Moving Target Defense for Web Applications

abstract: Web applications continue to remain as the most popular method of interaction for businesses over the Internet. With it's simplicity of use and management, they often function as the "front door" for many companies. As such, they are a critical component of the security ecosystem as vulnerabilities present in these systems could potentially allow malicious users access to sensitive business and personal data. The inherent nature of web applications enables anyone to access them anytime and anywhere, this includes any malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities present in the web application. In addition, the static configurations of these web applications enables attackers the opportunity to perform reconnaissance at their leisure, increasing their success rate by allowing them time to discover information on the system. On the other hand, defenders are often at a disadvantage as they do not have the same temporal opportunity that attackers possess in order to perform counter-reconnaissance. Lastly, the unchanging nature of web applications results in undiscovered vulnerabilities to remain open for exploitation, requiring developers to adopt a reactive approach that is often delayed or to anticipate and prepare for all possible attacks which is often cost-prohibitive. Moving Target Defense (MTD) seeks to remove the attackers' advantage by reducing the information asymmetry between the attacker and defender. This research explores the concept of MTD and the various methods of applying MTD to secure Web Applications. In particular, MTD concepts are applied to web applications by implementing an automated application diversifier that aims to mitigate specific classes of web application vulnerabilities and exploits. Evaluation is done using two open source web applications to determine the effectiveness of the MTD implementation. Though developed for the chosen applications, the automation process can be customized to fit a variety of applications.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Implementation of network moving target defense in embedded systems

Moving target defense provides opportunities for adaptive defense in embedded systems. A great deal of work has been done on incorporating moving target defense techniques into enterprise systems to increase the cost to attackers and level the playing field. A smaller body of work focuses on implementing these techniques in embedded systems, which can greatly benefit from adaptive self-defense techniques. This work implements a network shuffling proof of concept in the Zephyr real time operating system to tackle the challenge of incorporating shuffling techniques into embedded systems. A host-centric, high security implementation is provided which maximizes attacker uncertainty and minimizes the impact of host compromise. Identifiers are utilized at the datalink, network, and transport layers and rotated per connection using keys shared between host pairs.Existing shuffling schemes are explored, including those targeted to IoT contexts. Existing limitations in protecting embedded systems are considered along with the presented by moving target defense. The design details and implementation of incorporating a moving target defense module to in the Zephyr networking stack is provided. The protection provided by the scheme is evaluated and it is compared to existing address shuffling schemes. Future work in better handling data forwarding and collisions in the proof of concept scheme are considered. Options for adapting and building on the scheme to meet the needs of system designers are explored. This work provides system designers with insights into implementing address shuffling in embedded systems