While the seamless interconnection of IoT devices with the physical realm is envisioned to bring a plethora of critical improvements on many aspects and in diverse domains, it will undoubtedly pave the way for attackers that will target and exploit such devices, threatening the integrity of their data and the reliability of critical infrastructure. The aim of this thesis is to generate cyber threat intelligence related to Internet-scale inference and evaluation of malicious activities generated by compromised IoT devices to facilitate prompt detection, mitigation and prevention of IoT exploitation. In this context, we initially provide a unique taxonomy, which sheds the light on IoT vulnerabilities from five di↵erent perspectives. Subsequently, we address the task of inference and characterization of IoT maliciousness by leveraging active and passive measurements. To support large-scale empirical data analytics in the context of IoT, we made available corresponding raw data through an authenticated platform. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation is aimed at defending against a range of internal threats, including eaves-dropping on network taps, placement of malware to capture sensitive information, and general insider threats to exfiltrate sensitive information. Although the threats and adversaries may vary, in each context where a system is threatened, decoys can be used to deny critical information to adversaries making it harder for them to achieve their target goal. The approach leverages deception and the use of decoy technologies to deceive adversaries and trap nefarious acts. This dissertation proposes a novel set of properties for decoys to serve as design goals in the development of decoy-based infrastructures. To demonstrate their applicability, we designed and prototyped network and host-based decoy systems. These systems are used to evaluate the hypothesis that network and host decoys can be used to detect inside attackers and malware. We introduce a novel, large-scale automated creation and management system for deploying decoys. Decoys may be created in various forms including bogus documents with embedded beacons, credentials for various web and email accounts, and bogus financial in- formation that is monitored for misuse. The decoy management system supplies decoys for the network and host-based decoy systems. We conjecture that the utility of the decoys depends on the believability of the bogus information; we demonstrate the believability through experimentation with human judges. For the network decoys, we developed a novel trap-based architecture for enterprise networks that detects "silent" attackers who are eavesdropping network traffic. The primary contributions of this system is the ease of injecting, automatically, large amounts of believable bait, and the integration of various detection mechanisms in the back-end. We demonstrate our methodology in a prototype platform that uses our decoy injection API to dynamically create and dispense network traps on a subset of our campus wireless network. We present results of a user study that demonstrates the believability of our automatically generated decoy traffic. We present results from a statistical and information theoretic analysis to show the believability of the traffic when automated tools are used. For host-based decoys, we introduce BotSwindler, a novel host-based bait injection sys- tem designed to delude and detect crimeware by forcing it to reveal itself during the ex- ploitation of monitored information. Our implementation of BotSwindler relies upon an out-of-host software agent to drive user-like interactions in a virtual machine, seeking to convince malware residing within the guest OS that it has captured legitimate credentials. To aid in the accuracy and realism of the simulations, we introduce a novel, low overhead approach, called virtual machine verification, for verifying whether the guest OS is in one of a predefined set of states. We provide empirical evidence to show that BotSwindler can be used to induce malware into performing observable actions and demonstrate how this approach is superior to that used in other tools. We present results from a user to study to illustrate the believability of the simulations and show that financial bait infor- mation can be used to effectively detect compromises through experimentation with real credential-collecting malware. We present results from a statistical and information theo- retic analysis to show the believability of simulated keystrokes when automated tools are used to distinguish them. Finally, we introduce and demonstrate an expanded role for decoys in educating users and measuring organizational security through experiments with approximately 4000 university students and staff.

A cyber-security problem is a conflict-resolution scenario that typically consists of a security system and at least two decision makers (e.g. attacker and defender) that can each have competing objectives. In this thesis, we are interested in cyber-security problems where one decision maker has superior or better information. Game theory is a well-established mathematical tool that can be used to analyze such problems and will be our tool of choice. In particular, we will formulate cyber-security problems as stochastic games with asymmetric information, where game-theoretic methods can then be applied to the problems to derive optimal policies for each decision maker. A severe limitation of considering optimal policies is that these policies are computationally prohibitive. We address the complexity issues by introducing methods, based on the ideas of model predictive control, to compute suboptimal polices. Specifically, we first prove that the methods generate suboptimal policies that have tight performance bounds. We then show that the suboptimal polices can be computed by solving a linear program online, and the complexity of the linear program remains constant with respect to the game length. Finally, we demonstrate how the suboptimal policy methods can be applied to cyber-security problems to reduce the computational complexity of forecasting cyber-attacks.

This study aims to shed light on what a comparison between cybersecurity intelligence and public health surveillance systems can yield in practical improvements. The issue at hand is best described by the amount of threats both systems must detect. Intelligent malicious software, malware, designed by humans to spread and reap havoc in the abundance of unprotected networks worldwide and contagious diseases with millions of years of evolution behind their design to bypass human defences, infect and multiply. These two threats stand as mighty competitors to actors who try to monitor their presence to be able to give advice on further action to hinder their spread. The sheer amount of experience in public health of dealing with surveillance of contagious disease can contribute with important lessons to cyber intelligence when malware is becoming an even more alarming threat against everybody who uses the Internet. To compare them both this study uses high reliability theory to understand how Folkhälsomyndigheten, Sweden’s main authority in public health surveillance, and CERT-SE, Sweden’s national computer emergency response team, operate to make their surveillance as reliable as possible to detect emerging threats. Some key findings of the study points to the lack of regional or global binding policy’s to share information in the cyber security sector of which CERT-SE takes part in. The major roll of trust-based information sharing can be subject to shifts in relationships between states and excludes states with which no bilateral arrangements are made, but who may possess information of urgent necessity. The lack of arrangements in the cybersecurity sector, correspondent to the International health regulations by World Health Organization in public health, stands as a major difference between the two sectors access to information. However, this study may not stretch as far as to prove that the greater access to information would have proved to be of ease in a specific cyberincident. Case studies of this kind or further research of how agreements can be made in an anarchistic domain like the Internet are to be continued from this study.

This dissertation investigates and introduces novel algorithms, theories, and supporting frameworks to significantly improve the growing problem of Internet security. A distributed firewall and active response architecture is introduced that enables any device within a cyber environment to participate in the active discovery and response of cyber attacks. A theory of semantic association systems is developed for the general problem of knowledge discovery in data. The theory of semantic association systems forms the basis of a novel semantic path merger packet classification algorithm. The theoretical aspects of the semantic path merger packet classification algorithm are investigated, and the algorithm's hardware-based implementation is evaluated along with comparative analysis versus content addressable memory. Experimental results show that the hardware implementation of the semantic path merger algorithm significantly outperforms content addressable memory in terms of energy consumption and operational timing.