Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Software-defined networking (Computer network technology)
- Genre: Academic theses
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Ahn, Gail-Joon
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
Corporations invest considerable resources to create, preserve and analyze
their data; yet while organizations are interested in protecting against
unauthorized data transfer, there lacks a comprehensive metric to discriminate
what data are at risk of leaking.
This thesis motivates the need for a quantitative leakage risk metric, and
provides a risk assessment system, called Whispers, for computing it. Using
unsupervised machine learning techniques, Whispers uncovers themes in an
organization's document corpus, including previously unknown or unclassified
data. Then, by correlating the document with its authors, Whispers can
identify which data are easier to contain, and conversely which are at risk.
Using the Enron email database, Whispers constructs a social network segmented
by topic themes. This graph uncovers communication channels within the
organization. Using this social network, Whispers determines the risk of each
topic by measuring the rate at which simulated leaks are not detected. For the
Enron set, Whispers identified 18 separate topic themes between January 1999
and December 2000. The highest risk data emanated from the legal department
with a leakage risk as high as 60%.
their data; yet while organizations are interested in protecting against
unauthorized data transfer, there lacks a comprehensive metric to discriminate
what data are at risk of leaking.
This thesis motivates the need for a quantitative leakage risk metric, and
provides a risk assessment system, called Whispers, for computing it. Using
unsupervised machine learning techniques, Whispers uncovers themes in an
organization's document corpus, including previously unknown or unclassified
data. Then, by correlating the document with its authors, Whispers can
identify which data are easier to contain, and conversely which are at risk.
Using the Enron email database, Whispers constructs a social network segmented
by topic themes. This graph uncovers communication channels within the
organization. Using this social network, Whispers determines the risk of each
topic by measuring the rate at which simulated leaks are not detected. For the
Enron set, Whispers identified 18 separate topic themes between January 1999
and December 2000. The highest risk data emanated from the legal department
with a leakage risk as high as 60%.
ContributorsWright, Jeremy (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Yau, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
E-Mail header injection vulnerability is a class of vulnerability that can occur in web applications that use user input to construct e-mail messages. E-Mail injection is possible when the mailing script fails to check for the presence of e-mail headers in user input (either form fields or URL parameters). The vulnerability exists in the reference implementation of the built-in “mail” functionality in popular languages like PHP, Java, Python, and Ruby. With the proper injection string, this vulnerability can be exploited to inject additional headers and/or modify existing headers in an e-mail message, allowing an attacker to completely alter the content of the e-mail.
This thesis develops a scalable mechanism to automatically detect E-Mail Header Injection vulnerability and uses this mechanism to quantify the prevalence of E- Mail Header Injection vulnerabilities on the Internet. Using a black-box testing approach, the system crawled 21,675,680 URLs to find URLs which contained form fields. 6,794,917 such forms were found by the system, of which 1,132,157 forms contained e-mail fields. The system used this data feed to discern the forms that could be fuzzed with malicious payloads. Amongst the 934,016 forms tested, 52,724 forms were found to be injectable with more malicious payloads. The system tested 46,156 of these and was able to find 496 vulnerable URLs across 222 domains, which proves that the threat is widespread and deserves future research attention.
This thesis develops a scalable mechanism to automatically detect E-Mail Header Injection vulnerability and uses this mechanism to quantify the prevalence of E- Mail Header Injection vulnerabilities on the Internet. Using a black-box testing approach, the system crawled 21,675,680 URLs to find URLs which contained form fields. 6,794,917 such forms were found by the system, of which 1,132,157 forms contained e-mail fields. The system used this data feed to discern the forms that could be fuzzed with malicious payloads. Amongst the 934,016 forms tested, 52,724 forms were found to be injectable with more malicious payloads. The system tested 46,156 of these and was able to find 496 vulnerable URLs across 222 domains, which proves that the threat is widespread and deserves future research attention.
ContributorsChandramouli, Sai Prashanth (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
With the software-defined networking trend growing, several network virtualization controllers have been developed in recent years. These controllers, also called network hypervisors, attempt to manage physical SDN based networks so that multiple tenants can safely share the same forwarding plane hardware without risk of being affected by or affecting other tenants. However, many areas remain unexplored by current network hypervisor implementations. This thesis presents and evaluates some of the features offered by network hypervisors, such as full header space availability, isolation, and transparent traffic forwarding capabilities for tenants. Flow setup time and throughput are also measured and compared among different network hypervisors. Three different network hypervisors are evaluated: FlowVisor, VeRTIGO and OpenVirteX. These virtualization tools are assessed with experiments conducted on three different testbeds: an emulated Mininet scenario, a physical single-switch testbed, and also a remote GENI testbed. The results indicate that network hypervisors bring SDN flexibility to network virtualization, making it easier for network administrators to define with precision how the network is sliced and divided among tenants. This increased flexibility, however, may come with the cost of decreased performance, and also brings additional risks of interoperability due to a lack of standardization of virtualization methods.
