A Comprehensive Security Assessment Toolkit for HealthCare Systems

This research identifies the critical need for conducting a comprehensive information security assessment of any healthcare system. This effort is vital to establish and maintain compliance of security and privacy in healthcare organizations. The paper presents a novel framework and toolkit for security assessment to establish and maintain regulatory compliance. Furthermore, the paper lays out the design of a comprehensive, automated tool set to gain insight about electronic healthcare information system vulnerabilities in the system. The research then investigates various mitigation techniques to secure a healthcare information system and its electronic health records. Furthermore, as validation the proposed toolkit is evaluated in a real-world HIMSS 6 [1] healthcare organization and their over 20 partnering clinical practices

So You Think Your Router Is Safe?

A home router is a common item found in today’s household and is seen by most as just an Internet connection enabler. Users don’t realize how important this single device is in terms of privacy protection. The router is the centerpiece through which all the household Internet activities including ecommerce, tax filing and banking pass through. When this central device is compromised, users are at risk of having personal and confidential data exposed. Over the past decade, information security professionals have been shedding light on vulnerabilities plaguing consumer routers. Yet, most users are unaware of all the different ways a router can be compromised and tend to focus only on setting up a strong password to stop the neighbor from piggy backing on the Internet

A Framework for Vulnerability Detection in Software Application H2S and Protection Against Command Injection Flaw

"Application Security Assessment" is a process of providing complete security to the application from various vulnerabilities. Through this paper we are trying to detect what all vulnerabilities does our application "H2S" has and try to understand how can it affect our application. Application is taken as input from the user along with applications docume ntation. Also, User ID and password is to be given by the customer. After having all the required documents, application is deeply studied and understood . The main benefit of this application is that users can prevent their application and the essential i nformation that an application has from getting affected by the external attackers. Firstly a threat profile is created and then vulnerabilities are checked. Various vulnera bilities checked by the project are: INJECTION FLAW , CROSS - SITE SCRIPTING (XSS) , C ROSS SITE REQUEST FORGERY (CSRF) , RE - DIRECTIONAL FLAW , SESSION MANAGEMENT , MALICIOUS FILE EXECUTION, INSECURE DIRECT OBJECT REFERENCE , INFORMATION LEAKAGE AND IMPROPER ERROR HANDLING After checking for available vulnerabilities, risk is calculated using ris k ranking matrix and finally provide solution so that application fully secured from external attacks

On The Impact of Internet Naming Evolution: Deployment, Performance, and Security Implications

As one of the most critical components of the Internet, the Domain Name System (DNS) provides naming services for Internet users, who rely on DNS to perform the translation between the domain names and network entities before establishing an In- ternet connection. In this dissertation, we present our studies on different aspects of the naming infrastructure in today’s Internet, including DNS itself and the network services based on the naming infrastructure such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). We first characterize the evolution and features of the DNS resolution in web ser- vices under the emergence of third-party hosting services and cloud platforms. at the bottom level of the DNS hierarchy, the authoritative DNS servers (ADNSes) maintain the actual mapping records and answer the DNS queries. The increasing use of upstream ADNS services (i.e., third-party ADNS-hosting services) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds facilitates the deployment of web services, and has been fostering the evo- lution of the deployment of ADNS servers. to shed light on this trend, we conduct a large-scale measurement to investigate the ADNS deployment patterns of modern web services and examine the characteristics of different deployment styles, such as perfor- mance, life-cycle of servers, and availability. Furthermore, we specifically focus on the DNS deployment for subdomains hosted in IaaS clouds. Then, we examine a pervasive misuse of DNS names and explore a straightforward solution to mitigate the performance penalty in DNS cache. DNS cache plays a critical role in domain name resolution, providing (1) high scalability at Root and Top-level- domain nameservers with reduced workloads and (2) low response latency to clients when the resource records of the queried domains are cached. However, the pervasive misuses of domain names, e.g., the domain names of “one-time-use” pattern, have negative impact on the effectiveness of DNS caching as the cache has been filled with those entries that are highly unlikely to be retrieved. By leveraging the domain name based features that are explicitly available from a domain name itself, we propose simple policies for improving DNS cache performance and validate their efficacy using real traces. Finally, we investigate the security implications of a fundamental vulnerability in DNS- based CDNs. The success of CDNs relies on the mapping system that leverages the dynamically generated DNS records to distribute a client’s request to a proximal server for achieving optimal content delivery. However, the mapping system is vulnerable to malicious hijacks, as it is very difficult to provide pre-computed DNSSEC signatures for dynamically generated records in CDNs. We illustrate that an adversary can deliberately tamper with the resolvers to hijack CDN’s redirection by injecting crafted but legitimate mappings between end-users and edge servers, while remaining undetectable by exist- ing security practices, which can cause serious threats that nullify the benefits offered by CDNs, such as proximal access, load balancing, and DoS protection. We further demonstrate that DNSSEC is ineffective to address this problem, even with the newly adopted ECDSA that is capable of achieving live signing for dynamically generated DNS records. We then discuss countermeasures against this redirection hijacking

Network-based APT profiler

Constant innovation in attack methods presents a significant problem for the security community which struggles to remain current in attack prevention, detection and response. The practice of threat hunting provides a proactive approach to identify and mitigate attacks in real-time before the attackers complete their objective. In this research, I present a matrix of adversary techniques inspired by MITRE’s ATT&CK matrix. This study allows threat hunters to classify the actions of advanced persistent threats (APTs) according to network-based behaviors

Towards an efficient vulnerability analysis methodology for better security risk management

2010 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.Risk management is a process that allows IT managers to balance between cost of the protective measures and gains in mission capability. A system administrator has to make a decision and choose an appropriate security plan that maximizes the resource utilization. However, making the decision is not a trivial task. Most organizations have tight budgets for IT security; therefore, the chosen plan must be reviewed as thoroughly as other management decisions. Unfortunately, even the best-practice security risk management frameworks do not provide adequate information for effective risk management. Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing that form the core of traditional risk management, identify only the set of system vulnerabilities. Given the complexity of today's network infrastructure, it is not enough to consider the presence or absence of vulnerabilities in isolation. Materializing a threat strongly requires the combination of multiple attacks using different vulnerabilities. Such a requirement is far beyond the capabilities of current day vulnerability scanners. Consequently, assessing the cost of an attack or cost of implementing appropriate security controls is possible only in a piecemeal manner. In this work, we develop and formalize new network vulnerability analysis model. The model encodes in a concise manner, the contributions of different security conditions that lead to system compromise. We extend the model with a systematic risk assessment methodology to support reasoning under uncertainty in an attempt to evaluate the vulnerability exploitation probability. We develop a cost model to quantify the potential loss and gain that can occur in a system if certain conditions are met (or protected). We also quantify the security control cost incurred to implement a set of security hardening measures. We propose solutions for the system administrator's decision problems covering the area of the risk analysis and risk mitigation analysis. Finally, we extend the vulnerability assessment model to the areas of intrusion detection and forensic investigation