Adaptive Response System for Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

The continued prevalence and severe damaging effects of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in today’s Internet raise growing security concerns and call for an immediate response to come up with better solutions to tackle DDoS attacks. The current DDoS prevention mechanisms are usually inflexible and determined attackers with knowledge of these mechanisms, could work around them. Most existing detection and response mechanisms are standalone systems which do not rely on adaptive updates to mitigate attacks. As different responses vary in their “leniency” in treating detected attack traffic, there is a need for an Adaptive Response System. We designed and implemented our DDoS Adaptive ResponsE (DARE) System, which is a distributed DDoS mitigation system capable of executing appropriate detection and mitigation responses automatically and adaptively according to the attacks. It supports easy integrations for both signature-based and anomaly-based detection modules. Additionally, the design of DARE’s individual components takes into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of existing defence mechanisms, and the characteristics and possible future mutations of DDoS attacks. These components consist of an Enhanced TCP SYN Attack Detector and Bloom-based Filter, a DDoS Flooding Attack Detector and Flow Identifier, and a Non Intrusive IP Traceback mechanism. The components work together interactively to adapt the detections and responses in accordance to the attack types. Experiments conducted on DARE show that the attack detection and mitigation are successfully completed within seconds, with about 60% to 86% of the attack traffic being dropped, while availability for legitimate and new legitimate requests is maintained. DARE is able to detect and trigger appropriate responses in accordance to the attacks being launched with high accuracy, effectiveness and efficiency. We also designed and implemented a Traffic Redirection Attack Protection System (TRAPS), a stand-alone DDoS attack detection and mitigation system for IPv6 networks. In TRAPS, the victim under attack verifies the authenticity of the source by performing virtual relocations to differentiate the legitimate traffic from the attack traffic. TRAPS requires minimal deployment effort and does not require modifications to the Internet infrastructure due to its incorporation of the Mobile IPv6 protocol. Experiments to test the feasibility of TRAPS were carried out in a testbed environment to verify that it would work with the existing Mobile IPv6 implementation. It was observed that the operations of each module were functioning correctly and TRAPS was able to successfully mitigate an attack launched with spoofed source IP addresses

Autonomous Vehicle Ultrasonic Sensor Vulnerability and Impact Assessment

Vehicles today are relying more on technologies to bring about fully autonomous features. The conventional wirings within are being simplified into a network of electronic components, and this network is controlled via advanced sensing of the environment to make decisions in real-time. However, with the heavy reliance on the sensor readings, any inaccurate reading from the sensors could result in decisions that may cause life-threatening incidents. As such, this research focuses on the in-depth assessment of potential vulnerabilities of an important and commonly used obstacle sensing device, which is the ultrasonic sensor, in modern as well as autonomous vehicles. This research will help bring awareness to the car manufacturers and AV researchers so as to mitigate such issues

The Right Thing, The Smart Thing: A Call for Mass Action

[Excerpt] I was an organizer for 14 years. I never met with an organizing committee or spoke at a mass meeting when I didn t remind workers of something we all understand intuitively: There is one way you get what you need and want in this world—power. There are only two ways to get it—lots of money or lots of people organized together. Working people have never gotten anything except when they were organized and moving. The most important questions we in Atlanta deal with everyday are: How do we build power? How do we exercise power in a way that helps us build more power? We believe mass action, in all its many forms, is the most effective way to exercise power. We believe mass action actually helps build more power. American trade unionists operate in an environment that is full of constraints on our activity. Our private sector organizing is constrained by the NLRB. Our membership service is dictated by a contract. We often ask our attorneys to sign off on union activities. We double-check our public approval ratings. We accept these constraints for a variety of reasons both good and bad. But where we accept these constraints absolutely, we limit our ability to build and exercise power and, therefore, our effectiveness as trade unions. The only real tool we have is the strength of our membership. Any time the labor movement or any individual union in our country has grown or won substantial gains has been when members have been moving in mass action. Mass action is the smart thing and the right thing to do

