9,913 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
OnionBots: Subverting Privacy Infrastructure for Cyber Attacks
Over the last decade botnets survived by adopting a sequence of increasingly
sophisticated strategies to evade detection and take overs, and to monetize
their infrastructure. At the same time, the success of privacy infrastructures
such as Tor opened the door to illegal activities, including botnets,
ransomware, and a marketplace for drugs and contraband. We contend that the
next waves of botnets will extensively subvert privacy infrastructure and
cryptographic mechanisms. In this work we propose to preemptively investigate
the design and mitigation of such botnets. We first, introduce OnionBots, what
we believe will be the next generation of resilient, stealthy botnets.
OnionBots use privacy infrastructures for cyber attacks by completely
decoupling their operation from the infected host IP address and by carrying
traffic that does not leak information about its source, destination, and
nature. Such bots live symbiotically within the privacy infrastructures to
evade detection, measurement, scale estimation, observation, and in general all
IP-based current mitigation techniques. Furthermore, we show that with an
adequate self-healing network maintenance scheme, that is simple to implement,
OnionBots achieve a low diameter and a low degree and are robust to
partitioning under node deletions. We developed a mitigation technique, called
SOAP, that neutralizes the nodes of the basic OnionBots. We also outline and
discuss a set of techniques that can enable subsequent waves of Super
OnionBots. In light of the potential of such botnets, we believe that the
research community should proactively develop detection and mitigation methods
to thwart OnionBots, potentially making adjustments to privacy infrastructure.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure
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