Windows Active Directory Research Articles

Hands-on Educational Labs for Cyber Defense Competition Training

Cyber Defense Competitions provide students with challenging, hands-on, fun, and close to real world opportunities to learn, practice, and perform tasks that they will be expected to complete as cybersecurity professionals. The current availability of training resources focused on Cyber Defense Competitions is limited. We introduce CYOTEE: CYbersecurity Oriented Training Environment and Exercises. CYOTEE provides a set of nine fully modifiable and freely available hands-on laboratory activities intended to help students gain skills needed to be successful at Cyber Defense Competitions. This article provides details for two of those hands-on labs: (1) Linux Hardening and (2) Windows Active Directory Hardening. CYOTEE lab descriptions and setup scripts may be found on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/CenterForSecureAndDependableSystems/CYOTEE).

Ransomware: Analysing the Impact on Windows Active Directory Domain Services

Ransomware has become an increasingly popular type of malware across the past decade and continues to rise in popularity due to its high profitability. Organisations and enterprises have become prime targets for ransomware as they are more likely to succumb to ransom demands as part of operating expenses to counter the cost incurred from downtime. Despite the prevalence of ransomware as a threat towards organisations, there is very little information outlining how ransomware affects Windows Server environments, and particularly its proprietary domain services such as Active Directory. Hence, we aim to increase the cyber situational awareness of organisations and corporations that utilise these environments. Dynamic analysis was performed using three ransomware variants to uncover how crypto-ransomware affects Windows Server-specific services and processes. Our work outlines the practical investigation undertaken as WannaCry, TeslaCrypt, and Jigsaw were acquired and tested against several domain services. The findings showed that none of the three variants stopped the processes and decidedly left all domain services untouched. However, although the services remained operational, they became uniquely dysfunctional as ransomware encrypted the files pertaining to those services.

Applying Custom Algorithms in Windows Active Directory Certificate Services

The article presents a solution to the problem of not recognizing the O’zDst 1092:2009 algorithm by the operating system and the problem of using digital certificates generated using the O’zDst 1092:2009 algorithm and O’zDst 1106:2009 algorithm. These algorithms were adopted in 2009. But these algorithms are still not recognized by the operating system. For other cryptographic algorithms used in Windows, cryptographic service providers have been developed that provide cryptographic operation functions to other software. These cryp-tographic service providers do not support the above algorithms. From here it becomes necessary to develop the cryptographic provider supporting the O’zDSt 1106:2009 hashing algorithm and the O’zDSt 1092:2009 signature algorithm. But to work with digital certificates, one cryptographic provider is not enough. Special extensions are also required to encode and decode digital certificate data. Therefore, the development of an extension for cryptographic providers is given. Also, for managing digital cer-tificates and key lifecycle, a method of integrating cryptographic providers with Windows Active Directory Certificate Services is presented. Developed cryptographic providers are composed of 3 types of providers such as hash provider, signature provider, and key storage provider. The architecture of the key storage provider, a method for secure storage of cryptographic keys, as well as key access control are proposed. The description of the O’zDst 1092:2009 algorithm and the implementation of the functions of the Key storage provider interface are shown.

Software Aging Forecasting Using Time Series Model

<p class="Normal1">With the emergence of virtualization and cloud computing technologies, several services are housed on virtualization platform. Virtualization is the technology that many cloud service providers rely on for efficient management and coordination of the resource pool. As essential services are also housed on cloud platform, it is necessary to ensure continuous availability by implementing all necessary measures. Windows Active Directory is one such service that Microsoft developed for Windows domain networks. It is included in Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services for authentication and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization">authorization </a>of users and computers in a Windows domain type network. The service is required to run continuously without downtime. As a result, there are chances of accumulation of errors or garbage leading to software aging which in turn may lead to system failure and associated consequences. This results in software aging. In this work, software aging patterns of Windows active directory service is studied. Software aging of active directory needs to be predicted properly so that rejuvenation can be triggered to ensure continuous service delivery. In order to predict the accurate time, a model that uses time series forecasting technique is built.</p>

Software Aging Forecasting Using Time Series Model

<p class="Normal1">With the emergence of virtualization and cloud computing technologies, several services are housed on virtualization platform. Virtualization is the technology that many cloud service providers rely on for efficient management and coordination of the resource pool. As essential services are also housed on cloud platform, it is necessary to ensure continuous availability by implementing all necessary measures. Windows Active Directory is one such service that Microsoft developed for Windows domain networks. It is included in Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services for authentication and authorization of users and computers in a Windows domain type network. The service is required to run continuously without downtime. As a result, there are chances of accumulation of errors or garbage leading to software aging which in turn may lead to system failure and associated consequences. This results in software aging. In this work, software aging patterns of Windows active directory service is studied. Software aging of active directory needs to be predicted properly so that rejuvenation can be triggered to ensure continuous service delivery. In order to predict the accurate time, a model that uses time series forecasting technique is built.</p>

On the Unified Authentication Technology of Network Token

This paper has researches on the achievement of unified authentication. It uses Windows Active Directory as the authentication authority. It uses Kerberos, SPNEGO, JAAS and JGSS to achieve unified authentication service with single sign-on.Through unified management, unified authentication and the integration of application servers to avoid the emergence of non-uniform isolated information resources and to solve the key requirements of the unity of interface integration and safety certification.