A Comprehensive Survey of Voice over IP Security Research

We present a comprehensive survey of Voice over IP security academic research, using a set of 245 publications forming a closed cross-citation set. We classify these papers according to an extended version of the VoIP Security Alliance (VoIPSA) Threat Taxonomy. Our goal is to provide a roadmap for researchers seeking to understand existing capabilities and to identify gaps in addressing the numerous threats and vulnerabilities present in VoIP systems. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to vulnerabilities reported in a variety of VoIP products. We identify two specific problem areas (denial of service, and service abuse) as requiring significant more attention from the research community. We also find that the overwhelming majority of the surveyed work takes a black box view of VoIP systems that avoids examining their internal structure and implementation. Such an approach may miss the mark in terms of addressing the main sources of vulnerabilities, i.e., implementation bugs and misconfigurations. Finally, we argue for further work on understanding cross-protocol and cross-mechanism vulnerabilities (emergent properties), which are the byproduct of a highly complex system-of-systems and an indication of the issues in future large-scale systems

A cyber-kill-chain based taxonomy of crypto-ransomware features

In spite of being just a few years old, ransomware is quickly becoming a serious threat to our digital infrastructures, data and services. Majority of ransomware families are requesting for a ransom payment to restore a custodian access or decrypt data which were encrypted by the ransomware earlier. Although the ransomware attack strategy seems to be simple, security specialists ranked ransomware as a sophisticated attack vector with many variations and families. Wide range of features which are available in different families and versions of ransomware further complicates their detection and analysis. Though the existing body of research provides significant discussions about ransomware details and capabilities, the all research body is fragmented. Therefore, a ransomware feature taxonomy would advance cyber defenders’ understanding of associated risks of ransomware. In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first scientific taxonomy of ransomware features, aligned with Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain (CKC) model. CKC is a well-established model in industry that describes stages of cyber intrusion attempts. To ease the challenge of applying our taxonomy in real world, we also provide the corresponding ransomware defence taxonomy aligned with Courses of Action matrix (an intelligence-driven defence model). We believe that this research study is of high value for the cyber security research community, as it provides the researchers with a means of assessing the vulnerabilities and attack vectors towards the intended victims

Recommendations and best practices for cloud enterprise security

© 2014 IEEE. Enterprise security is essential to achieve global information security in business and organizations. Enterprise Cloud computing is a new paradigm for that enterprise where businesses need to be secured. Enterprise Cloud computing has established its businesses and software as a service paradigm is increasing its demand for more services. However, this new trend needs to be more systematic with respect to Enterprise Cloud security. Enterprise Cloud security is the key factor in sustaining Enterprise Cloud technology by building-in trust. For example, current challenges that are witnessed today with cyber security and application security flaws are important lessons to be learned. It also has provided best practices that can be adapted. Similarly, as the demand for Enterprise Cloud services increases and so increased importance sought for security and privacy. This paper presents recommendations for enterprise security to analyze and model Enterprise Cloud organizational security of the Enterprise Cloud and its data. In particular, Enterprise Cloud data and Enterprise Cloud storage technologies have become more commonly used in organization that adopt Cloud Computing. Therefore, building trust for Enterprise Cloud users should be the one of the main focuses of Enterprise Cloud computing research

Web attack risk awareness with lessons learned from high interaction honeypots

Tese de mestrado, Segurança Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2009Com a evolução da web 2.0, a maioria das empresas elabora negócios através da Internet usando aplicações web. Estas aplicações detêm dados importantes com requisitos cruciais como confidencialidade, integridade e disponibilidade. A perda destas propriedades influencia directamente o negócio colocando-o em risco. A percepção de risco providencia o necessário conhecimento de modo a agir para a sua mitigação. Nesta tese foi concretizada uma colecção de honeypots web de alta interacção utilizando diversas aplicações e sistemas operativos para analisar o comportamento do atacante. A utilização de ambientes de virtualização assim como ferramentas de monitorização de honeypots amplamente utilizadas providencia a informação forense necessária para ajudar a comunidade de investigação no estudo do modus operandi do atacante, armazenando os últimos exploits e ferramentas maliciosas, e a desenvolver as necessárias medidas de protecção que lidam com a maioria das técnicas de ataque. Utilizando a informação detalhada de ataque obtida com os honeypots web, o comportamento do atacante é classificado entre diferentes perfis de ataque para poderem ser analisadas as medidas de mitigação de risco que lidam com as perdas de negócio. Diferentes frameworks de segurança são analisadas para avaliar os benefícios que os conceitos básicos de segurança dos honeypots podem trazer na resposta aos requisitos de cada uma e a consequente mitigação de risco.With the evolution of web 2.0, the majority of enterprises deploy their business over the Internet using web applications. These applications carry important data with crucial requirements such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. The loss of those properties influences directly the business putting it at risk. Risk awareness provides the necessary know-how on how to act to achieve its mitigation. In this thesis a collection of high interaction web honeypots is deployed using multiple applications and diverse operating systems in order to analyse the attacker behaviour. The use of virtualization environments along with widely used honeypot monitoring tools provide the necessary forensic information that helps the research community to study the modus operandi of the attacker gathering the latest exploits and malicious tools and to develop adequate safeguards that deal with the majority of attacking techniques. Using the detailed attacking information gathered with the web honeypots, the attacking behaviour will be classified across different attacking profiles to analyse the necessary risk mitigation safeguards to deal with business losses. Different security frameworks commonly used by enterprises are analysed to evaluate the benefits of the honeypots security concepts in responding to each framework’s requirements and consequently mitigating the risk

From ZeuS to Zitmo : trends in banking malware

In the crimeware world, financial botnets are a global threat to banking organizations. Such malware purposely performs financial fraud and steals critical information from clients' computers. A common example of banking malware is the ZeuS botnet. Recently, variants of this malware have targeted mobile platforms, as The-ZeuS-in-the-Mobile or Zitmo. With the rise in mobile systems, platform security is becoming a major concern across the mobile world, with rising incidence of compromising Android devices. In similar vein, there have been mobile botnet attacks on iPhones, Blackberry and Symbian devices. In this setting, we report on trends and developments of ZeuS and its variants