5 research outputs found
HoneyDOC: An Efficient Honeypot Architecture Enabling All-Round Design
Honeypots are designed to trap the attacker with the purpose of investigating
its malicious behavior. Owing to the increasing variety and sophistication of
cyber attacks, how to capture high-quality attack data has become a challenge
in the context of honeypot area. All-round honeypots, which mean significant
improvement in sensibility, countermeasure and stealth, are necessary to tackle
the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel honeypot architecture termed
HoneyDOC to support all-round honeypot design and implementation. Our HoneyDOC
architecture clearly identifies three essential independent and collaborative
modules, Decoy, Captor and Orchestrator. Based on the efficient architecture, a
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enabled honeypot system is designed, which
supplies high programmability for technically sustaining the features for
capturing high-quality data. A proof-of-concept system is implemented to
validate its feasibility and effectiveness. The experimental results show the
benefits by using the proposed architecture comparing to the previous honeypot
solutions.Comment: Non
A Brave New World: Studies on the Deployment and Security of the Emerging IPv6 Internet.
Recent IPv4 address exhaustion events are ushering in a new era of
rapid transition to the next generation Internet protocol---IPv6. Via
Internet-scale experiments and data analysis, this dissertation
characterizes the adoption and security of the emerging IPv6 network.
The work includes three studies, each the largest of its kind,
examining various facets of the new network protocol's deployment,
routing maturity, and security.
The first study provides an analysis of ten years of IPv6 deployment
data, including quantifying twelve metrics across ten global-scale
datasets, and affording a holistic understanding of the state and
recent progress of the IPv6 transition. Based on cross-dataset
analysis of relative global adoption rates and across features of the
protocol, we find evidence of a marked shift in the pace and nature
of adoption in recent years and observe that higher-level metrics of
adoption lag lower-level metrics.
Next, a network telescope study covering the IPv6 address space of the
majority of allocated networks provides insight into the early state
of IPv6 routing. Our analyses suggest that routing of average IPv6
prefixes is less stable than that of IPv4. This instability is
responsible for the majority of the captured misdirected IPv6 traffic.
Observed dark (unallocated destination) IPv6 traffic shows substantial
differences from the unwanted traffic seen in IPv4---in both character
and scale.
Finally, a third study examines the state of IPv6 network security
policy. We tested a sample of 25 thousand routers and 520 thousand
servers against sets of TCP and UDP ports commonly targeted by
attackers. We found systemic discrepancies between intended
security policy---as codified in IPv4---and deployed IPv6 policy.
Such lapses in ensuring that the IPv6 network is properly managed and
secured are leaving thousands of important devices more vulnerable to
attack than before IPv6 was enabled.
Taken together, findings from our three studies suggest that IPv6 has
reached a level and pace of adoption, and shows patterns of use, that
indicates serious production employment of the protocol on a broad
scale. However, weaker IPv6 routing and security are evident, and
these are leaving early dual-stack networks less robust than the IPv4
networks they augment.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120689/1/jczyz_1.pd
Data Reduction for the Scalable Automated Analysis of Distributed Darknet Traffic
Threats to the privacy of users and to the availability of Internet infrastructure are evolving at a tremendous rate. To characterize these emerging threats, researchers must effectively balance monitoring the large number of hosts needed to quickly build confidence in new attacks, while still preserving the detail required to differentiate these attacks. One class of techniques that attempts to achieve this balance involves hybrid systems that combine the scalable monitoring of unused address blocks (or darknets) with forensic honeypots (or honeyfarms). In this paper we examine the properties of individual and distributed darknets to determine the effectiveness of building scalable hybrid systems. We show that individual darknets are dominated by a small number of sources repeating the same actions. This enables source-based techniques to be effective at reducing the number of connections to be evaluated by over 90%. We demonstrate that the dominance of locally targeted attack behavior and the limited life of random scanning hosts result in few of these sources being repeated across darknets. To achieve reductions beyond source-based approaches, we look to source-distribution based methods and expand them to include notions of local and global behavior. We show that this approach is effective at reducing the number of events by deploying it in 30 production networks during early 2005. Each of the identified events during this period represented a major globally-scoped attack including the WINS vulnerability scanning, Veritas Backup Agent vulnerability scanning, and the MySQL Worm.
