Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userMaster of Web Puppets: Abusing Web Browsers for Persistent and Stealthy Computation
84
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Panagiotis Papadopoulos
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
The proliferation of web applications has essentially transformed modern browsers into small but powerful operating systems. Upon visiting a website, user devices run implicitly trusted script code, the execution of which is confined within the browser to prevent any interference with the users system. Recent JavaScript APIs, however, provide advanced capabilities that not only enable feature-rich web applications, but also allow attackers to perform malicious operations despite the confined nature of JavaScript code execution. In this paper, we demonstrate the powerful capabilities that modern browser APIs provide to attackers by presenting MarioNet: a framework that allows a remote malicious entity to control a visitors browser and abuse its resources for unwanted computation or harmful operations, such as cryptocurrency mining, password-cracking, and DDoS. MarioNet relies solely on already available HTML5 APIs, without requiring the installation of any additional software. In contrast to previous browser-based botnets, the persistence and stealthiness characteristics of MarioNet allow the malicious computations to continue in the background of the browser even after the user closes the window or tab of the initial malicious website. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a prototype system, MarioNet, that is compatible with all major browsers, and discuss potential defense strategies to counter the threat of such persistent in-browser attacks. Our main goal is to raise awareness regarding this new class of attacks, and inform the design of future browser APIs so that they provide a more secure client-side environment for web applications.
rate research
Read More
We are at the beginning of a shift in how content is created and exchanged over the web. While content was previously created primarily by a small set of entities, today, individual users -- empowered by devices like digital cameras and services like online social networks -- are creating content that represents a significant fraction of Internet traffic. As a result, content today is increasingly generated and exchanged at the edge of the network. Unfortunately, the existing techniques and infrastructure that are still used to serve this content, such as centralized content distribution networks, are ill-suited for these new patterns of content exchange. In this paper, we take a first step towards addressing this situation by introducing WebCloud, a content distribution system for online social networking sites that works by re- purposing web browsers to help serve content. In other words, when a user browses content, WebCloud tries to fetch it from one of that users friends browsers, instead of from the social networking site. The result is a more direct exchange of content ; essentially, WebCloud leverages the spatial and temporal locality of interest between social network users. Because WebCloud is built using techniques already present in many web browsers, it can be applied today to many social networking sites. We demonstrate the practicality of WebCloud with microbenchmarks, simulations, and a prototype deployment.
A botnet is a network of compromised machines (bots), under the control of an attacker. Many of these machines are infected without their owners knowledge, and botnets are the driving force behind several misuses and criminal activities on the Internet (for example spam emails). Depending on its topology, a botnet can have zero or more command and control (C&C) servers, which are centralized machines controlled by the cybercriminal that issue commands and receive reports back from the co-opted bots. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the command and control infrastructure of one of the worlds largest proprietary spamming botnets between 2007 and 2012: Cutwail/Pushdo. We identify the key functionalities needed by a spamming botnet to operate effectively. We then develop a number of attacks against the command and control logic of Cutwail that target those functionalities, and make the spamming operations of the botnet less effective. This analysis was made possible by having access to the source code of the C&C software, as well as setting up our own Cutwail C&C server, and by implementing a clone of the Cutwail bot. With the help of this tool, we were able to enumerate the number of bots currently registered with the C&C server, impersonate an existing bot to report false information to the C&C server, and manipulate spamming statistics of an arbitrary bot stored in the C&C database. Furthermore, we were able to make the control server inaccessible by conducting a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Our results may be used by law enforcement and practitioners to develop better techniques to mitigate and cripple other botnets, since many of findings are generic and are due to the workflow of C&C communication in general.
Atomizing various Web activities by replacing human to human interactions on the Internet has been made indispensable due to its enormous growth. However, bots also known as Web-bots which have a malicious intend and pretending to be humans pose a severe threat to various services on the Internet that implicitly assume a human interaction. Accordingly, Web service providers before allowing access to such services use various Human Interaction Proofs (HIPs) to authenticate that the user is a human and not a bot. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a class of HIPs tests and are based on Artificial Intelligence. These tests are easier for humans to qualify and tough for bots to simulate. Several Web services use CAPTCHAs as a defensive mechanism against automated Web-bots. In this paper, we review the existing CAPTCHA schemes that have been proposed or are being used to protect various Web services. We classify them in groups and compare them with each other in terms of security and usability. We present general method used to generate and break text-based and image-based CAPTCHAs. Further, we discuss various security and usability issues in CAPTCHA design and provide guidelines for improving their robustness and usability.
Session management is a fundamental component of web applications: despite the apparent simplicity, correctly implementing web sessions is extremely tricky, as witnessed by the large number of existing attacks. This motivated the design of formal methods to rigorously reason about web session security which, however, are not supported at present by suitable automated verification techniques. In this paper we introduce the first security type system that enforces session security on a core model of web applications, focusing in particular on server-side code. We showcase the expressiveness of our type system by analyzing the session management logic of HotCRP, Moodle, and phpMyAdmin, unveiling novel security flaws that have been acknowledged by software developers.
Modern web applications often rely on third-party services to provide their functionality to users. The secure integration of these services is a non-trivial task, as shown by the large number of attacks against Single Sign On and Cashier-as-a-Service protocols. In this paper we present Bulwark, a new automatic tool which generates formally verified security monitors from applied pi-calculus specifications of web protocols. The security monitors generated by Bulwark offer holistic protection, since they can be readily deployed both at the client side and at the server side, thus ensuring full visibility of the attack surface against web protocols. We evaluate the effectiveness of Bulwark by testing it against a pool of vulnerable web applications that use the OAuth 2.0 protocol or integrate the PayPal payment system.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
