Toward Smart Moving Target Defense for Linux Container Resiliency

This paper presents ESCAPE, an informed moving target defense mechanism for cloud containers. ESCAPE models the interaction between attackers and their target containers as a "predator searching for a prey" search game. Live migration of Linux-containers (prey) is used to avoid attacks (predator) and failures. The entire process is guided by a novel host-based behavior-monitoring system that seamlessly monitors containers for indications of intrusions and attacks. To evaluate ESCAPE effectiveness, we simulated the attack avoidance process based on a mathematical model mimicking the prey-vs-predator search game. Simulation results show high container survival probabilities with minimal added overhead.Comment: Published version is available on IEEE Xplore at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/779685

Detailed Review on The Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in Software Defined Networks (SDNs) and Defense Strategies

The development of Software Defined Networking (SDN) has altered the landscape of computer networking in recent years. Its scalable architecture has become a blueprint for the design of several advanced future networks. To achieve improve and efficient monitoring, control and management capabilities of the network, software defined networks differentiate or decouple the control logic from the data forwarding plane. As a result, logical control is centralized solely in the controller. Due to the centralized nature, SDNs are exposed to several vulnerabilities such as Spoofing, Flooding, and primarily Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) among other attacks. In effect, the performance of SDN degrades based on these attacks. This paper presents a comprehensive review of several DoS and DDoS defense/mitigation strategies and classifies them into distinct classes with regards to the methodologies employed. Furthermore, suggestions were made to enhance current mitigation strategies accordingly

Cyber deception against DDoS attack using moving target defence framework in SDN IOT-EDGE networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) networking paradigm advancements are advantageous, but they have also brought new security concerns. The Internet of Things (IoT) Edge Computing servers provide closer access to cloud services and is also a point of target for availability attacks. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on SDN IoT-Edge Computing caused by botnet of IoT hosts has compromised major services and is still an impending concern due to the Work From Home virtual office shift attributed by Covid19 pandemic. The effectiveness of a Moving Target Defense (MTD) technique based on SDN for combating DDoS attacks in IoT-Edge networks was investigated in this study with a test scenario based on a smart building. An MTD Reactive and Proactive Network Address Shuffling Mechanism was developed, tested, and evaluated with results showing successful defence against UDP, TCP SYN, and LAND DDoS attacks; preventing IoT devices from being botnet compromised due to the short-lived network address; and ensuring reliable system performance

Moving Target Defense Using Live Migration of Docker Containers

abstract: Today the information technology systems have addresses, software stacks and other configuration remaining unchanged for a long period of time. This paves way for malicious attacks in the system from unknown vulnerabilities. The attacker can take advantage of this situation and plan their attacks with sufficient time. To protect our system from this threat, Moving Target Defense is required where the attack surface is dynamically changed, making it difficult to strike. In this thesis, I incorporate live migration of Docker container using CRIU (checkpoint restore) for moving target defense. There are 460K Dockerized applications, a 3100% growth over 2 years[1]. Over 4 billion containers have been pulled so far from Docker hub. Docker is supported by a large and fast growing community of contributors and users. As an example, there are 125K Docker Meetup members worldwide. As we see industry adapting to Docker rapidly, a moving target defense solution involving containers is beneficial for being robust and fast. A proof of concept implementation is included for studying performance attributes of Docker migration. The detection of attack is using a scenario involving definitions of normal events on servers. By defining system activities, and extracting syslog in centralized server, attack can be detected via extracting abnormal activates and this detection can be a trigger for the Docker migration.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Moving target defense for securing smart grid communications: Architectural design, implementation and evaluation

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) communications are often subjected to various kinds of sophisticated cyber-attacks which can have a serious impact on the Critical Infrastructure such as the power grid. Most of the time, the success of the attack is based on the static characteristics of the system, thereby enabling an easier profiling of the target system(s) by the adversary and consequently exploiting their limited resources. In this thesis, a novel approach to mitigate such static vulnerabilities is proposed by implementing a Moving Target Defense (MTD) strategy in a power grid SCADA environment, which leverages the existing communication network with an end-to-end IP Hopping technique among the trusted peer devices. This offers a proactive L3 layer network defense, minimizing IP-specific threats and thwarting worm propagation, APTs, etc., which utilize the cyber kill chain for attacking the system through the SCADA network. The main contribution of this thesis is to show how MTD concepts provide proactive defense against targeted cyber-attacks, and a dynamic attack surface to adversaries without compromising the availability of a SCADA system. Specifically, the thesis presents a brief overview of the different type of MTD designs, the proposed MTD architecture and its implementation with IP hopping technique over a Control Center–Substation network link along with a 3-way handshake protocol for synchronization on the Iowa State’s Power Cyber testbed. The thesis further investigates the delay and throughput characteristics of the entire system with and without the MTD to choose the best hopping rate for the given link. It also includes additional contributions for making the testbed scenarios more realistic to real world scenarios with multi-hop, multi-path WAN. Using that and studying a specific attack model, the thesis analyses the best ranges of IP address for different hopping rate and different number of interfaces. Finally, the thesis describes two case studies to explore and identify potential weaknesses of the proposed mechanism, and also experimentally validate the proposed mitigation alterations to resolve the discovered vulnerabilities. As part of future work, we plan to extend this work by optimizing the MTD algorithm to be more resilient by incorporating other techniques like network port mutation to further increase the attack complexity and cost