Hyp3rArmor: reducing web application exposure to automated attacks

Web applications (webapps) are subjected constantly to automated, opportunistic attacks from autonomous robots (bots) engaged in reconnaissance to discover victims that may be vulnerable to specific exploits. This is a typical behavior found in botnet recruitment, worm propagation, largescale fingerprinting and vulnerability scanners. Most anti-bot techniques are deployed at the application layer, thus leaving the network stack of the webapp’s server exposed. In this paper we present a mechanism called Hyp3rArmor, that addresses this vulnerability by minimizing the webapp’s attack surface exposed to automated opportunistic attackers, for JavaScriptenabled web browser clients. Our solution uses port knocking to eliminate the webapp’s visible network footprint. Clients of the webapp are directed to a visible static web server to obtain JavaScript that authenticates the client to the webapp server (using port knocking) before making any requests to the webapp. Our implementation of Hyp3rArmor, which is compatible with all webapp architectures, has been deployed and used to defend single and multi-page websites on the Internet for 114 days. During this time period the static web server observed 964 attempted attacks that were deflected from the webapp, which was only accessed by authenticated clients. Our evaluation shows that in most cases client-side overheads were negligible and that server-side overheads were minimal. Hyp3rArmor is ideal for critical systems and legacy applications that must be accessible on the Internet. Additionally Hyp3rArmor is composable with other security tools, adding an additional layer to a defense in depth approach.This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) awards #1430145, #1414119, and #1012798

XSS-FP: Browser Fingerprinting using HTML Parser Quirks

There are many scenarios in which inferring the type of a client browser is desirable, for instance to fight against session stealing. This is known as browser fingerprinting. This paper presents and evaluates a novel fingerprinting technique to determine the exact nature (browser type and version, eg Firefox 15) of a web-browser, exploiting HTML parser quirks exercised through XSS. Our experiments show that the exact version of a web browser can be determined with 71% of accuracy, and that only 6 tests are sufficient to quickly determine the exact family a web browser belongs to

Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK

Cyber adversaries have increasingly leveraged social engineering attacks to breach large organizations and threaten the well-being of today's online users. One clever technique, the "watering hole" attack, compromises a legitimate website to execute drive-by download attacks by redirecting users to another malicious domain. We introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the salient aspects for an organization protecting itself from a watering hole attack by altering the environment information in web traffic so as to deceive the attackers. Our main contributions are (1) a novel Social Engineering Deception (SED) game model that features a continuous action set for the attacker, (2) an in-depth analysis of the SED model to identify computationally feasible real-world cases, and (3) the CyberTWEAK algorithm which solves for the optimal protection policy. To illustrate the potential use of our framework, we built a browser extension based on our algorithms which is now publicly available online. The CyberTWEAK extension will be vital to the continued development and deployment of countermeasures for social engineering.Comment: IAAI-20, AICS-2020 Worksho