Hyp3rArmor: reducing web application exposure to automated attacks

Web applications (webapps) are subjected constantly to automated, opportunistic attacks from autonomous robots (bots) engaged in reconnaissance to discover victims that may be vulnerable to specific exploits. This is a typical behavior found in botnet recruitment, worm propagation, largescale fingerprinting and vulnerability scanners. Most anti-bot techniques are deployed at the application layer, thus leaving the network stack of the webapp’s server exposed. In this paper we present a mechanism called Hyp3rArmor, that addresses this vulnerability by minimizing the webapp’s attack surface exposed to automated opportunistic attackers, for JavaScriptenabled web browser clients. Our solution uses port knocking to eliminate the webapp’s visible network footprint. Clients of the webapp are directed to a visible static web server to obtain JavaScript that authenticates the client to the webapp server (using port knocking) before making any requests to the webapp. Our implementation of Hyp3rArmor, which is compatible with all webapp architectures, has been deployed and used to defend single and multi-page websites on the Internet for 114 days. During this time period the static web server observed 964 attempted attacks that were deflected from the webapp, which was only accessed by authenticated clients. Our evaluation shows that in most cases client-side overheads were negligible and that server-side overheads were minimal. Hyp3rArmor is ideal for critical systems and legacy applications that must be accessible on the Internet. Additionally Hyp3rArmor is composable with other security tools, adding an additional layer to a defense in depth approach.This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) awards #1430145, #1414119, and #1012798

Securearray: Improving WiFi security with fine-grained physical-layer information

Despite the important role that WiFi networks play in home and enterprise networks they are relatively weak from a security standpoint. With easily available directional antennas, attackers can be physically located off-site, yet compromise WiFi security protocols such as WEP, WPA, and even to some extent WPA2 through a range of exploits specific to those protocols, or simply by running dictionary and human-factors attacks on users' poorly-chosen passwords. This presents a security risk to the entire home or enterprise network. To mitigate this ongoing problem, we propose SecureArray, a system designed to operate alongside existing wireless security protocols, adding defense in depth against active attacks. SecureArray's novel signal processing techniques leverage multi-antenna access point (AP) to profile the directions at which a client's signals arrive, using this angle-of-arrival (AoA) information to construct highly sensitive signatures that with very high probability uniquely identify each client. Upon overhearing a suspicious transmission, the client and AP initiate an AoA signature-based challenge-response protocol to confirm and mitigate the threat. We also discuss how SecureArray can mitigate direct denial-of-service attacks on the latest 802.11 wireless security protocol. We have implemented SecureArray with an eight-antenna WARP hardware radio acting as the AP. Our experimental results show that in a busy office environment, SecureArray is orders of magnitude more accurate than current techniques, mitigating 100% of WiFi spoofing attack attempts while at the same time triggering false alarms on just 0.6% of legitimate traffic. Detection rate remains high when the attacker is located only five centimeters away from the legitimate client, for AP with fewer numbers of antennas and when client is mobile