Martin Vizváry

Cloud-based testbed for simulation of cyber attacks

Cyber attacks have become ubiquitous and in order to face current threats it is important to understand them. Studying attacks in a real environment however, is not viable and therefore it is necessary to find other methods how to examine the nature of attacks. Gaining detailed knowledge about them facilitates designing of new detection methods as well as understanding their impact. In this paper we present a testbed framework to simulate attacks that enables to study a wide range of security scenarios. The framework provides a notion of real-world arrangements, yet it retains full control over all the activities performed within the simulated infrastructures. Utilizing the sandbox environment, it is possible to simulate various security attacks and evaluate their impacts on real infrastructures. The design of the framework benefits from IaaS clouds. Therefore its deployment does not require dedicated facilities and the testbed can be deployed over miscellaneous contemporary clouds. The viability of the testbed has been verified by a simulation of particular DDoS attack.

Future of DDoS Attacks Mitigation in Software Defined Networks

Traditional networking is being progressively replaced by Software Defined Networking (SDN). It is a new promising approach to designing, building and managing networks. In comparison with traditional routed networks, SDN enables programmable and dynamic networks. Although it promises more flexible network management, one should be aware of current and upcoming security threats accompanied with its deployment. Our goal is to analyze SDN accompanied with OpenFlow protocol from the perspective of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). In this paper, we outline our research questions related to an analysis of current and new possibilities of realization, detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in this environment.

POSTER: Reflected attacks abusing honeypots

We present the observation of distributed denial-of-service attacks that use reflection of the flooding traffic off reflectors. This type of attack was used in massive attacks against internet infrastructure of Czech Republic in March, 2013. Apart from common hosts in the network, honeypots were abused as the reflectors. It caused the false positive incident detection and helped attackers. Honeypots, which are by default set to accept any incoming network connection, unintentionally amplified the effect of reflection. We present an analysis of the attack from the point of view of honeypots and show the risks of having honeypots respond to any incoming traffic. We also discuss the possibilities of attack detection and mitigation and present lessons learned from handling the attack. We point out a lack of communication and data sharing during the observed attack.

KYPO Cyber Range: Design and Use Cases

The physical and cyber worlds are increasingly intertwined and exposed to cyber attacks. The KYPO cyber range provides complex cyber systems and networks in a virtualized, fully controlled and monitored environment. Time-efficient and cost-effective deployment is feasible using cloud resources instead of a dedicated hardware infrastructure. This paper describes the design decisions made during it’s development. We prepared a set of use cases to evaluate the proposed design decisions and to demonstrate the key features of the KYPO cyber range. It was especially cyber training sessions and exercises with hundreds of participants which provided invaluable feedback for KYPO platform development.

Honeypot testbed for network defence strategy evaluation

In this paper, we describe a network defence strategy testbed, which could be utilized for testing the strategy decision logic against simulated attacks or real attackers. The testbed relies on a network of honeypots and the high level of logging and monitoring the honeypots provide. Its main advantage is that only the decision logic implementation is needed in order to test the strategy. The testbed also evaluates the tested network defence strategy. We demonstrate an example of network defence strategy implementation, the test setup, progress, and results. The source code of the testbed is available on GitHub.

Enhancing Network Intrusion Detection by Correlation of Modularly Hashed Sketches

The rapid development of network technologies entails an increase in traffic volume and attack count. The associated increase in computational complexity for methods of deep packet inspection has driven the development of behavioral detection methods. These methods distinguish attackers from valid users by measuring how closely their behavior resembles known anomalous behavior. In real-life deployment, an attacker is flagged only on very close resemblance to avoid false positives. However, many attacks can then go undetected. We believe that this problem can be solved by using more detection methods and then correlating their results. These methods can be set to higher sensitivity, and false positives are then reduced by accepting only attacks reported from more sources. To this end we propose a novel sketch-based method that can detect attackers using a correlation of particular anomaly detections. This is in contrast with the current use of sketch-based methods that focuses on the detection of heavy hitters and heavy changes. We illustrate the potential of our method by detecting attacks on RDP and SSH authentication by correlating four methods detecting the following anomalies: source network scan, destination network scan, abnormal connection count, and low traffic variance. We evaluate our method in terms of detection capabilities compared to other deployed detection methods, hardware requirements, and the attacker’s ability to evade detection.