Context-Aware Network Security.
The rapid growth in malicious Internet activity, due to the rise of threats like
automated worms, viruses, and botnets, has driven the development of tools
designed to protect host and network resources. One approach that has gained
significant popularity is the use of network based security
systems. These systems are deployed on the network to detect, characterize and
mitigate both new and existing threats.
Unfortunately, these systems are developed and deployed in production networks
as generic systems and little thought has been paid to customization.
Even when it is possible to customize these devices, the approaches for
customization are largely manual or ad hoc. Our observation of the production
networks suggest that these networks have significant diversity in end-host
characteristics, threat landscape, and traffic behavior -- a collection of
features that we call the security context of a network. The scale and
diversity in security context of production networks make manual or ad hoc
customization of security systems difficult. Our thesis is that automated
adaptation to the security context can be used to significantly improve the
performance and accuracy of network-based security systems.
In order to evaluate our thesis, we explore a system from three broad categories
of network-based security systems: known threat detection, new threat detection,
and reputation-based mitigation. For known threat detection, we examine a
signature-based intrusion detection system and show that the system performance
improves significantly if it is aware of the signature set and the traffic
characteristics of the network. Second, we explore a large collection of
honeypots (or honeynet) that are used to detect new threats. We show that
operating system and application configurations in the network impact honeynet
accuracy and adapting to the surrounding network provides a significantly better
view of the network threats. Last, we apply our context-aware approach to a
reputation-based system for spam blacklist generation and show how traffic
characteristics on the network can be used to significantly improve its
accuracy.
We conclude with the lessons learned from our experiences adapting to network
security context and the future directions for adapting network-based security
systems to the security context.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64745/1/sushant_1.pd
A framework for malicious host fingerprinting using distributed network sensors
Numerous software agents exist and are responsible for increasing volumes of malicious traffic that is observed on the Internet today. From a technical perspective the existing techniques for monitoring malicious agents and traffic were not developed to allow for the interrogation of the source of malicious traffic. This interrogation or reconnaissance would be considered active analysis as opposed to existing, mostly passive analysis. Unlike passive analysis, the active techniques are time-sensitive and their results become increasingly inaccurate as time delta between observation and interrogation increases. In addition to this, some studies had shown that the geographic separation of hosts on the Internet have resulted in pockets of different malicious agents and traffic targeting victims. As such it would be important to perform any kind of data collection over various source and in distributed IP address space. The data gathering and exposure capabilities of sensors such as honeypots and network telescopes were extended through the development of near-realtime Distributed Sensor Network modules that allowed for the near-realtime analysis of malicious traffic from distributed, heterogeneous monitoring sensors. In order to utilise the data exposed by the near-realtime Distributed Sensor Network modules an Automated Reconnaissance Framework was created, this framework was tasked with active and passive information collection and analysis of data in near-realtime and was designed from an adapted Multi Sensor Data Fusion model. The hypothesis was made that if sufficiently different characteristics of a host could be identified; combined they could act as a unique fingerprint for that host, potentially allowing for the re-identification of that host, even if its IP address had changed. To this end the concept of Latency Based Multilateration was introduced, acting as an additional metric for remote host fingerprinting. The vast amount of information gathered by the AR-Framework required the development of visualisation tools which could illustrate this data in near-realtime and also provided various degrees of interaction to accommodate human interpretation of such data. Ultimately the data collected through the application of the near-realtime Distributed Sensor Network and AR-Framework provided a unique perspective of a malicious host demographic. Allowing for new correlations to be drawn between attributes such as common open ports and operating systems, location, and inferred intent of these malicious hosts. The result of which expands our current understanding of malicious hosts on the Internet and enables further research in the area