Animals, Slaves, and Corporations: Analyzing Legal Thinghood

The Article analyzes the notion of legal “thinghood” in the context of the person–thing bifurcation. In legal scholarship, there are numerous assumptions pertaining to this definition that are often not spelled out. In addition, one’s chosen definition of “thing” is often simply taken to be the correct one. The Article scrutinizes these assumptions and definitions. First, a brief history of the bifurcation is offered. Second, three possible definitions of “legal thing” are examined: Things as nonpersons, things as rights and duties, and things as property. The first two definitions are rejected as not being very interesting or serving any heuristic function. Conversely, understanding legal things as property is meaningful, useful, and helps to understand what it means to say that animals are legally things. Defining things as property has certain rather important implications, which are analyzed at the end of the Article. For instance, not everything needs to be either a person or a thing: The historical institution of outlawry involved treating individuals neither as legal persons nor as legal things. One must conclude that the person–thing bifurcation is less fundamental than is often assumed

Personality attributes that predict cadet performance at West Point

Using data from the United States Military Academy at West Point (N = 1102 and N = 1049) from two successive years, we examined psychological measures of cadets and the correlations of those measures with consequential outcomes such as cadet performance and leadership potential. We examined four broad intelligences, two of which were thing-focused (spatial and mathematical) and two people-focused (verbal and personal intelligences) and their predictions to thing- and people-centered courses (e.g., chemistry versus psychology). We found support for a thing-people differential in reasoning. The broad intelligences and the Big Five personality traits also predicted academic and other performance criteria at consequential levels

Reassessing the Citizens Protection Act: A Good Thing It Passed, and a Good Thing It Failed

The Citizens Protection Act (CPA) of 1998 has always been a lightening rod for criticism, and it remains so today. This article reassesses the CPA’s perceived inadequacies in light of how it has actually affected (or, not affected) federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations. The article takes issue with the critics and demonstrates that the CPA succeeded where it should have, failed where it should have, and left us—however inadvertently—with a remarkably coherent and consistent approach to regulating federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations regardless of whether a suspect retains counsel early in the proceedings. The CPA requires federal prosecutors to follow state rules of professional conduct “to the same extent and in the same manner” as all other lawyers. The CPA was intended to—and did—nullify a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) declaration that unilaterally exempted federal prosecutors from much of the “no-contact” rule, which prohibits a lawyer in a matter from communicating with the client of another lawyer in the matter. The CPA was also intended to—but did not—require federal prosecutors to comply with various state interpretations of the no-contact rule that might have restricted their ability to participate in both covert and overt communications with represented criminal suspects. It is a good thing the CPA passed because DOJ’s assertion of authority over the no-contact rule for its own lawyers would inevitably have undermined public confidence in federal prosecutors’ commitment to fair and ethical investigatory processes. By the same token, it is a good thing that the CPA failed because broadly depriving DOJ of federal prosecutors’ involvement in communications with represented suspects would have substantially hindered criminal investigations for no good reason

Compelled to do the right thing

We use a model of opinion formation to study the consequences of some mechanisms attempting to enforce the right behaviour in a society. We start from a model where the possible choices are not equivalent (such is the case when the agents decide to comply or not with a law) and where an imitation mechanism allow the agents to change their behaviour based on the influence of a group of partners. In addition, we consider the existence of two social constraints: a) an external authority, called monitor, that imposes the correct behaviour with infinite persuasion and b) an educated group of agents that act upon their fellows but never change their own opinion, i.e., they exhibit infinite adamancy. We determine the minimum number of monitors to induce an effective change in the behaviour of the social group, and the size of the educated group that produces the same effect. Also, we compare the results for the cases of random social interactions and agents placed on a network. We have verified that a small number of monitors are enough to change the behaviour of the society. This also happens with a relatively small educated group in the case of random interactions.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, submitted to EPJ