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A Scalable High Fidelity Decoy Framework against Sophisticated Cyber Attacks

Published: 11 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surging trend of leveraging deception technique to detect and defeat sophisticated cyber attacks such as the advanced persistent threat. Deception typically employs a decoy network to entrap the attackers and divert the firepower away from the real protected assets. Unfortunately, existing decoy systems failed to achieve a balanced tradeoff between the decoy fidelity and scalability, which potentially undermines the effectiveness of attacker deception. In this paper, we propose a hybrid decoy architecture that separates lightweight front-end decoys from high-fidelity back-end decoy servers. To enhance the deception effectiveness, we introduce dynamics into the decoy system design to make the decoy a moving target, where the front-end decoys constrain attackers by transparently intercepting and forwarding the malicious commands to the heterogeneous back-end decoys for real execution. We implement two prototypes of the hybrid decoy architecture based on Linux Bash shell and Windows PowerShell. The experimental results demonstrate that our system can effectively misdirect and disinform attackers with small network and system overhead.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Evaluating a Planning Product for Active Cyberdefense and Cyberdeception2023 Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE)10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00395(2451-2456)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Decoy Processes With Optimal Performance FingerprintsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.327199911(43216-43237)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)Consistency is All I Ask: Attacks and Countermeasures on the Network Context of Distributed HoneypotsDetection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment10.1007/978-3-031-09484-2_11(197-217)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2022
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MTD'19: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Moving Target Defense
      November 2019
      87 pages
      ISBN:9781450368285
      DOI:10.1145/3338468
      • General Chair:
      • Zhuo Lu
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 11 November 2019

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      Author Tags

      1. cyber deception
      2. decoy network
      3. moving target defense

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 40 of 92 submissions, 43%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2023)Evaluating a Planning Product for Active Cyberdefense and Cyberdeception2023 Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE)10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00395(2451-2456)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
      • (2023)Decoy Processes With Optimal Performance FingerprintsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.327199911(43216-43237)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2022)Consistency is All I Ask: Attacks and Countermeasures on the Network Context of Distributed HoneypotsDetection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment10.1007/978-3-031-09484-2_11(197-217)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2022
      • (2021)A Multiphase Dynamic Deployment Mechanism of Virtualized Honeypots Based on Intelligent Attack Path PredictionSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2021/63782182021Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
      • (2021)HoneyBog: A Hybrid Webshell Honeypot Framework against Command Injection2021 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)10.1109/CNS53000.2021.9705039(218-226)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2021
      • (2021)Three decades of deception techniques in active cyber defense - Retrospect and outlookComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2021.102288106:COnline publication date: 1-Jul-2021

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