The success of the Internet has brought significant changes to the telecommunication industry. One of the remarkable outcomes of this evolution is Voice over IP (VoIP), which enables realtime voice communications over packet switched networks for a lower cost than traditional public switched telephone networks (PSTN). Nevertheless, security and privacy vulnerabilities pose a significant challenge to hindering VoIP from being widely deployed. The main object of this thesis is to define and elaborate unexplored security and privacy risks on standardized VoIP protocols and their implementations as well as to develop suitable countermeasures. Three research questions are addressed to achieve this objective: Question 1:  What are potential unexplored threats in a SIP VoIP network with regard to availability, confidentiality and privacy by means of unwanted traffic and information disclosure? Question 2:  How far are existing security and privacy mechanisms sufficient to counteract these threats and what are their shortcomings? Question 3:  How can new countermeasures be designed for minimizing or preventing the consequences caused by these threats efficiently in practice? Part I of the thesis concentrates on the threats caused by "unwanted traffic", which includes Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and voice spam. They generate unwanted traffic to consume the resources and annoy users. Part II of this thesis explores unauthorized information disclosure in VoIP traffic. Confidential user data such as calling records, identity information, PIN code and data revealing a user's social networks might be disclosed or partially disclosed from VoIP traffic. We studied both threats and countermeasures by conducting experiments or using theoretical assessment. Part II also presents a survey research related to threats and countermeasures for anonymous VoIP communication.

Wireless network access protocols are used in numerous safety critical applications. Network availability is essential for safety critical applications,since loss of availability can cause personal or material damage. An adversary can disrupt the availability of a wireless network using denial of service (DoS) attacks. The most widely used wireless protocols are vulnerable to DoS attacks. Researchers have published DoS attacks against IEEE 802.11 local area networks (LANs), IEEE 802.16 wide area networks (WANs) and GSM andUMTS mobile networks. In this work, we analyze DoS vulnerabilities in wireless network protocols and define four categories of attacks:  jamming attacks, flooding attacks, semantic attacks and implementation specific attacks. We identify semantic attacks as the most severe threat to current andfuture wireless protocols, and as the category that has received the least attention by researchers. During the first phase of the research project we discover semantic DoS vulnerabilities in the IEEE 802.11 communication protocols through manual analysis. The 802.11 standard has been subject to manual analysis of DoS vulnerabilities for more than a decade, thus our results indicate that protocol vulnerabilities can elude manual analysis. We conclude that formal methods are required in order to improve protocol robustness against semantic DoS attacks.We propose a formal method that can be used to automatically discover protocol vulnerabilities. The formal method defines a protocol model, adversary model and cost model. The protocol participants and adversary are modeled as finite state transducers, while the cost is modeled as a function of time. Our primary goal is to construct a formal method that is practical, i.e. does not require a vast amount of resources to implement, and useful, i.e. able to discover protocol vulnerabilities. We verify and validate our proposed method by modeling the 802.11w amendment to the 802.11 standard using Promela as the modeling language. We then use the SPIN model checker to verify the model properties and experiments to validate the results. The modeling and experiments result in the discovery and experimental validation of four new deadlock vulnerabilities that had eluded manual analysis. We find one deadlock vulnerability in 802.11i and three deadlock vulnerabilitiesin 802.11w. A deadlock vulnerability is the most severe form of communication protocol DoS vulnerabilities, and their discovery and removal are an essential part of robust protocol design. Thus, we conclude that our proposed formal method is both practical and useful.

