Publication Library
Double-Signed Fragmented DNSSEC for Countering Quantum Threat
Description: DNSSEC, a DNS security extension, is essential to accurately translating domain names to IP addresses. Digital signatures provide the foundation for this reliable translation, however, the evolution of 'Quantum Computers' has made traditional digital signatures vulnerable. In light of this, NIST has recently selected potential post-quantum digital signatures that can operate on conventional computers and resist attacks made with Quantum Computers. Since these post-quantum digital signatures are still in their early stages of development, replacing pre-quantum digital signature schemes in DNSSEC with post-quantum candidates is risky until the post-quantum candidates have undergone a thorough security analysis. Given this, herein, we investigate the viability of employing 'Double-Signatures' in DNSSEC, combining a post-quantum digital signature and a classic one. The rationale is that double-signatures will offer protection against quantum threats on conventional signature schemes as well as unknown non-quantum attacks on post-quantum signature schemes, hence even if one fails the other provides security guarantees. However, the inclusion of two signatures in the DNSSEC response message doesn't bode well with the maximum allowed size of DNSSEC responses (i.e., 1232B, a limitation enforced by MTU of physical links). To counter this issue, we leverage a way to do application-layer fragmentation of DNSSEC responses with two signatures. We implement our solution on top of OQS-BIND and through experiments show that the addition of two signatures in DNSSEC and application-layer fragmentation of all relevant resource records and their reassembly does not have any substantial impact on the efficiency of the resolution process and thus is suitable for the interim period at least until the quantum computers are fully realized.
Created At: 13 December 2024
Updated At: 13 December 2024
ChatNVD Advancing Cybersecurity Vulnerability Assessment with Large Language Models
Description: The increasing frequency and sophistication of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in software systems underscore the urgent need for robust and effective methods of vulnerability assessment. However, existing approaches often rely on highly technical and abstract frameworks, which hinders understanding and increases the likelihood of exploitation, resulting in severe cyberattacks. Given the growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse domains, this paper explores their potential application in cybersecurity, specifically for enhancing the assessment of software vulnerabilities. We propose ChatNVD, an LLM-based cybersecurity vulnerability assessment tool leveraging the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to provide context-rich insights and streamline vulnerability analysis for cybersecurity professionals, developers, and non-technical users. We develop three variants of ChatNVD, utilizing three prominent LLMs: GPT-4o mini by OpenAI, Llama 3 by Meta, and Gemini 1.5 Pro by Google. To evaluate their efficacy, we conduct a comparative analysis of these models using a comprehensive questionnaire comprising common security vulnerability questions, assessing their accuracy in identifying and analyzing software vulnerabilities. This study provides valuable insights into the potential of LLMs to address critical challenges in understanding and mitigation of software vulnerabilities.
Created At: 13 December 2024
Updated At: 13 December 2024
Optimizing Cyber Defense in Dynamic Active Directories through Reinforcement Learning
Description: This paper addresses a significant gap in Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) literature: the absence of effective edge-blocking ACO strategies in dynamic, real-world networks. It specifically targets the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of organizational Active Directory (AD) systems. Unlike the existing literature on edge-blocking defenses which considers AD systems as static entities, our study counters this by recognizing their dynamic nature and developing advanced edge-blocking defenses through a Stackelberg game model between attacker and defender. We devise a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based attack strategy and an RL-assisted Evolutionary Diversity Optimization-based defense strategy, where the attacker and defender improve each other strategy via parallel gameplay. To address the computational challenges of training attacker-defender strategies on numerous dynamic AD graphs, we propose an RL Training Facilitator that prunes environments and neural networks to eliminate irrelevant elements, enabling efficient and scalable training for large graphs. We extensively train the attacker strategy, as a sophisticated attacker model is essential for a robust defense. Our empirical results successfully demonstrate that our proposed approach enhances defender's proficiency in hardening dynamic AD graphs while ensuring scalability for large-scale AD.
Created At: 13 December 2024
Updated At: 13 December 2024
MTDSense AI-Based Fingerprinting of Moving Target Defense Techniques in Software-Defined Networking
Description: Moving target defenses (MTD) are proactive security techniques that enhance network security by confusing the attacker and limiting their attack window. MTDs have been shown to have significant benefits when evaluated against traditional network attacks, most of which are automated and untargeted. However, little has been done to address an attacker who is aware the network uses an MTD. In this work, we propose a novel approach named MTDSense, which can determine when the MTD has been triggered using the footprints the MTD operation leaves in the network traffic. MTDSense uses unsupervised clustering to identify traffic following an MTD trigger and extract the MTD interval. An attacker can use this information to maximize their attack window and tailor their attacks, which has been shown to significantly reduce the effectiveness of MTD. Through analyzing the attacker's approach, we propose and evaluate two new MTD update algorithms that aim to reduce the information leaked into the network by the MTD. We present an extensive experimental evaluation by creating, to our knowledge, the first dataset of the operation of an IP-shuffling MTD in a software-defined network. Our work reveals that despite previous results showing the effectiveness of MTD as a defense, traditional implementations of MTD are highly susceptible to a targeted attacker.
Created At: 13 December 2024
Updated At: 13 December 2024
Relation-aware based Siamese Denoising Autoencoder for Malware Few-shot Classification
Description: When malware employs an unseen zero-day exploit, traditional security measures such as vulnerability scanners and antivirus software can fail to detect them. This is because these tools rely on known patches and signatures, which do not exist for new zero-day attacks. Furthermore, existing machine learning methods, which are trained on specific and occasionally outdated malware samples, may struggle to adapt to features in new malware. To address this issue, there is a need for a more robust machine learning model that can identify relationships between malware samples without being trained on a particular malware feature set. This is particularly crucial in the field of cybersecurity, where the number of malware samples is limited and obfuscation techniques are widely used. Current approaches using stacked autoencoders aim to remove the noise introduced by obfuscation techniques through reconstruction of the input. However, this approach ignores the semantic relationships between features across different malware samples. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Siamese Neural Network (SNN) that uses relation-aware embeddings to calculate more accurate similarity probabilities based on semantic details of different malware samples. In addition, by using entropy images as inputs, our model can extract better structural information and subtle differences in malware signatures, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques. Evaluations on two large malware sample sets using the N-shot and N-way methods show that our proposed model is highly effective in predicting previously unseen malware, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques.
Created At: 13 December 2024
Updated At: 13 December 2024