Benefits on using H-P2PSIP in mobile environments

Proceeding of: VIII Jornadas de Ingeniería Telemática (JITEL '09), Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Cartagena, Murcia, 15-17 de septiembre de 2009The use of peer-to-peer technologies is increasing everyday and the improvement of mobility technologies is a reality. Now, it is expected that peer-to-peer applications run on mobile devices, but the conjunction of these two technologies is an open research issue. The user mobility impacts on the churn suffered by peer-to-peer networks and consequently it impacts on their performance. Therefore, some mechanisms are necessary to minimize this undesirable effect. Our proposal tries to solve this problem by using a Hierarchical P2PSIP architecture where different overlays are used for different peer mobility behaviours and they are interconnected between them through an interconnection overlay. In this way it is possible for peers that share the same behaviour to choose a certain protocol or to optimize some functionality that suits best with their mobility situation, while maintaining connectivity with all peers.This research work is being supported by the European Commission under the IST Content Network of Excellence3 (FP6-2006-IST-038423), by the Regional Government of Madrid under the BioGridNet4 project (CAM, S-0505/TIC- 0101) and by the Ministry of Science and Innovation under the CONPARTE project (MEC, TEC2007-67966-C03-03/TCM).No publicad

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

Automated performance attack discovery in distributed system implementations

Security and performance are critical goals for distributed systems. The increased complexity in design, incomplete expertise of developers, and limited functionality of existing testing tools often result in implementations with vulnerabilities and make the debugging process difficult and costly. The deployed vulnerabilities are often exploited by adversaries preventing the system from achieving its design goals. We refer to attacks that slow down the performance of a system as performance attacks. In the past, finding performance attacks has been a painstaking manual process that involved an expert of the target implementation. Given the cost associated with each vulnerability that occurs in the production, there is a need for tools to automatically check that the implementation of a protocol achieves its performance goals with respect to malicious components in the system. In this dissertation, we find performance attacks automatically from implementations of distributed systems. We do not try to show that an implementation is free from all attacks. Our goal is to find attacks and report them to the user in a timely manner. We first investigate how to find attacks automatically from implementations under a simulated environment. A simulated approach, however, has a fundamental limitation in terms of applicable target systems, as certain assumptions are made about languages, operating systems or libraries used. Therefore, we next investigate challenges and requirements to automatically find attacks in implementations of distributed systems under an emulated environment where no limiting assumptions are made

Storytelling Security: User-Intention Based Traffic Sanitization

Malicious software (malware) with decentralized communication infrastructure, such as peer-to-peer botnets, is difficult to detect. In this paper, we describe a traffic-sanitization method for identifying malware-triggered outbound connections from a personal computer. Our solution correlates user activities with the content of outbound traffic. Our key observation is that user-initiated outbound traffic typically has corresponding human inputs, i.e., keystroke or mouse clicks. Our analysis on the causal relations between user inputs and packet payload enables the efficient enforcement of the inter-packet dependency at the application level. We formalize our approach within the framework of protocol-state machine. We define new application-level traffic-sanitization policies that enforce the inter-packet dependencies. The dependency is derived from the transitions among protocol states that involve both user actions and network events. We refer to our methodology as storytelling security. We demonstrate a concrete realization of our methodology in the context of peer-to-peer file-sharing application, describe its use in blocking traffic of P2P bots on a host. We implement and evaluate our prototype in Windows operating system in both online and offline deployment settings. Our experimental evaluation along with case studies of real-world P2P applications demonstrates the feasibility of verifying the inter-packet dependencies. Our deep packet inspection incurs overhead on the outbound network flow. Our solution can also be used as an offline collect-and-analyze tool

Droplet: Decentralized Authorization for IoT Data Streams

This paper presents Droplet, a decentralized data access control service, which operates without intermediate trust entities. Droplet enables data owners to securely and selectively share their encrypted data while guaranteeing data confidentiality against unauthorized parties. Droplet's contribution lies in coupling two key ideas: (i) a new cryptographically-enforced access control scheme for encrypted data streams that enables users to define fine-grained stream-specific access policies, and (ii) a decentralized authorization service that handles user-defined access policies. In this paper, we present Droplet's design, the reference implementation of Droplet, and experimental results of three case-study apps atop of Droplet: Fitbit activity tracker, Ava health tracker, and ECOviz smart meter dashboard

A formal method for rule analysis and validation in distributed data aggregation service