With the dramatic expansion of computers and communication networks, computer crimes, such as threatening letters, fraud, and theft of intellectual property have been growing at a dreadful rate. The increasing frequency of malicious computer attacks on government agencies and Internet businesses has caused severe economic waste and unique social threats. The problems of protecting data and information on computers and communication networks has become even more critical and challenging, since the widespread adoption of the Internet and the Web. Consequently, it is very urgent to design an integrated network-security architecture so as to make information safer, proactively or reactively defeat any network attack, make attackers accountable, and help the law enforcement system to collect the forensic evidences. Among a variety of attacks on computer servers or communication networks, a prevalent, famous, and serious network-security subject is known as "Denial of Service" (DoS) or "Distributed Denial of Service" (DDoS) attacks. According to an investigation on computer crime conducted by CSI/FBI in 2003, Internet DoS/DDoS have increased in frequency, severity, and sophistication, and have caught international attentions to the vulnerability of the Internet. DoS/DDoS attacks consume the resources of a remote host or network, thereby denying or degrading service to legitimate users. Such attacks are among the hardest security problems to address because they are simple to implement, difficult to prevent, and very difficult to trace. Therefore, this dissertation will firstly concentrate on how to resolve these troublesome DoS/DDoS problems. This is considered as the first step to overcome generic network security problems, and to achieve the final goal for accomplishing a total solution of network security. Instead of tolerating DoS/DDoS attacks by mitigating their effect, to trace back the attacking source for eliminating the attacker is an aggressive and better approach. However, it is difficult to find out the true attacking origin by utilizing the incorrect source IP address faked by the attacker. Accordingly, this dissertation will aim at conquering this representative network security problem, i.e. DoS/DDoS attacks, with IP traceback, and designing an optimal IP traceback. IP traceback ¡X the ability to trace IP packets to their origins¡Xis a significant step toward identifying, and thus stopping, attackers. A promising solution to the IP traceback is probabilistic packet marking (PPM). This traceback approach can be applied during or after an attack, and it does not require any additional network traffic, router storage, or packet size increase. Therefore, the IP traceback research on countering DoS/DDoS attacks will be based on PPM scheme. In this dissertation, three outstanding improvements among four PPM criteria¡Xthe convergency, the computational overhead, and the incomplete PPM deployment problem¡Xhas been achieved. PPM-NPC is proposed to improve the PPM convergency and computational overhead. With non-preemptively compensation, the probability of each marked packet arrived at the victim equals its original marking probability. Therefore, PPM-NPC will efficiently achieve the optimal convergent situation by simply utilizing a 2-byte integer counter. Another better scheme, CPPM, is also proposed, such that the marked packets can be fully compensated as well while they are remarked. With CPPM, the probability of each marked packet arrived at the victim will also equal its original marking probability. Consequently, CPPM will achieve the optimal convergent situation efficiently as well. Furthermore, RPPM-NPC is presented to advance the accuracy of a reconstructed path in an incomplete PPM deployment environment by correcting and recovering any discontinuous individual transparent router and any segment of consecutive double transparent routers. This scheme may also reduce the deployment overhead without requiring the participation of all routers on the attack path. Except for these improved criteria, PPM robustness, some weak assumptions in PPM, and a few unsolved problems for PPM, e.g. reflective DDoS attacks, will also be improved in the future. It is also interesting in combining other network security researches, such as IDS, system access control mechanism, etc., for constructing a more complete network security architecture. Therefore, this research hereby is done in order to completely resolve the troublesome flood-style DoS/DDoS problems, and as the basis for accomplishing a total solution of network security.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim at rendering a computer or network incapable of providing normal services by exploiting bugs or holes of system programs or network communication protocols. Existing DoS attack defense mechanisms (e.g., firewalls, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems) typically rely on data gathered from gateways of network systems. Because these data are IP-layer or above packet information, existing defense mechanisms are incapable of detecting internal attacks or attackers who disguise themselves by spoofing the source IP addresses of their packets. To address the aforementioned limitations of existing DoS attack defense mechanisms, we propose a classification-based DoS attack detection technique on the basis of the SNMP MIB II data from the network interface to induce a DoS detection model from a set of training examples that consist of both normal and attack traffic data). The constructed DoS detection model is then used for predicting whether a network traffic from the network interface is a DoS attack. To empirically evaluate our proposed classification-based DoS attack detection technique, we collect, with various traffic aggregation intervals (including 1, 3, and 5 minutes), normal network traffic data from two different environments (including an enterprise network, and a university campus network) and attack network traffics (including TCP SYN Flood, Land, Fake Ping, and Angry Ping) from an independent experimental network. Our empirical evaluation results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed technique reaches 98.59% or above in the two network environments. The evaluation results also suggest that the proposed technique is insensitive to the traffic aggregation intervals examined and has a high distinguishing power for the four types of DoS attacks under investigation.

Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η μελέτη των κατανεμημένων επιθέσεων άρνησης υπηρεσίας σε δίκτυα υπολογιστών καθώς και οι τρόποι αντιμετώπισής και αναγνώρισής τους με χρήση νευρωνικού δικτύου. / The aim of this work is the study of distributed denial of service attacks on computer networks. Analyze the methods of DDoS attacks as well as how to deal and recognize them by using neural network.

Η παρούσα διατριβή πραγματεύεται το θέμα των κατανεμημένων επιθέσεων άρνησης υπηρεσιών στο Διαδίκτυο. Αναλύει τα υπάρχοντα συστήματα αντιμετώπισης και τα εργαλεία που χρησιμοποιούνται για την εξαπόλυση τέτοιου είδους επιθέσεων. Μελετά τον τρόπο που οργανώνονται οι επιθέσεις και παρουσιάζει την αρχιτεκτονική και την υλοποίηση ενός πρωτότυπου συστήματος ανίχνευσης των πηγών μιας κατανεμημένης επίθεσης άρνησης υπηρεσιών, καθώς και αντιμετώπισης των επιθέσεων αυτών. Τέλος, ασχολείται με το θέμα της ανεπιθύμητης αλληλογραφίας ως μιας διαφορετικού είδους επίθεση άρνησης υπηρεσιών και προτείνει ένα πρωτότυπο τρόπο αντιμετώπισής της. / In our thesis we deal with the issue of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the Internet. We analyze the current defense methodologies and the tools that are used to unleash this type of attacks. We study the way that those attacks are constructed and organized and present a novel architecture, and its implementation details, of a system that is able to trace back to the true sources of such an attack as well as effectively filter such attacks in real time. Lastly we deal with the issue of spam e-mail as a different form of a distributed denial of service attack and propose a novel methodology that deals with the problem.

