191,888 research outputs found
Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey
With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and
other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to
protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely
used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against
intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the
past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password
cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password
cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a
brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password
cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually
designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user
education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the
design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password
encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the
abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some
knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the
development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add
acknowledgement to helpe
Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security
Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions
“This is the way ‘I’ create my passwords ...":does the endowment effect deter people from changing the way they create their passwords?
The endowment effect is the term used to describe a phenomenon that manifests as a reluctance to relinquish owned artifacts, even when a viable or better substitute is offered. It has been confirmed by multiple studies when it comes to ownership of physical artifacts. If computer users also "own", and are attached to, their personal security routines, such feelings could conceivably activate the same endowment effect. This would, in turn, lead to their over-estimating the \value" of their existing routines, in terms of the protection they afford, and the risks they mitigate. They might well, as a consequence, not countenance any efforts to persuade them to adopt a more secure routine, because their comparison of pre-existing and proposed new routine is skewed by the activation of the endowment effect.In this paper, we report on an investigation into the possibility that the endowment effect activates when people adopt personal password creation routines. We did indeed find evidence that the endowment effect is likely to be triggered in this context. This constitutes one explanation for the failure of many security awareness drives to improve password strength. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to confirm our findings, and to investigate the activation of the effect for other security routines
POWER-SUPPLaY: Leaking Data from Air-Gapped Systems by Turning the Power-Supplies Into Speakers
It is known that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers
through their speakers via sonic and ultrasonic waves. To eliminate the threat
of such acoustic covert channels in sensitive systems, audio hardware can be
disabled and the use of loudspeakers can be strictly forbidden. Such audio-less
systems are considered to be \textit{audio-gapped}, and hence immune to
acoustic covert channels.
In this paper, we introduce a technique that enable attackers leak data
acoustically from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems. Our developed malware
can exploit the computer power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as
an out-of-band, secondary speaker with limited capabilities. The malicious code
manipulates the internal \textit{switching frequency} of the power supply and
hence controls the sound waveforms generated from its capacitors and
transformers. Our technique enables producing audio tones in a frequency band
of 0-24khz and playing audio streams (e.g., WAV) from a computer power supply
without the need for audio hardware or speakers. Binary data (files,
keylogging, encryption keys, etc.) can be modulated over the acoustic signals
and sent to a nearby receiver (e.g., smartphone). We show that our technique
works with various types of systems: PC workstations and servers, as well as
embedded systems and IoT devices that have no audio hardware at all. We provide
technical background and discuss implementation details such as signal
generation and data modulation. We show that the POWER-SUPPLaY code can operate
from an ordinary user-mode process and doesn't need any hardware access or
special privileges. Our evaluation shows that using POWER-SUPPLaY, sensitive
data can be exfiltrated from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems from a
distance of five meters away at a maximal bit rates of 50 bit/sec
IMPROVING SMART GRID SECURITY USING MERKLE TREES
Abstract—Presently nations worldwide are starting to convert their aging electrical power infrastructures into modern, dynamic power grids. Smart Grid offers much in the way of efficiencies and robustness to the electrical power grid, however its heavy reliance on communication networks will leave it more vulnerable to attack than present day grids. This paper looks at the threat to public key cryptography systems from a fully realized quantum computer and how this could impact the Smart Grid. We argue for the use of Merkle Trees in place of public key cryptography for authentication of devices in wireless mesh networks that are used in Smart Grid applications
Actor-network procedures: Modeling multi-factor authentication, device pairing, social interactions
As computation spreads from computers to networks of computers, and migrates
into cyberspace, it ceases to be globally programmable, but it remains
programmable indirectly: network computations cannot be controlled, but they
can be steered by local constraints on network nodes. The tasks of
"programming" global behaviors through local constraints belong to the area of
security. The "program particles" that assure that a system of local
interactions leads towards some desired global goals are called security
protocols. As computation spreads beyond cyberspace, into physical and social
spaces, new security tasks and problems arise. As networks are extended by
physical sensors and controllers, including the humans, and interlaced with
social networks, the engineering concepts and techniques of computer security
blend with the social processes of security. These new connectors for
computational and social software require a new "discipline of programming" of
global behaviors through local constraints. Since the new discipline seems to
be emerging from a combination of established models of security protocols with
older methods of procedural programming, we use the name procedures for these
new connectors, that generalize protocols. In the present paper we propose
actor-networks as a formal model of computation in heterogenous networks of
computers, humans and their devices; and we introduce Procedure Derivation
Logic (PDL) as a framework for reasoning about security in actor-networks. On
the way, we survey the guiding ideas of Protocol Derivation Logic (also PDL)
that evolved through our work in security in last 10 years. Both formalisms are
geared towards graphic reasoning and tool support. We illustrate their workings
by analysing a popular form of two-factor authentication, and a multi-channel
device pairing procedure, devised for this occasion.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables; journal submission; extended
references, added discussio
Between Hype and Understatement: Reassessing Cyber Risks as a Security Strategy
Most of the actions that fall under the trilogy of cyber crime, terrorism,and war exploit pre-existing weaknesses in the underlying technology.Because these vulnerabilities that exist in the network are not themselvesillegal, they tend to be overlooked in the debate on cyber security. A UKreport on the cost of cyber crime illustrates this approach. Its authors chose to exclude from their analysis the costs in anticipation of cyber crime, such as insurance costs and the costs of purchasing anti-virus software on the basis that "these are likely to be factored into normal day-to-day expenditures for the Government, businesses, and individuals. This article contends if these costs had been quantified and integrated into the cost of cyber crime, then the analysis would have revealed that what matters is not so much cyber crime, but the fertile terrain of vulnerabilities that unleash a range of possibilities to whomever wishes to exploit them. By downplaying the vulnerabilities, the threats represented by cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cyber crime are conversely inflated. Therefore, reassessing risk as a strategy for security in cyberspace must include acknowledgment of understated vulnerabilities, as well as a better distributed knowledge about the nature and character of the overhyped threats of cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and cyber war
- …