The usage of Cloud Serviced has increased rapidly in the last years. Data management systems, behind any Cloud Service, are a major concern when it comes to scalability, flexibility and reliability due to being implemented in a distributed way. A Distributed Data Aggregation Service relying on a storage system meets these demands and serves as a repository back-end for complex analysis and automatic mining of any type of data. In this paper we continue our previous work on data management in Cloud storage. We present a formal approach to express retrieval and aggregation rules with a compact, yet powerful tool called Rule Markup Language. Our extended solution proposes a standard form to schemes and uses the tool to match the rules to the XML form of the structured data in order to obtain the unstructured entries from BlobSeer data storage system. This allows the Distributed Data Aggregation Service (DDAS) to bypass several steps when processing a retrieval request. Our new architecture is more loosely-coupled with a separate module, the new tool, used fo

Command & Control: Understanding, Denying and Detecting - A review of malware C2 techniques, detection and defences

In this survey, we first briefly review the current state of cyber attacks, highlighting significant recent changes in how and why such attacks are performed. We then investigate the mechanics of malware command and control (C2) establishment: we provide a comprehensive review of the techniques used by attackers to set up such a channel and to hide its presence from the attacked parties and the security tools they use. We then switch to the defensive side of the problem, and review approaches that have been proposed for the detection and disruption of C2 channels. We also map such techniques to widely-adopted security controls, emphasizing gaps or limitations (and success stories) in current best practices.Comment: Work commissioned by CPNI, available at c2report.org. 38 pages. Listing abstract compressed from version appearing in repor

Security Engineering of Patient-Centered Health Care Information Systems in Peer-to-Peer Environments: Systematic Review

Background: Patient-centered health care information systems (PHSs) enable patients to take control and become knowledgeable about their own health, preferably in a secure environment. Current and emerging PHSs use either a centralized database, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or distributed ledger technology for PHS deployment. The evolving COVID-19 decentralized Bluetooth-based tracing systems are examples of disease-centric P2P PHSs. Although using P2P technology for the provision of PHSs can be flexible, scalable, resilient to a single point of failure, and inexpensive for patients, the use of health information on P2P networks poses major security issues as users must manage information security largely by themselves. Objective: This study aims to identify the inherent security issues for PHS deployment in P2P networks and how they can be overcome. In addition, this study reviews different P2P architectures and proposes a suitable architecture for P2P PHS deployment. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) reporting guidelines. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. We searched the following databases: IEEE Digital Library, PubMed, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and Semantic Scholar. The search was conducted on articles published between 2008 and 2020. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System was used as a guide for rating security issues. Results: Our findings are consolidated into 8 key security issues associated with PHS implementation and deployment on P2P networks and 7 factors promoting them. Moreover, we propose a suitable architecture for P2P PHSs and guidelines for the provision of PHSs while maintaining information security. Conclusions: Despite the clear advantages of P2P PHSs, the absence of centralized controls and inconsistent views of the network on some P2P systems have profound adverse impacts in terms of security. The security issues identified in this study need to be addressed to increase patients\u27 intention to use PHSs on P2P networks by making them safe to use

Advances in modern botnet understanding and the accurate enumeration of infected hosts

Botnets remain a potent threat due to evolving modern architectures, inadequate remediation methods, and inaccurate measurement techniques. In response, this re- search exposes the architectures and operations of two advanced botnets, techniques to enumerate infected hosts, and pursues the scientific refinement of infected-host enu- meration data by recognizing network structures which distort measurement. This effort is motivated by the desire to reveal botnet behavior and trends for future mit- igation, methods to discover infected hosts for remediation in real time and threat assessment, and the need to reveal the inaccuracy in population size estimation when only counting IP addresses. Following an explanation of theoretical enumeration techniques, the architectures, deployment methodologies, and malicious output for the Storm and Waledac botnets are presented. Several tools developed to enumerate these botnets are then assessed in terms of performance and yield. Finally, this study documents methods that were developed to discover the boundaries and impact of NAT and DHCP blocks in network populations along with a footprint measurement based on relative entropy which better describes how uniformly infections communi- cate through their IP addresses. Population data from the Waledac botnet was used to evaluate these techniqu

Dht-based security infrastructure for trusted internet and grid computing

Abstract: We designed a distributed security infrastructure with self-defence capabilities to secure networked resources in Grids and internet applications. This paper reports new developments in fuzzy trust management, game-theoretic Grid models, security-binding methodology, as well as new Grid performance metrics, defence architecture and mechanisms against intrusions, worms, and low-rate pulsing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The design is based on a novel Distributed Has