatically by using the error derived from training process. As a result, the sequential prediction method can predict with higher accuracy than the batch prediction method. We also show that the attacks can be detected by using the dynamic threshold method with the sequential prediction method.

Digitization of information in all spheres of human activity and use of technological innovations, as a basic case for the emergence of all wages and attacks that may be insufficient to modern technologies and the continuous expansion of the complexity of security and hardware. Protection against these attacks and payment can be viewed in different directions in information and communication technologies and only from this is secure with protection of DNS servers. DNS servers are recommended as a subject in the research. The basic idea behind this is to simulate different types of DNS attacks and to propose a method to look for interceptions and alarms using a system to detect and prevent intrusion into a DNS server. Along with that, there is an opportunity, the results of what you need to visualize and statistically processed in your graphs and charts.

In Named Data Networks, cache pollution, cache poisoning and interest flooding are three popular types of attacks that can drastically degrade the network performance. However, previous methods for mitigating these attacks are not sufficiently effective or efficient. Also, they cannot simultaneously handle the three attacks. To handle these problems, we propose an effective and lightweight countermeasure scheme. It consists of token-based router monitoring policy (TRM), hierarchical consensus-based trust management (HCT), and popularity-based probabilistic caching policy (PPC). In TRM, each edge router monitors and evaluates each data requester’s probability of launching the cache pollution attack and each data provider’s probability of launching the cache poisoning attack, and accordingly assigns, rewards and penalizes tokens to them to control their data request and data provision activities. In HCT, each core router manages its directly connected edge routers using TRM, and the core routers trust each other through adopting the concept of consensus in Blockchain. PPC uses probabilistic caching based on the popularity of received content to further mitigate the attacks and reduce caching and data verification overhead. Results from simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme has better performance, in terms of interest satisfaction ratio and average end-to-end delay than current mechanisms.

Computer networks have fallen easy prey to cyber attacks in the ever-evolving internet services. Domain Name System (DNS) has also not remained untouched with these cybercrime attempts. Encrypted HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic over Secure Socket Layer (SSL), alternatively called HTTPS, has succeeded to prevent DNS attacks to a great extent. To secure DNS traffic, the security community has introduced the concept of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) to improve user privacy and security by combating eavesdropping and DNS data manipulation on the way to prevent Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. This paper discusses one of the persistent security concerns, abuse of DNS protocol to create covert channels by tunneling data through DNS packets. We identify tunneling activities that utilize DNS communications over HTTPS by presenting a two-layered approach to detect and characterize DoH traffic using time-series classifiers.

We propose a privacy-aware schema that enables Authoritative DNS Servers to distribute their zones to third parties, e.g. Recursive DNS Servers or scrubbing services, without disclosing sensitive information. Therefore, DNS attack mitigation may be effectively accomplished at external vantage points, presumably closer to the attack sources than the Authoritative DNS Server. Our schema leverages on the space, time and privacy-enhancing properties of Cuckoo Filters to map zone names in an efficient manner, while permitting rapid name updates for large zones. The feasibility of our approach is tested via experiments within our laboratory testbed for a variety of DNS zones. Our evaluation intends to assess the privacy-awareness of our schema and its responsiveness to zone name changes. We conclude that our approach enables mapping of large DNS zones, while preserving privacy.

As massive research efforts are poured into server-side DNS security enhancement in online cloud service platforms, sophisticated APTs tend to develop client-side DNS attacks, where defenders only have limited resources and abilities. The collaborative DNS attack is a representative newest client-side paradigm to stealthily undermine user cache by falsifying DNS responses. Different from existing static methods, in this paper, we propose a moving target defense solution named multi-vNIC intelligent mutation to free defenders from arduous work and thwart elusive client-side DNS attack in the meantime. Multiple virtual network interface cards are created and switched in a mutating manner. Thus attackers have to blindly guess the actual NIC with a high risk of exposure. Firstly, we construct a dynamic game-theoretic model to capture the main characteristics of both attacker and defender. Secondly, a reinforcement learning mechanism is developed to generate adaptive optimal defense strategy. Experiment results also highlight the security performance of our defense method compared to several state-of-the-art technologies.

