Moving target defense for the security and resilience of mixed time and event triggered cyber–physical systems

Potteiger, Bradley; Dubey, Abhishek; Cai, Feiyang; Koutsoukos, Xenofon; Zhang, Zhenkai

doi:10.1016/j.sysarc.2022.102420

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques are used to defend against CRAs [50]. Different defense techniques were introduced to mitigate the attacks on the control flow of software in [51], [52].…”

Section: ) Ghumvee Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

NG-MVEE: A New Proposed Hybrid Technique for Enhanced Mitigation of Code Re-Use Attack

et al. 2023

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Code-Reuse Attacks (CRAs) are solid mechanisms to bypass advanced software and hardware defenses because they use the software's own code and they are very hard to be detected without significant overhead. Numerous methods have been proposed to protect against memory-based attacks that result from reusing parts of the attacked binary code. In this paper, two problems were tackled. the first problem is the lack of a categorized survey, analysis, and evaluation of the different CRAs proposed in the literature. The second problem is the inherent vulnerability that exists in protection techniques that are based on Multi-Variant Execution Environment (MVEE) since they are using shared Linux libraries with gadget-prone codes. In the paper a novel framework of CRA mitigation is introduced; fusing the two different prominent techniques of control flow integrity and multi-variant execution environment. The novel mitigation technique, named Next Generation MVEE (NG-MVEE), was built upon an existing generic CRA detection system (GHUMVEE) and complemented with a different CRA detection technique (G-Free) in order to provide comprehensive protection against code-reuse attacks. The outcome of the hybrid system is an optimized hybrid version of an MVEE technique, with minimal performance overhead increase due to the added protection layer of the G-Free technique. A median of 7% performance overhead resulted from the proposed protection system.

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Section: ) Ghumvee Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

NG-MVEE: A New Proposed Hybrid Technique for Enhanced Mitigation of Code Re-Use Attack

et al. 2023

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“…This implies that MTD does not necessitate the creation of new security measures, which frequently necessitate a thorough, high-standard security analysis and, as a result, might take a long time or effort. 16 As a result, MTD offers a new line of defense that maintains legacy resources while improving security by dynamically modifying the attack surface, such as any feature of system components (e.g., data, software, platforms, runtime environments, networks) to raise attacker uncertainty and confusion. The core techniques in MTD are diversity, shuffling, and redundancy.…”

Section: Moving Target Defensementioning

confidence: 99%

“…MTD was created as a proactive security mechanism to avoid cyberattacks by modifying the attack surface of systems on a continual and dynamic basis. Because it focuses on reorganizing system configurations to confuse attackers while still utilizing existing security procedures, the core premise of MTD is “cheap defense.” This implies that MTD does not necessitate the creation of new security measures, which frequently necessitate a thorough, high‐standard security analysis and, as a result, might take a long time or effort 16 . As a result, MTD offers a new line of defense that maintains legacy resources while improving security by dynamically modifying the attack surface, such as any feature of system components (e.g., data, software, platforms, runtime environments, networks) to raise attacker uncertainty and confusion.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward deceiving the intrusion attacks in containerized cloud environment using virtual private cloud‐based moving target defense