ContributorsStall Rechia, Felipe (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
In traditional networks the control and data plane are highly coupled, hindering development. With Software Defined Networking (SDN), the two planes are separated, allowing innovations on either one independently of the other. Here, the control plane is formed by the applications that specify an organization's policy and the data plane contains the forwarding logic. The application sends all commands to an SDN controller which then performs the requested action on behalf of the application. Generally, the requested action is a modification to the flow tables, present in the switches, to reflect a change in the organization's policy. There are a number of ways to control the network using the SDN principles, but the most widely used approach is OpenFlow.
With the applications now having direct access to the flow table entries, it is easy to have inconsistencies arise in the flow table rules. Since the flow rules are structured similar to firewall rules, the research done in analyzing and identifying firewall rule conflicts can be adapted to work with OpenFlow rules.
The main work of this thesis is to implement flow conflict detection logic in OpenDaylight and inspect the applicability of techniques in visualizing the conflicts. A hierarchical edge-bundling technique coupled with a Reingold-Tilford tree is employed to present the relationship between the conflicting rules. Additionally, a table-driven approach is also implemented to display the details of each flow.
Both types of visualization are then tested for correctness by providing them with flows which are known to have conflicts. The conflicts were identified properly and displayed by the views.
With the applications now having direct access to the flow table entries, it is easy to have inconsistencies arise in the flow table rules. Since the flow rules are structured similar to firewall rules, the research done in analyzing and identifying firewall rule conflicts can be adapted to work with OpenFlow rules.
The main work of this thesis is to implement flow conflict detection logic in OpenDaylight and inspect the applicability of techniques in visualizing the conflicts. A hierarchical edge-bundling technique coupled with a Reingold-Tilford tree is employed to present the relationship between the conflicting rules. Additionally, a table-driven approach is also implemented to display the details of each flow.
Both types of visualization are then tested for correctness by providing them with flows which are known to have conflicts. The conflicts were identified properly and displayed by the views.
ContributorsNatarajan, Janakarajan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that decouples the control plane from the data plane, which allows network administrators to consolidate common network services into a centralized module named SDN controller. Applications’ policies are transformed into standardized network rules in the data plane via SDN controller. Even though this centralization brings a great flexibility and programmability to the network, network rules generated by SDN applications cannot be trusted because there may exist malicious SDN applications, and insecure network flows can be made due to complex relations across network rules. In this dissertation, I investigate how to identify and resolve these security violations in SDN caused by the combination of network rules and applications’ policies. To this end, I propose a systematic policy management framework that better protects SDN itself and hardens existing network defense mechanisms using SDN.
More specifically, I discuss the following four security challenges in this dissertation: (1) In SDN, generating reliable network rules is challenging because SDN applications cannot be trusted and have complicated dependencies each other. To address this problem, I analyze applications’ policies and remove those dependencies by applying grid-based policy decomposition mechanism; (2) One network rule could accidentally affect others (or by malicious users), which lead to creating of indirect security violations. I build systematic and automated tools that analyze network rules in the data plane to detect a wide range of security violations and resolve them in an automated fashion; (3) A fundamental limitation of current SDN protocol (OpenFlow) is a lack of statefulness, which is extremely important to several security applications such as stateful firewall. To bring statelessness to SDN-based environment, I come up with an innovative stateful monitoring scheme by extending existing OpenFlow specifications; (4) Existing honeynet architecture is suffering from its limited functionalities of ’data control’ and ’data capture’. To address this challenge, I design and implement an innovative next generation SDN-based honeynet architecture.
More specifically, I discuss the following four security challenges in this dissertation: (1) In SDN, generating reliable network rules is challenging because SDN applications cannot be trusted and have complicated dependencies each other. To address this problem, I analyze applications’ policies and remove those dependencies by applying grid-based policy decomposition mechanism; (2) One network rule could accidentally affect others (or by malicious users), which lead to creating of indirect security violations. I build systematic and automated tools that analyze network rules in the data plane to detect a wide range of security violations and resolve them in an automated fashion; (3) A fundamental limitation of current SDN protocol (OpenFlow) is a lack of statefulness, which is extremely important to several security applications such as stateful firewall. To bring statelessness to SDN-based environment, I come up with an innovative stateful monitoring scheme by extending existing OpenFlow specifications; (4) Existing honeynet architecture is suffering from its limited functionalities of ’data control’ and ’data capture’. To address this challenge, I design and implement an innovative next generation SDN-based honeynet architecture.
ContributorsHan, Wonkyu (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016