Address resolution protocol (ARP) cache poisoning is mostly used to perform man‐in‐the‐middle (MITM) and denial of service (DoS) attacks for sniffing and network services disruption, respectively, in switch LAN networks. The former attack affects the privacy of a network user, whereas the latter attack causes huge damage to networks in terms of unavailability of services. There are many security solutions that provide protection against such type of attacks at firewall level with the assumption that an insider attack does not exist. However, the most damaging and severe attacks on universities database servers to well‐known banking system have been caused by insider malicious users. In this study, the authors propose an agent‐based ARP cache poisoning detection (AACPD) scheme that detects the MITM and DoS attacks in a switch LAN environment. The objective of this scheme is to provide protection from insider malicious users. The proposed AACPD is compared with similar existing schemes in a real‐time environment. The experimental results show that AACPD efficiently and accurately detects attackers with minimum effect on network performance as compared to similar existing schemes.

Free wireless Internet is getting so common that we’re starting to expect it pretty much everywhere we go from coffee shops to airports, which is great in a lot of ways but it also means there are more opportunities for hackers to fool People because anyone can sit down somewhere set up a mobile hotspot or wireless network of their own and give it a believable name like an airport name, and if someone use their network they can watch and record all the network traffic including any usernames password an credit card details. This report introduces testing public Wi-Fi security using Rasbperry pi and Kali Linux, by performing attacks including DNS Spoofing, Wi-Fi password Cracking, Man in the Middle and Evil Twin, it also discusses Public Wi-Fi vulnerabilities and how to prevent or avoid such attacks.

Mitigating Cache poisoning in Name Data Networking (NDN) can significantly improve the effect of ubiquitous data caching, which is a prominent feature in NDN. However, since verification signatures cannot be practical in the network routers, finding a suitable method to mitigate cache poisoning in NDN routers is a challenge. Therefore, in this paper, the proposed method tries to identify invalid contents by the defined parameters: popularity, negative feedback and credibility. Then, with combining these three metrics, the trust model is presented to estimate the validity of each content. Moreover, the proposed method creates an incentive among users to exchange trusted contents. Finally, the evaluation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method to detect invalid contents as compared to previous methods.

This research details a country-wide cyber-attack and proposes a cyber-firewall called ‘Seddulbahir’ to defend against future attacks. The country-wide dual-phased cyber-attack scenario includes tw...

The trustworthy operation of the DNS service is a very important precondition for a secure Internet. As we point it out, DNS cache poisoning could be even more dangerous if it is performed against DNS64 servers. Based on RCF 5452, we give an introduction to the three main components of DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, namely Transaction ID prediction, source port number prediction, and birthday paradox based attack, which is possible if a DNS or DNS64 server sends out multiple equivalent queries (with identical QNAME, QTYPE, and QCLASS fields) concurrently. We design and implement a methodology and a testbed, which can be used for the systematic testing of DNS or DNS64 implementations, whether they are susceptible to these three vulnerabilities. We perform the tests with the following DNS64 implementations: BIND, PowerDNS, Unbound, TOTD (two versions) and mtd64-ng. As for the testbed, we use three virtual Linux machines executed by a Windows 7 host. As for tools, we use VMware Workstation 12 Player for virtualization, Wireshark and tshark for monitoring, dns64perf for Transaction ID and source port predictability tests, and our currently developed "birthday-test" program for concurrently sent multiple equivalent queries testing. Our methodology can be used for DNS cache poisoning vulnerablility analysis of further DNS or DNS64 implementations. A testbed with the same structure may be used for security vulnerablility analysis of DNS or DNS64 servers and also NAT64 gateways concerning further threats.

Due to the slow adoption of DNSSEC, the defense against Kaminsky-style DNS cache poisoning still mainly relies on conventional challenge-response mechanisms which have security vulnerabilities. Existing industry and academic research on DNS cache poisoning focuses on preventing cache injection, while systematic study on the entire poisoning process including the domain hijacking phase remains scarce. From an attacker’s perspective, we provide a complete tri-state poisoning model, based on which we further mathematically model the latent state (i.e., hijacking phase) and quantitatively analyze the influence of different factors on the hijacking effect. The simulation and experiment results are consistent with the mathematical model in different scenarios, justifying the effectiveness of the model and the significance of the domain hijacking phase. Finally, countermeasures and suggestions are proposed to strengthen the defense against Kaminsky-style cache poisoning by reducing the success rate of domain hijacking.

Distributed “denial of service” attacks based on the traffic reflection and amplification (DRDoS attacks) still are a powerful threat for computer networks. More than half of all attacks were executed by using multiple types of attacks. Development of new protection mechanisms against such attacks is one of the most important tasks in the field of computer security. In this paper, we present experiments on DNS attack, NTP attacks and combined DRDoS-attack simulation. We simulated several protection mechanisms as well as a mechanism developed by us. We compared these protection mechanisms for different kinds of attacks.