Hyder

Ahmed

2022

Concurrency and Computation

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The container-based cloud has its distinct security challenges. In this article, moving target defense (MTD) is used to increase the cost and effort of the attacker to exploit resources and follow an attack path to compromise the critical resources in a container-based cloud. The existing MTD mechanisms for cloud have not focused on intruder prevention inside containerized environment. The proposed solution is one of its kind that utilizes resource movement inside and across the virtual private network in the cloud to deceive intruders. The framework continuously changes the target/container to increase confusion about the routing path, so attackers cannot follow the simple attack path. This obscure cloud architecture increases the delay in attack and gives system/network administrators significant time to use Intrusion Detection mechanisms for countering the attack. The proposed scheme is implemented on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by using an extensive network of nodes hosting the stateful pods that are created and destroyed periodically. The experimental analysis confirmed that the proposed scheme substantially increased the attack path length and added obscurity at a low computation cost. However, as per experiments, implementing the proposed scheme in GCP slightly increases the dollar cost. K E Y W O R D Scontainerization, intrusion attacks, Kubernetes, moving target defense, virtual private cloud INTRODUCTIONContainerize technology has been introduced as an alternative to virtualization technology (VM). In the last few years, 1 the approach to set up the application in a container then the VM was widely accepted by companies around the world and adopted in the cloud environment. This containerized technology provides many benefits like lightweight, short startup time, and lower virtualization overhead. 2,3 In a cloud environment, the remote code execution attack is used to exploit the network for delivering the payload (malicious code) to the host OS. The attacker used some JavaScript-based code to exploit the vulnerable application to modify the authentication policy and gain access to the host operating system. The remote code execution method is harmful where the attacker scans for the target within the cloud virtual network.The attacker compromises the edge host facing the public Internet to get access and scan for other hosts within that virtual network. From that compromise entry point, attacker performs a series of attacks to search for the asset and follow the simple attack path to reach the target which is normally a database server. Which in most scenarios are isolated from the public Internet. The attacker repeats the attacks to find the path toward the target to reach the target server. 4 In a cloud network architecture, the successful attack requires only a few steps to reach from the edge host to Muhammad Faraz Hyder, Waqas Ahmed, and Maaz Ahmed contributed equally to this study.

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“…[130], [131], [132], [133], [134], [135], [136] Node MTD ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ [137], [149], [150], [141], [132], [133], [146], [150], [145], [146] [147], [148] Dynamic Software Evolution ✓ ✓ ✓ [151], [87], [152], [153] Consensus & Distributed Trust ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ [160], [161], [162], [163], [164],…”

Section: Risk Management Vs Cyber-resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This method periodically changes the network configuration in use by communicating endpoints. Potteiger et al [134] propose to implement MTD techniques such as address space randomization (ASR), and data space randomization (DSR) in a mixed time and event-triggered architecture in order to maintain the safety and the availability during the attack. Mixing both architecture allows the system support predictable operation during normal circumstances while maintaining rapid detection and reconfiguration during an attack.…”

Section: Network Mtd Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber-Resilience Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems

Segovia

Rubio‐Hernan

Cavalli

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE 19th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA)

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Concerns for the resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in critical infrastructure are growing. CPS integrate sensing, computation, control and networking into physical objects and mission-critical services, connecting traditional infrastructure to internet technologies.While this integration increases service efficiency, it has to face the possibility of new threats posed by the new functionalities. This leads to cyber-threats, such as denial-of-service, modification of data, information leakage, spreading of malware, and many others.Cyber-resilience refers to the ability of a CPS to prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt to the adverse effects associated with cyber-threats, e.g., physical degradation of the CPS performance resulting from a cyber-attack. Cyber-resilience aims at ensuring CPS survival, by keeping the core functionalities of the CPS in case of extreme events. The literature on cyber-resilience is rapidly increasing, leading to a broad variety of research works addressing this new topic. In this article, we create a systematization of knowledge about existing scientific efforts of making CPS cyber-resilient. We systematically survey recent literature addressing cyber-resilience with a focus on techniques that may be used on CPS. We first provide preliminaries and background on CPS and threats, and subsequently survey state-of-the-art approaches that have been proposed by recent research work applicable to CPS. In particular, we aim at differentiating research work from traditional risk management approaches, based on the general acceptance that it is unfeasible to prevent and mitigate all possible risks threatening a CPS. We also discuss questions and research challenges, with a focus on the practical aspects of cyber-resilience, such as the use of metrics and evaluation methods, as well as testing and validation environments.

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Moving target defense for the security and resilience of mixed time and event triggered cyber–physical systems

Cited by 14 publications

References 17 publications

NG-MVEE: A New Proposed Hybrid Technique for Enhanced Mitigation of Code Re-Use Attack

NG-MVEE: A New Proposed Hybrid Technique for Enhanced Mitigation of Code Re-Use Attack

Toward deceiving the intrusion attacks in containerized cloud environment using virtual private cloud‐based moving target defense

Cyber-Resilience Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems

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