The aim of this Master's thesis is to design and to implement the security test in considering a resistance of the device under test to the effects of the distributed denial of service attack DDoS SYN Flood. After processing the test results is developed a protocol about security test of the device under test. In this thesis are tested two devices, namely CISCO ASA5510 firewall and a server with the specified name Server. The theoretical part of the thesis discusses the primary types of network attacks such as reconnaissance, gain access and denial of service attacks. Explained the concept of DoS and its principle, further types of DoS attacks and distributed denial of service attacks DDoS.

The threat of malicious Internet activities such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, spam emails or Internet worms/viruses has been increasing in the last several years. The impact and frequency of these malicious activities are expected to grow unless they are properly addressed. In this thesis, we propose to design and evaluate a set of practical and effective protection measures against potential malicious activities in current and future networks. Our research objective is twofold. First, we design the methods to defend against DDoS attacks. Our research focuses on two important issues related to DDoS attack defense mechanisms. One issue is the method to trace the sources of attacking packets, which is known as IP traceback. We propose a novel packet logging based (i.e., hash-based) traceback scheme using only a one-bit marking field in IP header. It reduces processing and storage cost by an order of magnitude than the existing hash-based schemes, and is therefore scalable to much higher link speed (e.g., OC-768). Next, we propose an improved traceback scheme with lower storage overhead by using more marking space in IP header. Another issue in DDoS defense is to investigate protocol-independent techniques for improving the throughput of legitimate traffic during DDoS attacks. We propose a novel technique that can effectively filter out the majority of DDoS traffic, thus improving the overall throughput of the legitimate traffic. Second, we investigate the problem of distributed network monitoring. We propose a set of novel distributed data streaming algorithms that allow scalable and efficient monitoring of aggregated traffic. Our algorithms target the specific network monitoring problem of finding common content in traffic traversing several nodes/links across the Internet. These algorithms find applications in network-wide intrusion detection, early warning for fast propagating worms, and detection of hot objects and spam traffic.

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The ability to detect and prevent a network from DDoS attack and to ensure the high quality infrastructure is a back bone of today’s network security issues. In this thesis, we have successfully validated an algorithm using OmNet++ Ver. 4.0 simulation to show how a DDoS attack can be detected and how the nodes can be protected from such an attack using GOSSIP protocol.

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) such as water treatment plants, power grids and telecommunication networks are critical to the daily activities and well-being of our society. Disruption of such CIs would have catastrophic consequences for public safety and the national economy. Hence, these infrastructures have become major targets in the upsurge of cyberattacks. Defending against such attacks often depends on an arsenal of cyber-defence tools, including Machine Learning (ML)-based Anomaly Detection Systems (ADSs). These detection systems use ML models to learn the profile of the normal behaviour of a CI and classify deviations that go well beyond the normality profile as anomalies. However, ML methods are vulnerable to both adversarial and non-adversarial input perturbations. Adversarial perturbations are imperceptible noises added to the input data by an attacker to evade the classification mechanism. Non-adversarial perturbations can be a normal behaviour evolution as a result of changes in usage patterns or other characteristics and noisy data from normally degrading devices, generating a high rate of false positives. We first study the problem of ML-based ADSs being vulnerable to non-adversarial perturbations, which causes a high rate of false alarms. To address this problem, we propose an ADS called DAICS, based on a wide and deep learning model that is both adaptive to evolving normality and robust to noisy data normally emerging from the system. DAICS adapts the pre-trained model to new normality with a small number of data samples and a few gradient updates based on feedback from the operator on false alarms. The DAICS was evaluated on two datasets collected from real-world Industrial Control System (ICS) testbeds. The results show that the adaptation process is fast and that DAICS has an improved robustness compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We further investigated the problem of false-positive alarms in the ADSs. To address this problem, an extension of DAICS, called the SiFA framework, is proposed. The SiFA collects a buffer of historical false alarms and suppresses every new alarm that is similar to these false alarms. The proposed framework is evaluated using a dataset collected from a real-world ICS testbed. The evaluation results show that the SiFA can decrease the false alarm rate of DAICS by more than 80%. We also investigate the problem of ML-based network ADSs that are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. In the case of network ADSs, attackers may use their knowledge of anomaly detection logic to generate malicious traffic that remains undetected. One way to solve this issue is to adopt adversarial training in which the training set is augmented with adversarially perturbed samples. This thesis presents an adversarial training approach called GADoT that leverages a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate adversarial samples for training. GADoT is validated in the scenario of an ADS detecting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which have been witnessing an increase in volume and complexity. For a practical evaluation, the DDoS network traffic was perturbed to generate two datasets while fully preserving the semantics of the attack. The results show that adversaries can exploit their domain expertise to craft adversarial attacks without requiring knowledge of the underlying detection model. We then demonstrate that adversarial training using GADoT renders ML models more robust to adversarial perturbations. However, the evaluation of adversarial robustness is often susceptible to errors, leading to robustness overestimation. We investigate the problem of robustness overestimation in network ADSs and propose an adversarial attack called UPAS to evaluate the robustness of such ADSs. The UPAS attack perturbs the inter-arrival time between packets by injecting a random time delay before packets from the attacker. The attack is validated by perturbing malicious network traffic in a multi-attack dataset and used to evaluate the robustness of two robust ADSs, which are based on a denoising autoencoder and an adversarially trained ML model. The results demonstrate that the robustness of both ADSs is overestimated and that a standardised evaluation of robustness is needed.

