Vulnerability Of Internet Research Articles

Securing SCADA-based Critical Infrastructures: Challenges and Open Issues

Conventionally, the security of critical infrastructures was mainly focused on environmental threats. Cyber attacks, nevertheless, have shifted the attention to various other threats and damages. The attackers try to exploit vulnerabilities in networks and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, since these technologies are the integral part of the critical systems. Therefore, the vulnerability of Critical Infrastructure (CI) against cyber threats has led the need to devise modern security measures. Unavailability or failure of one CI can cause enormous devastation and damage to the society, economy and stability by provoking cascading failures to many other related infrastructures. Traditional security measures attempt to cater well-known emerging threats; however, strong and adaptive security measures/techniques are inevitable to defend against innovative attacks. This paper presents a survey on cyber threats and defense measures to highlight the necessity for securing SCADA-based critical infrastructures and provides an insight into the security challenges and open issues in this regard.

Development of Internet Vulnerability Index for Youth through Internet Overdependency Analysis

Development of Internet Vulnerability Index for Youth through Internet Overdependency Analysis

Internet of things forensics: Recent advances, taxonomy, requirements, and open challenges

The explosive growth of smart objects and their dependency on wireless technologies for communication increases the vulnerability of Internet of Things (IoT) to cyberattacks. Cyberattacks faced by IoT present daunting challenges to digital forensic experts. Researchers adopt various forensic techniques to investigate such attacks. These techniques aim to track internal and external attacks by emphasizing on communication mechanisms and IoT’s architectural vulnerabilities. In this study, we explore IoT’s novel factors affecting traditional computer forensics. We investigate recent studies on IoT forensics by analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. We categorize and classify the literature by devising a taxonomy based on forensics phases, enablers, networks, sources of evidence, investigation modes, forensics models, forensics layers, forensics tools, and forensics data processing. We also enumerate a few prominent use cases of IoT forensics and present the key requirements for enabling IoT forensics. Finally, we identify and discuss several indispensable open research challenges as future research directions.

Reviewing a Historical Internet Vulnerability: Why Isn't BGP More Secure and What Can We Do About it?

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) plays a crucial role in today’s communications as it is the inter-domain routing protocol that holds together the Internet, providing the path for IP packets to flow between networks across the globe operated by different providers. Although the first version of BGP was published in 1989 and its lack of security mechanisms has been known since then, BGP remains vulnerable to attacks that can cause large scale outages or can be used for other malicious purposes on the Internet, such as traffic sniffing or spam sending. Moreover, the lack of security has not prevented the surge of new applications that run on top of the Internet, making tampering with BGP increasingly attractive. As an example, BGP hijacking was used to steal at least $83,000 worth of cryptocurrency in 2014, and again more recently in April 2018. Thus, securing BGP is key to increasing the overall security of the Internet ecosystem. This paper offers a historical review of the different ideas put forward to secure inter-domain routing and what happened to these ideas along the way, noting if they were implemented and are in use, the impact they had on other proposals, and other characteristics explaining the difficulty of securing BGP. This study analyzes 10 BGP extensions focused on BGP availability, 7 BGP extensions and best practices focused on securing BGP communication and routing information, and 11 security proposals coming from the research and industry communities. It examines where the ideas came from, the implicit trust delegation and the residual vulnerabilities of proposals. Even though performance and incentives of specific security solutions have been largely discussed, most proposals have not even been implemented, limiting the overall security improvement of BGP. Reviewing the full life cycle of the proposed ideas, the trusted actors and mechanisms and their requirements gives insight into why adoptions rate are so limited. In fact, there is a remarkable lack of consensus on what needs to be secured or validated, and the approach to be taken, preventing solutions to get critical support to move their deployment forward. Additionally, no BGP security mechanism, even the most narrow one, has been easily implemented and deployed. However, there are security best practices that certainly improve local and overall BGP security. Since no solution comes without costs and all proposal have opponents in network operation community, it may be possible that secure routing should be provided as a separate service from routing, and other entities could offer such solutions.

Security Vulnerabilities of Internet of Things: A Case Study of the Smart Plug System

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, more and more small devices are connected into the Internet for monitoring and control purposes. One such type of devices, smart plugs, have been extensively deployed worldwide in millions of homes for home automation. These smart plugs, however, would pose serious security problems if their vulnerabilities were not carefully investigated. Indeed, we discovered that some popular smart home plugs have severe security vulnerabilities which could be fixed but unfortunately are left open. In this paper, we case study a smart plug system of a known brand by exploiting its communication protocols and successfully launching four attacks: 1) device scanning attack; 2) brute force attack; 3) spoofing attack; and 4) firmware attack. Our real-world experimental results show that we can obtain the authentication credentials from the users by performing these attacks. We also present guidelines for securing smart plugs.

