Including Network Routers In Forensic Investigation

Network forensics concerns the identification and preservation of evidence from an event that has occurred or is likely to occur. The scope of network forensics encompasses the networks, systems and devices associated with the physical and human networks. In this paper we are assessing the forensic potential of a router in investigations. A single router is taken as a case study and analysed to determine its forensic value from both static and live investigation perspectives. In the live investigation, tests using steps from two to seven routers were used to establish benchmark expectations for network variations. We find that the router has many attributes that make it a repository and a site for evidence collection. The implications of this research are for investigators and the inclusion of routers in network forensic investigations

DNS in Computer Forensics

The Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical core component of the global Internet and integral to the majority of corporate intranets. It provides resolution services between the human-readable name-based system addresses and the machine operable Internet Protocol (IP) based addresses required for creating network level connections. Whilst structured as a globally dispersed resilient tree data structure, from the Global and Country Code Top Level Domains (gTLD/ccTLD) down to the individual site and system leaf nodes, it is highly resilient although vulnerable to various attacks, exploits and systematic failures

A Holistic Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Security : Principles, Practices, and New Perspectives

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Automated Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against Wi‑Fi Networks

Currently used wireless communication technologies suffer security weaknesses that can be exploited allowing to eavesdrop or to spoof network communication. In this paper, we present a practical tool that can automate the attack on wireless security. The developed package called wifimitm provides functionality for the automation of MitM attacks in the wireless environment. The package combines several existing tools and attack strategies to bypass the wireless security mechanisms, such as WEP, WPA, and WPS. The presented tool can be integrated into a solution for automated penetration testing. Also, a popularization of the fact that such attacks can be easily automated should raise public awareness about the state of wireless security

A Secure Integrated Framework for Fog-Assisted Internet of Things Systems

Fog-Assisted Internet of Things (Fog-IoT) systems are deployed in remote and unprotected environments, making them vulnerable to security, privacy, and trust challenges. Existing studies propose security schemes and trust models for these systems. However, mitigation of insider attacks, namely blackhole, sinkhole, sybil, collusion, self-promotion, and privilege escalation, has always been a challenge and mostly carried out by the legitimate nodes. Compared to other studies, this paper proposes a framework featuring attribute-based access control and trust-based behavioural monitoring to address the challenges mentioned above. The proposed framework consists of two components, the security component (SC) and the trust management component (TMC). SC ensures data confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorization. TMC evaluates Fog-IoT entities’ performance using a trust model based on a set of QoS and network communication features. Subsequently, trust is embedded as an attribute within SC’s access control policies, ensuring that only trusted entities are granted access to fog resources. Several attacking scenarios, namely DoS, DDoS, probing, and data theft are designed to elaborate on how the change in trust triggers the change in access rights and, therefore, validates the proposed integrated framework’s design principles. The framework is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to benchmark its performance in terms of time and memory complexity. Our results show that both SC and TMC are lightweight and suitable for resource-constrained devices

Detection of ICMPv6-based DDoS attacks using anomaly based intrusion detection system: A comprehensive review

Security network systems have been an increasingly important discipline since the implementation of preliminary stages of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for exploiting by attackers. IPv6 has an improved protocol in terms of security as it brought new functionalities, procedures, i.e., Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6). The ICMPv6 protocol is considered to be very important and represents the backbone of the IPv6, which is also responsible to send and receive messages in IPv6. However, IPv6 Inherited many attacks from the previous internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS is a thorny problem on the internet, being one of the most prominent attacks affecting a network result in tremendous economic damage to individuals as well as organizations. In this paper, an exhaustive evaluation and analysis are conducted anomaly detection DDoS attacks against ICMPv6 messages, in addition, explained anomaly detection types to ICMPv6 DDoS flooding attacks in IPv6 networks. Proposed using feature selection technique based on bio-inspired algorithms for selecting an optimal solution which selects subset to have a positive impact of the detection accuracy ICMPv6 DDoS attack. The review outlines the features and protection constraints of IPv6 intrusion detection systems focusing mainly on DDoS attacks

Be Aware with a Honeypot

The Internet has already become a hostile environment for computers, especially when they are directly connected with a public IP address. We have experienced this hostile activity where on an average day; the ITB Honeypot recorded over a thousand reconnaissance attacks seeking unauthorised entry onto our private network. Our Honeypot is a basic PC running Windows XP with no services offered and no activity from users that would generate traffic. The Honeypot is running in a passive state on a stub-network where all inbound and outbound traffic is recorded at the bridging computer to the WAN. We report on the majority of scans and vulnerability attacks that were used and investigate the processes that targeted vulnerable ports and access points on the network

Wide spectrum attribution: Using deception for attribution intelligence in cyber attacks

Modern cyber attacks have evolved considerably. The skill level required to conduct a cyber attack is low. Computing power is cheap, targets are diverse and plentiful. Point-and-click crimeware kits are widely circulated in the underground economy, while source code for sophisticated malware such as Stuxnet is available for all to download and repurpose. Despite decades of research into defensive techniques, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus, code auditing, etc, the quantity of successful cyber attacks continues to increase, as does the number of vulnerabilities identified. Measures to identify perpetrators, known as attribution, have existed for as long as there have been cyber attacks. The most actively researched technical attribution techniques involve the marking and logging of network packets. These techniques are performed by network devices along the packet journey, which most often requires modification of existing router hardware and/or software, or the inclusion of additional devices. These modifications require wide-scale infrastructure changes that are not only complex and costly, but invoke legal, ethical and governance issues. The usefulness of these techniques is also often questioned, as attack actors use multiple stepping stones, often innocent systems that have been compromised, to mask the true source. As such, this thesis identifies that no publicly known previous work has been deployed on a wide-scale basis in the Internet infrastructure. This research investigates the use of an often overlooked tool for attribution: cyber de- ception. The main contribution of this work is a significant advancement in the field of deception and honeypots as technical attribution techniques. Specifically, the design and implementation of two novel honeypot approaches; i) Deception Inside Credential Engine (DICE), that uses policy and honeytokens to identify adversaries returning from different origins and ii) Adaptive Honeynet Framework (AHFW), an introspection and adaptive honeynet framework that uses actor-dependent triggers to modify the honeynet envi- ronment, to engage the adversary, increasing the quantity and diversity of interactions. The two approaches are based on a systematic review of the technical attribution litera- ture that was used to derive a set of requirements for honeypots as technical attribution techniques. Both approaches lead the way for further research in this field