This study was carried out with the intention of examining the defensive mechanism employed against the latest cyber espionage methods including both insider and outsider attacks. The main focus of this study was on web servers as the targets of the cyber attacks. Information in connection to the study was obtained from researchers’ online articles. A survey was also conducted at MidSweden University in order to obtain information about the latest cyber attacks on web servers and about the existing defensive mechanism against such attacks. The existing defensive mechanism was surveyed and a simple design was created to assist in the investigation of the efficiency of the system. Some simple implementations of the existing defensive mechanism were made in order to provide some practical results that were used for the study. The existing defensive mechanism was surveyed and improved upon where possible. The improved defensive mechanism was designed and implemented and its results were compared with the results from the existing defensive mechanism. Due to the fact that the majority of the attackers use defensive mechanisms’ vulnerability in order to find their way into devices such as web servers, it was felt that, even with the most sophisticated improved defensive mechanism in place, it would not be entirely correct to claim that it is possible to fully protect web servers against such attacks.

This thesis is aimed at monitoring of computer networks using NetFlow data. It describes main aspects of detection network anomalies using IDS systems. Next part describes Nemea framework, which is used for creating modules. These modules are able to detect network incidents and attacks. Following chapters contain a brief overview of common network attacks with their specific remarks which can help in process of their detection. Based on this analysis, the concept of mitigation rules was created. These rules can be used for mitigation of DDoS attack. This method was tested on several data sets and it produced multiple mitigation rules. These rules were applied on data sets and they marked most of the suspicious flows.

La problématique des botnets, réseaux de machines infectées par des logiciels malveillants permettant de les contrôler à distance, constitue une préoccupation majeure du fait du nombre de machines infectées et des menaces associées: attaque par déni de service distribué (DDoS), spam, vol de données bancaires. Les solutions de lutte contre les botnets proposées présentent des limitations majeures dans le contexte d'un opérateur réseau (contraintes de volumétrie et de passage à l'échelle, respect de la confidentialité et de la vie privée des utilisateurs). Cette thèse propose quatre contributions orientées réseau de lutte contre les botnets. Chaque contribution traite d'une étape complémentaire dans la problématique des botnets: la première contribution permet de remonter à la source d'attaques par déni de service, et ainsi d'identifier un groupe de machines infectées à l'origine de ces attaques. La deuxième contribution concerne la détection des communications entre les machines infectées et leurs serveurs de contrôle et commande dans un réseau à large échelle, et offre ainsi l'opportunité de bloquer ces serveurs pour limiter le risque de nouvelles attaques. La troisième contribution permet une détection collaborative de botnets dans un contexte inter-domaine et inter-opérateur, permettant ainsi de lutter contre l'aspect hautement distribué de ces botnets. Enfin, la dernière contribution proposée permet de remédier aux botnets en ralentissant les communications entre les machines infectées et leur serveur de contrôle, offrant par ce biais une contre-mesure aux stratégies d'évasions développées par les cybercriminels afin de rendre leurs botnets plus résilients. / The problem of botnets, networks of infected hosts controlled remotely by attackers, is a major concern because of the number of infected hosts and associated threats, like distributed denial of service (DDoS), spams, and data theft. State of the art solutions to fight against botnets have major limitations in a context of a network operator (scalability of the solution, confidentiality and privacy of users). In this thesis, we propose four network-based contributions to fight against botnets. Each solution address a different and complementary issue in this area: the first contribution tracebacks the source of denial of service attacks which threaten the network availability, allowing by that way to identify infected devices used to perpetrate these attacks. The second contribution detects the communications between infected computers and their command and control server (C&C) in a large scale network and offers the opportunity to block these servers to minimize the risk of future attacks. The third contribution enables collaborative detection of botnets in an inter-domain and inter-operator context in order to fight against the highly distributed aspect of these botnets. Finally, the last contribution mitigates botnets by slowing down the communication between infected hosts and their C&C server, providing a countermeasure against evasion techniques developed by cybercriminals to make their botnets more resilient

Útoky typu odoprenia služby (DDoS) sú v dnešných počítačových sieťach stále frekventovanejším bezpečnostným incidentom. Táto práca sa zameriava na detekciu týchto útokov a poskytnutie relevantných informácii za účelom ich mitigácie v reálnom čase. Spomínaná funkcionalita je dosiahnutá s využitím techník prúdového dolovania z dát a strojového učenia. Výsledkom práce je sada nástrojov zastrešujúca celý proces strojového učenia - od vlastnej extrakcie príznakov cez predspracovanie dát až po export natrénovaného modelu pripraveného na nasadenie v produkcii. Experimentálne výsledky vyhodnotené na viacerých reálnych a syntetických dátových sadách poukazujú na presnosť systému väčšiu ako 99% s možnosťou spoľahlivej detekcie prebiehajúceho útoku do 4 sekúnd od jeho začiatku.

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