With the advance of wireless access technologies, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has gained significant increase in popularity and deployment due to the substantially improved transmission rate and decreased deployment costs. However, this same widespread deployment makes WLANs an attractive target for network attacks. Several vulnerabilities have been identified and reported regarding the security of the current 802.11 standards. To address those security weaknesses, IEEE standard committees proposed the 802.11i amendment to enhance WLAN security. The 802.11i standard has demonstrated the capability of providing satisfactory mutual authentication, better data confidentiality, and key management support, however, the design of 802.11i does not consider network availability. Therefore, it has been suggested that 802.11i is highly susceptible to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which exploit the vulnerability of unprotected management frames. This research first investigates common DoS vulnerabilities in a Robust Security Network (RSN), which is defined in the 802.11i standard, and presents an empirical analysis of such attacks – in particular, flooding-based DoS attacks. To address those DoS issues, this thesis proposes a novel design and implementation of a lightweight stateless authentication scheme that enables wireless access points (APs) to establish a trust relationship with an associating client and derive validating keys that can be used to mutually authenticate subsequent layer-2 (link layer) management frames. The quality of service provisioning for real-time services over a WLAN requires the total latency of handoff between APs to be small in order to achieve seamless roaming. Thus, this thesis further extends the proposed link-layer authentication into a secure fast handoff solution that addresses DoS vulnerabilities as well as improving the existing 802.11i handoff performance. A location management scheme is also proposed to minimise the number of channels required to scan by the roaming client in order to reduce the scanning delay, which could normally take up 90% of the total handoff latency. In order to acquire practical data to evaluate the proposed schemes, a prototype network has been implemented as an experimental testbed using open source tools and drivers. This testbed allows practical data to be collected and analysed. The result successfully demonstrated that not only the proposed authentication scheme eradicates most of the DoS vulnerabilities, but also substantially improved the handoff performance to a level suitable for supporting real-time services.

In a commercial Internet environment, the quality of service experienced by a user is critical to competitive advantage and business survivability. The availability and response time of a distributed software service are central components of the overall quality of service provided to users. Traditionally availability is a measure of service down time. Traditionally availability measures the probability that the service will be live and is expressed in terms of failure occurrence and repair or recovery time. Response time is a measure of the time taken from when the service request is made, to when service provision occurs for the user. Deteriorating response time is also a valuable indicator to denial of service attacks which continue to pose a significant threat to service availability. The concept of the service cluster is increasingly being deployed to improve service availability and response time. Cluster processor replication increases service availability. Cluster dispatching of service requests across the replicated cluster processors increases service scalability and therefore response time. This thesis commences with a review of the research and current technology in the area of distributed software service availability. The review aims to identify any deficiencies within that area and propose critical features that mitigate those deficiencies. The three critical features proposed are in relation to user wait time, cluster dispatching, and the trust-based filtering of service requests. The user wait time proposal is that the availability of a distributed service should reflect both liveness probability level and probabalistic user access time of the service. The cluster dispatching proposal is that dispatching processing overhead is a function of the number of Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams/Transport Control Protocol (TCP) segments that are received by the dispatcher in respect of each service request. Consequently the number of IP datagrams/TCP segments should be minimised ideally so that for each incoming service request there is one IP datagram/TCP segment. The trust-based filtering proposal is that the level of trust in respect of each service request should be identified by the service as this is critical in mitigating distributed denial of service attacks - and therefore maximising the availability of the service A conceptual availability model which supports the three critical features within an Internet clustered service environment is then described. The conceptual model proposes an expanded availability definition and then describes the realization of this definition via additional capabilities positioned within the Transport layer of the Internet communication environment. The additional capabilities of this model also facilitate the minimization of cluster dispatcher processing load and the identification by the cluster dispatcher of request trust level. The model is then implemented within the Linux kernel. The implementation involves the addition of several options to the existing TCP specification and also the addition of several functions to the existing Socket API. The implementation is subsequently evaluated in a dispatcher-based clustered service environment.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (p.127-137).

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an open IP based service infrastructure that enables an easy deployment of new rich multimedia services mixing voice and data. The IMS is an overlay network on top of IP that uses SIP as the primary signaling mechanism. As an emerging technology, the SIP standard will certainly be the target of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and consequently IMS will also inherit this problem. The objective of proposed architecture for IMS is to cram the potential attacks and security threats to IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and explore the security solutions developed by 3GPP. This research work incorporates the ideas of immune system and multiagent architecture that is capable of detecting, identifying and recovering from an attack. The proposed architecture protects IMS core components i.e. P-CSCF (Proxy- Call Session Control Function), I-CSCF (Interrogating-Call Session Control Function), S-CSCF (Serving Call Session Control Function) and HSS (Home Subscriber Server) from external and internal threats like eavesdropping, SQL injection and denial-ofservice (DoS) attacks. In the first level i.e. CPU under normal load all incoming and out going messages were investigated to detect and prevent SQL injection. Second level considers Denial of Service (DOS) attacks when CPU load exceeds threshold limit. Proposed architecture is designed and evaluated by using an approach called Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). The results obtained confirm consistency of the architecture. / kalyani-0046737527800