Measuring and Analysing the Chain of Implicit Trust: AStudy of Third-party Resources Loading

The web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, whereby websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. The latter can also load further resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this creates a dependency chain underpinned by a form of implicit trust between the first-party and transitively connected third parties. The chain can only be loosely controlled as first-party websites often have little, if any, visibility on where these resources are loaded from. This article performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they do not directly load. Although the majority (84.91%) of websites have short dependency chains (below three levels), we find websites with dependency chains exceeding 30. Using VirusTotal, we show that 1.2% of these third parties are classified as suspicious—although seemingly small, this limited set of suspicious third parties have remarkable reach into the wider ecosystem. We find that 73% of websites under-study load resources from suspicious third parties, and 24.8% of first-party webpages contain at least three third parties classified as suspicious in their dependency chain. By running sandboxed experiments, we observe a range of activities with the majority of suspicious JavaScript codes downloading malware

Off-Path TCP Exploits of the Mixed IPID Assignment

In this paper, we uncover a new off-path TCP hijacking attack that can be used to terminate victim TCP connections or inject forged data into victim TCP connections by manipulating the new mixed IPID assignment method, which is widely used in Linux kernel version 4.18 and beyond to help defend against TCP hijacking attacks. The attack has three steps. First, an off-path attacker can downgrade the IPID assignment for TCP packets from the more secure per-socket-based policy to the less secure hash-based policy, building a shared IPID counter that forms a side channel on the victim. Second, the attacker detects the presence of TCP connections by observing the shared IPID counter on the victim. Third, the attacker infers the sequence number and the acknowledgment number of the detected connection by observing the side channel of the shared IPID counter. Consequently, the attacker can completely hijack the connection, i.e., resetting the connection or poisoning the data stream. We evaluate the impacts of this off-path TCP attack in the real world. Our case studies of SSH DoS, manipulating web traffic, and poisoning BGP routing tables show its threat on a wide range of applications. Our experimental results show that our off-path TCP attack can be constructed within 215 seconds and the success rate is over 88%. Finally, we analyze the root cause of the exploit and develop a new IPID assignment method to defeat this attack. We prototype our defense in Linux 4.18 and confirm its effectiveness through extensive evaluation over real applications on the Internet

Analyzing the Great Firewall of China over space and time

Abstract: A nation-scale firewall, colloquially referred to as the "Great Firewall of China," implements many different types of censorship and content filtering to control China's Internet traffic. Past work has shown that the firewall occasionally fails. In other words, sometimes clients in China are able to reach blacklisted servers outside of China. This phenomenon has not yet been characterized because it is infeasible to find a large and geographically diverse set of clients in China from which to test connectivity. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by using a hybrid idle scan technique that is able to measure connectivity between a remote client and an arbitrary server, neither of which are under the control of the researcher performing measurements. In addition to hybrid idle scans, we present and employ a novel side channel in the Linux kernel's SYN backlog. We show that both techniques are practical by measuring the reachability of the Tor network which is known to be blocked in China. Our measurements reveal that failures in the firewall occur throughout the entire country without any conspicuous geographical patterns. We give some evidence that routing plays a role, but other factors (such as how the GFW maintains its list of IP/port pairs to block) may also be important

pSESYNTH project: Community mobilization for a multi-disciplinary paleo database of the Global South

How to enhance paleoscientific research, collaboration and application in the Global South? The INQUA-funded multi-year pSESYNTH project envisions the first multi-disciplinary Holocene paleo database through a collaborative vision for past human-environmental systems in the Global South, and their future sustainability

Ruthenium oxide-carbon-based nanofiller-reinforced conducting polymer nanocomposites and their supercapacitor applications.

In this review article, we have presented for the first time the new applications of supercapacitor technologies and working principles of the family of RuO2-carbon-based nanofiller-reinforced conducting polymer nanocomposites. Our review focuses on pseudocapacitors and symmetric and asymmetric supercapacitors. Over the last years, the supercapacitors as a new technology in energy storage systems have attracted more and more attention. They have some unique characteristics such as fast charge/discharge capability, high energy and power densities, and long stability. However, the need for economic, compatible, and easy synthesis materials for supercapacitors have led to the development of RuO2-carbon-based nanofiller-reinforced conducting polymer nanocomposites with RuO2. Therefore, the aim of this manuscript was to review RuO2-carbon-based nanofiller-reinforced conducting polymer nanocomposites with RuO2 over the last 17 years

Assessment of protein silver nanoparticles toxicity against pathogenic Alternaria solani

Mycogenic synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) was carried out in the present investigation using an aqueous extract of endophytic non-pathogenic Alternaria solani F10 (KT721914). The mycosynthesized AgNPs were characterized by means of spectroscopic and microscopic techniques. The surface plasmon resonance found at 430 nm confirmed the formation of stable AgNPs for several weeks at room temperature. Also, the results revealed the formation of spherical and monodispersed AgNPs with an average size of 14.8 +/- 1.2 nm. The FT-IR spectrum suggested that the fungal extracellular proteins and secondary metabolites had the role in Ag reduction and AgNPs capping of which protein Ag nanoconjugates were formed. Furthermore, the mycosynthesized AgNPs exhibited potent antifungal activity against different pathogenic isolates of the same Alternaria solani fungus, the causal pathogen of tomato early blight disease. 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