As the Internet struggles to cope with scalability, mobility, and security issues, new network architectures are being proposed to better accommodate the needs of modern systems and applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) has emerged as a promising next-generation Internet architecture: it sets to decouple content from hosts, at the network layer, by naming data rather than hosts. CON comes with a potential for a wide range of benefits, including reduced congestion and improved delivery speed by means of content caching, simpler configuration of network devices, and security at the data level. However, it remains an interesting open question whether or not, and to what extent, this emerging networking paradigm bears new privacy challenges. In this paper, we provide a systematic privacy analysis of CON and the common building blocks among its various architectural instances in order to highlight emerging privacy threats, and analyze a few potential countermeasures. Finally, we present a comparison between CON and today's Internet in the context of a few privacy concepts, such as, anonymity, censoring, traceability, and confidentiality.Further, endpoint authentication mechanisms (whereby an endpoint can only authenticate the counterpart, but not the message) have been challenged by frequent attacks against SSL [34,42] and the hacking of certification authorities [46]. Also, the Internet today often struggles with mobility and resilience to disruption. Transport layer is, by design, unable to manage mobile parties and addon features -e.g., Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Hierarchical MIPv6 [19] -have been suggested, albeit suffering from handoff latency and packet losses [26].Motivated by these issues, new architectures have been proposed, in the last few years, aiming to redesign the Internet (see, e.g., NSF's Future Internet Architecture multi-million program [57]), and accommodate content-oriented applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) [22] has set to decouple contents from hosts, at the network layer, by relying on the publish/subscribe paradigm. CON shifts identification from host to content, so that this can be located anywhere in the network. The content-centric communication paradigm introduced by CON relies on naming the content itself, rather than its location, and thus radically changes the way data is handled. Content is selfcontained, has a unique name, can be retrieved by means of an interest for that name, cached in any arbitrary location, and digitally signed to ensure its integrity and authenticity.
Web developers routinely rely on third-party Java-Script libraries such as jQuery to enhance the functionality of their sites. However, if not properly maintained, such dependencies can create attack vectors allowing a site to be compromised.In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of client-side JavaScript library usage and the resulting security implications across the Web. Using data from over 133 k websites, we show that 37 % of them include at least one library with a known vulnerability; the time lag behind the newest release of a library is measured in the order of years. In order to better understand why websites use so many vulnerable or outdated libraries, we track causal inclusion relationships and quantify different scenarios. We observe sites including libraries in ad hoc and often transitive ways, which can lead to different versions of the same library being loaded into the same document at the same time. Furthermore, we find that libraries included transitively, or via ad and tracking code, are more likely to be vulnerable. This demonstrates that not only website administrators, but also the dynamic architecture and developers of third-party services are to blame for the Web's poor state of library management.The results of our work underline the need for more thorough approaches to dependency management, code maintenance and third-party code inclusion on the Web.
Abstract-Users' anonymity and privacy are among the major concerns of today's Internet. Anonymizing networks are then poised to become an important service to support anonymousdriven Internet communications and consequently enhance users' privacy protection. Indeed, Tor an example of anonymizing networks based on onion routing concept attracts more and more volunteers, and is now popular among dozens of thousands of Internet users. Surprisingly, very few researches shed light on such an anonymizing network. Beyond providing global statistics on the typical usage of Tor in the wild, we show that Tor is actually being mis-used, as most of the observed traffic belongs to P2P applications. In particular, we quantify the BitTorrent traffic and show that the load of the latter on the Tor network is underestimated because of encrypted BitTorrent traffic (that can go unnoticed). Furthermore, this paper provides a deep analysis of both the HTTP and BitTorrent protocols giving a complete overview of their usage. We do not only report such usage in terms of traffic size and number of connections but also depict how users behave on top of Tor. We also show that Tor usage is now diverted from the onion routing concept and that Tor exit nodes are frequently used as 1-hop SOCKS proxies, through a so-called tunneling technique. We provide an efficient method allowing an exit node to detect such an abnormal usage. Finally, we report our experience in effectively crawling bridge nodes, supposedly revealed sparingly in Tor.
Passwords are widely used for user authentication, and will likely remain in use in the foreseeable future, despite several weaknesses. One important weakness is that human-generated passwords are far from being random, which makes them susceptible to guessing attacks. Understanding the adversaries capabilities for guessing attacks is a fundamental necessity for estimating their impact and advising countermeasures. This paper presents OMEN, a new Markov model-based password cracker that extends ideas proposed by Narayanan and Shmatikov (CCS 2005). The main novelty of our tool is that it generates password candidates according to their occurrence probabilities, i.e., it outputs most likely passwords first. As shown by our extensive experiments, OMEN significantly improves guessing speed over existing proposals. In particular, we compare the performance of OMEN with the Markov mode of John the Ripper, which implements the password indexing function by Narayanan and Shmatikov. OMEN guesses more than 40% of passwords correctly with the first 90 million guesses, while JtR-Markov (for T = 1 billion) needs at least eight times as many guesses to reach the same goal, and OMEN guesses more than 80% of passwords correctly at 10 billion guesses, more than all probabilistic password crackers we compared against.
Abstract. This paper addresses the important goal of quantifying the threat of linking external records to public Online Social Networks (OSN) user profiles, by providing a method to estimate the uniqueness of such profiles and by studying the amount of information carried by public profile attributes. Our first contribution is to leverage the Ads audience estimation platform of a major OSN to compute the information surprisal (IS) based uniqueness of public profiles, independently from the used profiles dataset. Then, we measure the quantity of information carried by the revealed attributes and evaluate the impact of the public release of selected combinations of these attributes on the potential to identify user profiles. Our measurement results, based on an unbiased sample of more than 400 thousand Facebook public profiles, show that, when disclosed in such profiles, current city has the highest individual attribute potential for unique identification and the combination of gender, current city and age can identify close to 55% of users to within a group of 20 and uniquely identify around 18% of users. We envisage the use of our methodology to assist both OSNs in designing better anonymization strategies when releasing user records and users to evaluate the potential for external parties to uniquely identify their public profiles and hence make it easier to link them with other data sources.
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