Malicious Insider Attacks Research Articles

Group Key Management based on (2, 2) Secret Sharing

In Internet, IP multicast has been used successfully to provide an efficient, best-effort delivery service for group communication applications. However, applications such as multiparty private conference, distribution of stock market information, pay per view and other subscriber services may require secure multicast to protect integrity and confidentiality of the group traffic, and validate message authenticity. Providing secure multicast for group communication is problematic without a robust group key management. In this paper, we propose a group key management scheme based on the secret sharing technology to require each member by itself to generate the group key when receiving a rekeying message multicast by the group key distributor. The proposed scheme enforces mutual authentication between a member and the group key distributor while executing the rekeying process, and provides forward secrecy and backward secrecy properties, and resists replay attack, impersonating attack, group key disclosing attack and malicious insider attack.

A Demonstration of Malicious Insider Attacks inside Cloud IaaS Vendor

 Abstract—Until now, many researches have carried out analyzing the vulnerabilities as well as finding the defense strategies for malicious insider (MI) at cloud environment. However, all these previous works only considered the perspective of MI attacks that are originated from tenant side in a public cloud. Furthermore, in these existing works, the MI attack techniques are only basically and abstractly described. Without the proof of concept, MI attacks are just theoretical threats. In this paper, we consider the scenario that MI executes the attack inside the Cloud IaaS vendor. Moreover, in order to show the realistic of MI attacks in the scenario, this paper introduces three concrete MI attacks with a proof of concept implementation based on existing tools. Three introduced MI attacks in this paper are: memory scanning, template poisoning, and snapshot cracking. The demonstration result shows that MI attacks inside cloud IaaS vendor are no longer potential threats but realistic issues that we need to consider.

Context-Aware Access Control Model for Cloud Computing

In view of malicious insider attacks on cloud computing environments, a new ContextAware Access Control Model for cloud computing (CAACM) was presented. According to the characteristic of cloud computing, we take spatial state, temporal state and platform trust level as context. The model establishes mechanisms of authorization from cloud management role to objects, which enables dynamic activation of role permission by associating cloud management role with context. It also achieves fine-grained access control on cloud objects by supervising the permission of management role in full life cycle. Moreover, it introduces the concept of exclusive managerial role, which extends access control from static protection on resources to dynamic authorization on managerial roles. Further, it describes the approach of role permission activation systematically. CAACM formally proves to be safe and it lays the groundwork for the deployment of CAACM in cloud computing systems.

A Robust User Authentication Scheme Using Dynamic Identity in Wireless Sensor Networks

In modern, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) stand for the next evolutionary and innovative development step in utilities, industrial, building, home, shipboard, and transportation systems automation. The feature of WSNs is easy to deploy and has wide range of applications. Therefore, in distributed and unattended locations, WSNs are deployed to allow a legitimated user to login to the network and access data. Consequently, the authentication between users and sensor nodes has become one of the important security issues. In 2009, M. L. Das proposed a two-factor authentication for WSNs. Based on one-way hash function and exclusive-OR operation, the scheme is well-suited for resource constrained environments. Later, Khan and Algahathbar pointed out the flaws and vulnerabilities of Das's scheme and proposed an alternative scheme. However, Vaidya et al. found that both Das's and Khan–Algahathbar's schemes are vulnerable to various attacks including stolen smart card attacks. Further, Vaidya et al. proposed an improved two-factor user authentication to overcome the security weakness of both schemes. In this paper, we show that Vaidya et al.'s scheme still exposes to a malicious insider attack that seriously threatens the security of WSNs. Furthermore, we propose an improve scheme that mends those vulnerabilities.

A Framework for Analyzing Template Security and Privacy in Biometric Authentication Systems

In this correspondence, we analyze the vulnerabilities of biometric authentication protocols with respect to user and data privacy. The goal of an adversary in such context is not to bypass the authentication but to learn information either on biometric data or on users that are in the system. We elaborate our analysis on a general system model involving four logical entities (sensor, server, database, and matcher), and we focus on internal adversaries to encompass the situation where one or a combination of these entities would be malicious. Our goal is to emphasize that when going beyond the usual honest-but-curious assumption much more complex attacks can affect the privacy of data and users. On the one hand, we introduce a new comprehensive framework that encompasses the various schemes we want to look at. It presents a system model in which each internal entity or combination of entities is a potential attacker. Different attack goals are considered and resulting requirements on data flows are discussed. On the other hand, we develop different generic attacks. We follow a blackbox approach in which we consider components that perform operations on biometric data but where only the input/output behavior is analyzed. These attack strategies are exhibited on recent schemes such as the distributed protocol of Bringer (ACISP 2007), which is based on the Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystem, the related protocol of Barbosa (ACISP 2008), which uses the Paillier cryptosystem, and the scheme of Stoianov (SPIE 2010), that features the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem. All these schemes have been developed in the honest-but-curious adversary model and show potential weaknesses when considered in our malicious insider attack model.

Attack countermeasure trees (ACT): towards unifying the constructs of attack and defense trees

ABSTRACTAttack tree (AT) is one of the widely used non‐state‐space models for security analysis. The basic formalism of AT does not take into account defense mechanisms. Defense trees (DTs) have been developed to investigate the effect of defense mechanisms using measures such as attack cost, security investment cost, return on attack (ROA), and return on investment (ROI). DT, however, places defense mechanisms only at the leaf nodes and the corresponding ROI/ROA analysis does not incorporate the probabilities of attack. In attack response tree (ART), attack and response are both captured but ART suffers from the problem of state‐space explosion, since solution of ART is obtained by means of a state‐space model. In this paper, we present a novel attack tree paradigm called attack countermeasure tree (ACT) which avoids the generation and solution of a state‐space model and takes into account attacks as well as countermeasures (in the form of detection and mitigation events). In ACT, detection and mitigation are allowed not just at the leaf node but also at the intermediate nodes while at the same time the state‐space explosion problem is avoided in its analysis. We study the consequences of incorporating countermeasures in the ACT using three case studies (ACT for BGP attack, ACT for a SCADA attack and ACT for malicious insider attacks). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.