Botnets and Internet of Things Security

Recent distributed denial-of-service attacks demonstrate the high vulnerability of Internet of Things (IoT) systems and devices. Addressing this challenge will require scalable security solutions optimized for the IoT ecosystem.

On the Future of Information: Reunification, Computability, Adaptation, Cybersecurity, Semantics

The vulnerability of software and the Internet and the accumulation of unprocessed information in big data are serious problems in informatics. Both are human-related. The former was traced to flaws caused by human interventions in development. In the latter case, humans also intervene to connect the dots, find meaningful patterns, and make sense of the information. The proposed solutions are based on more human interventions, which tend to aggravate the problems rather than solving them. I propose the complete elimination of human interventions in both cases. This goal is conceptually easy to achieve. The approach, however, is radical and theoretical. It considers the causal set, a mathematical object, as the universal language underlying all information in nature and, hence, also all computation. This assumption is recognized as the fundamental principle of causality, that effects follow their causes. The new theory is based solely on the causal set, its metric, and its vast array of algebraic properties. The consequences are unexpected, fascinating, and totally new. Since translations between causal sets and programming languages are easy, I also propose to confine the use of programming languages to the human interface, and create an inner layer of mathematical code expressed as a causal set. Machines talk only to mathematically verified, bug-free, secure code. Included in this paper are experimental and computational verifications of the theory, proposed applications to Internet vulnerability, science and technology, machine learning, computer intelligence, and details for building a first prototype.

One tunnel is (often) enough

A longstanding problem with the Internet is that it is vulnerable to outages, black holes, hijacking and denial of service. Although architectural solutions have been proposed to address many of these issues, they have had difficulty being adopted due to the need for widespread adoption before most users would see any benefit. This is especially relevant as the Internet is increasingly used for applications where correct and continuous operation is essential. In this paper, we study whether a simple, easy to implement model is sufficient for addressing the aforementioned Internet vulnerabilities. Our model, called ARROW (Advertised Reliable Routing Over Waypoints), is designed to allow users to configure reliable and secure end to end paths through participating providers. With ARROW, a highly reliable ISP offers tunneled transit through its network, along with packet transformation at the ingress, as a service to remote paying customers. Those customers can stitch together reliable end to end paths through a combination of participating and non-participating ISPs in order to improve the fault-tolerance, robustness, and security of mission critical transmissions. Unlike efforts to redesign the Internet from scratch, we show that ARROW can address a set of well-known Internet vulnerabilities, for most users, with the adoption of only a single transit ISP. To demonstrate ARROW, we have added it to a small-scale wide-area ISP we control. We evaluate its performance and failure recovery properties in both simulation and live settings.

Earthquakes, soft bombs, and internet vulnerability

Earthquakes, soft bombs, and internet vulnerability

Security of the internet and the known unknowns

Seeking answers to questions about Internet vulnerabilities.

Earthquakes, Soft Bombs, and Internet Vulnerability

Countermeasures are needed to thwart recent advances in military warfare that disable physical infrastructure, including the power grid that global Internet services rely upon

A SIP-oriented SPIT Management Framework

Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony is increasingly gaining popularity among home and business users alike, as a viable alternative to traditional telephony, and is expected to achieve a significant market share in the near future. When this happens, it is also expected that several new threats exploiting the Internet vulnerabilities will appear. One of these is the Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT). This paper examines in detail the SPIT attack, provides a review and assessment of previously proposed SPIT management techniques and proposes the use of an attack-oriented methodology for thwarting the SPIT threat. This results in a generic SPIT management framework, which combines the strengths of existing solutions, while alleviating their insufficiencies.

Better Technology via Hacking

COMPUTER SCIENCE In the public mind, the term “hacker” has nothing but negative connotations, conjuring up images of subversive outcasts writing illicit computer viruses, breaking into bank accounts, or scrambling Pentagon databases. But the epithet originally meant someone adept at taking technology intended for one purpose and retooling it, often in startlingly creative and unexpected ways; and the global community of information technologists who tweak software and hardware outside normal channels still exists. Conti, a professor of computer science at the United States Military Academy, takes the position that mainstream computer scientists could learn some lessons from the unconventional thinking in the hacker community. In a special issue on hacking and innovation, he points out that hackers are passionate about technology, unconstrained by traditional methods, and often years ahead of their academic and corporate counterparts. Hackers publish journals and present their work at well-attended technical conferences, but live in a parallel universe apart from better-known professionals. Other articles in the issue explore how hackers help pinpoint security flaws in wireless networks and identify Internet vulnerabilities, and discuss some of the legal issues surrounding nontraditional technology experimentation. — DV Commun. ACM 49 , 33 (2006).

