Security Vulnerability Evaluation of Popular Personal Firewalls and Operating Systems

In this thesis, experimental evaluation of security vulnerabilities has been performed under DoS attacks for popular personal firewalls from McAfee, Norton and Kaspersky; and for operating systems namely Apple’s Leopard and SnowLeopard, and Microsoft’s Windows XP and Windows 7. Our experimental results show that the firewalls and operating systems behave differently under a given DoS attack. Some of the firewalls crashed under certain DoS attacks especially when they were configured to prevent and block packets belonging to such attacks. Operating systems evaluated in this thesis were also found to have different built-in security capabilities, and some of them even crashed under certain DoS attacks requiring forced reboot of the system. Comparative performance of firewalls and operating systems under DoS attacks has been presented

Cyber Security Evaluation of CentOS Red Hat Based Operating System Under Cyber Attack with Increasing Magnitude

The increasing interest in ‘always-connected’ devices and the Internet of Things has led to electronic devices with Internet connectivity becoming a staple in modern household and workplace. Consequently, this increase has also led to an increase in vulnerable devices, ripe for hijacking by a malicious third party. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have consistently been an issue since the birth of the Internet. With the large number of devices available today, the strength and consistency of these attacks has only grown and will continue to grow. Since, depending on certain variables, these DDoS attacks can effectively render a target system inoperable, precautions must be taken in order to prevent these attacks. Not all devices are created equal; Many harbor flaws that allow them to be used by a separate, malicious host without the knowledge of the owner. There is a myriad of devices on the market today, any of which can be used in a network of zombie machines meant to carry out an attack, a botnet. These botnets are used to flood a system with information, ideally consuming large amounts of resources, such as memory or processing power. If the attack is successful, operation within the target system is effectively halted, often for long periods of time in the more severe attacks. Just like the variety in devices, there is a variety in the software that operates these devices. In this experiment, I focus efforts on comparing the ability of CentOS 15 with Windows Server 2012R to function under attack. I analyze four popular DDoS attacks using simulated network traffic consisting of botnets ranging from of over 16 million systems, 65 thousand systems and 254 systems in a controlled, closed environment

Security Evaluation of Microsoft’s Windows Under Cyber-Flood Attacks

Cyberattacks are quite common occurrences today as such can compromise entire networks producing collective vulnerabilities. As shown herein, manifold experimental findings exhibit ramifications for a cyberattack victim during multiple simulations. All experiments were conducted with Apple’s iMac, the victim system, and different editions of Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 8.1. Cyberattacks herein categorize as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks including Smurf, Ping Flood, Transmission Control Protocol-Synchronize (TCP-SYN) Flood, and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Flood attacks. Experimental results from each cyberattack are recordings of computer activities such as memory consumption, disk utilization, and overall processor utilization. DDoS attack simulations include networks with over 65 thousand systems per network which generate attack traffic for the victim system. Likewise, simulated legitimate traffic attempts to connect with a victim system for further evaluation purposes. Experimental data analysis involves comparing impactful differences between cyberattacks, Microsoft Windows versions, and editions of both versions

The Cyber Security Evaluation of a Wireless and Wired Smart Electric Meter

In this thesis, an Experimental cyber security evaluation of Wireless Smart Electric Meter has been performed under cyber security attacks. The security integrity of data collection from EPM 6100 Power Quality Wireless Smart Electric Meter under a wireless cyber-attack was evaluated. After which the security integrity of data collection from the same Wireless Smart Electric Meter was evaluated under a different configuration. In this Thesis, we tested three different smart meters for their connectivity under different cybersecurity attacks. We compared the security integrity of the three different smart meters to measure their response under different cybersecurity attacks

Router security effect on performance of a network

Recently many of the devices that create a computer network offer security to help protect networks from hackers, such as computers, servers, firewalls and even routers. In most cases when protecting a network from hackers having more security is not always the best, because the more resources of the device is used by the security in inspecting connections, and it can compromise performance of the network. This thesis investigates performance benefit of having security on a router and its impact on the connection rate of the network when it is under security attacks. In this thesis, different security features and configurations offered by the router are tested to see how they affect the connection rate of the network under different security attacks, and compare with the benchmark network performance when there was no security used at all in the router

Security Evaluation of Virtualized Computing Platforms

In this thesis, security experiments were conducted to evaluate embedded security protocol performance of two leading server operating systems, Apple’s MAC OS server LION Vs. Microsoft’s Windows server 2012 R2 OS under different types of security attack. Furthermore, experiments were conducted to understand and evaluate the effect of virtualization using Hyper-V with Windows 2012 R2 OS on MAC hardware platform. For these experiments, connection rate, connection latency, non-paged pool allocations and processor core utilization for different OS, virtual machines, and under different traffic types were measured

Cyber Security Evaluation of Smart Electric Meters

In this thesis, effect of intermediate network systems on power usage data collection from Smart Electric Meter in Smart Grid was evaluated. Security integrity of remote data collection from GE’s Power Quality Smart Electric Meter EPM 6100 and EPM 7000 under cyber-attacks were evaluated. Experimental security evaluations of Smart Electric Meters were conducted to understand their operation under cyber-attacks. Integrity of data communication between the GE’s smart meters and remote monitoring computer was evaluated under different types of cyber security attacks. Performance comparison was done for security integrity of EPM 6100 and EPM 7000 power quality meter under various cyber-attacks