Transport-aware IP routers: A built-in protection mechanism to counter DDoS attacks

The lack-of service differentiation and resource isolation by current IP routers exposes their vulnerability to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (Garber, 2000), causing a serious threat to the availability of Internet services. Based on the concept of layer-4 service differentiation and resource isolation, where the transport-layer information is inferred from the IP headers and used for packet classification and resource management, we present a transport-aware IP (tIP) router architecture that provides fine-grained service differentiation and resource isolation among different classes of traffic aggregates. The tIP router architecture consists of a fine-grained Quality-of-Service (QoS) classifier and an adaptive weight-based resource manager. A two-stage packet-classification mechanism is devised to decouple the fine-grained QoS lookup from the usual routing lookup at core routers. The fine-grained service differentiation and resource isolation provided inside the tIP router is a powerful built-in protection mechanism to counter DDoS attacks, reducing the vulnerability of Internet to DDoS attacks. Moreover, the tIP architecture is stateless and compatible with the Differentiated Service (DiffServ) infrastructure. Thanks to its scalable QoS support for TCP control segments, the tIP router supports bidirectional differentiated services for TCP sessions.

Controlling high bandwidth aggregates in the network

The current Internet infrastructure has very few built-in protection mechanisms, and is therefore vulnerable to attacks and failures. In particular, recent events have illustrated the Internet's vulnerability to both denial of service (DoS) attacks and flash crowds in which one or more links in the network (or servers at the edge of the network) become severely congested. In both DoS attacks and flash crowds the congestion is due neither to a single flow, nor to a general increase in traffic, but to a well-defined subset of the traffic --- an aggregate . This paper proposes mechanisms for detecting and controlling such high bandwidth aggregates. Our design involves both a local mechanism for detecting and controlling an aggregate at a single router, and a cooperative pushback mechanism in which a router can ask upstream routers to control an aggregate. While certainly not a panacea, these mechanisms could provide some needed relief from flash crowds and flooding-style DoS attacks. The presentation in this paper is a first step towards a more rigorous evaluation of these mechanisms.

Emerging Patterns and Threat Scenarios on the Information Frontier

The leapfrogging developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are rapidly connecting the world into a smaller, ‘global village’ scenario. The rewards of connectivity, are however, deeply marred by the multifarious threats impinging on the information infrastructure. It is reckoned that the Morris Worm (also known as the Internet Worm) in 1988, initially exposed the vulnerability of Internet, and ushered a new era in information security. Since then, the nature of threat has only progressed to more lethal and sophisticated levels. This has been clearly manifested by the recent Code Red, Sircam and Nimda worms. This paper, while attempting to evaluate these emerging patterns, emphasizes upon the dire need for enhanced information security mechanisms and practices. In the aftermath of 9–11, the US envisages similar attacks on its homeland, which includes cyber-attacks carried out by terrorist outfits on America's information assets. Reflecting on the cyber capabilities of contemporary terrorist groups, especially Al Qaeda, the paper also draws attention to the increasingly blurring lines between the state and non-state actors plying on the slippery lanes of the information superhighway.

Internet vulnerabilities related to TCP/IP and T/TCP

The Internet put the rest of the world at the reach of our computers. In the same way it also made our computers reachable by the rest of the world. Good news and bad news! Over the last decade, the Internet has been subject to widespread security attacks. Besides the classical terms, new ones had to be found in order to designate a large collection of threats: Worms, break-ins, hackers, crackers, hijacking, phrackers, spoofing, man-in-the-middle, password-sniffing, denial-of-service , and so on.Since the Internet was born of academic efforts to share information, it never strove for high security measures. In fact in some of its components, security was consciously traded for easiness in sharing. Although the advent of electronic commerce has pushed for "real security" in the Internet, there are still a large number of users (including computer scientists) that are very vulnerable to attacks, mostly because they are not aware of the nature (and ease) of the attacks and still believe that a "good" password is all they need to be concerned about.Aiming for a better understanding of the subject, we wrote a first paper [1] in which we discussed several threats and attacks related to TCP/IP . The present work is an extension of the first one, and its main goal is to include T/TCP in the discussion. Additionally, in an effort to make this paper more comprehensive, we included some sections from the former.Besides the description of each attack (the what ), we also discuss the way they are carried out (the how ) and, when possible, the related means of prevention, detection and/or defense.